in this extremely crowded S-Zimmer. I'm Jakob, I'm your hero for tonight until 10, and I'm here to welcome you and to welcome these wonderful three guys on the stage. They're going to talk about the infrastructure of Wikipedia and yeah, they are Lukas, Amir and Daniel and I hope you have fun. Hello, my name is Amir. I'm a software engineer at Wikimedia Deutschland, which is the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikimedia Foundation runs Wikipedia. Here is Lukas, Lukas is also a software engineer at Wikimedia Deutschland and Daniel here is a software architect at Wikimedia Foundation. We are all based in Germany, Daniel Leipzig, we are in Berlin and today we want to talk about how we run Wikipedia with using donors money and not lots of advertisement and collecting data. So in this talk, first we are going to go on an inside-out approach. So we are going to first talk about the application layer and then the outside layers and then we go to an outside-in approach and then talk about how you're going to hit Wikipedia from the outside.   We don't run any ads and we are only 370 people. If you count Wikimedia Deutschland or other chapters, it's around 500 people in total. It's nothing compared to the companies outside. But all of the content is managed by volunteers. Even our staff doesn't do edits at content to Wikipedia and we support 300 languages, which is a very large number. And Wikimedia, it's 18 years old, so it can vote now. And also Wikimedia hosts some really, really weird articles. I want to ask you what is your, if you have encountered any really weird article in Wikipedia, my favorite is at least the people who died on the toilet. But if you know anything, raise your hand. Do you know any weird articles in Wikipedia? Do you know some? The classic one? You need to unmute yourself. I need. Oh, okay. This is technology. I don't know anything about technology. Okay. Now the, my favorite example is people killed by their own invention. That's a, yeah, that's a lot of fun. Look it up. It's amazing. A list of prison escapes using helicopters. I almost said helicopter escapes using prisons, which doesn't make any sense. But that was also a very interesting list. I think we also have a category of lists of lists of lists. Yes, right. Yeah, okay. And every few months, someone thinks it's funny to redirect it to Russell's paradoxes. Oh, yeah. But also beside that, people cannot read Wikipedia in Turkey or China. But three days ago, actually the blog in Turkey was ruled unconstitutional, but it's not lifted yet. Hopefully it will be lifted soon. So Wikipedia, Wikipedia project is just not Wikipedia. It's lots and lots of projects. Some of them are not as successful as the Wikipedia. Like we can use. But for example, Wikipedia is the most successful one. And there's another one that's Wikidata. It's being developed by Wikimedia Deutschland. I mean, the Wikidata team with Lukas. And it's being used, it has the data that Wikipedia or Google Knowledge Graph or Siri or Alexa uses. It's basically a sort of a backbone of all of the data through the whole internet. So our infrastructure, let me. So first of all, our infrastructure is all open source. By principle, we never use any commercial software. We could use as lots of things that they even sometimes were given us for free, but we were refused to use them. Second thing is we have two primary data center for like failovers when for example, whole data center goes offline. So we can failover to another data center. We have three caching points of presence or CDNs. Our CDNs are all over the vault. Also, we have our own CDN, we don't use Cloudflare because Cloudflare, we care about our privacy of the users and it's very important that for example, people from countries that might be dangerous for them to edit Wikipedia, so we really care to keep the data as protected as possible. We have 17 billion page views per month and which goes up and down based on the season and everything. We have around 100 to 200,000 requests per second. It's different from the page view because requests can be requests to the objects, it can be API, lots of things. And we have 300,000 new answers per month and we run all of this with 1,300 bare metal servers. So right now, Daniel is going to talk about the application layer and the inside of the infrastructure. Thanks, Amir. Oh, the clicky thing, thank you. So the application layer is basically the software that actually does what a wiki does, right? It lets you edit pages, create, update pages and then search the page views. The challenge for Wikipedia of course is serving all the many page views that Amir just described. The core of the application is a classic lamp application. I have to stop moving? Yes, is that it? It's a classic lamp stack application so it's written in PHP, it runs on Apache server, it uses MySQL as the database in the backend. We used to use HHVM instead of the... Yeah, we... Hello. We used to use HHVM as the PHP engine but we just switched back to the mainstream PHP using PHP 7.2 now because Facebook decided that HHVM is going to be incompatible with the standard and they were just basically developing it for themselves. Right, so we have separate clusters of servers for serving different requests. Page views on the one hand and also handling edits. Then we have a cluster for handling API calls and then we have a bunch of servers set up to handle asynchronous jobs, things that happen in the background, the job runners and I guess video scaling is a very obvious example of that. It just takes too long to do it on the fly but we use it for many other things as well. Media Wiki is kind of an amazing thing because you can just install it on your own, share it, hosting 10 bucks a month web space and it will run but you can also use it to serve half the world and so it's a very powerful and versatile system which also, I mean, this wide span of different applications also creates problems. That's something that I will talk about tomorrow but for now let's look at the fun things. So if you want to serve a lot of page views, you have to do a lot of caching and so we have a whole set of different caching systems. The most important one is probably the parser cache so as you probably know, Wiki pages are created in a markup language, WikiText and they need to be parsed and turned into HTML and the result of that parsing is of course cached and that cache is semi-persistent. It nothing really ever drops out of it. It's a huge thing and it lives in a dedicated MySQL database system. Yeah, we use memcached a lot. For all kinds of miscellaneous things, anything that we need to keep around and share between server instances and we have been using Redis for a while for anything that we want to have available not just between different servers but also between different data centers because Redis is a bit better about synchronizing things between different systems. We still use it for session storage especially though we are about to move away from that and we'll be using Cassandra for session storage. We have a bunch of additional services running for specialized purposes like scaling images, rendering formulas, math formulas. Oris is pretty interesting. Oris is a system for automatically detecting vandalism or rating edits. So this is a machine learning based system for detecting problems and highlighting edits that may not be great and need more attention. We have some additional services that process our content for consumption on mobile devices, chopping pages up into bits and pieces that then can be consumed individually and many more. In the background, we also have to manage events. We use Kafka for message queuing and we use that to notify different parts of the system about changes. On the one hand, we use that to feed the drop runners that I just mentioned but we also use it for instance to purge the entries in the CDN when pages become updated and things like that. Okay, the next session is going to be about the databases. Are they very quickly? We will have quite a bit of time for discussion afterwards, but are there any questions right now about what we said so far? Everything extremely crystal clear? Okay, no clarity is left, I see. Oh, one question in the back. Can you maybe turn the volume up a little bit? Thank you. Yeah, I think this is your section, right? Oh, it's Amir again, sorry. So, I want to talk about my favorite topic, the dungeons of every production system, databases. The database of Wikipedia is really interesting and complicated on its own. We use MariaDB, we switch from MySQL in 2013 for lots of complicated reasons. As I said, because we are really open source, you can go not just check our database tree that says like how it looks and what's the replicas and masters. Actually, you can even query the Wikipedia's database live.  Like, it was a funny thing that a couple of months ago, someone sent me a message like, oh, I found a security issue. You can just query Wikipedia's database. I was like, no, no, it's actually, we let this happen. It's sanitized, we removed the password hashes and everything, but it's still, you can use this. And, but if you wanted to say like, how the clusters work, the database clusters, because it gets too big, they first started charting, but now we have sections that are basically different clusters. Really large wikis have their own section. For example, English Wikipedia is S1, German Wikipedia with two or three other small wikis are in S5, wiki data is on S8 and so on. And each section have a master and several replicas, but one of the replicas is actually a master in another data center because of the failover that I told you. So it basically two layers of replication exist. This is what I'm telling you is about metadata, but for Wikitext, we also need to have a complete different set of databases, but it can be, we use consistent hashing to just scale it horizontally, so we can just put more databases on it for that. But I don't know if you know it, but Wikipedia stores every edit. So you have the text of Wikitext of every edit in the whole history in the database. Also we have partial cache that Daniel explained and partial cache is also consistent hashing, so we just can horizontally scale it. But for metadata, it's slightly more complicated. Metadata shows and is being used to render the page. So in order to do this, this is for example a very short version of the database that I showed you. You can even go and look it up for other ones, but this is a S1, S1 Ikea, this is the main data center. The master is this number and it replicates to some of this and