Hi, you are using the right stack for this kind of project, very promising!
I have only two questions I could not answer myself by reading the docs, it would be great if you would like to answer these:
A) Groups: for many use cases of "social softwares" groups are a very basic requirement - I can not see any way to have a group inside an instance or a way to simulate groups by using Pleroma in a multi-tenant way, like one Pleroma instance for each group served from the same code installation (ecto has a db prefix feature, maybe this could help with a quick path for a "multi-tenancy-as-groups" feature?). Am I missing something or are groups simply not there yet?
B) EU data protection: would you say that Pleroma is safe for (naive) users to install in the sense of EU conformity or is it a risk currently for a single person to offer a Pleroma instance in EU? I could not find any information about this very important topic - what again made me wonder if developers are realizing the importance of this issue at all?
Would be very interesting to read your ideas about these issues!
BTW the docs at https://docs.pleroma.social/readme.html would be more readable if the sidebar could be adjusted to the width of the containing text - HTML + CSS allows that, it should be used! Also having "Top" - a navigation directive - listed as an actual chapter name seems a little strange.
groups are a very complicated topic, everybody wants them but nobody can agree on what exactly they are. Either way, we are working on them for Pleroma, they are necessary for a lot of other nice features that we want to have in the future. See https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma-meta/issues/14
I'm wondering if EU data protection rules are fully supposed to be applied by small businesses. Because then it has very hard to properly follow consequences for contact list management (smartphone and paper phonebooks, etc.)
If that was my server I would of course put a joke in /etc/shadow - did you try to brute force the hashes? It would not be a great surprise to find some obvious funny content if you try?
That's a pretty long passphrase, so someone would have to have put it in the word list directly to ever guess something that long. Would be fun though.
Can anybody provide a good comparison e.g. with Meltano?
I am not affiliated with the Meltano people, but I like the idea of keeping the system modular, what seems to make it easier to replace components.
I have no doubt that we will see better replacements for every component of a data pipeline in the coming years. If there is only one thing to do right, then it´s to not bet on one tool but keep the whole stack flexible.
I am still missing well established standards for data formats, workflow definitions and project descriptions - hopefully open source ninjas will deliver on this front before proprietary pirats will destroy the field with progress-inhibiting closed things. It seems to be too late to create an "Autocad" or "Word" file format for datascience, but I see no clear winner atm, but hopefully my sight is bad - please enlighten me!
I am not a Twitter engineer, but I guess that this is nothing else but a great marketing campaign - suddenly many people remember all their accounts and login and that will help to produce very nice reports about the "active user base".
But why is this needed?
My guess: many people are sick of Twitter and since one president of one nation made it his personal propaganda vehicle it is becoming a mental wasteland - new ecosystems are growing and people inside these new communities are quite happy that all the zombies are contained in that trash dump, like facebook.
Actually we should all be happy that these first big "social" networks decontaminated the internet for us - these are now the Tschernobyls of social media where all the toxic waste is collected, hopefully for many years.
How do you know that they do not hire "any people with ops experence"? Do you have insight? Is there any public evidence for this or anything you could publish yourself to add some substance to your words?
It would be great if you understand that just saying something is not enough on the internet.
The "Ops" section actually consists of product development teams for features in GitLab itself (the Configure/Monitor "stages"), while the SREs are in the "Infrastructure" department. See https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/#engineering-d.... But yes, we don't seem to be hiring SREs at the moment, but I assume we'll add more openings in the beginning of next year.
Regarding DBAs, that job you posted is more of a normal Backend Engineer role with a database specialty. We also have dedicated Database Engineer roles:
I didn't find some of those jobs, so thanks for linking them.
As a side note I just went through those job descriptions and I -really- like the layout.
On topic: Unfortunately they really do prove my point. There is a very strong focus on "strong" programming skills which is rather undefined. It's literally mentioned in every single role description.
The overwhelming majority of staff that knows how to run software reliably ironically are not software engineers, although there certainly are some software engineers who also possess this skill.
The people I'm speaking about typically understand concepts and solutions (like PAXOS, filesystems or public cloud) more than they understand software development methodology or software product structure.
I guess you have a global reach and can be quite picky about who you hire, maybe you /do/ exclusively hire architecture and systems focused programmers, or maybe "strong" programming skills are a different definition to mine.
That's certainly a valid concern! From my perspective, the programming skills in these job descriptions are one requirement among many others, and I'm not sure how much weight it really has in the hiring process for these roles, especially if your other skills are a good enough match.
We do have this note on all job pages, which maybe should be more prominent:
> Avoid the confidence gap; you do not have to match all the listed requirements exactly to apply.
Some amount of general programming experience is definitely required though, since SREs and DBEs frequently have to dig into our codebase and things like Ansible runbooks. And especially regarding SQL, a lot of it is heavily abstracted not only through the Rails ORM but also our own code.
Found some other jobs that focus less on programming, though we don't have current openings for most of these either:
Why is significant Rails experience a requirement for a database engineer position? That will quite drastically limit your options. Yes, it is a useful skill but hardly necessary to do this job. I know a lot of really good database consultants and they can usually identify and fix bad queries in virtually any framework or ORM. The skills are really transferable.
