I've spent like 2 days on this semi-toy project, for which I would have been paid generously had I chosen to work for a client instead. This pleasure cost me hundreds of €s not earned. But it feels ssooooo good to code smth just for pleasure.

Totally worth it!

More pleasure than money could buy?

Care to share? I'm intrigued 😁

I started a flutter app yesterday. I hope it will give me pleasure too :D

@electrineer prolly yes. Money will buy me smth others have done. For me the pleasure is to play with stuff myself :)

if only I could buy time...

@ScriptCoded nothing fancy. Playing with go [learning], building a universal kernelspace loadbalancer based on iptables. My app will be its controlplane: healthchecks, api, configuration, mgmt, monitoring, etc

@netikras 🥴 you have me confused

@ScriptCoded how come?

@netikras what is the interface of the app? CLI? Web? Is it a monitoring service or does is combine data monitored by other services? And did you make a load balancer on kernel level? I made a load balancer in C: no overhead. In python: 50% slower. But that's on localhost. For internet it's just fine. A python loadbalancer is around 40 lines if you don't have too much balancing logic and just choose a random target to forward to.

@retoor currently it's still a wip. Main interface is cli, rest is tbd [maybe].

Yes, kernel-level lb. It's based on netfilter, which operates in kernel. It itself supports loadbalancing, but managing it is tedious and it does not have healthchecks.

The project is basically an iptables wrapper. Which makes it a good candidate for further development - a k8s operator managing nodes' firewall rules through a daemonset. This will enable me to have hybrid clusters [mixed nodes: multicloud, physical, etc.] with publicly exposed all ports, but protected by a common firewall config - iptables.

> cost me hundreds of €s not earned

Spoken like the CEO of a big game dev company who is complaining about piracy 🙃

@Lensflare well why make games if you aren't being paid for them

why go into work if they're not gonna pay you

@jestdotty relax, I‘m criticizing the AAA game industry, not @netikras

@Lensflare it's not emotional, it's logical. the philosophy behind it doesn't fit

@netikras Because I was too tired to try and understand 😄 What benefit do you get from having it be in kernelspace?

@ScriptCoded performance. Not crossing any kernel rings for any of the forwarded packets, not making any syscalls. Not making double accounting for sockets. And perfectly fitting all the needed 'working' state in memory, in kernel, even if the app crashes. In fact, the only way to crash such a LB is to crash the OS itself, so bugs in my code will not affect traffic directly - they will only prevent state in kernelspace from being updated [eg running h/c against targets and taking them to LB_OFFLINE chain if hc fails, which does not happen THAT often]

My client is fintech, so every millisecond counts

@netikras Oh cool! But I thought you had no client?

@Lensflare Maybe that said CEO should bring back actual freaking demo's of games. So that you know, test a game before giving you money... (still a high risk that you don't get money of the demo is f**ed)

@Grumm indeed.

CEOs love to blame it on piracy when the game or product isn‘t a financial success.

A quote from Gaben:

Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.

@ScriptCoded I do. But I can choose when to work for them and when not :)

@Grumm that's why they don't do demos

it's a great idea in theory but game makers figured out it dropped sales by 90% 😁

and this was good indie games no less!

@jestdotty Then they should start making games beter :D

Imagine they do that with cars ?

> Can I test drive this model before buying ?

> ooh... uugh nooooo, you can't.... You have to buy the car first, new policy to increase the sales because our sales dropped when we let people do a test drive and we don't know why they don't buy our car after the test drive...

@Grumm so that plays on different psychology

games play on hype

cars they want you to test drive so they hook you based on the human instinct of possession. once you feel something is yours you will overvalue it. when people are asked how much an orange they have is worth vs an orange someone else has is worth they will always rate theirs as worth more, iirc by 80%. so for physical items, provided it's difficult to steal them, they want your monkey brain to "imagine yourself in it", aka not just in that moment but your life with that thing. this will cause attachment, and especially in males possessiveness, but also trigger that confirmation bias where everybody thinks what they "own" is worth more than what someone else owns, so then they will pay a lot more to possess that item for real than they would've in a rational state of mind

in the case of games they're selling you dreams. not physical items with utilities I guess. you demo you ruin the hype

@jestdotty I am not a CEO, but why not release the demo and let that demo end on a cliffhanger.

So that you trigger the 'I want to discover more'.

On steam, I see a lot of indie games giving demo's where you can play the first level or stuff like that.

@Grumm effect isn't as strong as drip-feeding hype I guess

with cars they have to work you for that psychological effect to be strong. iirc it's any big ticket items. the successful vendors basically have a rule of "let them joyride it as much as possible". someone driving a car for 2 hours might not do it. they'll call you back. it's a whole flirting and showing you steak in front of your face until you're Pavlov's dog thing

with video games they do the hype-train with slow releasing blogs, trailers, teasers, etc. the indie devs figured it out years back and they slow-drip and make "communities" for minimum 6 months to 3 damned years. it's frankly so annoying, but it's what works

@Grumm they know damn well that if they'd make a demo, potential buyers would see how bad or boring it is.

We are at a time where the mere existence of a demo is an indicator of quality already.