then this one, the second one that is supposed to be 2000 because it's the second data center and it's the master of the other one. And it has its own replications. Between cross CC replications because the master data center is in Ashford, Virginia. The second data center is in Dallas, Texas. So they need to have a cross CC, the replication and that happens with a TLS to make sure that no one starts to listen to in between these two. And we have the snapshots and even dumps of the whole history of Wikipedia. You can go to dumps.wikimedia.org and download the whole history of every wiki you want except the ones that we had to remove for privacy reasons. And with lots and lots of backups. I recently realized we have lots of backups. And in total is 570 terabytes of data and total 150 database servers and queries that happens to them is around 350,000 queries per second and in total it requires 70 terabytes of RAM. So, and also we have another storage section that called Elastic Search, which you can guess it. It's being used for search on the top right. If you're using desktop, it's different in mobile, I think. And also it depends on if you're a RTA language as well. But also it runs by a team called Search Platform because none of us are from Search Platform. We cannot explain it this much. We don't know much how it works. It's a lie. Also we have a media storage for all of the free pictures that is being uploaded to Wikimedia. For example, we have a category in Commons. Commons is our wiki that holds all of the free media. And we have a category in Commons called cats looking at left and we have category cats looking at right. So we have lots and lots of images. It's 390 terabytes of media, one billion objects and uses Swift. Swift is the object storage component of OpenStack. And it has several layers of caching, front end, back end and yeah, that's mostly it. And we want to talk about traffic now. So this picture is when Sweden in 1967 moves from left, driving from left to right. This is basically what happens in Wikimedia infrastructure as well. So we have five caching layers. The most recent one is Exyn, which is in Singapore. The three one are just CDN, ULSFO, IKEA, the Samsung Exyn. Sorry, ULSFO, Samsung Exyn are just CDNs. We have also two points of presence, one in Chicago and the other one is also in Amsterdam. But we don't get to that. So we have, as I said, we have our own content delivery network with our traffic. Our location is done by GeoDNS, which actually is written and maintained by one of the traffic people. And we can pull and de-pull DCs. It has a time to leave of 10 minutes. So if a data center goes down, we have, it takes 10 minutes to actually propagate for being de-pulled and re-pulled again. And we use LVS as transport layer and which one is the fourth layer? This layer three and four of the Linux load balancer for Linux and supports consistent hashing. And also we grew so big that we needed to have something that manages the load balancers. So we wrote something on our own system, which is called PiBall. And also lots of companies actually peer with us. We, for example, directly connect to Amsterdam, M6. So this is how the caching works, which is, anyway, there is lots of reasons for this. Let's get started. We use TLS, we support TLS 1.2, then the first layer we have NGNX minus.  So that's related, but not correct. So we have NGNX, which is the free version and we have NGNX plus which is the commercial version and NGNX, but we don't use NGNX to do load balancing or anything. So we stripped out everything from it and we just use it for TLS termination. So we call it NGNX minus. It's an internal joke. So, and then we have varnish front end. Varnish also is a caching layer and the front end is on the memory, which is very, very fast. And we have the back end, which is on the storage and the hard disk, but it's a slow. The fun thing is like just CDN caching layer takes 90% of our request. It responds at 90% of request, just gets to the varnish and just return. And then if it doesn't work, it goes through the application layer. The varnish holds, it has a TTL of 24 hours. So if you change an article, it also gets invalidated by the application. So if someone edits, the CDN actually purges their result. And the thing is the front end is sharded by request. So you come here, load bus, it just randomly sends your request to a front end. But then the back end is actually, if the front end can't find it, it sends it to the back end. And the back end is actually sort of, how is it called? It's used hashed by the request. So for example, article of Barack Obama is only being served from one node in the data center in the CDN. If none of this work is actually hits the other data center. So yeah, I actually explained all of this. So we have two, two caching clusters. One is called text and the other one is called upload. It's not confusing at all. And if you want to find out, you can just do mtren.vicimedia.org and you're the end node is text lb.vicimedia.org, which is our text storage. But if you go to upload.vicimedia.org, you get to the hit the upload node cluster. Yeah, this is so far, what is it? And it has lots of problems because A varnish is open core. So the version that we use is open source. We don't use the commercial one, but the open core one doesn't support TLS. What? What happened? Okay, no. No, no, you should, you're not supposed to see this. Okay, sorry for the, huh? Okay. Okay, sorry. So varnish has lots of problems. Varnish is open core. It doesn't support TLS termination, which makes us to have this nginx minus there system just to the TLS termination makes our system complicated. It doesn't work very well with Swift that causes us to have a crown job to restart every varnish node twice a week. So we have a crown job that just restarts every varnish node, which is embarrassing. But also, and the other hand, when the end of varnish, like backend, wants to talk to the application layer, it also doesn't support TLS termination. So we use IPsec, which is even more embarrassing. But we are changing it. So we call it, we are using Apache traffic server, which is a very, very nice. And it's also open source, fully open source, like in with Apache foundation. Apache does the TLS, ATS does the TLS termination. And still for now, we have a varnish front end that still exists. But the backend is also going to change to the ATS. So we call this ATS sandwich. Two ATS happening between and at the middle, there's a varnish. The good thing is that the TLS termination, when it moves to ATS, you can actually use a TLS 1.3, which is more modern and more secure and even way faster. So it basically drops 100 milliseconds from every request that goes to Wikipedia that's translated to centuries of our users time every month. But ATS is going on and hopefully it will go live soon. And once these are done, so this is the new version. And as I said, the TLS, and even if we can't do this, we can actually use the more secure instead of APsec to talk about machine data centers. Yes. And now it's the time that Lukas talks about what happens when you type in that Wikipedia.org. Do you want? Yes, this makes sense. Thank you. So first of all, what you see on the slide here is the image doesn't really have anything to do with what happens when you type enwikipedia.org because it's an offline Wikipedia reader, but it's just a nice image. So this is basically a summary of everything they already said. So if, which is the most common case, you are lucky and get a URL which is cached, then so first your computer asks for the IP address of enwikipedia.org. It reaches this global DNS statement. And because we're at Congress here, it tells you the closest data center is the one in Amsterdam, so ESMs. And it's going to hit the edge, what's it called, load balancer slash router there, then going through TLS termination through engine X minus. And then it's going to hit the varnish caching server, either front end or back end. And then you get a response and that's already is and nothing else is ever bothered again. It doesn't even reach any other data center, which is very nice. And so that's, you said, around 90% of the requests we get. And if you're unlucky and the URL you requested is not in the varnish in the Amsterdam data center, then it gets forwarded to the IKEA data center, which is the primary one. And there it still has a chance to hit the cache. And perhaps this time it's there and then the response is going to get cached in the front end, no, in the Amsterdam varnish and you're also going to get a response. And we still don't have to run any application stuff. If we do have to hit any application stuff, then varnish is going to forward that. If it's upload.wikimedia.org, it goes to the media storage Swift. If it's any other domain, it goes to media wiki. And then media wiki does a ton of work to connect to the database. In this case, the first chart for English Wikipedia, get the wiki text from there, get the wiki text of all the related pages and templates, no, wait, I forgot something. First, it checks if the HTML for this page is available in parser cache. So that's another caching there. And this application cache, this parser cache might either be memcached or the database cache behind it. And if it's not there, then it has to go get the wiki text, get all the related things, and render that into HTML, which takes a long time, and goes through some pretty ancient code. And if you are doing an edit or an upload, it's even worse, because then it always has to go to media wiki. And then it not only has to store this new edit either in the media backend or in the database, it also has to update a bunch of stuff, especially if you, first of all, it has to purge the cache. It has to tell all the Varnish servers that there's a new version of this URL available, so that it doesn't take a full day until the time to live expires.  