Daily Tech News 32 December 2023

• After migrating a huge application spread across a hundred servers from one cloud to another, my key takeaway was containerisation.
  
  Not using Docker, which is great if you're deploying simple applications created by some other group that has a build team. Well, not great, but adequate. Actually Docker pretty much sucks even then, but there are worse things. Like Node.js.
  
  My preferred containerisation platform is LXD.
  
  So they blew that up. (Linux Containers)
  
  To make a stupid story short, LXD is Canonical's - the people behind Ubuntu Linux - build of the Linux Containers system. It works well. It's still supported.
  
  But they've moved it from the Apache license, which lets you do pretty much anything you want, to AGPL, which forces you to release your updates if you build a complex service based on it. And that license makes corporate lawyers itchy.
  
  
  
• And they've added a contributor license agreement to control the terms under which open-source developers can contribute to the project. (Stephane Graber)
  
  This is not usually a good sign.
  
  
  
• And Canonical has stopped contributing to the upkeep of the public container image server. So if you're running LXD 5.20 or later - the version where these license changes took effect - and you want to install an image from that image server you should have done it yesterday. (Linux Containers)
  
  Access to system images is being phased out for LXD users in steps, starting today, with all access being cut off for all LXD users by May 1st.
  
  You can still install Ubuntu under LXD on Ubuntu, which is in fact what I do 97% of the time. The other 3% may become a problem.
  
  When you find a solution that works, it's only a matter of time before somebody takes it away.
  
  
  

• How bad are search results? Bad. (Dan Luu)
  
  In running six tests on each of five search engines plus ChatGPT - thirty-six tests in all - eight results earned scores in the range of OK to Great.
  
  The other twenty-eight results ranked anywhere from Bad to Terrible.
  
  In fact, Google, which built its entire business on providing a better search engine than anyone else, rated Bad or worse on every test.
  
  Bing was even worse on average, but was acceptable on one test, and better than acceptable on another.
  
  
  
• California is entering a death spiral of malice and incompetence. This might be a bad thing. (SF Gate)
  
  Do tell.
  
  
  
• The president of the Navajo Nation has asked NASA to delay a Moon launch over the possible presence of human remains. (KNAU)
  
  This confused me for a moment, but it's not quite as stupid as it seems, though it's still plenty stupid.
  
  The possible human remains aren't on the Moon - at least, not yet. They're on the rocket, thanks to a commercial service that delivers a few crumbs of your loved ones' ashes into space.
  
  The Navajo Nation objects to this - and here comes the stupid part - because they claim the Moon as a sacred site.
  
  The simple and obvious response to this, which NASA will not make because they were already full of woke bullshit the last time this came up in 1998, is Have you been there? No? Then fuck off.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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