Obviously this is still a Pixel issue - but at least I can connect to my home Wifi again.

I previously posted saying that Wifi was broken in general, but I mistook my ongoing Xfinity outage as being unable to connect to any wifi. Thus I removed the post.

When the outage ended, I could connect to some other networks and couldn't figure out why.

It wasn't until after a painful factory reset process that I tried going from WPA3/WPA2 mode to just WPA2 on both of my APs and suddenly everything is able to connect again.

It seems that the recent OTA update borked WPA3-Personal in a way that doesn't allow it to navigate the "compatibility mode" of WPA3/WPA2 either.

Edit - Looks like this might even be something Verizon specific - UQ1A-20231205.015.A1

Edit2 - Also mine is a Pixel 7 Pro - a Pixel 6 Pro user reports no such issue - YMMV.

Other Arch Flavors I've tried (some are no longer with us) include:

• ArchBang
• EndeavourOS
• Manjaro
• Chakra

So with that out of the way, I've found my Garuda experience incredibly painful. From messy repositories (Chaotic-AUR plus their own stuff), to an overly involved upgrade process (when using the helper) - the distro screams of a team that has no freakin' clue how to maintain an actual distribution.

It's basically Arch on hard mode with so many settings rolled into their own packages which need to be removed before customization.

Then we get to the purported performance enhancements and, honestly, this is the worst performing distro I've ever used, by multiple miles. I'm not sure if its the scheduler settings, or something with the zram settings - but this distro hitches and hangs constantly. (5950x, 64GB of Ram, Samsung 980 Pro drives, NVIDIA RTX 3080Ti - NOT a weak machine by any standards)

I'd normally chalk it up to compositor issues on Wayland (yes, I prefer Wayland and it works fine for most Arch derivitaves even with Nvidia). However the performance issues even crop up on basic terminal commands on a TTY with lots of weird hangs and lags.

The ONLY thing that was easier on this distro was installing the various Proton GE builds and other specialty stuff found in the Chaotic-AUR. But given the above, it's definitely not worth it when one can configure an Arch box to do the same things without all of the problems.

Perhaps I'm not doing something right? Given all the praise for this distro, perhaps it shouldn't perform like this?

To be completely and utterly clear - I'm an advanced user trying out these distros for fun and discovery. I can indeed "just use a different distro" but wanted to give this one a fair shake before moving on.

A bit more context there since you might wonder why customers can cause Sev1's.

Well, I work for a Database Technology company and we provide a managed service offering. This managed service offering has SLA's that essentially enforce a 5 minute response time for any "urgent" issue.

Well, a common urgent issue is that the customer suddenly wants to load in a bunch of new data without informing us which causes the cluster to stop accepting write loads.

It's to the point where most if not all urgent pages result in some form of scaling of the cluster.

Since this is a customer driven behavior, there is no real ability to plan for it - and since these particular customers have special requirements (and thus, less ability to automate scaling operations), I'm unsure if there is any recourse here.

It's to the point that it doesn't even feel like an SRE team anymore - we should just instead be called "On-demand scaling agents". Since we're constantly trying to scale ahead of our customers.

All in all, I'm starting to feel like this is a management/sales level issue that I cannot possibly address. If we're selling this managed service offering as essentially "magic" that can be scaled whenever they need then it seems like we're being setup for failure at the organizational level. Not to mention, not being smart about costs behind scaling and factoring that into these contracts.

So, fellow SRE's have you had to have this conversation with a larger org? What works for something like this? What doesn't? Should I just seek greener pastures at this point?

P.S. - Posted c/Programming due to lack of a c/SRE

I've tried foam earplugs, but those are impossible to use socially as everything's too muddy. Also they'd end up sliding out eventually.

I eventually bought audiophile grade earplugs and they are FANTASTIC but the flange tips irritate my ears so bad.

I know circumaural headphones work great, but people have a harder time understanding I'm just using them as a filter to even hear them.

Hello all!

While it's 13 months and some change away, I think its important to emphasize our rules and code of conduct before things get too heated.

