It is certainly my biggest dislike factor with my stay in Germany, and I'm still struggling to come to terms with it: do I dislike it enough to compel me to move away? is this something I can accept? How much can I influence and improve things that I directly interact with?
It seeps in everywhere too, with almost all aspects.
Day-to-day with restaurants, cafe, shops. Almost all interaction feels like it's actively checked if it's in their process or job description. Shop staffs are typically disengaged and can't really help you with anything outside the normal process.
Healthcare, both receptionist and doctors. You can see the rushed service because they are only compensated for limited amount of time by the state insurance. This took me a while to figure out; the process really defines what treatment you get, with what equipments, as well as the duration, and they have to do their best with the constraints put by the process.
An example: with Wurzelkanalbehandlung, the process says (at least back then) only 1 hour of Laborkosten can be compensated by the state insurance. This means if the dentist took more than 1 hour to work on you, that would be done at their personal loss, and thus the incentive to rush the procedure.
Going private helps (they tend to be more relaxed after the mention of of Privatzahler, and gives you access to newer equipments not yet acknowledged by the state insurance processes), but you still have to research, find, and pick the right practice.
Bureaucracy, administrative. You often have to deal with clerks that just go "I just work here", the rules says this and there's nothing I can do, throws hand in the air. Goodbye, next person please!
In day-to-day work, I can also see it. New hires tend to be more into the work, and questions things, but the system does push everyone to just follow the process and not do anything more. I've seen my colleagues slowly shift into this mode, delivering what is outlined, nothing more, not questioning the intent behind the work (or at least, doing it much less than before, because the system does not incentivise that).
I would summarize Americans (and perhaps most English speaking countries) as perceiving this mindset to be callous, ineffective, and a dereliction of autonomy.
But I'm interested in how Germans perceive Americans in reverse? If shop staff went out of their way to help them find a product, shoot the breeze, or recommend a lunch spot, would Germans tend to see this as being overzealous? Would it cause embarrassment, or be a pleasant surprise? Just curious.
I tend to view shop staff having a random talk with someone while I’m waiting to purchase or ask something as a dereliction of duty. If you want to catch up with a friend you can do it on your own time.
Every country is different and you need to learn slightly different ways of dealing with them in each. On a bad day it can be pretty exhausting.
It turns out, people everywhere want the same things, in the end. They just go about them differently.
In Germany, it often helps frame it as both of you trying to work with the rules together; as a framework to build within and on, rather than a cage to hold you in.
Doesn't always work. Nothing works all the time, (especially if the other person is having a bad day themselves and just wants it to be over). But if it helps even once eh?
The difference in healthcare between private and public insurance is, as far as i know, because if a doctor sends you for some test or something that your insurance feels was unnecessary then the doctor has to pay for it with the public flavour. At least, that’s what I heard but could be wrong.
I don't know how much of that 6 hours build is tangled up in github workflows, but if it's a single contiguous block, you probably could make it near zero by making the self-hosted runner do only the preparation and only the final upload process (workflow_dispatch when the build is complete).
Most of it is just time waiting either while the source assets are downloaded (I clean slate it, that's the point of CI after all), the build itself runs, or the artifact is uploading to it's storage home. I'm sure it could be re-architected to use less actions minutes but if I'm going to redo it I will probably just move away from actions altogether because it's only loosely linked to Github anyway (runs on a schedule) and that way I am insulated from any future changes they come up with. The hardest part will likely be figuring out the Slack bot posting, I do use the marketplace action for that, but that's probably low lift. With LLM assisted coding I'm leaning more and more to little in house apps for stuff like this, it keeps you from dealing with lock in and other extractive gotchas.
per minute billing is hard to wrap around the head
On my larger organization, we have on average 20 to 30 *active* runners during business hours. Assuming 5 on the off-hours, my napkin math says it comes down to about 10 fully-utilized-runners per month, so about 864$/mo. For the size of my organization that is honestly totally acceptable.
