It has gotten a bit weirder in the age of “everything is a subscription”. For example, I was just looking at one for a development browser I use. I’m paying $12/month. They have a deal now where it’s $84/year for new customers, for the lifetime of their subscription. Not a one time discount.

I didn’t go off complaining, but I definitely feel a little frustrated that my reward for being an existing customer is to get to keep paying full price.

And I’m back. Whew, that was a rough upgrade. I had to do some manual PostgreSQL surgery to get it past 0.19.3 - there were two versions of the hot_rank function so the migration script was failing.

Then I noticed the logs were full of pictrs spitting out “Read corrupted data…” and crash looping, and I spent a couple of hours trying to get it to do anything. I finally had to give up and nuke it, so I guess the few images I’ve posted over the years are 404s now.

I started to get discouraged and I was going to just decommission the server, but I’ll try to learn my lesson and keep a closer eye on it so I can catch future problems before it’s too late.

Thanks very much!

I didn’t realize it was outdated; I get emails from Elestio regularly (including just this week) that it was automatically updated to the latest version. Apparently I forgot (it’s slowly coming back to me now) that at some point something broke on an upgrade and I must have pinned the version back in early 2024.

I just tried to move it forward and unfortunately, anything after that version breaks with a failing schema migration (maybe the same problem I had back then). I restored a backup for now and I’ll figure out how to fix it over the weekend.

I appreciate the assistance and info.

I think you missed the point.

Why is that safer/better? That binary can do anything a shell script can, and it’s a lot harder to inspect.

How Flint is doing is irrelevant to what I said, the same as me picking on a polluted city in Canada doesn’t change the fact that Canada generally has safe drinking water.

The comment I responded to made it sound like US tap water is mostly not safe to drink. That’s demonstrably untrue. I’m not defending the horrors of industrial capitalism or condoning environmental destruction, I’m merely pointing out that the US does in fact have standards, regulation, and enforcement for drinking water quality. This does not mean it’s perfect, but it does mean that in general you can drink the water out of the tap, like I do every day.

I hate that we live in a world where only extreme viewpoints are allowed. Either the USA is the greatest country in the world or it’s a complete shithole, anything else is just shouted down. I still make the stupid mistake of caring about what’s real rather than what makes a good soundbite on social media.

“Drinking water quality in the United States is generally safe. In 2016, over 90 percent of the nation’s community water systems were in compliance with all published U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) standards. Over 286 million Americans get their tap water from a community water system. Eight percent of the community water systems—large municipal water systems—provide water to 82 percent of the US population.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_water_quality_in_the_United_States

I don’t know where you got that idea, but public tap water is federally regulated in the US (at least for now). Bottled water is popular because of marketing, not because tap water is unsafe.

There’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed over the past few years where people refuse to read anything longer than a handful of words. In fact, it’s often lobbied as an insult toward the writer: “not gonna read that, bro” has a similar connotation as “what have you got there, nerd, a math book?” combined with “I guess I triggered you so bad you had to provide supporting detail for your ideas, ha ha!”

I think there’s a self reinforcing loop where we’ve all moved to mobile devices where it’s tedious and annoying to type anything, so we’ve gotten more used to shorter and shorter messages, making anything longer look old fashioned and out of touch. People who grew up with phones now feel like it’s tedious and annoying to even read a full paragraph (or watch a non-short video), let alone expend the extra energy required to decode handwriting and figure out a scribbled word from context. It’s easier just to say “not gonna read ur wall”, and reinforce that it’s now shameful to write a comment as long as this one.

Just saw another one this morning.

You might assume that, but in fact the ADA is one of the places where the US was ahead of the game in protecting people’s rights. It wasn’t always like it is now.