@Chicken Re-tired? So tired a second time?

Go rest.

@AaronBertrand IMO - for what its worth, I think people are more concerned that the dumps are released rather than minor changes for operational purposes

Agreed. It's still not something I'd want to just switch up without asking if there are objections.

(I hope, too, it's been made clear that there is a renewed commitment to the data dump. Even if some of the pushing (like this change) comes from folks like me. But I understand if that's not all that trustworthy, too.)

I think you're doing a great job ensuring that we know what y'all want to do about the data dumps and ensuring we're a part of the discussion as it pertains to a switch like that.

@AaronBertrand It's appreciated :)

→ 27 messages moved to Chimney

@b_jonas it is just the OS iso on a DVD like those you used to find on magazines before they went for "digital download DVD" (which is wort the "You know what is [redacted]" corner of AVGN btw, why should someone buy a magazine to get a digital download that they can find on the official site? The only reason to buy the magazine was to skip the download if you had slow internet)

And like I said, those are made by random nobody companies selling thru Amazon. Not going to trust them, they could very well be selling disks with pre-planted malware.

After all, there are multiple confirmed cases of small resellers selling out-of-the-box compromised android devices, I don't see why you should trust someone making a disk any more.

@M.A.R. does this reply?

Enjoy!

I love those rare cases when a remix, or cover, of old song turns out better than the original.

You.. probably want to disable the subtitles so you don't understand a single word.

I won't held myself responsible for any epiphany you may get otherwise.

@SPArcheon nah, it's fine and need much more than that to cause me any discomfort. :D

And, nice shorts! :-P

... I just have discoverd "Bardcore".

Poor YouTube algorithm that analyze the user's view history to suggest "What's Next" is probably choking in my case, lol. :D

hmm let's really see what it now suggests...

this wilt beest the divine answ'r to the beshrew of nightc're

^ @AndreasmovedtoCodidact seems perfect for thee.

@ShadowWizardLoveZelda hehe can't post here, too NSFW even though many innocent songs, and even MLP, not so long ago... interesting.

As if the "bad" stuff has bigger weight or something? Or perhaps it's according to views count... dunno.

Well it's crap anyway, suggesting things I usually don't like anyway, so never really using it. Probably these days it's "AI powered". (didn't look into it yet)

@SPArcheon ah, thought it's about the core of Bard, the AI of Google.

How to slowly make @AndreasmovedtoCodidact appreciate MLP songs 101.

Just disguise them as something else.

like feeding a pill to a cat hidden in a meatball

ahh

feeding a pill to @M.A.R

@AaronBertrand I just want to say, thank you very much for all the work you do on SE and how dedicated you are to the community. It's people like you who keep me on the network.

I know we've butted heads somewhat in the past, especially when it came to things like edge case fixes and minor issues, but overall, I really love what you do for the community.

@SPArcheon Sort of. The other important reason besides the speed or expense of download used to be that there was like half a decade around 2004 when DVD burners were very expensive but DVD readers were affordable.

(And overlapping with that there was like a decade when even CD burners were expensive.)

@Sonic Thanks. And I want to say, I don't disagree with you on those issues. I would love to fix all the bugs and have no imperfections or quirky behavior. But I'm also a realist, and have been in software engineering nearly three decades, and the reality is that there are only so many engineers able to work on so many things. At this company that is definitely true, plus it's free software supported by ads that most people block, and the software itself is extremely complex.

So the "one pixel to the left" bugs - while good to know - are not likely to rise to the top unless an engineer happens to be working in that same bit of code.

@b_jonas yes.. but they are doing it now :P

We have a lot of very dedicated and passionate engineers, but they're also busy. Occasionally one will get a break between projects and/or are able to carve out their own time to address some minor issue(s). This happened this week. It's just not something that can keep pace with the number of minor issues that are bound to always exist, get fixed, reappear or break something else, etc.

Yes, today there isn't any reason to buy those. (Technically there is, if you want a nice printed label right on the disk, or a fancy printed plastic DVD case, you can't always easily make those at home, but still.)

There's the sad part that factory stamped DVDs probably have a longer lifetime than burned ones, but any data that you stamp in a factory in large numbers is probably already well preserved so it's not worth to buy it just for the extended lifetime.

@AaronBertrand My main concern with edge cases and minor faults is that they tend to give off the false impressions that the software is unrefined or that the developers can't be bothered to maintain it. I remember someone complaining about how (they thought) the site was being maintained by amateurs - I'm not sure if you saw my response, but it was:

@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog I did see that, and I appreciate it. But I also don't want to give the false impression that edge cases and minor faults will all be fixed, never mind immediately (which is what some users seem to demand at times).

In general (not just here), severity and impact will push things to the top, and time and resources will create a high water mark.

Probably the actual problem is to define what is considered minor and what isn't. Where is the line? Who can even draw it?

Something that one deem as critical, might be minor to somebody else.

@AaronBertrand Yes, I do remember - I'd reported a pluralization bug in the view count, and there was a user repeatedly posting duplicates of my report and demanding that it be fixed, to the point we ended up removing their posts as trolling.

Right, we have millions of users and probably 100 or so are active on meta. Some minor thing can be life-and-death for one user, and they are often very passionate about that, but that doesn't make it any more critical to the rest.

@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog well it becomes actual trolling at some point. Troll can also grow from ordinary user, not just appear out of nowhere.

Sometimes, however, a user's pattern of using the site means that they end up running into what's otherwise a super rare and minor edge case very frequently. That does get them a bit annoyed. Here's an example.

@AaronBertrand exactly.

@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog so then the question I'll ask "what features does it prevent you from using/seeing?" and based on that can decide how minor, or not, it is.