Post Rules:

1. Local and Arizona Politics only

All posts must be directly related to and have a significant involvement/impact on any of:

• Policy. This includes any discussion of specific governmental policies or the development of such policies. Government policy can be developed at any level of government (from elected school board to the Arizona Legislature). It also includes court decisions which either create law itself (appellate court decisions) or involve the government.
• Electioneering. This includes polling, events directly pertaining to elections, and discussion of candidates and political parties, including their platforms and policies.
• Politician Capacity. Any incident or potential incident that could prevent a current politician from serving in their capacity in government (e.g. death, injury/sickness, criminal prosecution or resignation) is topical. We consider politicians to be either (1) elected members of government; or (2) members of government confirmed/voted on by elected members of government.
• Advocacy. Any efforts to influence or promote a position on the above 3 areas of topicality. This includes protests, demonstrations and the positions and advocacy of interest groups.
• Pertinent New Reporting. New articles that cover previously unreported details of past events which both would have been topical if reported when they occurred and have a clear connection to current Arizona or local politics or future elections. Analysis, editorializing, or speculation on prior events with no newly reported facts is not covered under this clause, even if there is a link to current Arizona or local politics.

All posts must at least have a significant internal discussion or focus about current Arizona or Tucson politics as defined above. Therefore, if only a small part of an article contains topical discussion, it may still be considered off-topic.

The following are some common examples of inherently off-topic content:

• Nonpolitical actions of politicians or their relatives, meaning (1) anything a politician does that doesn't impact one of the 4 areas of politics defined above, (2) discussion of the non-political actions of a politician's relatives.
• National level politics that doesn't explicitly impact Arizona or Tucson. Even if the macro impact is significant. (National Debt Showdowns, etc)
• Media discussing other media outlets.
• Crime stories without direct relation to current Arizona politics, such as (1) shootings, (2) crimes of non-politicians such as donors or activists, and (3) and court decisions not tied explicitly to Arizona politics as defined above.

2. Articles must be published within the last two weeks

3. Do not create your own title for Link Posts - Either copy the post title manually, or use Lemmy's suggestion.

4. All submissions must be in English, Español, or O'odham (Tohono, Akimel, etc.)

5. Do not resubmit "already submitted" content

6. Disclosure of employment

Tucson.social expressly forbids users who are employed by a source to post link submissions to that source without broadcasting their affiliation with the source in question.

7. No Hateful Speech

People that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.

Marginalized or vulnerable groups include, but are not limited to, groups based on their actual and perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, or disability. These include victims of a major violent event and their families.

While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect those who promote attacks of hate or who try to hide their hate in bad faith claims of discrimination.

8. Do not suggest or support harm

Comments that threaten, advocate, celebrate, suggest, wish, hope, dream, express extreme indifference towards, or could result in harm of any kind, violence, or death are prohibited. This includes any comment or opinion post that has the effect of discouraging people from taking the COVID vaccine or playing their part in necessary public health measures.

9. No Spam

10. No unapproved bots

Newsbot is approved.

11. No Brigading

Any user caught assisting a brigade from another instance will be permanently banned. Any instances brigading this one will be defederated immediately.

---

Comment Rules:

1. Be civil and constructive at all times.

We understand that sometimes this can slip, so if you are asked politely by a moderator to cool it down - please comply. Being belligerent after this point is not tolerated and will result in a ban.

2. No Personal Attacks

3. No trolling, baiting or flaming

Trolling includes, but is not limited to:

• Commenting or submitting links in a way that can be reasonably interpreted as having the intent to shock, anger, or sow discord without good faith. ¹ ²
• Baiting is the act of making comments that can be reasonably interpreted as having the intention of getting a rise out of other users and goading other users into violating rules. ²
• Flaming is the act of attacking other users for their views or opinions and overlaps significantly with our rules on incivility.

¹ Good faith is sincere intention to be fair, open, and honest, regardless of the outcome of the interaction.

