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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Twitter operates servers in the EU. They will have at least Frankfurt server. Probably UK and probably elsewhere.
    It’s geographically closer, so reduces latency and server load (faster to complete a request, faster to discard allocated resources).
    It also gives redundancy. If Frankfurt DC explodes, the system will fall back to the next closest DC (probably London).

    So let’s say that the EU DC stops existing. And requests go over the ocean to the US.
    Twitter still has customers in the EU. They are still making money from EU citizens. Because twitter isn’t free. It costs money to manage, develop and run. Twitter tries to recoup those costs via adverts and subscription services.
    So let’s say that twitter is no longer allowed to extract money from the EU. The EU bans companies advertising on twitter.
    Any companies that have business in the EU (like selling to EU citizens) are no longer allowed to advertise on twitter.
    Paypal, visa etc is no longer allowed to take payments from EU citizens for twitter services.
    Any EU service that has twitter integrations is no longer allowed to charge for twitter features.
    Basically, twitter has no way of getting money from the EU.

    Why would twitter spend money to access the EU population. It’s a cost sink. Dead weight.
    There is no growth. Getting 50 million new EU users means a massive cost increase.
    Plus paying for that extra load on (say) US based servers, and their international backbone links. (Just because you can reach a server on the other side of the world for “free”, doesn’t mean commercial services can pump terabytes of data internationally for free).

    So yeh, the servers could stay located in the US where twitter operations HQ is. Twitter could disband their international headquarters, so they no longer have companies in the EU.
    But they wouldn’t be able to get any money from EU citizens. And if they tried to circumvent the rules, then they can be blocked by DNS and BGP. So the only way to access twitter is by a VPN.
    That didn’t work well in Brazil, and twitter caved in to the demands of the Brazil government.










  • My first GP phonecall to get an in-person appointment resulted in a tiny piece of paper with suicide/help hotlines, and an ADHD form.
    I was worried about ADHD and Bipolar. I wasn’t myself. At all. It got pretty bad.

    After an in person appointment and me failing to fill in my form (edit: or not filling it in correctly, I guess?), a referral to a psychiatrist wasn’t justified and I heard no more.

    I eventually seeked private healthcare for this.
    And proper private healthcare, not that fucking “better health” or whatever that YouTube ad is. From actual doctors from an actual clinic.
    After a 1 hour consultation and £300, I felt listened to.
    The psychiatrist identified both ADHD and Bipolar traits, but said they were not significant enough compared to the depression. Treat the depression first, then circle back to the other possible issues.

    6 months on SNRIs, and I can’t believe the difference.
    I don’t feel like I’m struggling with memory loss. The traits I thought could be ADHD (hyperfocus sessions and yet easily distracted - exclusively) became manageable. The every day tasks suddenly were accomplishable. I haven’t tracked my mood very closely, but I’m either on a 2 month hypomania streak or this is actually just what I’m normally like and I can’t remember what feeling normal actually is. So maybe any bipolar I do have isn’t impacting my life so much.

    It took 6 months between the GP disappointment and seeking private care for it.
    It’s the best fucking £300 I’ve ever spent.
    The reason I got there, as opposed to accepting the GPs diagnosis, was a colleague talked about their experience. They talked about their depression, a failed visit to a GP, seeking a 2nd opinion, getting meds, and turning their life around.
    They said “don’t stop until you feel heard. Don’t stop until you agree with the doctor”.




  • Yeh, mental health issues are just health issues.
    It took me a while to realise that. A broken brain (whether Alzheimer’s, chronic depression or whatever) is just like a broken leg (or broken arm, or chronic back pain or whatever).

    You don’t ask someone with a broken leg or chronic back pain to help you move house.
    I guess it’s easier to tell when someone has a physical injury, which probably removes some of the stigma around talking about it.


  • That’s were the real AI job losses will be.
    A chat bot agent to deal with most of managers concerns, and a dashboard of tickets for those the agent can’t reply to. The last remaining CEo sits Infront of their dashboard and views tickets, get background and relevant info, and makes a decision based on what’s presented.

    Seriously, imagine 1 person having the responsibility, being well compensated, and has literally everything presented in front of them like some homer-simpson-working-from-home type thing.
    So many VP and CEO salaries could be saved, and let people get back to actually doing useful work.

    I’d hate to be the AI “prompt engineer” that spends their day typing “you are a CEO of a fortune 500 company…” type system prompt, tho


  • I’ve used proxmox with VMs running Debian for Docker Compose stacks.
    Most “get started quickly” tutorials are docker based, and building into a compose stack with dependencies is easy enough.
    Then a VM per stack (depending on isolation, duplication/redundancy and all that).

    I’ve recently started playing with k8s, and Talos Linux is amazing.
    I went from no-idea to k8s-yaml-hell faster than I could imagine. No need to configure kubernetes.