A well serviced rolex in 2026 with laser cut gears drifts +/- 15sec per day.

One with hand filed gears is going to be +/- a minute on a good day, and that’s what early navigation was using. I have watches with hand filed gears and they can be a bit rough.

Prior to that, it was dead reckoning, dragging a string every now and again to calculate speed and heading and the current and then guesstimating your location on a twice daily basis.

Those two wildly inaccurate systems mapped most of the world for us.

In a perfect world they drift less than a minute per day and you’re relatively close to the time with an average or just by picking one and knowing that you don’t have massive time skew.

I believe this saying was first made about compasses which also had mechanical failures. Having three lets you know which one failed. The same goes for mechanical watches, which can fail in inconsistent ways, slow one day and fast the next is problematic the same goes for a compass that is wildly off, how do you know which one of the two is off?

It’s probably a specific windows desktop app, probably TurboTax by intuit, the company that lobbies to make filing your taxes hard and to destroy any free simple government app to file taxes.

So, not sure why they’d complain about not being able to help shoot their foot off but we all have preferences. :shrug:

The key to proper regulation is to keep money and influence from pooling at the top, making it difficult for any single person to buy enough influence.

As it is, we have a dozen monopolies that should be broken up that are making a small section of the population so rich they are essentially above laws.

But, proper regulation can exist if people want it, and more specifically in the case of the USA, legislators want it. Unfortunately, Dems actively prevent it, and republicans are ripping it down, so the rest of us are kinda fucked.

Somewhere, someone, has to buy a set amount of servers, based on a running capacity projection and build those into usable machines. The basis of a datacenter, is an inventory system, a dhcp server, a tftp server, and a DNS server that get used to manage the lifecycle of hardware servers. That's what everyone did at one point, and the best of them build themselves tooling.

What amazon has is built on what was available at the time both for tooling and existing systems that they'd have to integrate with. You almost certainly don't have to build anything that complex. Additionally, you can get an off the shelf DCIM that integrates with your DHCP and DNS servers and trigger ansible runners in your boot sequences that handle the lifecycle steps. It's considerably easier to do now than it was 15 years ago.

While they don't use AWS specifically for a lot of stuff, the internal tooling can still build thousands of boxes an hour though they don't really pay for UI work for that stuff.

You can put a host(s) in a fleet, tell it the various software sets you want installed and click go and you'll have a fleet when you come back, so don't think that what you're being asked to build is impossible or not being used under every single major cloud provider or VPS provider.

The slightly harder part is deciding what you're going to give to devs for a front end. Are you providing raw hosts, VMs, container fleets, all of it? how are you handling multi-zone or multi-region . . ., how are you billing or throttling resources between teams.

The beauty of this is you get a lot of stuff for free these days. You can build out a fleet, provide a few build scripts that can be pulled into some CI/CD pipeline in your code forge of choice and you don't really need to build a UI.

Provisioning tooling is hard, but it's a lot easier now that it was 15/20 years ago and all the parts are there. I've built it several times on very small teams. I would have loved to have 10 devs to build something like that, but the reality is that you can get 80% with a little glue code and a few open source servers.

If you’re using experimental file systems, I’d expect you to be pretty competent in being able to hold your own in a storage emergency, like compiling a kernel if that’s the way out.

This is a made up emergency, to break the rules.

Run a full screen term on my machine for a good chunk of my workflow and I just like to have time and battery in my term. I render it as ‘(15:35) [80} $ ‘ and for boxes without batteries it’s just ‘(15:35) $ ‘

Some times I’ll go back through my scroll back and look at the time when I’m trying to figure things out. Or when I run a command that generates a ton of output, I’ll note the time and run the command then later search back to the time in scroll back to start at the top of the log.

None of these are features I truly miss on a vanilla box, I can look at a clock or watch and will put a comment into the scroll back to find later.

It seems like I’ve seen several of these over the years when a patch to parse comments would probably be simpler and less of an anti-pattern. What am I missing here?

Edit: or a config dir that allows multiple key files.