² Trolling and baiting do not include expressing personally held views that are objectively false or in the minority opinion unless they are specifically expressed in a manner intended to gain a rise out of other users.

The followings acts are some examples of trolling:

• Editing comments to brag about downvotes or entice inflammatory replies Linking to media with the intent to shock, anger, or sow discord without good faith.
• Bragging about trolling or participating in bad faith on tucson.social, either on this subreddit or elsewhere on the fediverse.
• Concern trolling; pretending to advocate something not believed in in order to parody, make fun of, or otherwise create discord in a group they disagree with (i.e., playing both sides)
• Using a title for a submission that shows intent to bypass the prohibition of text posts
• "Novelty" or "gimmick" accounts

4. No spam or soliciting users
5. Do not witch hunt or expose personal information

Do not make calls to action directed at non-public persons. Users are not allowed to post information with the purposes of causing harm to or harassment of other people. This includes but is not limited to: names, telephone numbers, street or email address. Hinting that you have this information of other users may also earn a ban.

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Hello all!

After our first few months of operation, I can now confidently put a number on the time and monetary costs of running this site.

First off, right now tucson.social is entirely funded, operated, and moderated by one person - me. I'd like to expand that team to include more people who can volunteer some time. I won't be asking for donations unless the hosting/time costs are too great - but as it stands, this is affordable for me.

Okay, so let's break down the costs into a few categories:

1. Setup expense in man hours
2. Domain expenses
3. OCI infrastructure expenses
4. Cloudflare Infrastructure expenses
5. Maintenance expense in man hours
6. Moderation expense in man hours
7. Miscellaneous expenses

1 - Setup expenses in man hours

The first week was about 30 hours of getting everything working how I wanted. A more simple configuration could've been had much faster, but I wanted a bit more security than that provides.

The second week of working out all the kinks between cloudflare and my origin server was another 16 hours or so.

Total, about 46-50 hours I guess?

2 - Domain expenses

• tucson.social costs 110 USD/yr
• tucson.chat (yet to be launched) costs around 40 USD/yr

These costs will be incurred again sooner rather than later since I'll be transferring my domains to porkbun instead of letting Google transfer them to Squarespace.

For this year, TOTAL: $300

For other years (hopefully) TOTAL: $150

3 - OCI Infrastructure costs

Early on, I used block volumes to back the image storage - this was expensive and wasn't worth the performance benefits due to CDN caching at the edge. I eventually converted to object storage.

The compute instance's size is about "medium-ish" and the burst settings are a bit aggressive to claw back some savings. So far this is more than sufficient for our needs, and we haven't run into any notable performance issues.

Before the conversion, the infrastructure had a price tag of $55 USD/mo (assuming 30 days)

After the conversion, the infrastructure is a much more reasonable total of $35 USD/mo.

4 - Cloudflare infrastructure costs

• $25 USD/mo for the Pro Subscription
• $5 USD/mo to enable Argo routing
• roughly 100GB of data transfer for $10 USD/mo

Totaling $40 USD a month, give or take.

5 - Maintenance expense in man hours

Very low. Sometimes I do muck something up during an update, but I typically only spend about 8 hours a month maintaining the actual server infrastructure. Another 8 hours are spent looking over cloudflare to mitigate any DDOS attacks. So yeah, 16 hours a month maybe.

6 - Moderation expense in man hours

Almost none, maybe 4 hours a month total, most spent removing duplicate newsbot posts. The smaller instance doesn't require much, if any, moderation at the moment.

7 - Miscellaneous expenses and totals

There have likely been a few small fees that I've forgotten about, but likely not exceeding a $20 dollars or so.

Projected average monthly spend:

$85-$90*

* - yearly costs averaged in

Average yearly spend:

$1020-$1080

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On wanting moderators at this time.

My desire for moderators at this point has less to do with actual work to do, and more to do with not only having myself to talk over moderation decisions with. It's difficult figuring out what people want, and another moderator (or few) could be an important balance to my moderation style.

cross-posted from: https://tucson.social/post/85984

A HUGE guide for University of Arizona students that includes local places to see, things to do and places to eat while in Tucson.

