I'm not sure who needs to hear this, but sending stimulus cheques to people just so they can pay their rent is nothing more than a one time landlord subsidy. Renters will have the eviction gun pressed back into their temples in thirty days, only difference is it'll be colder outside. Collecting rent during a winter pandemic is extortion.
It is perhaps worth noting that cloud CI services' pricing "makes sense" when priced against the cost of having a team whose job is build systems. This is business function bureaucratization and elimination at its finest, and I think _in that context_ outsourcing it works.
So, what’s my time worth?
- Pay the vendors,
- Set up my own CI infra, or
- Figure out how to do binary builds and installables for Python
Some of this stems from the decision to build a lot of Python versions, "on demand", which means that Python gets built from source three times in the test suite. That's where the huge majority of the testing time goes.
- There’s Github Actions, but the billing is similar to CircleCI’s. For enough minutes for a reasonable number of builds, that’s gonna be around $21/user/month (“Enterprise” plan).
- I couldn’t get the tests to run at all on Travis, because of kernel/libc compatibility issues mediated by Docker, so that’s out.
- Jenkins is notoriously fiddly to operate and requires Sysadmin Time, as well as some notion of users to fall back on, thus a surprising number of prerequisite systems as well. However, it can be run in a cheap AWS instance for about $8/mo, maybe less with reserved instances.
- CircleCI mostly Just Works, given a config that doesn’t require extensive knowledge of the CI infrastructure to read (although it did require that to write it). However, for my project, where tests require docker and run for 30+ minutes, it gets into a USD 70/month plan real quick.
Been reading Simone Caroti's "The Culture Series of Iain M. Banks", wherein he argues that the Culture is what Moylan termed a "critical utopia": a society & narrative not meant to be perfect or complete, but a schismatic, self-interrogating, dialectic concerned with questioning and reframing the society's own goodness. Also, as Moylan would have it, a work intended to be read not only as literature but as an argument to spark (or problematize?) real-world political actions.
I believe everyone who participates in those spaces directly should at least be informed, and I’m interested in input from that group, as well. If that's you and you want to be involved in writing it, put your hand up and I’ll coordinate with you to make time. My goal for the end of the week next week is to have something ready for comment - something we can stare at and go “yeah, I can live with this”/“no I hate this and it worries me that you’re even proposing it” etc.
attn transneptunians and gentlefolks: with the community growing, I think it’s probably time we wrote down some of the norms and had a conversation about how to handle them. I’m going to work on a doc outlining a possible code of conduct for Transneptune spaces (Discord, Slack, this Masto instance, etc) and throw it around for discussion, during the week next week.
One of the worst crimes of social media, among many, is how algorithmic content presentation assumes people have no interest in individuals, only topics. It's so inhuman! What fuckup went 'ah yes, this person follows people who post trees, they must only be interested in trees, not the person. Trees, coming up!'
Turnaround time on interesting suggestions/questions: between 2d and 2y.