pimeys

Augustiner :3

It is very hard to brew a good lager, like the good Helles style famously brewed in Bavaria. I've been on a mission every time I come to the US to find good Helles, and I found two places that get very close:

This place in Seattle: https://maps.app.goo.gl/czPMtm4xkunkopEc8

And this in Weaverville: https://maps.app.goo.gl/wuNS33EcQ1qC9zfb9

But quite often even if they advertise the beer as German style Helles, it has some quality that makes it very different. Usually it's sweet or even hoppy. I think for an american a special beer should have a special taste, but a good Helles is just very fresh and crisp beer.

Edit: and Becks is one of the worst beers in Germany in my opinion... At least nobody tries to sell overpriced Sternburg here.

A classic Monty Python joke from Live at the Hollywood Bowl. Definitely some truth in this... I live in Germany with some of the best lagers in the world, and having a Miller Light for the first time was a really weird experience.

Now when I've visited the US quite a few times, I can say I dislike the expensive craft beers way more compared to the classic american lagers... They are way too hoppy, but the worst thing is how much more expensive they are! Like a pale ale can be over ten dollars, but a pint of PBR is 3.50. Beer should be cheap, and I don't really like how this craft beer culture made the prices go so high.

If you follow a certain orange website, until very recently there's been a big group of apologists who protect the big and mighty if any bad news surfaced.

This has started to change, but the change is very recent. And in the startup ecosystem using a Mac is a standard and if you do not like them, you are considered weird and the latest social note keeping tool everybody else uses in the company has severe bugs on Linux, if it even works.

Plex and plexamp are quite good. Jellyfin and finamp too.

Just a glass full of crushed ice and drink your water like a true American 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

But to be serious, I'd like to have a water filter in my fridge. The water here has a bit too much calc to my taste.

That reminds me I should finally play Donkey Kong on game boy. It is supposedly the best game for the system...

...in US. Pretty rare in the EU where apartments usually come with the cheapest fridge available.

For sure. I would say if you run a distro like Arch, using it without cow filesystem and snapshots is not a good idea... You can even integrate snapshots with pacman and bootloader.

I've been running nixos for so long, that I don't really need snapshots. You can always boot to the previous state if needed.

If you write software and run tests against a database, I'd avoid having the docker volumes on btrfs pool. The performance is not great.

Yeah. I would not for example install ZFS to a laptop. It's just not great there, and it doesn't like things such as sudden power failure, and it uses kind of a lot of memory...

ZFS is still the de-facto standard of a reliable filesystem. It's super stable, and annoyingly strict on what you can do with it. Their Raid5 and Raid6 support are the only available software raids in those levels that are guaranteed to not eat your data. I've run a TrueNAS server with Raid6 for years now, with absolutely no issues and tens of terabytes of data.

But, these copy on write filesystems such as ZFS or btrfs are not great for all purposes. For example running a Postgres server on any CoW filesystem will require a lot of tweaking to get reasonable speeds with the database. It's doable, but it's a lot of settings to change.

About the code quality of Linux filesystems, Kent Overstreet, the author of the next new CoW filesystem bcachefs, has a good write-up of the ups and downs:

• ext4, which works - mostly - but is showing its age. The codebase terrifies most filesystem developers who have had to work on it, and heavy users still run into terrifying performance and data corruption bugs with frightening regularity. The general opinion of filesystem developers is that it's a miracle it works as well as it does, and ext4's best feature is its fsck (which does indeed work miracles).
• xfs, which is reliable and robust but still fundamentally a classical design - it's designed around update in place, not copy on write (COW). As someone who's both read and written quite a bit of filesystem code, the xfs developers (and Dave Chinner in particular) routinely impress me with just how rigorous their code is - the quality of the xfs code is genuinely head and shoulders above any other upstream filesystem. Unfortunately, there is a long list of very desirable features that are not really possible in a non COW filesystem, and it is generally recognized that xfs will not be the vehicle for those features.
• btrfs, which was supposed to be Linux's next generation COW filesystem - Linux's answer to zfs. Unfortunately, too much code was written too quickly without focusing on getting the core design correct first, and now it has too many design mistakes baked into the on disk format and an enormous, messy codebase - bigger that xfs. It's taken far too long to stabilize as well - poisoning the well for future filesystems because too many people were burned on btrfs, repeatedly (e.g. Fedora's tried to switch to btrfs multiple times and had to switch at the last minute, and server vendors who years ago hoped to one day roll out btrfs are now quietly migrating to xfs instead).
• zfs, to which we all owe a debt for showing us what could be done in a COW filesystem, but is never going to be a first class citizen on Linux. Also, they made certain design compromises that I can't fault them for - but it's possible to better. (Primarily, zfs is block based, not extent based, whereas all other modern filesystems have been extent based for years: the reason they did this is that extents plus snapshots are really hard).

I started evaluating bcachefs in my main workstation when it arrived to the stable kernels. It can do pretty good raid-1 with encryption and compression. This combination is not really available integrated to the filesystem in anywhere else but zfs. And zfs doesn't work with all the kernels, which prevents updating to the latest and greatest. It is already a pretty usable system, and in a few years will probably take the crown as the default filesystem in mainstream distros.

But finding the actual great German beer, the blessed helles, is not super easy in US. People seem to think all these bocks are super common in Germany, but it's actually helles what everybody drinks (and pils in the north). Helles is extremely hard to brew correctly, it requires a very specific temperature and pure ingredients.

I spent most of my vacation in US last year finding a good helles from a bar. I found one after many tries, and the closest I could get to a bavarian helles was in Weaverville, in Leveller Brewing Co. I went to thank the owner for this great beer, and he told me he studied brewing in Bavaria and brewing that beer took a lot of trial and error.

Edit: somebody soon comes to tell how easy it is to find helles in US. Yes, but it often doesn't taste how it should. Or you get some old bottled stock of Augustiner that is not a same thing as fresh Augustiner in Munich.