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Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

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Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#301

Post by networked »

roydivision wrote: post #12

Reminds me of the proposal to keep the nuclear launch codes inside the body of an innocent volunteer, so the President would have to kill the person to get the codes. https://boingboing.net/2015/12/11/proposal-keep-the-nuclear-...

It's the 1980s, and the United States implements this policy. What happens on the Soviet side? After the United States' announcement the Soviet press and Soviet sympathizers worldwide gasp loudly in horror. "How cruel are Americans, really? Is the barbaric act of murdering and butchering an innocent young man the only thing still able to keep their president from destroying our Earth?"

The Soviet General Secretary soon receives a report about what the new policy means tactically. Americans will take several extra minutes, possibly more, to authorize retaliation. (The exact delay is subject to disagreement. Secret experiments are conducted to get the timing down. They are inconclusive.) Amid the decade's mounting tensions, a preemptive nuclear strike looks more tempting than before.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#302

Post by dmurray »

dirkt wrote: post #292
myself248 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever since hearing about point-and-call, I've started using it in the kitchen when turning on the stove. I used to destroy one or two pans a year by turning on the wrong burner, but it's now been about a year and a half and I haven't screwed it up yet. The knobs are labeled with a terrible little glyph meant to indicate which is which, and I've supplemented this with plain-english Brady labels "front left", "front ri…

Not sure how it is in other countries, but don't the knobs when going left-to-right always correspond clockwise to the burners, starting at the lower left? And the oven knob is to the right? I've never seen a different arrangement.

My four knobs go front to back. I don't know what order they're in - the glyphs are fairly readable to me. I've seen this arrangement plenty, it's not unique.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#303

Post by audience_mem »

zedpm wrote: post #70
illumin8 wrote: post #59

This is a great idea, and I'd like to point out that having such a system in place would have prevented one of the largest Internet outages in recent memory - the Amazon S3 outage in 2017: https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/ > At 9:37AM PST, an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used b…

It's kind of funny, since various operations performed in the AWS web console use this model (e.g. type the name of the resource you're trying to delete). As an organization, they're aware of this approach and think it's useful, but (presumably) didn't use it in their own internal tooling.

Perhaps those were added after they learnt their lesson.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#304

Post by dmurray »

dasyatidprime wrote: post #284
jlmorton wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

War story time. Long ago, I worked for an interesting company that insisted on running its entire business on Linux desktops, all the way back between 1999-2002. Imagine running StarOffice/OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Netscape Navigator, etc, for your entire business back in 2000, including your executive team, marketing teams, everyone, most of whom had never even heard of Linux before. Anyway, this being Linux, everyon…

You probably knew this already, and there's probably better solutions if you're not in the manual sysadmin world, but after I did that on a personal machine a few decades ago (I think it was?), I got in the habit of using `--one-file-system` when doing major recursive rm operations that weren't meant to cross filesystems. Or `find -xdev … -delete` for anything more selective.

It seems better to alias rm to "rm --one-file-system", assuming major cross-filesystem deletes aren't something you do all the time that should be made as ergonomic as possible.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#305

Post by blackboxlogic »

encom wrote: post #167
wruza wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always using the "phone keys cigarettes money" mantra together with patting on my pockets before opening any outside door.

I do that exact some thing, and I haven't smoked in 3 years. The downside is that if I'm supposed to remember to bring something, in addition to those 3 things, I'm extremely likely to forget it. If it's super duper important, I tie it to the door handle.

To remember to bring a physical object, I leave my keys on it. Downside, sometimes people will bring my keys to me when they find them in strange places, like the fridge.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#306

Post by GauntletWizard »

PureParadigm wrote: post #240
harikb wrote: post #62

I have a habit of creating cli tools, which potentially do dangerous things, to default to dry-run mode. For example, instead of the typical `--dry-run` or `-n` option, my scripts instead had a cheesy `--do-it` to be non-dry-run. It is annoying as hell to my colleagues, but saved the day many times.

A coworker of mine would write all his bash scripts to echo out the commands it would run, and then to actually run it he would pipe it to bash. This way he could inspect the commands to make sure they were correct before running them. Something like: ./dangerous-script.sh $args | bash

I would love a shell that allows you to “run” a script in manual mode - Where at the end of every command, every statement, it prints what the next command will be with all variables expanded or otherwise called out, and then requires you to hit “enter” to cause it to proceed. I write a decent amount something between README and Shell Script. I’ve already got an awk one-liner that parses the shell out of Markdown. I typically copy+paste, line-by-line, from my README and add a bunch of echo statements to verify what i’m doing.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#307

Post by mangamadaiyan »

andreareina wrote: post #280
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds of a quote from, I think, Discworld. > You're a survivor. > But I've nearly died, dozens of times. > Exactly.

Sounds like Rincewind. See also the octogenarian barbarians who are so deadly precisely because they've had a lifetime of experience of not dying.

That would be Cohen the Barbarian (aka Genghis Cohen) and his cohorts, collectively known as the Silver Horde.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#308

Post by beefield »

gomox wrote: post #285
abrookewood wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sinking feeling and cold panic when you realise what you've done. God that is horrible.

My favorite version is when that UPDATE or DELETE SQL query that you expected to finish instantly takes a few seconds before giving you your cursor back.

If someone just gave me a tool to show me the expected wall time of query before actually running it, I would be quite happy. I would not even need that much of accuracy, anything up to one order of magnitude would be useful, and even up to two orders of magnitude I would use occasionally.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#309

Post by dredmorbius »

PureParadigm wrote: post #240
harikb wrote: post #62

I have a habit of creating cli tools, which potentially do dangerous things, to default to dry-run mode. For example, instead of the typical `--dry-run` or `-n` option, my scripts instead had a cheesy `--do-it` to be non-dry-run. It is annoying as hell to my colleagues, but saved the day many times.

A coworker of mine would write all his bash scripts to echo out the commands it would run, and then to actually run it he would pipe it to bash. This way he could inspect the commands to make sure they were correct before running them. Something like: ./dangerous-script.sh $args | bash

Same, or save to a file, temporarily, check that, then run the resulting script.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#310

Post by jai_ »

chrisseaton wrote: post #293
Aeolun wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing A cannot be the right thing to do if you think doing B is still impossible. If you cannot kill your friend to kill a few hundreds of thousands more, how can it possibly be justified? I just struggle to come up with a scenario where that is the case. Of course I’m of the school that thinks firing nuclear weapons is never a good idea.

But ‘know you should’ is not the same as ‘can physically bring yourself to do it’.

But that is the exact point. Having a human interlock explicitly shifts the dependency. Knowing that you should launch nukes is no longer enough and being able to bring yourself to physically kill someone is the additional requirement that we are _deliberately_ adding to this process despite there not being an obvious logical link between the two actions before.
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