This is assuming 0.002$ per minute of job being actively executed. If it turns out to be 0.002$ per minute of *runner being registered* on the control plane, it would increase quite a bit. We are still using the old HorizontalRunnerAutoscaler with actions-runner-controller, with quite a pool of prewarmed runners idling to pick up a job. It would be a strong reason to use the new RunnerScaleSet (to take advantage of the reactive webhook-based scaling) and keep a very lean pool of prewarmed runners.
We have the same question, our runners are registers 24x7 but we probably only use a few hours a week.
I get the logic of it, they have to have some sort of task running on their side when the runner is working. If it's only build time, then we don't care.
I am actually not familiar with such limitations with storage VPS against webservers. It doesn't seem to be the norm, and I would still search with "Storage VPS" as search keyword in e.g. https://lowendtalk.com.
I've personally used the following in the past. It was quite cheap and generally happy with it.
You might also want to get (snipe) a server off https://www.kimsufi.com/uk/servers.xml — the best ones usually sold out within a minute or two, but nothing beats the price.
Really easy to use changedetection.io to snipe one of these. Did it a few weeks ago, they become available rather often but indeed disappear within a couple of minutes.
Personally I'd suggest that you do not publicly expose such an OS but rather have it act as a NFS mount for another VPS with a newer OS release.
Also, while they offer backups (with restoring them being a manual and paid process), no such option is available for the Storage VPS offering, you can see that much being stated in the FAQ at the bottom of the page.
Once again, I rather enjoy their services and they're a relatively local company so I'm glad to support them, but at the same time Hetzner is pretty much on par with what they offer, with time based billing (instead of per month) and a nice UI: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box (though I had to verify my ID when I signed up with them, which was inconvenient and actually had my attempt be denied a few years ago until recently when it worked, not sure what that was about)
Furthermore, you might also look at the offerings by Contabo, though their performance isn't exactly excellent and there are setup fees and their UI looks antiquated (but the service itself is okay): https://contabo.com/en/storage-vps/
I think most options out there will have certain drawbacks, since for whatever reason the status quo is to have smaller packages so whatever backing resources the servers have can probably be split up nicely amongst the customers' instances, thus making storage optimized VPSes something of a niche product.
Approx. price per the recommended setups (no public facing EOL distros) for 1TB of data, per month (divided when yearly billing applicable):
Interesting to find that I'm not the only person doing this! I also just hop to Atom if I need to do something more involved with git
I typically do this when tidying up / amending >1 commit at a time (anything I can't do easily with git rebase interactive mode), or to resolve merge conflicts.
Procedurally generated[1] large-scale environment[2] to explore with the prime goal of adventuring downwards, with layers of organic pristine biomes[3], full of unexplainable relics and asymmetrically strong entities that live naturally within[4].
Risk of Rain 2 is the closest thing I know to this, the biggest difference being the gameplay (it's more of a fun shooter game, rather than an exploration/adventure game) and the fictional universe.
[1]: Primarily the tactical gameplay elements (terrain, elevation, enemies, spots of interest, etc.) much like roguelike games, over the visual aspects (colors, animals, trees, etc.) like No Man's Sky or biomes in Minecraft
[2]: Think of FromSoftware games: Dark Souls, Sekiro, Elden Ring — it invokes a sense of massive explorable environment, with limited movement capabilities
[3]: Think about the amazement and awe invoked when exploring an undiscovered, unique biomes in e.g.: Subnautica (Lava Lakes) or Etrian Odyssey (practically all the stratum)
Any games that have competitive, collaborative multiplayer aspect I think!
Especially Google Spreadsheets; perhaps not math/computation-heavy like EVE, but it's one of the best tools to organize data in a collaborative manner online.
I also see it (ab)used frequently as a mediawiki/online text-editor alternative, barely using any spreadsheet mathematical formulas, using it simply as a place to write text for others to read, e.g.: this gigantic reference spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JjK7Ws4gfzKChRs5ueox...
Any game can be competitive, it doesn't need multiplayer for it. Speed runs are a prime example of this. All you need is a goal, and people will compete who will reach the highest value. I mean we have even an Excel esports-League now, and there are twitch rivals for the cozy game Stardew Valley...
Yes, I have to rent a local server to proxy all my home network through it, otherwise it is unreliable or outright does not work. It is absurd.
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