buro9

Joined 19 years ago

Karma
24,701
Submissions
3,622
Member since
Jan 8
barely active on here now, VP Eng @ Grafana Labs
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Recent submissions

Comment · 8 months ago
and in a single moment, the value of software patents to companies is fully restored... the software license by itself is not enough to protect software innovation, a non-trivial implementation can now be (reasonably) trivially re-implemented.

I'm sure most people here would agree patents stifle innovation, but if copyright doesn't work for companies then they will turn to a different tool.

Comment · 11 months ago
A reply of sorts, and a standard disclaimer that I work at Grafana Labs.

> career-driven development

we don't have this and promote and reward as frequently for "I've done solid operations" as we do for "I've added this feature" (I'm on promotion committees and can state this confidently).

what we do have is high autonomy for engineers. This autonomy means it's a freedom that engineers have to identify problems they feel are important and to work on them, they do not need permission and leadership do not veto this. Some of the best features in the last few years have been a direct result of this autonomy, it's one of the things that makes working here so attractive to many of the engineers. But, with autonomy comes a little chaos, and not everything that is done is going to satisfy every end user of OSS or paid customer (of which these are a small percent of the whole).

a lot of the innovation speed is just in the DNA of the company, even the creation of Grafana can be traced to a desire to get things done; Torkel wanted Kibana to also work for Prometheus, Kibana declined to add this, Torkel didn't stand still and added things to a fork of Kibana now called Grafana and hasn't stopped adding things since.

> They also deprecated Angular within Grafana and switched to React for dashboards. This broke most existing dashboards.

we did, I think the entire journey was 7 years long, communicated many times, over at least 6 major releases. maintaining dashboards in two languages increased complexity, whilst reducing compatibility, and gave a very large security surface to be worried about. we communicated clearly, provided migration tools, put it in release notes, updated docs, repeated it at conferences and on community calls.

arguably we went too slow, and should've ripped the band-aid off, but we were sensitive to the fact that it was a breaking change and so we proceeded with extreme caution. it's done now, it was finally completed in the last version, only a very small number of users reported impact as a result of the time and care taken on this.

> I just hope OTEL settles, gets stable and boring fast

this is distinct from Grafana, but it's a good point... OTel is the product of virtually every vendor at this point, and a hell of a lot of engineers, it now has a lot of momentum and the pace is unlikely to ease up due to the sheer number of contributions and things that OTel as a community wishes to achieve.

the most likely eventuality is that enough stability emerges to allow vendors (including but not limited to Grafana Labs) to abstract away the pace of innovation occurring underneath, but this is in tension with providing the benefits of the innovation to the people that use it.

what I would say is that for most people the boring and slow path does still exist, and it's still good... just use Prometheus, a logging option of your choice, and simple Grafana dashboards and alerts. that combination hasn't varied in years, and those on it today are still immune from caring about the pace of innovation and change in OTel and across the Observability industry. OTel is being used in production at massive scale by lots of companies, but whether your project or company need move to it now reflects your priorities, many are adopting to gain independence from vendors, or just control over their telemetry, but many customers are also saying they're happy to stay on the slow and boring path and for everything to work predictably with low cost to keep pace... it works too.

Comment · 1 year ago
Use NextDNS (https://nextdns.io) on your mobile phone as a Private DNS provider, and switch as many apps as allow it to be web apps, i.e. https://m.uber.com works just fine, and use Firefox on mobile and enable `about:config` via `chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml` , from there switch `beacon.enabled` to false.

Far less requires an actual app than most people imagine. It's the apps that leak so much.

Comment · 1 year ago
I hated it so much I migrated to ProtonPass, deleted my data, and set my account to expire.

Then Proton CEO made some statements I found offensive, so I re-activated my Bitwarden account, migrated back, and am now learning to love the changes.

The best I've got for tips are:

1. Settings > Appearance > Quick Copy

2. Settings > Appearance > Compact Mode

3. Settings > Appearance > Extension Width > Wide

I still don't love it, but it remains the best of the bunch.

Comment · 1 year ago
not any more, now the thing about Arsenal is that it's all set pieces and over-reliance on corners.

Saka isn't all that either, he'd be nothing within Odegaard.

(this is convincing, and I know about as much as the IT Crowd did)

Comment · 1 year ago
I don't agree with the law, there's no point in using emphasis to labour the point, the UK Govt advice on who it applies to is here https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act... and feel free to read it. As to enforcement, it's a new law so there has been none, hence no-one can speak to that, but you're right that extradition is the path and on that front if a similar law exists and agreements are in place, then for example most European countries would extradite. We don't know where the author is, but they posted on here in the morning of European time zones, and all I suggested is that they do their diligence on their personal risk as a result of laws that do claim to apply their service. No-one should dismiss the risk, the person should speak to a lawyer.
Comment · 1 year ago
The law has ridiculous overreach, that's true. And we haven't seen what international enforcement of it looks like yet. But to deal with the facts as they are now, the law states that it applies if you have UK users, and that the personal liability for officers of the company can be up to £18M... The overreach continues because it also covers "harmful but not illegal" content.

The app publishing didn't exclude the UK, it probably should.

Comment · 1 year ago
Beware if you have UK users, you should read the new law in the UK called the online safety act.

Your site has young trans people, sexual content, and would also be a target for grooming from chasers. The risks, for you, are very high.

Comment · 1 year ago
The article doesn't even touch "people enter their email incorrectly when registering an account".

I've received magic links to my Gmail account that belong to other people, for accounts that have ordered flight tickets, or clothing, or digital services.

Those people, I guess they now have no way to access their online account, as they cannot password reset (if that was the fallback), or change their email (usually requiring confirmation), or receive their magic link.

There's nothing I can do here, except to delete the email, I don't have any indication as to what the correct email should be, and the person's name is the same as my legal name and there are a lot of people with that name in the World.

Few services verify an email during sign-up, because I'm sure data shows that added friction during sign-up results in fewer people signing up.

Comment · 1 year ago
It's been 2025 for 6 months already...
Comment · 1 year ago
> 403 is generally a bad way to get crawlers to go away

Hardly... the article links says that a 403 will cause Google to stop crawling and remove content... that's the desired outcome.

I'm not trying to rate limit, I'm telling them to go away.

Comment · 1 year ago
Oh I did this with the Facebook one and redirected them to a 100MB file of garbage that is part of the Cloudflare speed test... they hit this so many times that it would've been 2PB sent in a matter of hours.

I contacted the network team at Cloudflare to apologise and also to confirm whether Facebook did actually follow the redirect... it's hard for Cloudflare to see 2PB, that kind of number is too small on a global scale when it's occurred over a few hours, but given that it was only a single PoP that would've handled it, then it would've been visible.

It was not visible, which means we can conclude that Facebook were not following redirects, or if they were, they were just queuing it for later and would only hit it once and not multiple times.

Comment · 1 year ago
It's never that smooth.

In fact 2M requests arrived on December 23rd from Claude alone for a single site.

Average 25qps is definitely an issue, these are all long tail dynamic pages.

Comment · 1 year ago
Apparently yes.

If a more specific UA hasn't been set, and the library doesn't force people to do so, then the library that has been the source of abusive behaviour is blocked.

No loss to me.

Comment · 1 year ago
At this point, no.

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