For example, if you edit a template, it might have been used in a million pages. And the next time anyone requests one of those million pages, those should also actually be rendered again using the new version of the template. So it has to invalidate the cache for all of those. And all of that is deferred through the job queue. And it might have to calculate thumbnails if you uploaded the file or create retranscode media files, because maybe you uploaded in what do we support? You upload in WebM, and the browser only supports some other media codec or something. We transcode that, and also encode it down to different resolutions. So then it goes through that whole dance. And that was already those slides. Amir, you're going to talk again about how we manage. Hear me? OK, yeah. I quickly come back just for a short break to talk about managing to manage, because managing 1,300 bare metal hardware plus a Kubernetes cluster is not easy. So what we do is that we use Puppet for configuration management in our bare metal systems. It's 50,000 lines of Puppet code. I mean, lines of code is not a great indicator, but you can roughly get an estimate of how it thinks work. And we have 100,000 lines of Ruby. And we have our CI and CDs cluster. So we don't store anything in GitHub or GitLab. We have our system, which is based on Garrett. And for that, we have our system of Jenkins. And the Jenkins does all of these kind of things. And also, because we have a Kubernetes cluster for services, some of our services, if you manage a change in the Garrett, it also builds the Docker files and containers and push it up to the production. And also, in order to remove SSH comments, we have Cummins that's like in-house automation. And we built this one for our systems.  And with this, I get back to Lucas. So I am going to talk a bit more about Wikimedia Cloud Services, which is a bit different in that it's not really our production stuff, but it's where you people, the volunteers of the Wikimedia Movement, can run their own code. So you can request a project, which is kind of a group of users. And then you get assigned a pool of, you have this much CPU and this much RAM. And you can create virtual machines with those resources and then do stuff there and run basically whatever you want to create and boot and shut down the VMs and stuff. We use OpenStack. And there's a horizon front end for that, which you use through the browser. And it locks you out all the time. But otherwise, it works pretty well. Internally, ideally, you manage the VMs using Puppet. But a lot of people just SSH in and then do whatever they need to set up the VM manually. And it happens. And there's a few big projects like Toolforge, where you can run your own web-based tools. Or the beta cluster, which is basically a copy of some of the biggest wikis. Like there's a beta English Wikipedia, beta wiki data, beta media commons, using mostly the same configuration as production, but using the current master version of the software instead of whatever we deploy once a week. So if there is a bug, we see it earlier, hopefully, even if we didn't catch it locally, because the beta cluster is more similar to the production environment. And also the continuous integration service run in Wikimedia Cloud Services as well. And also, you have to have Kubernetes somewhere on these slides, right? So you can use that to distribute work between the tools in Toolforge. Or you can use the Grid Engine, which does a similar thing, but it's like three decades old. And through five forks now, I think the current fork we use is some of Grid Engine. And I don't know what it was called before. But that's Cloud Services. So in a nutshell, this is our all systems. We have 1,300 bare metal services with lots and lots of caching, like lots of layers of caching, because mostly we service read. And we can just keep them as a cached version. And all of this is open source. You can contribute to it if you want to. And all of configuration is also open. And this is the way I got hired. I started contributing to the system. And people are like, yeah, come and work for us. So this is a. That's actually how all of us got hired. So yeah, and this is the whole thing that happens in Wikimedia. And if you want to help us, we are hiring. You can just go to jobs at Wikimedia.org. If you want to work for Wikimedia Foundation. If you want to work with Wikimedia.org, then you can go to Wikimedia.D. And at the bottom, there's a link for jobs because the link's too long. If you can contribute, if you want to contribute to us, there's so many ways to contribute. As I said, there's so many bugs. We have our own Graphana system. You can just look at the monitor. And if fabricator is our bug tracker, you can just go there and find a bug and fix things. Actually, we have one repository that is private, but it only holds the certificates for SETLS and things that are really, really private. We cannot remove them. But also, the documentation for infrastructure is at Wikitech.wikimedia.org. And documentation for configuration is at NOC, the Wikimedia.org plus the documentation of our code base. The documentation for MediaWiki itself is at mediawiki.org. And also, we have our own system of URL shortener. You can go to w.wiki and shorten any URL in Wikimedia structure. So we reserve the donor sign for the donate site. And yeah, if you have any questions, please. We have quite a bit of time for questions. So if anything wasn't clear or they are curious about anything, please, please ask. One question, what is not in the presentation. Do we have any efforts with hacking attacks? So the first rule of security issues that we don't talk about security issues, but let's say this way, we have all sorts of attacks happening. We have, usually, we have DDOS. Once there was happening a couple of months ago, that was very successful. I don't know if you read the news about that. But we also, we have an infrastructure to handle this. We have a security team that handles these cases, and yes. Hi, hello. How do you manage access to your infrastructure from your employees? So we have an LDAP group and with the LDAP for the web-based systems. But via SSH, and for the SSH, we have a strict protocols, and then you get a private key. And some people usually protect a private key using UV keys. And then you have, you can access to the system, basically. Yeah. Well, there's some fireballing setup that there is only one server for data center that you can actually reach through SSH, and then you have to tunnel through that to get to any other server. And also, we have an internal firewall. And it's basically if you go to the inside of the production, you cannot talk to the outside. Even you, for example, do git clone, github.com doesn't work. It only can access tools that are for inside the Wikimedia Foundation infrastructure. OK. Hi. You said you do TLS termination through Engine X. Do you still allow non-HTPS, so HTTP non-secure access? No, we dropped it a really long time ago. 2013 or so? Yeah, 2015. 2013, we started serving the most of the traffic. But 15, we dropped all of the non-HTPS protocols. And recently, we even dropped, and we are not serving any SSL requests anymore. And TLS 1.1 is also being phased out. So we are sending warnings to the users, like, you are using TLS 1.1. Please migrate to these new things that came out around 10 years ago. So yeah. Yeah, I think the deadline for that is February 2020 or something. Then we'll only have TLS 1.2. So we are going to support TLS 1.3. Yeah. Are there any questions? So does read-only traffic from logged in users hit all the way through to the parser cache? Or is there another layer of caching for that? Yes, we bypass all of that. Yeah, you can. We need one more microphone. Yes, it actually does. And this is a pretty big problem and something we want to look into. But it requires quite a bit of re-architecting. If you are interested in this kind of thing, maybe come to my talk tomorrow at noon. Yeah, one reason we are planning to do is active-active. So we have two primaries. And the read request gets requests to from logged in users can hit the secondary data center instead of the main one. I think there was a question way in the back there for some time already. Hi, I got a question. I read on Wikitech that you're using Garneti as a virtualization platform for some parts. Can you tell us something about this? Or what parts of Wikipedia or Wikimedia are hosted on this platform? I'm not so sorry. So I don't know this kind of very, very sure. But take it with a grain of salt. But as far as I know, Garneti is used to build a very small VMs in productions that we need for very, very small micro sites that we serve to the users. So we built just one or two VMs. We don't use it very often, as I think so. Do you also think about Open Hardware? Not for servers. I think for the offline reader project, but this is not actually run by the foundation. It's supported, but it's not something that the foundation does. There was a lot of thinking about Open Hardware. But really, Open Hardware in practice usually means you don't, you know, if you really want to go down to the chip design, it's pretty tough. So yeah, it's usually not practical. Sadly. And one thing I can say about this is that we have some machines that are really powerful that we give to the researchers to run analysis on the between this itself. And we needed to have GPUs for those. But the problem was there wasn't any open source driver for them. So we migrated and used AMD, I think. But AMD didn't fit in the rack. It was quite an endeavor to get it to work for our researchers to have used GPU. I'm still impressed that you answer 90% out of the cache. Do all people access the same pages or is the cache that huge? So what percentage of the whole database is in the cache then? I don't have the exact numbers, to be honest. But a large percentage of the whole database is in the cache. I mean, it expires after 24 hours. So really obscure stuff isn't there. But I mean, it's a parallel distribution. You have a few pages that are accessed a lot. And you have many, many, many pages that are not actually accessed at all for a week or so, except maybe for a crawler. So I don't know a number. My guess would be it's less than 50% that is actually cached, but that still covers 90%. It's probably the top 10% of pages would still cover 90% of the page views. But I don't know. This would be actually, I should look this up. It would be interesting numbers to have, yes. Do you know if this is 90% of the page views or 90% of the get requests? Because requests for the JavaScript would also be cached more often, I assume. I would expect that for non-page views it's even higher. Because all the icons and JavaScript models and CSS and stuff doesn't ever change. Unless that's already inflating the 90%. But there's a question back there. Hey, do your data centers run on green energy? Very bad question. So the Amsterdam CDN one is full green. But the other ones are partially green, partially coal and gas. As far as I know, there are some plans to make them move away from it. But the other hand, we realize that we don't produce as much as a carbon emission. Because we don't have much servers and we don't use much data. There was an estimation that we realized our carbon