Formerly /u/Zalack on Reddit.

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  • 16 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • It’s not that strange. A timeout occurs on several servers overnight, and maybe a bunch of Lemmy instances are all run in the same timezone, so all their admins wake up around the same time and fix it.

    Well it’s a timeout, so by fixing it at the same time the admins have “synchronized” when timeouts across their servers are likely to occur again since it’s tangentially related to time. They’re likely to all fail again around the same moment.

    It’s kind of similar to the thundering herd where a bunch of things getting errors will synchronize their retries in a giant herd and strain the server. It’s why good clients will add exponential backoff AND jitter (a little bit of randomness to when the retry is done, not just every x^2 seconds). That way if you have a million clients, it’s less likely that all 1,000,000 of them will attempt a retry at the extract same time, because they all got an error from your server at the same time when it failed.

    Edit: looked at the ticket and it’s not exactly the kind of timeout I was thinking of.

    This timeout might be caused by something that’s loosely a function of time or resources usage. If it’s resource usage, because the servers are federated, those spikes might happen across servers as everything is pushing events to subscribers. So, failure gets synchronized.

    Or it could just be a coincidence. We as humans like to look for patterns in random events.


  • Haven’t seen acollierasto mentioned yet.

    She’s a scientist with a PHD in Astrophysics and does deep dives on specific topics, generally from the angle of science communication and how it often fails that topic in some way.

    Her videos are very simple and low production value, but packed with information. She’s a great communicator and you walk away from each video, not just with better knowledge on a topic, but also with a sense of where the holes in that knowledge are. Like where the limits of the metaphor being used to covey the topic to you exist.


  • Part of it is how you engage with the media. I worked in film for a while and when I watch a well-made TV show, I’m constantly analyzing the shot composition, editing, and sound.

    What lens is this shot on? Where is the camera placed? How is it moving? What does that say about this character or moment?

    When does a scene choose to use it’s closest shot on a character? Why that moment and not another?

    How is the story or scene structured and do I think that works? What order are they revealing information to us and why?

    When the scene pivots, what are they doing with craft to underline that. How is the balance of power between the characters changing and how is that being visualized?

    Whose scene is it? Is that choice surprising? When they chose to show a character reacting rather than the one speaking, why?

    Are the actors making surprising choices in their performance? Are they playing big moments small or small moments big? What ticks are they giving the character? What are they trying to say about who this person is with all that.

    Visual media, like any other craft, is filled with hundreds of intentional choices every frame. Taking it in doesn’t have to be a passive experience on the viewers part. We don’t listen consider reading a book passive, and watching a film or television series doesn’t have to be pace either.

    Just like books, not all television has the same depth to it’s choices, but as you actively take in various pieces of media, you’ll start to get a feel for the level of intentionality sleeping was made with. Like Andor has a lot more intentionality in it’s craft than The Book of Boba Fett.

    I’m not saying that it’s good to watch hours of TV every day, but the time that you do spend watching television need not be time that you’re brain isn’t exercising itself.