little mx. no-spoons @fluffy@queer.party

So hey just a request:

if I say something that you know to be untrue or that contradicted something else I said previously, please let me know so that I can reconcile things and disentangle things that are true from things I only wish were true.

I don't want to be an unreliable narrator, and I don't want to fall into some very bad habits and patterns that have been ingrained to me all my life.

I want to be better than that.

Thanks. 💜

Oops I lost my old #introductions post in the last instance fandango but enough has changed I'd might as well make a new one right?

Hi, I'm fluffy! I'm a software engineer by day (working at an HIV research lab as of December, 2018) and in my spare time I make music, games, comics, and bad decisions.

See my bio for various links!

Also http://beesbuzz.biz/about for a somewhat fuller bio I guess.

New policy: whenever someone refers to someone else as being “gender non-binary” I’ll ask if they are gender male/gender female

And then there's the issue of, what happens when your backing data changes? How do you propagate changes?

There's a reason that cache invalidation is considered one of the two hardest things in programming (along with naming things and off-by-one errors).

Okay so a bit of why not to do that:

memcached isn't durable. It can also get overloaded with client requests. Or your network connection to it goes down momentarily, or whatever. It's perfectly fine as a *cache*, but the intended failure mode is you consult the truth source.

And like, why memcached as the storage backend? That's not what it's intended for. If your solution to performance involves actively warming a cache and using the cache as the source of truth... I don't even know how to finish that sentence other than, "Don't." Because, don't.

And I mean even if they were given a "thou shalt not use SQL" mandate, half a million lines of text isn't that hard to just load in when your service worker starts up and put into an in-process hash or whatever. It'll take, what, a few MB of RAM and a couple extra seconds?

Someday I should write yet another rant about how much people overengineer systems around some perceived need for "scaling" far beyond what the simple solution can already handle perfectly well. NoSQL-thinking is so pernicious and pervasive and not actually useful.

As much as I love the #DoveSelfEsteemProject (especially the Steven Universe bits), keep in mind that Dove is a Unilever company, whose CEO says stuff like this: https://www.thedrum.com/news/2019/06/19/unilever-ceo-alan-jope-laments-the-woke-washing-ads-polluting-brand-purpose

While trying to fix a redis/celery problem with redash at work I came across this blog entry: https://goshippo.com/blog/loading-data-memcached-or-how-we-built-rube-goldberg-machine-python-redis-memcached-and-celery/

The fact that the punchline wasn't "and then we realized it would be trivial to just use a shell script to load the data into SQL and query that directly" is meh

New post: Plaidophile: Keeping it personal https://beesbuzz.biz/blog/5709-Keeping-it-personal

TIL that Koichi Sugiyama didn't start composing video game music until he was in his 50s, and was 55 when he composed Dragon Quest. It's never too late to start a career as a video game composer!

New post: Plaidophile: Stuff, and things https://beesbuzz.biz/blog/6965-Stuff-and-things

oogh, I made a joke on a streamer's chat that did not land at all and now I feel like garbage again

New post: Plaidophile: Improvement https://beesbuzz.biz/blog/7195-Improvement

So I gotta say, today I'm feeling a lot better. Between getting 9 hours of sleep last night, the lower nortriptyline dose, the magnesium supplements, and me not using my CPAP last night, surely one of those things was the primary contributing factor.

I was even able to take a decent-sized walk without feeling completely wiped out today! Although I'll probably still want to drive or bus to work tomorrow.

Always remember to Bee Kind