emission is basically the same as 200 in the data center, plus all of the travel that all of the stuff do and all of the events is 250 households. It's very, very small. I think it's 1,000 of the comparable traffic with Facebook, even if you just cut down with the same traffic. Because Facebook collects the data. It runs very sophisticated machine learning algorithms. That's a real complicated. But for Wikimedia, we don't do this, so we don't need much energy. Does that answer your question? We have any other questions left? Yeah, sorry. Hi. How many developers do you need to maintain the whole infrastructure? And how many developers or, let's say, developer hours you needed to build the whole infrastructure? The question is, because what I find very interesting about the talk is a nonprofit. So as an example for other nonprofits is how much money are we talking about in order to build something like this as a digital common? So if this is just about actually running all this, so just operations, it's less than 20 people, I think. Which makes, if you basically divide the request per second by people, you get to something like 8,000 requests per second per operations engineer. Which I think is a pretty impressive number. This is probably a lot higher. I would really like to know if there's any organization that tops that. I don't actually know the actual operations budget. I don't know. It's two digit millions annually. Total hours for building this over the last 18 years, I have no idea. For the first five or so years, the people doing it were actually volunteers. We still had volunteer database administrators and stuff until maybe 10 years ago, eight years ago. So yeah, it's really nobody did any accounting of this. I can only guess. Hello, tools question. A few years back, I saw some interesting examples of salt stack use for Wikimedia, but right now I see only puppet that come in mentioned. So what happened with that? I think we ditched the salt stack. I cannot, because none of us are in the cloud services team, and I don't think I can answer you. But if you look at the Wikitec, the Wikimedia network, it's probably, if last time I checked, it says like it's the applicator and obsolete. We don't use it anymore. Do you use the backdrops, like the job runners, to fill spare capacity on the web serving servers, or do you have dedicated servers for the roles? I think they're dedicated, right? The job runners. If you're asking job runners are dedicated, yes, they are. I think five per primary data center. Yeah, and they don't, I mean, do we actually have any spare capacity on anything? We don't have that much hardware. Everything is pretty much at 100%. I think we still have some server that is just called MISC1111 or something, which run five different things at once. You can look for those on Wikitec. But sorry, it's not five, it's 20 per data center, 20 per primary data center. That's our job runner. And they run 700 jobs per second. And I think that does not include the video scaler, so those are separate again. No, they merged them like two months ago. Okay, cool. Maybe a little bit of topic, but can you tell us a little bit about decision-making process for technical decision, architecture decisions, how does it work in an organization like this? Decision-making process for architecture decisions, for example. Yeah, so Wikimedia has a committee for making high-level technical decisions called Wikimedia Technical Committee, TechCom. And we run an RSE process, so any decision that is cross-cutting strategic or especially hard to undo should go through this process. And it's pretty informal. Basically, you file a ticket and start this process. It gets announced on the mailing list. Hopefully, you get input and feedback. And at some point, it's approved for implementation. We're currently looking into improving this process. It's not, sometimes it works pretty well, sometimes things don't get that much feedback, but it makes sure that people are aware of these high-level decisions. Daniel is the chair of that committee. Yeah, if you want to complain about the process, please do. Yes, regarding CINCD along the pipeline, of course, with that much traffic, you want to keep everything consistent, right? So is there any testing strategies that you have set internally? Of course, unit tests, integration tests, but do you do something like continuous end-to-end testing on beta instances? So we have beta cluster, but also we do deploy, we call it train, so we deploy once a week. All of the changes get merged to one branch, and the branch gets cut in every Tuesday, and it first goes through the test wikis, and then it goes through all of the wikis that are not Wikipedia, except Catalan and Hebrew Wikipedia. So basically, Hebrew and Catalan Wikipedia volunteer to be the guinea pigs of the next wikis. And if everything works fine, usually it goes there and there's like, oh, the fatal monitor and we have a logging, and then it's like, okay, we need to fix this, and we fix it immediately, and then it goes live to all wikis. This is one way of looking at it also. So our test coverage is not as great as it should be, and so we kind of abuse our users for this. We are, of course, working to improve this, and one thing that we started recently is a program for creating end-to-end tests for all the API modules we have, and in the hope that we can thereby cover pretty much all of the application logic, bypassing the user interface. I mean, the full end-to-end should, of course, include the user interface, but the user interface tests are pretty brittle and often tests where things are on the screen, and it just seems to us that it makes a lot of sense to have tests that actually test the application logic for what the system actually should be doing rather than what it should look like, and yeah, we are currently working on making, so yeah, basically this has been a proof of concept and we are currently working to actually integrate it in CI, that patch should land when once everyone is back from the vacations, and then we have to write about the thousands or so tests, I guess. I think there's also a plan to move to a system where we actually deploy it basically after every commit and can immediately roll back if something goes wrong, but that's more mid-term stuff and I'm not sure what the current status of that proposal is. And it will be incubated, so it will be completely different. That would be amazing. But right now we are on this weekly basis, if something goes wrong, we roll back to the last week's version of the code. There are any questions left, sorry. Yeah. Okay, I don't think so, so yeah, thank you for this wonderful talk. Thank you for all your questions. Yeah, I hope you liked it. See you around the next talk, yeah, we'll pause.


You know, as long as I have, you take the organization to heart. The organization itself is a wonderful organization. It provides scientists with a fantastic platform to achieve things. Without the platform that Irie provides, none of us could achieve the things that we do achieve. I have to say, in brackets, once you're on the platform, Irie seems to do its utmost to almost sabotage the concert through its peculiar administrative behavior. But one does think about the future of Irie. Irie is an Asian organization. The Asian countries are developing in terms of wealth, power, and their science and performance is growing. The investment in science is increasing, so China is emerging as a big player in biological sciences. India are the same. So what role will Irie have? Can Irie compete and be significant? And how does it remain significant? That's an interesting question. I think that we have to look at its title first of all. Irie is the International Rights Research Institute. So it has to maintain its international nature. It has to be about research. It has to be able to command the respect of scientists throughout the world. Scientists have to look at Irie at any time and say, this is an organization that has a lot to offer when we start to discuss food production for the major part of the world's population. Now, how does it do that with a small staff and a budget which runs at, I don't know, 50 million dollars a year compared to the budgets of China and India and Japan and other countries? Again, that's an interesting question. I think crucial to it is being bold. I think it has to be bold. It has to be strategic in its thinking. It has to tackle big problems of significance. I think it always has to have a cutting edge component to its work. It also has to be able to act, as I said earlier, as a lens. It has to be able to focus the energy and intellects of people in advanced institutions around the world on real world problems. It has to give people the opportunity to use their science in a coupled manner to crack problems of great significance, whatever those problems are. Now, it can only do that if it has a reputation, a solid reputation of intellectual ability and solid achievement. Erie is not about fertiliser management. It's not about water management. It's about bigger issues than that. It has to be in the future. Whichever branch of Erie's activities you're thinking of, be it social sciences, be it molecular biology, it has to be up there with the leading thinkers. Climate change is a massively important problem as we move forward. Erie has a tough job in the area of climate change. Unlike climate change scientists in general, who think of 100 years from now, some of them think even longer, some of them might even think 1,000 years from now, Erie has to think about 50 years from now. How will these things be affecting the livelihood of farmers and the population of Asia 50 years from now? That's a difficult problem and it requires great thought. It requires accomplishment. So moving forward, I think Erie has to ensure that it is seen as an intellectually vibrant, exciting place. The kind of place where somebody from California Institute of Technology, MIT, Cambridge, wants to come and visit, wants to share a problem with somebody who's here. It also has to remember that its mission is to help people, to provide a better life for themselves and their families. So it has also got this delivery component to its work. I think it's got to manage some or another to balance that so that it can, if it is creating new products, new ideas, new products, it has also to understand the mechanisms of transfer because those are important to it. Now, how it balances those two components going forward is going to be always a challenge for it. But it has to be an organization that everybody wants.