As recently as October 2017, they had exactly one database person. So I can imagine quite a lot of work and hiring needed to scale up a solid ops practice.
"Until very recently I was the only database specialist which meant I had a lot of work on my plate."
I would not call myself an operations expert by any means, but I have done quite a bit of infrastructure work in the past; both with bare metal setups and cloud based solutions.
With that said, the old database specialist position was about 80% engineering, 20% infrastructure, with the infrastructure work being done in cooperation with the production engineers.
I left the database team a good year ago and quite a lot has changed since then. I think these days we have a handful of people focusing on the database side of things.
To be fair it depends a bit on the context. I present myself sometimes as a database expert and other times a Ruby/C Developer. And I would argue that I, as a minor PostgreSQL contributor who follows the mailing lists, am more knowledgeable than most about databases and especially PostgreSQL.
Edit: Admittedly while I have done a lot of DBA stuff and server operations on top of my software development, hardware and networking are not my strong points so if the company could afford it I would want a more traditional server/networking guy on my team (and at a previous job I did exactly that). And I agree their job posting seem to have a very heavy focus on development experience.
What are your qualifications that enable you to come to this conclusion?
I would be very interested in studying your publications - where can I find your analysis?
Also it would be really very appreciated if you would like to publish the datasets that lead you to this conclusion - would you like to give us a public repo with the data, so we can check your results?
That's not very humble. His assertions are quite basic, and don't need research-grade qualifications to consider. The earth has certainly prehistorically been much warmer, so nature handled it just fine, and it is an interesting question to consider how much more arable land a warmer earth would have.
Earth has not been considerably warmer prehistorically (a term that, technically speaking, refers to the period between the appearance of tool-using hominins and the invention of written history). If you mean paleontological periods before the appearance of genus Homo, yes, but that's not very relevant given how the GP talked about the human civilization (which, incidentally, did not exist in the prehistoric era either!)
As far as we know, the loss of arable land caused by the climate change (and other anthropogenic environmental changes) far outweighs possible gains elsewhere, and even if it didn't, agricultural land area is not exactly fungible.
Ok, I used the wrong word. I was also referring to OP's point that "nature was just fine" - the earth has been up to 12degC warmer than present, before humans could make any impact. My point is that, taken in isolation, a warmer earth is not fundamentally bad, nor new.
As for his point about humans preferring warmer temperatures - hopefully that is self-evident.
>As far as we know, the loss of arable land caused by the climate change (and other anthropogenic environmental changes) far outweighs possible gains elsewhere
Would like to see an analysis of arable land gained vs. lost. This is all purely hypothetical, of course - such a change would be drastic, and as you point out, arable land isn't exactly fungible.
A warmer earth with humans on it is fundamentally new, as we've not been around that long. Even forerunner species like Homo habilis only go back three million years. An eye blink in the geologic record, and long, long after the five mass extinctions.
12C warmer would put vast amounts of the land area of the planet outside habitable conditions for humanity. We'd probably be restricted to former arctic regions, and not much else. So no, I don't think it's self evident at all. It won't take many degrees rise to rule us out of equatorial regions, then tropical...
True, it would be new to humans, but (at least initially) it's not fundamentally a problem (please note, I'm arguing in the most theoretical sense here). Large amounts of the equatorial regions are already uninhabitable - it would be interesting to see an analysis of the total inhabitable land loss vs gain for each degree in temperature rise.
Given a slow enough rate of change, species would adapt and migrate. Presuming there aren't farms, cities, roads, railways, dams and fences preventing smooth migration to the newly appropriate regions.
My concern is we're changing the climate at geologically unprecedented rates, likely far too quickly for species to evolve and migrate, even if we hadn't locked up 50% of the world's landmass for our own use. That will play interesting havoc with food chains no matter what former permafrost and arctic is freed up for use (with its own emissions load on melting).
Start changing behaviour after the IPCC first report came in, in 1990. Waiting until we have not just visible, but dramatic and surprisingly early consequences is leaving taking evasive action in the car until the bodywork has started to crumple. I note that nearly all the surprises seem to be of things being far more or far sooner than predicted...
That leaves dramatic and expensive global scale action. We're not doing it. There's no sign we're thinking about doing it. Let the market resolve is the sole incredibly weak suggestion.
I don't think history is going to view citizens and politicians of the 21st century kindly. I can forgive and understand those contributing to the problem before say 1990, before the awareness was widespread. We've emitted more since 1990 than in the entire time before.
And the "hothouse" Earths were drastically different from Earth today. Given time, life adapts, but the point is that there's no time. There have been sudden, drastic global climate changes in Earth's history before. It's just that they have been accompanied by massive extinction events. Whatever we do, we probably won't destroy the whole ecosystem. But that's a rather ridiculously low bar to clear!
Sure, the "hothouse" earths are at the drastic end of the scale, but earth has spent significant periods of time at temperatures a few degrees above current. "There is no time" is a complex assertion that needs at least some research, and if there really isn't, what do you propose we do?