And sometimes that passion can be interpreted as a lot of things (and I'm not explicitly applying these labels to anything I've seen): demanding, annoying, petty, whiny and, yes, troll-y.

@ShadowWizardLoveZelda But still, someone could easily assert that their off-by-one-pixel cosmetic thing du jour is the thing that will make them rage quit.

But in any case, it's very clear from your posts that you do care a lot about the community. Especially your recent post on the data dump schedule.

@AaronBertrand well yes, people might rage quit over things that most will find silly, e.g. a single downvote.

That's never happened. /wink

@AaronBertrand There is one thing I give to anyone I meet in real life who shows they're passionate about something I really care about, and that's a bag of chocolates. I want you to (virtually) have one:

@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog I've seen things like that too.

But again, like in any complex software, it's really hard to even know, never mind permanently satisfy, all the different users who use the software in very different ways. It doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but again, <--- realist.

In that example, I felt bad, even though I was only involved in the change to say "this is causing resource drain and we should do something." But I wasn't involved in how it changed, and it truly never occurred to anyone that users would visit the community user's profile page for any reason other than curiosity or to take part in a gag.

Well, that's not exactly true. I did say "we should stop running the queries that calculate these things for this user in real time."

@AaronBertrand To be clear there, my issue there wasn't the removal itself, but rather the lack of communication around it. I still think it would have been nice if an error message were put in place whenever a user tries to access a page that has been removed. Case in point: when a user tries to access the URL for the removed "trigger reputation recalc" button in the reputation audit page, they get an error message about its removal.

I understand now that the lack of communication was simply because it never occurred to you that anyone would access those pages

I understand. But because of the thoughts we had about the workflow (or lack of one), we really didn't think it warranted any kind of announcement. We fix one-liners all the time, and they nearly all have some perceptible change. If we announced every one of them we'd fix a lot less.

If you haven't noticed, we've drifted toward disclosing less, not more. And unfortunately it's something I can't control.

@AaronBertrand I can imagine, what with the DDoS attacks we get.

This is especially true when it is a fix that wasn't user-reported (like that one). I thought the worst that could happen is someone would notice that their comment count etc. was missing.

@AaronBertrand That's true - a public announcement wouldn't have helped the 99.9% of users who don't have much reason to access the removed pages. But an error message upon attempting to access the removed pages would have pointedly helped the 0.1% of users who do.

@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog yummy! Now you gave me reason to be passionate about something you care about.... ;-)

@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog But not when we thought it was 0.0%.

We're human man, we make mistakes too.

But anyhow, @AaronBertrand just know that if you happen to arrive to Israel give me a call, and we'll meet and have a beer together. :D

Last year, I took down production over something really silly. (Well, by not predicting something really silly, I let production go down.)

(So far I met IRL one SE staff member, Yaakov, though not over a beer. ;))

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, well, Meta's user base is a bit weird, and what would generally be regarded as a super minor change can end up annoying someone in a way you'd least expect. Making those changes is good, but keeping that principle in mind when doing so is better.

@AaronBertrand there's a saying "It's human to make mistakes, it's even more human to admit doing them" or something like that. No?

i.e. there are those who'll just blame others and dodge responsibility. Now that isn't nice.

@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog Yep, I get it. But you might have noticed that occasionally I spend a lot of time away from meta. It's not always because I'm too busy, it's sometimes because of the entitlement. :-)

Ah, found it.

> To Err is Human, To Admit it is Divine

@Aaron so, you're Divine. ^ :-)

I'll probably get in trouble for this probably-NDA tidbit: There is an age-old saying here that you're not truly a Stacker until you take down production.

So, it was kind of necessary.

@AaronBertrand wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incidents/20151005-MediaWiki

@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog Sometimes it is because I'm busy. Or because I'm not always in control of what I can say or even talk about.

@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog Mine was something a little less trivial than a typo. But still toward the DUH end of the spectrum.

Anyway, I hope I don't ever seem abrasive when I'm really just trying to set expectations.

I also apologize if I've come across as entitled or not appreciative in my past communications - I do tend to argue quite passionately for things I believe in.

Anyway, I have to go now - keep up your good work representing the community!

@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog That word was probably a bit harsh but also wasn't aimed at you specifically. :-)

@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog Thanks for the productive and positive chat! And the chocolates!

@AaronBertrand I hope you liked the chocolates!

@AaronBertrand awesome! ;)

@AaronBertrand I think its true of any tech job

I've done it at LEAST once, and gotten blamed for it another time :D

@JourneymanGeek It certainly wasn't true at Wayfair, where almost every server in their infra is considered part of a giant cash register. :-)

Taking down production would probably put you on a PIP. At many places, it's a rite of passage.

@JourneymanGeek Only once?! Darn, you must be a good one :D

My worst "oopsie" moment at work was sending email to a client, and adding in the cc field someone I thought is a co-worker of the client, except it was manager of a different client company, who happens to be a rival company. (He has the same first name as the one I meant to include.)

Think it's even worse than taking down production server, so I win. :D

@ShadowWizardLoveZelda Depends on what goes wrong when you take down the production server :P Over here, it's just impatient users and loads of teams calls/e-mails/service-desk reports about long response times :P Other bugs can crash way more important stuff, like entire planes :P

meh, if airplane can crash due to server shut down, it was poorly designed to begin with. :D

@Tinkeringbell so I used to annoy the heck out of my boss by being super super cautious

and doing a scottie, and padding how long it took to do things

I took down the helpdesk system by accident...

then got sent home sick :D

@JourneymanGeek after you carried too many printers from place to place as punishment? ;)

Oh that was the casino

I wasn't there long enough to break anything :D

lol

weak day for "link at beginning" reports... all false...

oh, not all.... found one with actual spam from today... so guess still useful, just high fp rate compared to the others.