The study aimed to determine changes in utilization of healthcare services during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to prior years. A systematic review was conducted, and 81 studies across 20 countries were included, reporting on over 11 million services pre-pandemic and 6.9 million during the pandemic. The primary outcome was a median 37% reduction in overall service utilization with reductions for visits, admissions, diagnostics, and therapeutics of 42%, 28%, 31%, and 30%, respectively. Among studies reporting secondary outcomes, there were 60 estimates, with 27, 45%, reporting larger reductions in utilization among people with a milder spectrum of illness, and 33, 55%, reporting no difference. The study concludes that healthcare utilization decreased by about a third during the pandemic, with greater reductions among people with less severe illness. This article was authored by Mark Jones, Minna Johansson, Ian Scott, and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


I'm married That keeps making all these hobbit jokes cuz I'm short and I've got a ring now. Yeah, really distasteful Really distasteful, but good. I'm happy. I'm happy.  You find the ring pitch clock Sports sports the pitch clock is here in baseball and people are I Don't know it's mixed bag a lot of people are upset, but I think it's a very vocal Minority that just like being mad about everything Jim I'm gonna hit you with your politics you theory. Yeah, like the two sides of crazy are actually closer to each other Then the people in the middle that are trying to figure out a magnet or horse your effect Yeah, that they're just you know in the middle They're like well, I could use a tweak here and there But the construct is good and then the people on the ends are like stop running for homers and the other people are like Make baseball slower. Yeah, it's it's a good time to be on the interstate baseball's bad I will enjoy the pitch clock once all the trouble of Adjusting is over which I think that's where I'm getting fresher. We're like we don't want games ending with Infractions duh no one wants a great MLB the new rule was like let's have games and infractions You get all the infractions out of the way and then they're not gonna happen anymore because people are gonna get used to it Frog heaven frog heaven is really nice Jim this almost a breakdown you were at this I think this Japanese zoo in Itachi City They were practicing their bear escape drill out me as a furry mid-show great video though Because if a bear does escape you have to practice for that right you got to put a guy in the costume And he's gonna run around this guy's running around Eventually you see the gun come out the window Zach I like that you know and they shoot the bear There falls then they bring the net over them and all that you do fire alarms in school You do bear escapes at zoo terrible acting by the bear the man or woman who was in the bear costume It they were they were like as if they pulled the short straw Custom you need the guy who wants to be the bear this bear was caught so easily it was not realistic I couldn't disagree more the bear was a fantastic actor Bear escapes the zoo. It's not like he goes on a rampage like that's the movies not good Did you see this bear?  Oh Jim the more sports and nowhere. I bet on sports Draftkings you ever been there Yeah, I have nice Zack and more sports. This is an old-fashioned High tea fest as we've got a coach ref Stare down And that's a key part in the video cuz they each get closer the coach takes Fran takes two steps And I have free and the ref he takes two steps as I can I can take steps as well And the ref's kind of got this face on like it's a short guy slash shorter guy slash I'm the ref face we doing this like I realize I look like a bag of suck, but I'll play your game Yeah, and then the coach his team comes on to win goes on to win a huge comeback He gets rewarded for that in the press conference. They're like, do you think the technicals helped and he's like, do you think they did? Smiling cuz he does think they did. Oh, can you throw it to the not sports? I have a great This is so good. This is one of my favorite not sports in a while I almost don't want to cuz uh Zach the not sports is about an owl that escaped and a love story Zach You're gonna like this one. There's an owl named flacco that escaped the Central Park Zoo. Okay. Now. This is the first time I am incredibly jealous of bird watchers because this out the first time the first time yet No, no truthfully this owl escaped the Central Park Zoo Yes, and it's now taking residency in Central Park So all of the bird watchers all of the Twitter accounts Central Park birds Manhattan bird alert all these accounts are like whoa There's already an owl in Central Park named Geraldine before we keep going hot He throws up back. You like that owl pellet puke. Yes Flacco is putting on a show trying to win over Central Park.  It's not on here that the earth got three centimeters closer to the moon this year Guess who doesn't know that anyone? What about if we have like one bad spin?  Yeah, cuz you're not out there Yeah, so these birds could bang these is just you watch interstellar recently. Yeah, I wish it on the flight Let's sing our song Geraldine. How could you be true? Won't you? We'll figure it out. It's the employee of the week. It's the employee of the week I'm giving it to our guy beeps. Yeah Wow He doesn't even know the bug bug dude We've been doing team profile projections player profile projections episode a day every day until opening day on talking baseball and talking Yanks, he's the producer of both of those shows and I went on vacation you went on vacation I went on vacation with you and he's held down the fort. I tell you what?  That's promo code dumb only at Draftkings sports book minimum age and eligibility restrictions apply see Sean Oates for details So you think the refs in on it.  I got I think I might be going refs in on it. Oh, yeah Motivation oh, yeah Because a lot of reps would have given a tee Stared at me too long gives a good technical. You're out. Wow yours is kind of I go backhand. Why Europe don't I do this? That's more time out. I think come over the top. Yeah refs come over the top Yeah, you know, he's got a really good technical Nicky cast when he does the ref on his tiktok thing That's so fun. I don't follow any of his stuff


Crazy Unrealistic People vs. Rational Realistic People Crazy Unrealistic People believe all our systems are rigged for the benefit of the rich and powerful. Rational Realistic People believe all our systems happen to benefit the rich and powerful by pure coincidence. Crazy Unrealistic People believe the mass media feed the public lies to manufacture consent for agendas which go against the public interests. Rational Realistic People believe the media are telling the truth, and the public just naturally enjoys supporting wars on the other side of the planet and domestic policies which make them poorer and sicker. Crazy Unrealistic People believe drastic revolutionary changes are needed to create a just society which works for everyone. Rational Realistic People believe a just society that works for everyone can be achieved by participating in political parties that are explicitly set up to prevent a just society that works for everyone. Crazy Unrealistic People believe drastic revolutionary changes are needed in our society to avoid an environmental collapse that is already well underway. Rational Realistic People believe the environmental collapse that is already well underway can be avoided by making small incremental changes over the next several centuries. Crazy Unrealistic People believe the U.S. Empire has lied about its every war and is also lying about the current one. Rational Realistic People believe that while history has shown that the U.S. lies about all those other wars, this time it's definitely telling the truth. Crazy Unrealistic People believe the U.S. Empire amassing war machinery on the borders of its top two geopolitical rivals is an extremely provocative act of aggression designed to advance the Empire's geostrategic objectives. Rational Realistic People believe the U.S. amassing war machinery on the borders of its top two geopolitical rivals is an innocent act of defense. Crazy Unrealistic People believe government agencies are spying on us and working to censor the Internet. Rational Realistic People believe that too, but they think it's a good thing. Crazy Unrealistic People believe a status quo of nonstop war, militarism, nuclear brinkmanship, ecocide, exploitation, oppression, and authoritarianism is untenable and must be dismantled by any means necessary. Rational Realistic People believe we can just ignore those problems and think about more pleasant things. Crazy Unrealistic People believe that the only way to achieve desperately needed change in a society whose systems are rigged for the powerful is to disregard those rigged systems and use the power of our numbers to force the end of the injustices we face and the creation of new systems. Rational Realistic People believe we can get the changes we need if we just vote a little harder in the next election. Crazy Unrealistic People believe the definition of insanity is continually doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Rational Realistic People believe doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results just might work this time.


I don't know if we have any amendments to the agenda. I don't recognize our guests. Do we have anything or any amendments to the agenda, Sarah? I don't. Okay. Wait. I just need you guys. I wanted to, I sent you orders. I need one more person to. Authorize that one payment. Okay. Thank you. Okay. So the only, uh, I don't know if we have any, I don't know, I don't know how we go forward with the road commissioner. Issue. And it's now a little more confusing perhaps because. Victor is running against me and Gary. Is running against. Steve. For the select board positions. So whatever we do. I want to be sure that we're not. In any, uh, In any way, but, uh, short of that, I'm open to any, uh, Any discussion about how we go forward on this. Peter. Um, I think we should, I think we should move forward. Uh, with this and interview the two people that have. Uh, expressed interest in that. In that job. Um, it's been. Uh, three weeks. Since, uh, since I resigned from there and, and I think, and we've had two people step forward. And I think we should interview. I agree. Me too. Yeah.  Certainly take your place. Um, on that interview committee and, and, uh, so that you wouldn't feel any conflict. I know Liz has some interest. I've been thinking about this a lot. I've been thinking about it a lot. And I've. Come up with a few solutions that I didn't like very much. Um, and you know what I ultimately concluded. And. Um, Um, And I'm part of me wants to suggest that maybe Liz. Should fill in for Steve. But one of the problems there is a Steve's the one. Who really has the knowledge base. About what. Believe me when I say, I've been thinking about this a lot. I've been thinking about a lot. And I've come up with a few solutions that I didn't like very much. And I realize. It has its own issues. But I think we should all do it. Oh. Yeah, then it's a meeting, but that's going to be a. The interview part can be done in executive session. Correct. Sarah. No, I'll have to check the statutes. I don't, I don't see. Let's just review them together. Shall we? Okay. So you could do this. First of all, you could do this at the next meeting on Tuesday. That would be good. You, there must be a specific finding that a premature general public knowledge would place the public body or a person involved at a substantial disadvantage. No. Um, It is important that the minutes show. Wait, hold on. I'm sorry. I'm on the wrong side. One negotiating or securing, securing real estate purchase or lease options. No. The appointment or employment or evaluation of a public officer or employee. So there you go. So you could, we could warn an executive session. Under one VSA 313 and I will warn a public portion after that executive session. So in case you guys decide to, um, make a decision. Does that work for you? Yeah. How does everybody feel about that? I just think. Here's Mary. Hey. Sorry, I took so long. Oh, perfect. You're here. I left the iPad out in the car. Okay. Well, we've been, well, we've been discussing is how to go forward with this road commissioner. Yeah. Uh, what we've been discussing is having us all meeting the entire select board, interview the two candidates and executive session. At our meeting on Tuesday. Um, well, my feeling is. I think we should postpone any longer. It's been three weeks. And I think that's, that's long enough. It's probably been too