This is a special kind of rant, so I’m starting a new tag in addition to it. It’ll be updated next year, I’m sure.

The state of yak shaving in today’s computing world is insane.

Here we go.

It’s 2024, and…

• …and I can’t get CloudWatch agent to work to get memory monitoring (also, why is this extra step needed, why can’t memory monitoring be part of default metrics? Nobody cares about memory?) Screwing around with IAM roles and access keys keeps giving me:
  
  ****** processing amazon-cloudwatch-agent ******
2024/04/05 20:51:36 E! Please make sure the credentials and region set correctly on your hosts.

  At which point I give up and just do this:
  
  #!/bin/bash                                                              

inst_id=$(ec2metadata --instance-id)                                                    
while :
do
used_megs=$(free --mega | awk 'NR!=1 {print $3}' | head -1)
aws cloudwatch put-metric-data \
    --namespace gg \
--metric-name mem4 \
--dimensions InstanceId=${inst_id} \
--unit "Megabytes" \
--value $used_megs
sleep 60
done
  
  Finally it works. Add it to my custom dashboard. Nice.
  
  Wait, what’s that? Saving metrics to my custom dashboard from the EC2 instance overrides what I just added. I have to manually edit the JSON source for the dashboard.
  
  It’s 2024.
  
• …and we have what even our apparently an HTTP standard for determining a user’s time zone but per our overlords, but yet no… We are reduced to a ridiculous set of workarounds and explanations for this total fucking bullshit like “ask the user” — yet we do have the Accept-Language header and we’ve had it since RFC 1945 (that’s since 1996, that is for more time than the people claiming this is an answer have been sentient.
  
  It’s 2024.
  
• ..and we have a shit-ton of Javascript frameworks, and yet some very popular ones couldn’t give a shit about a basic thing like environment variables (yeah, yeah, I know how that particular sausage is made — screw your sausage, you put wood shavings in it anyway).
  
  
  
• …and because I’m starting this rant rubric, we still are on the tabs-vs-spaces (perkeleen vittupä!) and CR-vs-LF-vs-CRLF. WTF, people. This is why I am not getting anything smart, be it a car, a refrigerator, or whatever. I know that sausage. It’s reverse Polish sausage.
  
  It’s 2024.