So I'm going through a hell upgrade of mysql https://mastodon.social/@mcc/112294139220776280 and the only reason this is a problem is because one of the Wordpress tables got mangled during an upgrade. In fact, the only reason I am running Mysql is to support Wordpress. I don't really want to be running Mysql. Or Wordpress. But I set up this website in 2006, and now I'm stuck maintaining Wordpress, and the Mysql it depends on, and the Ubuntu THAT depends on, for like… the rest of my life. Every new LTS, a jolt of pain
When I think about programmers with live services, I think about like…wizards. I imagine every time they cast a spell, in order for that spell to keep running it eats up a tiny speck of their attention. Spells are inanimate, but they act with intention. So they must run as a tiny background process in the caster's brain. Borrowing sapience.
When you're young, you cast spells freely, carelessly. Then you grow old, and your thoughts are sluggish because 40% of your brain is maintaining old spells
And you're tempted, like, what if I just… kill that process. Let the magic go. But you can't remember exactly what any one of these spells were doing and maybe it's making a single bed of flowers glow with radiance, and it doesn't matter if you keep it running or not, and maybe if you kill that old spell a dam will collapse somewhere.
I've got a tiny helper CGI I made around 2004, it does something small and simple codewise but without the tiny helper CGI it would be impossible. And a HUGE number of knitting forums are absolutely RELYING on this script today. I don't know how they even found it. Every time there's a disruption on that VPS, I get a lot of concerned emails at the support address from old ladies on knitting forums because their forum signatures are no longer displaying. How did these strangers come to rely on me
It creates a magic URL that redirects to a random item from a list you provided. Imagine putting in ten image URLs, then putting the magic url in an [img] in a forum signature.
@nyquildotorg I'm proud of how small and simple it is but it does something useful effectively. It's like three pages of perl or something and I've barely needed to touch it in decades.
@mcc@nyquildotorg as with all things that start as a hobby "hey this is a cool thing to do" that end up being some critical component for some piece of technology or other - it's written in Perl.
@mcc this is something that’s been on my mind lately as well — how to design small utilities so that they can run effectively forever without notable maintenance or significant marginal cost. 😵💫
@mcc@nfagerlund this is where we usually get into our whole thing about literate programming and how it's a good idea and should be used more, but it's not a complete solution to the larger problem
@mcc@nfagerlund if humanity is going to change this dynamic where somebody needs to understand the complexity and that ends up being the limit on our collective abilities, we need to attain a standard of code quality where everyone can forget about it for fifty years, and yet someone can re-learn easily when a changing situation requires it to be changed
@irenes@mcc right, like… what’s “literate infrastructure” look like, and how do you hand it off to someone (your future self, or maybe someone else when you get incapacitated) without it being a big shitty burden. 🫤
@nfagerlund@mcc but also.... the connections to lower and higher layers need to be clear, it needs to be possible to re-discover that there even IS a layer there
I always love the bit in sci-fi, where the descendants come across the old knowledge bank, and the tech is self- describing to an extent that is completely usable by the novices.
Try to build a Unix package from source a mere ten years old these days, and see how well it works.
@mcc can you point me to those knitting forums? my wife is a very good but solo knitter making artful stuff to wear. she only buys the occasional pattern from web shops but has no peers wrt knitting.
@mcc that is actually a great twist on Chesterton's fence because presumably the fence is just sitting there and active work to tear down but the magic here is actively consuming your capacity to keep it up. But still you can't let it drop just in case.
@mcc Ooof. Have you looked into any of the contemporary SSG's like 11ty? I've heard several people talk positively about transitioning from WP to 11ty.
@cali Actually I've transitioned completely to an SSG named "Pelican", like, eight years ago for new content. I'm only keeping this around as a life support system for my very old posts :(
I've looked into converting my WP install to static pages, but last time I looked I found it hard to find a converter that preserved comments.
@cali I think at one point I was hoping to transfer the comments to some other externally hosted system such as Disqus, but I've given up on that now plus in this age of AI scraping I could not possibly trust a Disqus-like system
@ieure I guess I really should learn to do containers. I'm just kinda eeehhhh on learning docker cuz isn't it partially closed source? Maybe I should learn "flatpak" or one of the 19 other indistinguishable things? But all the tutorials and containers I find are for Docker.
@mcc The core stuff is fully open-source, their Docker Desktop GUI isn't. Maybe also their thing that competes with Kubernetes (Docker Swarm) also? I have no use, so I don't use it.
Container image formats and runtimes are standardized by OCI, so you can pick a different runtime (lxc, containerd, probably others) and still use "docker images."
But you're right that Docker is the default thing for this, and most stuff assumes you're using it.
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