long, but. Yeah. I mean, three weeks isn't the end of the world, but I think we need to, we've had two people come forward. Maybe if we hadn't had anybody come forward, it'd be a little different. But with two people coming forward to, uh, Say that they would take that position. I think we should interview them. Well, I just feel like there's a potential conflict of interest because. Um, you have the two people running against two people on the select board. It's possible. That's a potential conflict of interest. But if we have. Five select board members there, uh, I don't, I don't see that it's a problem. I, I can't see where it's a problem. The other option. The other option would be to have the three select board members that aren't, uh, You know, in the race against each other, do the interview, and maybe even potentially selecting a community member to be involved in that or something. And then. There is absolutely no, uh, Conflict of interest at that point. No, but the three, the three that would be left, I don't, I don't see that it's a problem. I can't see where it's a problem. Um, or the people that know the least about the roads in terms of how you maintain them to the quality that we've had in the past. I agree with that. And, and, um, You know, there would definitely take some preparation for information to be put together for that meeting. Um, but maybe, maybe some, some of the, uh, community members that we have that do have experience with answer with roadways or whatever might be interested in and being on that panel. Just a suggestion. Yeah. My other thought would be I hear what you're saying. Come on, Steve. I'm just saying I think that that the five select board members can do the interview. I mean, as far as the process to go, I mean, we don't have to have any vote in who's being hired. But as far as being part of the interview, I think we can do that. We can recuse ourselves from voting on. That's what I was going to suggest. We can we can recuse ourselves. We can recuse ourselves from the vote, but participate in the interview. Right. I like that. Yeah, that would make sense. Yep. Yep. I'm good with that. Okay. How much time do we want to schedule for each person? Half hour? Yes. I mean, just so I'm clear, I think we ought to wait. So I might end up voting against this. I haven't decided yet, but that's okay. That's okay. I would think I would think half an hour. Yeah. Peter. Yes. Just to be clear, you talk about half an hour per person. Yes. Yes. Do we want to have any of the road crew there or the new foreman? Yeah. New foreman should definitely be there. I think the new foreman should be there too. So, again, all these issues are tough issues. I think having having Steve and Shane both there increases the probability of a conflict of interest. I agree. Well, Steve isn't going to be a purpose. With all that noise in the background. That's me. Sorry, I'll turn it off. Just can you go someplace where it's a little quieter? Maybe anyway, you can unmute yourself when you need to speak. Thank you. You know, I don't know.  I just, I just think having both Shane and now Shane wouldn't be voting. You just be participating in the interview. But I don't know. I think it complicates it more. Yeah, I don't see anything wrong. I mean, normally Paul and I do interviews like when we were doing, getting somebody in there, another employee. So it'd be just Paul and I, I mean, we're going to have five select board members and two of the members are going to recuse themselves from, from the voting. They're just going to participate. And I don't see anything wrong with that. We're open. No, I don't see anything wrong with that. I don't think we need any more people in there and I'd rather not have my son in there. Yeah, I agree. And I think under Vermont law, the fact that both of you have already declared that there's an appearance or could be the appearance of a conflict means you've met the standard under the law for declaring it. And that's all you need to do. Right. So I think, I think that's the perfect solution to handling this. Yeah. Any other comments? Anybody? Liz, you're good with that. Sarah. I just want to recap. So what you're, what you're going to do is the whole board is going to meet, is this going to be on February 2nd? That's just out of it. Yes.  Yeah. Steve and you will participate in the interview. Shane will not be there. But however, when it comes to voting, you too will not vote. You and Steve will not vote. Is that right? Yes. That's correct. I just want to get it straight. Although no one's made that motion yet, but that's what we've been discussing. Is that the first order of business? The only order. Well, we'll have a little other business. That's certainly going to be the major order of business. And yes, I would say it should be the first. We don't have, we don't have people waiting for, waiting for interviews. I agree. So Victor, does that work for you? Potential conflict with next Tuesday night. You do. I mean, maybe I can get out of it. It's only a dentist appointment, but it's at five o'clock. I'll get out of it. Well, why can't we do the interview earlier? Or does that not work for everybody? I could work. Victor, what time is your four o'clock or your three thirty? I'll just get out of it and make it at five. Well, while I have it, see if it, Victor, see if it's a big problem getting out of it. It's a big. I don't think it does, Peter. Okay. All right. Okay. Sarah. Yes. While I have you here, should I try calling the other candidate? I can put everything on mute just to make sure that that day. Yes, that would be good. You guys want to have to go. So, if you want my vote, then I got to vote now. Otherwise, I'll, I won't be able to stay because I've got to be out of here in 15 minutes and I'm not done. We'll be done in 15 minutes, Mary. Then I'll be leaving with wet hair. This meeting is going to be over soon. Well, what I'm suggesting is don't call Gary. I want it. Can we, can I call the vote? Well, just, just wait two seconds. Sarah's trying to call him right now. So, Peter. Yes. Is that a conflict? If she's, if she's votes, if Mary votes against it and then she turns around and votes on the, on, she'll be one of the three that vote yay or nay. No. The candidate. She's, she's, she is just voting. The motion, Victor, is going to be that this is how we're going to go forward. So if she votes not to do it and we decide to do it, that doesn't mean she can't participate in the process. I don't think we want to wait until meeting. I just, I agree with Steve. I, I think it's, I think it's time to do it. And I think the likelihood of, of other candidates coming forward is, is not great. So we need to do this and the mantle of the responsibility that I've been carrying for the last three weeks has been bearing heavy on me. It's been increasing my drinking, which is a bad thing. Well, I can't, that's not true, by the way, for anybody who watches the orca thing, but nevertheless, we need to have a, we need to have a road commissioner. I agree. I'm going to make the motion. Just, just hold on one second. We're waiting for, uh, waiting for Sarah. You know, Peter, you can just attribute the extra drinking to the cold weather. It helps keep you warm. There you go. Well, or the situation in Washington has caused some issues for me too. So, and COVID, everyone's drinking more because of COVID. So we all have excuses. Mary, Mary got in. We got, we got Mary in first thing yesterday morning and she's going in on Thursday. So pretty good. Oh, wow. That's fast. What's the scope? So, uh, yes, the other candidate can make it. He may not have zoom, so he's going to come down to the office and I'll set him up at, uh, at that time to use, uh, you know, what are, this computer of worse comes to worse. Okay. Perfect. Okay. So now we're, now we're ready for a motion. You're going to make the motion, Mary. Yeah. You did. We'll make the motion. I'll make the motion. I'll second. Okay. The motion is that we, uh, move to, um, have interviews on February 2nd with the two candidates for the road commissioner. Um, and that Peter and Steve will recuse them. All right. And Peter and Steve will recuse themselves from the vote, but they will attend, uh, the interview process. Yeah. Back up. Okay. Thank you, Phil. Any further discussion? All in favor of the motion. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Mary Skinner, can you hear us? Aye. Okay. Wait, is Mary, is that a, uh, Mary, are you opposed or are you voting for? I'm opposed. Okay. Well, I need you to say opposed, Mary, not aye. Oh, well, I, you said all those are poet, opposed. So I said. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay. I got it. Okay. We're clear. That's, that's what's important. Okay. You're free to go, Mary. Thank you. Thank you guys. Bye. Bye, Mary. Any other business, anybody? Can I say something, Peter? Sure. You started out the meeting. I just want to, I, you know, I just want to be clear on this. You started out the meeting that I was running against you or somebody was, uh, you know, it's a choice of words, but I don't feel that, uh, the only reason I run is, uh, you people always say that nobody ever runs for office and these were the only ones that were available this year. I was running for a three-year term, not necessarily against Peter Hood. I know you hold it, but non-negative, non-negative campaign, Victor, it's fine. That's well said. That's well said, Victor. I appreciate, I appreciate that. And maybe I didn't, maybe I didn't phrase that exactly correctly. I should have said you were running for the three-year seat as I am running for the three-year seat. But anyway, I think everybody understands what's going on and it's fine. After this mess that we had in Washington, D.C., I don't see any reason to be. So how many, uh, how many debates should we have and when should they be? Hi. Better happen soon. Hey, I'm, I'm, I'm glad you're interested. Uh, so any other business, anybody, Dorinda, you're good? Yep. As long as they, did you send that off, Steve, or? I didn't. I was looking for your email there and I didn't see the, the warrants in there at all. But can you resend that to me? Sure. Thank you. And I'll, and I'll respond to it right away. Peter. Yes. Do you want me to, I tried to set up in a, um, sort of a pre-meeting with Claire from, um, uh, Central Mar Regional Planning Commission and then she couldn't do it, but I'm hoping for February 10th. Do you want to be a part of that meeting? I just want to sort of do the planning for the agenda. I would kind of like to be part of it because I'm going to run the meeting. You're going to run what meeting? Which meeting, which meeting are you talking about? The meeting. I'm talking about the budgeting, uh, the capital spending plan meeting. Do you want to be, I do not need to be part of that meeting. Okay. Unless you want me to be. No, no, no. I just didn't know if you, I know you're coming to the main meeting, but I'm going to do a pre-planning meeting with the Claire. Okay. So just get to this. Okay. Fine. Anything else? Anybody? How's the rest fell? Give us a quick update. Coming along. Better day by day. Okay. No, Lowry can't wait for you to take back this. Um, I know. Hey, he, he doesn't understand what is going on. He came in way too late and it's like, yeah, such a pain for him. Yeah. I've been staying up with it. It was, you know, just so that we had some, you know, representation there and I'm going to take it over, uh, in February and we'll, we'll release him from his contract. Okay. Did you know that Tesla now has, um, satellites that are doing like super high speed? They're apparently available in our area. Is that true? Apparently that's what I just heard. Yeah. I've heard, I've heard months out is what I've, what I've heard. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's an exciting prospect. Yeah. It's interesting. Yeah. But I think yours is still faster. Phil. See you forever. Yeah. The problem with the satellite as it is like with Q's network is the redundancy and, uh, there are some people in the area who are beta testing it though. So we'll know more shortly. We got something in the mail about it asking us to sign up for it. I was going to ask your car to communicate with it, Liz, and see how it works. Yeah. See what you're talking about. I bet it would. We can turn Liz's car into a hot spot, I bet. Yeah. We can also sign on to Liz. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you very much. I'm sorry. We, I'm sorry we had to have this little extra meeting, but I just want to be sure that whatever decision we make, we make it a real meeting. We do it all together. We talk about it. And yeah, I thought it was important to do this. So thank you all for being here and we'll see you on Tuesday. Thank you. Thank you. Bye.


