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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 5th, 2023

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  • Just recently I had a tech store guy gently but repeatedly insist to me that a certain USB cable was a USB 3 cable because it was type C on both ends. I didn’t wanna argue with him, but the box clearly said “480 Mbit”, so it was just a type C charging cable.

    Of course the box designers were hoping you’d make that mistake so they didn’t write USB 2 on there, just the speed. And most boxes won’t even have that, you’ll just have to buy it and see.

    But I mean if someone who spent their whole life fixing computers can get something that basic wrong, then it’s really a hopeless situation for anyone who isn’t techy.

    And of course once it’s out of the box it’s anyone’s guess what it is. It’s a real mess for sure.






  • I’ve been in love with the concept of ansible since I discovered it almost a decade ago, but I still hate how verbose it is, and how cumbersome the yaml based DSL is. You can have a role that basically does the job of 3 lines of bash and it’ll need 3 yaml files in 4 directories.

    About 3 years ago I wrote a big ansible playbook that would fully configure my home server, desktop and laptop from a minimal arch install. Then I used said playbook for my laptop and server.

    I just got a new laptop and went to look at the playbook but realised it probably needs to be updated in a few places. I got feelings of dread thinking about reading all that yaml and updating it.

    So instead I’m just gonna rewrite everything in simple python with a few helper functions. The few roles I rewrote are already so much cleaner and shorter. Should be way faster and more user friendly and maintainable.

    I’ll keep ansible for actual deployments.