Clojurians Log v2

It's a mixed bag here... We have a pretty dense highway network for a small country. Much of it was built in the seventies, and we did not sufficiently keep up with maintenance and modernisation through the 90s and 2000s. We're catching up now, at the moment there are some big infrastructure projects going on on the ring around Brussels for instance, but some roads haven't really been upgraded in decades.

Roads are a regional responsibility (the regions being Flanders, wallonia, and Brussels). The first two have significantly increased their maintenance budget and are doing a lot of renewal projects, Brussels however has severe budget issues, and was politically dreadlocked for over a year, so the situation there is not likely to improve any time soon.

https://www.euractiv.com/news/new-schuman-roundabout-is-worst-possible-outcome-says-architect/

Good morning

good morning

good morning ☀️

good morning!

Schuman should be the prime target for guerrilla tile flippers and tree planters.

I'll gladly fund some pickaxes and shovels

Good ♨️ morning

Please ignore the bit of metal there. It really isn't a good idea to move towards metal things on a military firing range. (and I'm glad they warn you about it)

Good morning 🙂

Evening!?

Really enjoying the normal 22 degrees overcast summer weather we returned to this morning.

Yes, 2000 hours our time. I feel the evening greeting is warranted, even if we're on UGT.

It might have been a publisher decision. One publisher wanted to charge me for the generation of the index…… I said no but they went ahead and did it anyway.

longing for that bubble to pop (I'd be happier if it did it and caused slightly less collateral damage)

I was looking at the salary averages on IT Jobs Watch, damage is being done from a financial perspective in my opinion.

I believe that is its stated job 🤷🏼‍♂️

💣🧨 🏭 💣🧨 🏭 💣🧨

🔨 General Ludd needs new, bigger tools 😉

drones can easily destroy a data centre (proven recently in West Asia)

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgk28nj0lrjo

unless data centres get human rights first (some slight hyperbole from me) https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/the-world-today/2026-06/worlds-internet-infrastructure-under-threat-who-going-protect

Who is paying Calum Inverarity?

The ODI https://theodi.org/about-the-odi/governance/

ha, you are paying for it

This is why #C0B7Q4XRM1U exists, to balance #C068E9L5M2Q etc 😉

While I enjoy constantly learning new stuff still, after 45+ years in IT, I am also glad that I am extremely close to retirement and never have to deal with the job market ever again 😐

create #plan-drone-attacks-on-ai-infra and I'll join ;-)

I do think having military things in civilian data centres is a bad idea. It isn't to the level of using human shields, but it is running down the same lines of thought (esp when you start to think about hospital and health service data and coordination done in data centres)

The US armed forces moved from their bases into local hotels which is very much human shields. But yeah, running military operations from the same data center makes it a legitimate target.

The whole "AI data center" thing has made me wonder more about existing "cloud data center" infra and how much we've already ignored this problem for the years (decades?) that we've shifted to "the cloud" -- we no longer know what a given set of servers is running, since we virtualized everything into shared systems.

At work, we use managed virtual servers -- and we've had a couple of instances where the data center company has had to move our systems to different (physical) servers to avoid negative performance impacts from other companies' loads running on the same hardware as our systems. With no indication of what those companies' systems are doing to have such an impact on us.

btw. I'm very envious of this: https://clojurians.slack.com/archives/CBJ5CGE0G/p1782740114822809?thread_ts=1782730619.144069&cid=CBJ5CGE0G

The convenience of having zero downtime CPU, memory, and disk upgrades is very compelling tho' 😕 And even near-zero downtime migration of our "servers" to new hardware -- they migrated our entire QA & production clusters to new hardware a year or two back and it took just seconds...

@otfrom I just need to ride out one more year, until I can get Medicare here (still not completely free, but the closest the US has to the NHS setup). Healthcare here is brutal! 😞 I had to go to the ER (A&E) on Saturday for chest pains and high heart rate -- I was very dehydrated after too much exertion in the basement and hauling stuff up stairs but I thought I might be having a heart attack -- and even with their 20% discount for payment on-the-spot, it was over $900 for a couple of hours (chest x-ray, fluids, two rounds of blood tests).

(because I had not hit my deductible yet this year -- on a plan that costs me over $1,000 per month in insurance!)

@borkdude are you playing a piano?

yep

whats you favorite melody to play in the morning? )

I'm more of an evening player ;)

then what is you favorite melody for Sunday evening? )

yeah, people outside of the US really, really don't get how terrible the payments are around US healthcare

I'm glad you are ok and sorry for your bank balance

Having my wife on Medicare now (since she turned 65 in November), has roughly halved my payment, but with gap insurance etc for her, that's close to $500/month. My company pays $400/month on top of my payment BTW. And the out-of-pocket max is about $9k/year I think -- which I never hit, so even that outrageous monthly payment only covers part of any healthcare I need. If you have to have anything done that insurance refuses to cover -- which is more common than it should be -- you end up paying nearly all of that. Several years ago, we got into a battle with insurance about a treatment my wife needed every three months, that cost $10k per treatment. After a lot of time, effort, and stress, insurance agreed to cover about $7k for each treatment -- so that was still $12k out of pocket. I really do miss European healthcare 😐

Mind you, she's had two full knee replacements this year and we've paid nothing for all of that (well, nothing except the $500/month! 😄 ).

I don't have any one particular melody, I just play to learn new stuff usually

HurrAI! crying-laughing-joy-blood 💸 💸 💸 https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/1ufkc2q/then_vs_now/

I remember buying a fairly early color PowerBook that came with 4MB RAM installed and I added 16MB RAM. According to Copilot, that was probably the 1400c and cost about 2K GBP back then and the RAM card probably cost about 450 GBP. I had a 520c before that (also came with 4MB RAM but could only be upgraded to 14MB total apparently -- I thought it was that one I'd added a 16MB card to, but Copilot says not).

Going from 48 GIGABYTES to 64G for $200 seems like a bargain compared to the old days 🙂

(the 520c had 160MB HD -- which seemed insanely huge at the time... one of my earlier computers, a SAGE IV, had 1MB RAM and a 20MB HD!)

Is AI your new RAM pack? Priceless 😅