When you think of a toxic friend or peer, what's the first thought that comes to mind? Is it someone who gossips frequently? Maybe someone who's bossy and a nightmare to work with? Well, what about Machiavellianism? Machiavellianism refers to a personality trait that is characterized by an ability to be extremely manipulative, deceitful, and cunning, as a means to achieve one's goals, such as power and status. And it's one of the three tenets of The Dark Triad, which includes narcissism and psychopathy. Individuals with a Machiavellian personality profile can be incredibly manipulative. Put it this way, if someone with a Machiavellian trait was a soul reaper, manipulation is their zampicuto. As a matter of fact, there are many clear-cut examples of this type of personality in movies and television, such as Frank Underwood from House of Cards, the ambitious and conniving politician who stops at nothing to achieve his goals and further his political career. And who can forget Walter White from the show Breaking Bad? The embattled anti-hero and drug kingpin who ruthlessly destroys anyone who gets in his way. Sounds kind of scary, right? Well, although these are extreme examples, Machiavellian individuals definitely exist and they can make any setting toxic. These four signs can help you figure out if you have a peer or friend with the Machiavellian quality. Let's dive right into the signs. Number one, excessive gossip. Have you ever met someone who seems to beam with joy when speaking negatively about others? Gossip is a predictable and inevitable aspect of life and it's not abnormal for someone to gossip occasionally. However, gossiping becomes very dangerous and toxic when taken to the extreme, such as starting vicious rumors and using others to obtain personal information that could be damaging to their reputation. Individuals with the Machiavellian trait tend to weaponize any information that comes their way and have a talent for manipulating harmless statements into something that conveniently fits their narrative. So be extremely careful and tread with caution when saying anything to them. Number two, highly competitive. Possessing a strong sense of ambition is generally something positive and admirable, which it is. There's nothing wrong with being competitive. However, when a person is so competitive that they're willing to compromise their own values and hurt other people to achieve their goals, that's when it becomes toxic. According to Professor Mariana Bakarova, PhD, people who would score highly when being tested for Machiavellianism, for instance, are very motivated by money, power, and competition and winning, unless so on community building. So you can see why bullying would come easily for Machiavellians. Coercion and intimidation are just a few of the tactics that Machiavellian individuals use to gain leverage. Whether it's in school, the workplace, or in social situations. So if you're seeing an almost ruthless competitive streak in one of your friends, peers, or acquaintances, this could be a sign of Machiavellianism. Number three, insincere flattery. Another prevalent behavior of a Machiavellian individual is the use of insincere and excessive flattery, especially to those in positions of power and influence. Take it from the queen bee herself, Regina George. She uses the, oh my God, where did you get that? It's so cute, line. Then turns around and bashes that same thing she just complimented. Flatterers can appear to be very charming and friendly, but if the Machiavellian trait is present, then that flattery can come with an ulterior motive. Social psychologists and authors of studies in Machiavellianism, Richard Christie and Florence Gays, emphasize the fact that Machiavellians tend to use their relationships for personal gain, instead of a deep, meaningful friendship. They form weak, superficial bonds with others. This way it's easier to pick up and put down the friendship when needed. If you notice your friend or acquaintance is constantly showering a person of power or influence, such as a teacher, a boss, or even a celebrity with gifts and compliments, but then proceeds to treat everyone else poorly, this could be a sign of a Machiavellian trait. And number four, manipulation. This component is central to a Machiavellian's cold and calculated nature, and can manifest in several different ways. Some examples of their manipulative tactics include trying to generate sympathy from others through deceit, turning others against someone else, or even gaslighting. Protecting ourselves from being manipulated by these types of individuals is vital. And according to licensed psychologist Diane Grant, PhD, there are several ways you can avoid falling prey to Machiavellians, such as setting boundaries, building supportive relationships, and avoiding trusting them with any vulnerabilities. So, do you have a Machiavellian person in your life? How are you dealing with the situation? Let us know in the comments. If you liked this video, be sure to hit the like button and subscribe to Psych2Go for more content. Thanks so much for watching, and see you in our next video.


Welcome to Digital Asset News, the top stories in cryptocurrency and digital assets and background of bite-sized pieces. Really today we've got one story and that's this. Goldman Sachs senior exec on huge institutional demand for Bitcoin and what this article allows us to do is to peel back the curtain and see not just what institutions are doing but corporations, hedge funds, treasuries and pensions are thinking about Bitcoin and how bullish it is because they're actually talking about using Bitcoin for payments as opposed to a store of value. So we're going to dig deep into this one and we're going to try to talk about what this potentially all could mean for when the impending bear market comes about. So we'll take a look at this but first let's take a look at what's going on into the market. So right now it is March 13th, 5 p.m. Houston, Texas time I'm with my my guy Chewie here and we're still in Houston because we have this investment property and there's just some problems that are coming up so we need to make sure this is ready as we have all these people coming in through Airbnb to rent it out and it's been pretty good. We came here just about a week and a half ago or so we got everything fixed up and ready to go put an Airbnb and now here we are I think we're almost three months booked for people to come in so that's what's great not really having a job but there's no I have no job I mean me and my wife just work for ourselves and we're going to do things like this so this is always good news so let's take a look what's going on so if you haven't known Bitcoin just popped over 60,000 so congratulations to all the Bitcoin holders every single Bitcoin holder today is in profit so congratulations to everybody that is a pretty great thing also on top of that let's see Ethereum is up 9% Binance Coin it just seems like when when Bitcoin goes up everything else goes up and that's just pretty much how it works so if you're into cryptocurrency just remember that little sage advice Bitcoin goes up usually a lot of things go up especially when we're hitting all-time highs let's see XRP 6.27 for Polkadot I think fantastic besides Bitcoin 15% for EOS wow that's crazy 19% for Bitcoin SV all right sure 3% 9% for FTX token 21% for Sushi swap huh interesting and then some more stuff Filecoin 11% and so on and so forth so let's just take a look real quick actually let me blow this up so you can see I'm talking about let's take a look at the sentiment score through trade the chain and see what's going to be the next ones this always just gets me into my my inner trader so take a look at next genesis vision one chain and mayor and you trust those looks like they're at Decentraland Pundi X Pundi and Ethereum classic so this part right here I see this little middle number here for next 4.2% to 13% that's like 90% accuracy for trade the chain also on top of that just so you know talking about institutions I'll be on the Alex Masioli show on Tuesday Alex is my main guy my my my inner pipeline for all the different institution gossip things that are going on and those guys meet we're talking about their their personal portfolios so I'll just be be there for I don't know comic relief or something so we'll see we'll see how it all works out I'll share the link later on all right let's give it today's top story shall we and here we are and she was gone because he's lazy all right so what is this all about well this one is important to me it's interesting to me I should say because of a conversation that's a me and Alex Masioli were having which was he believes that the reason why bitcoin and crypto really popped off was because of the coronavirus and I told I believe that too he thinks that the reason was because everybody was at home and nothing to do so they did a lot of research and of course this was the time of the happening so they figured out about that they probably figured out some things about cycles they probably looked at what it could actually do they did some deep dives and they figured out just how great crypto and digital assets could be but he thinks that once we start to get the vaccines people do more things by themselves you know they're actually able to travel and do other things he says that he thinks that crypto will actually drop off because people won't be as interested into it because they'll have other other interests and that's the part where we diverge I personally believe that because everybody has been very you know educating themselves now they can have a more informed conversation just for about bitcoin for example and just say hey you know bitcoin is gold 2.0 it's you can you can transfer it or spend it or send it anywhere in the world to anyone in the world in less than 30 minutes it's used to cost a nickel and now it costs 50,000 actually 60,000 as of today it is the most uh it's the best performing asset over the last 10 years it's why I'm heavily invested into it that is my bitcoin elevator pitch so if you've been to danteachescrypto.com you know exactly what I'm talking about so when people start to hear about that like oh we'll tell you more you know how much was it a year ago wow 5,000 now it's at 60,000 wow tell me why it is so great well the centralization and of course because of what's going on with the money printing and they went on that rabbit hole but uh I truly believe that now the people educated they're able to go and uh yeah intermingle with all the people that they know maybe their jobs or more on site they get together more with friends and family and they sort of talk about these things in person and I think that is actually going to lead to a bigger influx of of crypto users and digital asset investors and of course that's why I created this website danteachescrypto.com because it's it's it goes over the some basics and a