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Sir Julian Huxley: The moral for UNESCO is clear. The task laid upon it of promoting peace and security can never be wholly realised through the means assigned to it- education, science and culture. It must envisage some form of world political unity, whether through a single world government or otherwise, as the only certain means of avoiding war… in its educational programme it can stress the ultimate need for a world political unity and familiarize all peoples with the implications of the transfer of full sovereignty from separate nations to a world organization. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


Sir Julian Huxley: At the moment, it is probable that the indirect effect of civilization is dysgenic instead of eugenic, and in any case it seems likely that the dead weight of genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability and disease proneness, which already exist in the human species will prove too great a burden for real progress to be achieved. Thus even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


Bertrand Russell: The subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship. The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First that the influence of home is obstructive. Second that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Thirdly verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


My autistic accent: vaguely northern US accent (emulated mostly from TV growing up), reflexive mimicking of vocal quirks around people I particularly respect (ie. like a faint lisp, or pieces of a thick accent), naturally monotone with occasional emulated attempts at emotional inflection (not super often, I don't have the effort to emulate inflection at the same time as emulating expression and I prioritize expression), difficulty with volume control (sensory and excitement based), moderate rate of speech.

Oh, and some canned phrases/responses I've picked up over the years, though at this point I have to pay attention to notice them.

Share your accent!

#autism #ActuallyAutistic #AutisticAccent

(Out of spoons, if someone gives me an image description for the set I'll edit to add it)

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Outage - Database Stuck


... I can't get 1 day without issues apparently...

When I was asleep, it looks like the database got stuck in some sort of optimize process with everything stuck waiting on that.

Restarting the database server forced that process to clear and cleaned things up.

I suspect what happened was I got overzealous after things started working great and I set the background worker count too high (these workers automatically run in the background doing things like updating contacts, downloading posts, etc).

I tuned that setting down, and increased the number of connections the database allows.



Dear god I feel like a newb... I used to do this stuff professionally and I feel the fact that it's been years.

Biggest performance issue I've had for a little while with this server turns out to be because the hypervisor copied the MAC address when I copied the server. It shouldn't have taken me nearly this long to identify this problem!

Aaaargh!



Performance Issues - Tentatively Resolved?


I feel really dumb for not noticing the cause sooner, I most attribute it to the rareness of the problem and the inconsistency at which it occurred.

I use a virtual server environment for my servers, and one of my measures to improve reliability and performance was to have two instances of the webserver behind a load balancer. In laymen's terms, whenever you're connecting you're assigned to whichever has the least connections and they're otherwise identical (same files, connect to the same database, etc).

Well... turns out when I duplicated the server initially, the software decided to not change the MAC address. Laymen's: The ip address of the server is different, but the network uses the mac address to map ip addresses to boxes, if two boxes have the same mac address then traffic is going to sporadically and randomly switch between them... but also with a bad IP address which means half of the traffic is always getting rejected.

So your connection to the load balancer was fine, but it was struggling to connect to the webservers and the webservers were struggling to connect to the database.

Once I changed that the server immediately became quite zippy!

My sincere apologies for the impact.

in reply to Server News

Oh, and I noticed this started around the time I set up the second server. But I was already having performance impacts before then (the second server was created to address that)... but because I only ever turned off the load balancer or directed it to one server without fully shutting down one of them, I never realized it was a low level network issue. (And pings were working fine... except when they weren't, and it was random chance to catch what was happening)



Outage - Self Resolved - Investigating


The server went down for a few hours today and resolved before I could look at it. It's also been a really bad day for my physical health so I've had very little capacity.

I am looking into why it happened but have no firm answers at this time.

in reply to Server News

As far as I can tell, the biggest most obvious culprit is the database backup which was happening at that time.

It looks like the database is big enough that backups are no longer simple and I'll need to change my backup method.

in reply to Server News

Revised method of backups set up, tomorrow I'll test that it's working and then attempt a restore (on a second server so no impact here).

I've also refreshed the virtual network interface as I learned it may have been dropping packets for some unknown reason and it's working fine now.