The details make it a very hard problem. There is scientific consensus that a too rapidly changing climate leads to mass extinction of species (plants, animals, etc.), because suddenly species are not adapted to the climate they find themselves in and can't migrate quickly enough. This loss of biodiversity should be of great concern, because it is irrecoverable. There are tons of other non-obvious problems that are not commonly understood.
It is a very hard problem, which is why I personally hate to see so many issues conflated under one slogan. Your point about species adaption is a fair one, however if we are going to consider absolute effects on biodiversity, direct human activity has already had a significantly worse effect.
> if we are going to consider absolute effects on biodiversity, direct human activity has already had a significantly worse effect
Do you have a source for this or are you just basing it on "common sense"
It does toe that Hans have primarily impacted species that tend to sit higher on the food chain. We have caused the extinction of more animals than plants. Rapid warming can kill of plants that can't move quickly migrate quickly enough to stay within the temperature ranges where they can survive.
It isn't just matter of spreading their seeds far enough (like the reforestation of New England), many plants rely on a prexistingnset of conditions created by the the presence of other species to be able to grow. When the required shifts get large enough there simply may not be enough time for those conditions to be established elsewhere before the temperatures in the current areas kills off the species.
Plants species (and animals like coral) serve as a critical component for many other species. It is quite conceivable that rapid global warming will lead to an extinction event that far exceeds anything that humans have managed to date.
Our understanding of ecological systems is still pretty limited and I don't think we can know for sure how bad it will be. I am personally hopeful that we can delevope terraforming techniques to assist with ecosystem relocation that can mitigate some of this.
I don't really have a source on that, although I'm also not aware of any particular species that are known to have been wiped out due to the current climate change. It is, however, fairly obvious that humans have had an enormous impact on pretty much every inhabitable part of the earth. Even without climate change, it's plausible that human activity will ultimately destroy most ecosystems.
>It is quite conceivable that rapid global warming will lead to an extinction event that far exceeds anything that humans have managed to date.
>When the required shifts get large enough there simply may not be enough time...
>Our understanding of ecological systems is still pretty limited
You've made a number of assertions here about ecology with no reference to research.
This is one of my main issues with the way climate change is presented - much is made of tipping points and the scale of the incoming catastrophe, but the fact is we simply don't know. Even if it is true that we have a low number of decades until irreversible catastrophe, what exactly can be done about that?
You are the one who made a strong assertion that the potential for extinction caused by rapid global warming is less than what humans have already caused.
I made relatively few assertions and the ones I did make are basic ecological science. I was pointing out that your strong claim was irresponsible given the plausible possibilities and our limited knowledge.
Not quite. I made the assertion that the ecological damage humans have already caused is much worse than that caused so far by current climate change. We both agree that predicting the further change in climate and its ecological impact is very difficult.
> I made the assertion that the ecological damage humans have already caused is much worse than that caused so far by current climate change.
Take a look again at what you are responding too and what you said, it is not at all clear that we're were contrasting past effects on diversity. Indeed, given the topic of the the prospective of rapid global warming causing it is unclear what relevency that point would have.
Would you please like to add data and evidence to add some substance to your words? It is not enough to just "say something" on the internet - you need to provide evidence if you want to be taken seriously.
It is true that the earth has already been warmer. We're reaching points that humans are never seen, though.
Second, the problem here is not only the total temperature variation but the speed at which the temperature is changing.
Think of the difference between a car going from 130 km/h to 0 km/h in 8 seconds, and a car going from 130 km/h to 0 km/h in 0.3 seconds. Not really endearing.
Understood, although we have no way to know if there have ever been similar events, as the geologic record is something of a low-pass filter.
Just for the sake of argument, let's say you find yourself in a car in the second scenario, with no known way to stop it. What would you do? I say this as a pragmatist - if we take the headlines at face value, and we only have ~10 years to avert a catastrophe, then the only realistic way to avert it is if 90% of the world's population spends that 10 years planting trees before killing themselves.
The earth isn't going to return to that state any time soon :) I posed it as an open question - given any particular rise in temperature, what is the total loss and gain of inhabitable land?
I have only two questions I could not answer myself by reading the docs, it would be great if you would like to answer these:
A) Groups: for many use cases of "social softwares" groups are a very basic requirement - I can not see any way to have a group inside an instance or a way to simulate groups by using Pleroma in a multi-tenant way, like one Pleroma instance for each group served from the same code installation (ecto has a db prefix feature, maybe this could help with a quick path for a "multi-tenancy-as-groups" feature?). Am I missing something or are groups simply not there yet?
B) EU data protection: would you say that Pleroma is safe for (naive) users to install in the sense of EU conformity or is it a risk currently for a single person to offer a Pleroma instance in EU? I could not find any information about this very important topic - what again made me wonder if developers are realizing the importance of this issue at all?
Would be very interesting to read your ideas about these issues!
BTW the docs at https://docs.pleroma.social/readme.html would be more readable if the sidebar could be adjusted to the width of the containing text - HTML + CSS allows that, it should be used! Also having "Top" - a navigation directive - listed as an actual chapter name seems a little strange.