Forricide

One of those niche, (presumably?) widely-unknown bugs that is actually extremely relevant to subcommunities of people who play the game - in particular, any decent Minecraft speedrunner is well aware of "boat break" and plays around the possibility.

Part of the reason I love speedrunning games in general is how it tends to bring weird bugs to the forefront of your consciousness, just like this!

Definitely seems to be getting worse, outside of AWS itself, more websites seem to be having sporadic or serious issues. Concerning considering how long the outage has been going.

So for me, extremely anecdotally, I host a few fairly low-importance things on a home server (which is just an old desktop computer left sitting under a desk with Ubuntu slapped on it): A VPN (WireGuard), a few Discord bots, a Twitch bot + some auth stuff, and a few other services that I personally use.

These are the issues I've ran into that have caused downtime in the last few years:

- 1x power outage: if I had set up restart on power, probably would have been down for 30-60 minutes, ended up being a few hours (as I had to manually press the power button lol). Probably the longest non-self-inflicted issue.

- Twitch bot library issues: Just typical library bugs. Unrelated to self-hosting.

- IP changes: My IP actually barely ever changes, but I should set up DDNS. Fixable with self-hosting (but requires some amount of effort).

- Running out of disk space: Would be nice to be able to just increase it.

- Prooooooobably an internet outage or two, now that I think about it? Not enough that it's been a serious concern, though, as I can't think of a time that's actually happened. (Or I have a bad memory!)

I think that's actually about it. I rely fairly heavily on my VPN+personal cloud as all my notes, todos, etc are synced through it (Joplin + Nextcloud), so I do notice and pay a lot of attention to any downtime, but this is pretty much all that's ever happened. It's remarkable how stable software/hardware can be. I'm sure I'll eventually have some hardware failure (actually, I upgraded my CPU 1-2 years ago because it turns out the Ryzen 1700 I was using before has some kind of extremely-infrequent issue with Linux that was causing crashes a couple times a month), but it's really nice.

To be clear, though, for an actual business project, I don't think this would be a good idea, mainly due to concerns around residential vs commercial IPs, arbitrary IPs connecting to your local network, etc that I don't fully pay attention to.

> “How's that going to work when ten years in the future you have no one that has learned anything,”

Pretty obvious conclusion that I think anyone who's thought seriously about this situation has already come to. However, I'm not optimistic that most companies will be able to keep themselves from doing this kind of thing, because I think it's become rather clear that it's incredibly difficult for most leadership in 2025 to prioritize long-term sustainability over short-term profitability.

That being said, internships/co-ops have been popular from companies that I'm familiar with for quite a while specifically to ensure that there are streams of potential future employees. I wonder if we'll see even more focus on internships in the future, to further skirt around the difficulties in hiring junior developers?

That would definitely make the most sense. It’s also hydro in Quebec (hydro-Québec).

This one (among others) does really fascinate me. Maybe it’s due to spending a lot of time around diverse groups of people but I’ve never really seen a huge distinction between these words. Washroom, bathroom, toilet, I and everyone I know pretty much would use interchangeably? Or at least wouldn’t blink at someone else using them.

Restroom, and a variety of others, might be slightly more usage specific but still… wouldn’t be unexpected or weird, I’d say?

I always assumed we just called it hydro in BC because so much of the power comes from hydroelectric, but then I moved and it seems we call it hydro everywhere no master source..?

That's very fair - at least with third party software, it can be nigh impossible to track down a problem.

With third party libraries, I've too-often found myself reading the code to figure something out, although that's a frustrating enough experience I generally wouldn't wish on other people.

Fixing everything is impractical, but I'd say a safer rule of thumb would be to at least understand small strangenesses/errors. In the case of things that are hard to fix - e.g. design/architectural decisions that lead to certain performance issues or what have you - it's still usually not too time consuming to get a basic understanding of why something is happening.

Still better to quash small bugs and errors where possible, but at least if you know why they happen, you can prevent unforeseen issues.

I use a Cepstrum (bought a kit + switches + keycaps and put it together; there's no soldering required, so it's quite easy). I never 3D printed tenting, so it's not quite perfect for normal typing, but for gaming it's fantastic - I don't think I can go back to non low-profile switches.

Your book is legendary and I have recommended it to a good number of students/programmers-in-learning. Haven't ever made it through (no matter how good the textbook, I'm still not a textbook person...) but immense respect for the time and dedication required to make such a brilliant and engaging learning material.

You're correct, there are a bunch of different ticket options. Not sure about how it's actually implemented, though.

Slightly tangential, but when I was in Montreal, I was blown away that you just purchase a ticket from a machine and you get a printed out ticket with an NFC chip inside. Not my favourite part of the trip (Montreal is beautiful!) but definitely a cool piece of technology to see being put to such a mundane use.

This is a super interesting anecdote, considering the name definitely confused me at the time - trying to learn web development with no context I did indeed think it was some kind of Mozilla-centric resource. All those times using w3schools over MDN are, in hindsight, a little sad aha.

Couldn't agree more. Learning bad things - not that TDD is bad, or anything, but over committing to it might be - is a huge part of understanding why certain approaches are better or worse than others. Although, I suppose 'making mistakes is the path to learning' is already conventional wisdom, so.

Yep, they've had that feature for quite a while, too.

I've always had the impression that - although obviously there is pressure within the company to monetize - they seem to have a lot of developer focus on 'just doing the obvious things that clients want'. Almost every major complaint or feature request I can think of from the last decade or so of using Discord has been addressed in some way, which is really cool to see from software... even if they do somewhat irritating things sometimes.