little intermediate stuff but it's 100% free and when people go there they learn about it the only thing I ask is the one thing I ask is that you tell two people uh TTP as I call it and then uh when you tell two people they sign up and they learn more about it and then it's just as a flywheel effect because I want you guys here with me uh because I don't just between us uh it's kind of boring just being me sometimes because all I really do is work it'd be great if I had some more friends who didn't have a job and they could they could like you know do more things besides you know uh working their asses off you know 60 80 hours a week and then you know getting together every so often I just want people more like me it's just a better life that's that's all I can tell you anyhow so that that is that is that part and what we're going to talk about with this article is what's going to happen uh I think as far as like institutions dumping on us uh as time moves on because guess what the bear market's coming all right so here's what's going on with this piece and I'll go over this quickly during a recent interview Matthew McDermott head of digital assets for Goldman Sachs global market division talked about bitcoin of course he's the head of the department he said in in terms of kinds of institutional demand we have seen no signs of that abating and when we talk about institutional man we talk about the whole cross section of the industry sectors the team have fielded well over 300 conversations and I'm referring to hedge funds asset managers macro funds banks corporate treasurers insurance and pension funds so when we hear about these these whole swaths of people it's it's very interesting to say like when we talk about institutions it's not just like a certain institutions it's all these different types of people that we just talked about right corporations the treasuries the treasurers the pension funds hedge funds which gets in a bit so it's just a big swath of big money coming in and all these different types they're going to have their own goals just like my goals for cryptocurrency are my goals they're not your goals right and and and we talked about this a couple of videos ago I said look if you're in your you know your 40s you got grandkids like myself you have a different goal than if you are in your 20s just starting out and you know you just want to be an investor or as opposed to like somebody who's in their 80s or 90s and they're like you know what I just want some some extra retirement income so again everybody's goal is different for as far as investors and everybody's goal is probably different as far as institutions and corporations and that's going to play a big factor into what happens as far as the bull and bear market and four-year cycles like I talked about so to continue on this is what he says he goes look they're interested in they're interested in two different aspects firstly should they invest in bitcoin on the balance sheet and that's what microstrategy did with Michael you know michael cellar that's what tesla did elan musk that's what a mass mutual type of huge insurance company did they just want to put in their treasury they just want to hold on to it and that's it and that's great you know we welcome those people with open arms thanks for stabilizing the price a little bit right and then secondly this was the most interesting me yeah they're also thinking about it particularly in the context of tesla's announcement which is should we consider it as a payment mechanism so first of all if this was 20s thank god this is in 2017 there wasn't in 2017 it was just vaporware there was nothing really built there was no tracks laid down I don't know how institutions could have gotten in but in my thinking I was always like well this is the future so they'll just figure it out as time goes on yeah they figured it out but the first thing they did was they dumped everything everybody dumped everything and then they built the rails in 2018 19 and 20 and now here around 2021 and the institutions are here but it's just interesting to me that that these guys are saying well we're going to go against some of that store of value talk which is they're probably still going to do but now they're talking about payments and if you're around in 2017 you know that payments using bitcoin as a as a payment as a decentralized payment was awful as more people used it the network became severely congested it became super expensive and it became incredibly a time waste we would say because what used to take like 30 minutes 20 15 30 minutes was taken 12 hours 24 hours two days to send bitcoin around it was just awful so then you know people came up with with the lighting network and secondary solutions which would be like off-chain type of thing but we're still not there so it's great that these guys are talking about payments but I don't think they really understand exactly what would happen if they did that with payments it just wouldn't work the only way it would work is if they just like how PayPal does and this is I think the most interesting part PayPal is going to give you people can buy bitcoin bitcoin cash Ethereum and Litecoin they're going to be able to roll it out to merchants in I believe quarter two and they're going to roll it out globally if they haven't done it already I always forget so the thing is once you're able to pay with you know merchants with your PayPal account let's say you have Litecoin right you say I want to buy those shoes and Litecoin is what a hundred bucks let's say it's you know new Weasies I don't know and you're like I want some some some Nike's and here's a here's a hundred bucks here's one Litecoin right you're not going to pay that merchant and Litecoin they're not going to get Litecoin it's all going to be transacted but it's going to be really off-chain and it's going to be settled in fiat and cash and what PayPal is going to do is they're going to keep that cryptocurrency and they're going to get loaded that's really what it really comes down to so if these guys are thinking yeah we can do that you understand what they're going to do is they're going to massively accumulate cryptocurrency until it doesn't make any sense anymore and that's really what it comes down to so again we're talking about hedge funds and all these different places our institutions and corporations they're not here to be our friends and to make sure that we're okay and we make a lot of money their job is to help them and at some point when it doesn't make any sense they're going to sell and we've had I've had back and forth with Alex about this as well and he agrees he's like look it's the same thing and people say Rob you understand this whole time is different and I'm telling you right now as long as there's still greedy people as long as there's still people who like to manipulate the market and make a ton of money as long as those things that exist and as long as corporations still have to answer to their shareholders then it's not going to be that much different I think there's still going to be a bear market what goes up must come down I don't care how great the asset actually is once we start to get to a state of FOMO and there is just a parabolic hook that goes all the way up there will be huge problems down the pipe and that's just how I see it so anyhow it's great that they're they're looking for payments I think they will accumulate massively but I think if they accumulate massively they will dump massively and that's the big thing about it's not how much you make it's how much you keep and that's really where the skill comes in is when do you have that exit strategy to get out to sell your positions and go through all right so to finish this up I talked about hedge funds what they're interested in is broader market behavior and really identifying what are the most efficient ways for them to get exposure and to think about hedging and of course that is exactly what I just talked about these hedge funds there's no love there they're like look we're here for profits and if we don't make profit we're out so this was just a I thought pretty good piece about what was going on and the last thing I'll all to say about is this is because all these different plays we just talked about are considered smart money right so if they're all smart money then they know what you know they know what I know and they know about the four-year cycle like we talked about 2012 there's a halving 2013 all-time high 2014 there's a dip 2015 there's a reset 2016 there is a halving 2017 all-time high 2018 dip 2019 reset 2020 there is a halving 2021 we're going to hit all-time highs 2022 maybe a little bit sooner we're going to see a dip and then 2023 a reset and everything starts again but here's the big thing if all these institutions and all these corporations all these people know about it they know about these four-year cycles they know that I know it they know that you know it they know that everybody knows it the question is will they front-run this bear market and go you know what once we see this hockey stick instead of it letting to go to like from you know 130,000 of bitcoin up to 150, 200, 210,000 we're just going to cut it off at a certain point and just start selling and then once you see somebody sell a massive amount of bitcoin you have to understand the people that are getting in after you or actually a lot of people right now there's a survey one in three people don't know what the hell they're actually investing in never like look I bought bitcoin at 110,000 and or 130,000 and now went out to 80,000 this is junk or it goes in 130 even 120 they're like this is junk I'm out of here because they don't understand let me for you know what they sell of course the institution sell first drops it these guys don't know what the hell they're doing they sell second third fourth fifth one millionth and before you know what the whole thing goes down 40 50 60 percent 70 percent and then of course the news rags pick it up CNBC MSNBC like see who told you it was a bubble then you got Rubini out there and Peter whatever that guy's name is that gold bug guy I will never say his name they're going to be out there going yep yeah told you told you he's just so stupid you should have listened to me you should have bought you know tomatoes or whatever and then before you know it for another bear cycle so I know when people say this is different it's not different that's just how it is all right so that was my rant for a little bit so first of all if you made all the way and I want to say thanks for sticking with me if you like that video and you found some value give it a thumbs up I really appreciate it also consider subscribing a lot of things we talk about our time sensitive and that is it also I'll put two more videos up left to right one of our top stories that'll come up and that is all so thanks for watching I appreciate it see you in the next one