So, back when I was about 9/10 ish (1999) I remember going to museum with my grandparents that contained a few key things that stood with me over 2 decades later.

The first, and creepiest was an animatronic of a homeless/drug addict in an alley or on a bench. This is the “anchor” memory, it’s hard to forget such a creepy thing.

The second was a more hands on focused kids area where I spent a majority of my time.

The last was a restaurant with some TVs installed around the eating area somewhere in the building - I distinctly seeing ads for the new Tarzan movie, so I’m thinking this was the summer of 99ish.

It could also have been the Chicago Childrens Museum, but when looking at older pictures absolutely nothing stands out to me as memorable - additionally they don’t have any on-site restaurants that I can see from my research.

After lots of internet sleuthing, I think but can’t confirm, that it is the Museum of Science and Industry. Some of the pictures of some of the exhibits seem really familiar.

I suppose the key thing preventing my brain from saying “This is the one” is lack of anyone else mentioning such an animatronic at any of these places.

I asked my grandma, but she’s pretty deep in dementia and doesn’t really recall those experiences anymore. 😢

So /c/Chicago, are any of you old enough to remember such an exhibit from 99? If so, what museum was that?

Hello all,

Last week I asked the community for feedback in regards to the newsbot, whether it's useful, and if it should stay as it is.

I didn't get much feedback, but the little I did get was negative or ambivalent about it.

Thus I've decided to go with my "gut" here and make the following changes:

REMOVE:

• tucson.com feeds in localnews, and localpolitics, and the non-functioning one for localsports.
• tucsonsentinel.com feeds in localnews.

Reason - Tucson.com's feed is very messy, contains many duplicates and "updated" articles (after a gunman is caught, for example), and most of the articles are paywalled anyways.

Additionally, I want to return localnews entirely back to the users. Y'all get to decide what's newsworthy now.

KEEP:

• tucsonsentinel.com feed for localpolitics
• thisistucson feed for home/tucson.social

Reason - Keeping up with local politics, particularly city council stuff, local elections, and other stuff is painfully boring, but incredibly important to keep up with. I think a bot here makes sense.

As for thisistucson - it's not that noisy and is incredibly useful for someone who just wants to know about all the events going on. Much of what this feed posts was getting duplicated in localnews because the links are technically different between the feeds. Removing the localnews feed, should help a LOT with those duplicates.

---

Feedback

Please provide feedback in this thread if this is still too much bot. Given how many people upvote newsbot articles, it's not clear that the bot is 100% bad for all people. Thus the changes above represent a good-faith attempt to meet somewhere in the middle.

It does seem like it was manageable with just one feed, but adding tucson.com to news and politics seems like a mistake in hindsight.

My intent was to make it easier for everyone to find local news in those relevant channels without having to go through the process of searching for and sharing the article themselves.

However, a thread over at beehaw suggested I was really saturating their feeds with tucson news in a way that was unwelcome and inauthentic.

We have grown, and people are beginning to post their own content here, should the bot stay or go?

We can also just cut down the amount of feeds we're subscribed to. I just thought I needed to be more balanced, by offering at least one more source alongside Tucson Sentinel.

That being said, when we were just subscribed to Tucson Sentinel, the rest of the fediverse didn't seem to mind due to the less hectic pace of their posts. So that's an option as well.

Alternatively, and this is the one I'm leaning towards the most.

I'll keep the thisistucson.com feed for the home page, that's been fairly useful and matches the /r/Tucson precedent.

I'll also keep the Tucson Sentinel local politics feed, it's been VERY good at keeping people informed of upcoming civic duties and I think that's a very important thing a bot can do. Help us with the boring crap!

That would return the news feed back to the users entirely and reduce the politics feed by a lot.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

Spent some time looking for what specific bumblebee, digger bee, or carpenter bee this might be. Couldn't figure it out.

Repost from my non-admin account. The internet access is terrible at the cabins.