basfo

AWS is built for production. It’s complex because it’s designed to create robust environments that can scale almost infinitely, that’s why half of the internet runs on AWS. But to make the most of it, you need to understand how it works and why it’s built that way. That’s why being an “AWS expert” is practically a job description on its own, thats why cloud engineering teams exists, platforms, SRE, etc.

For quick and dirty app deployments, though, other vendors like Heroku probably do a better job.

And it was HUGE, the microsoft logo was like 50% of the screen.

We’re 100% on Azure but so far there’s no impact for us.

Luckily, we moved off Azure Front Door about a year ago. We’d had three major incidents tied to Front Door and stopped treating it as a reliable CDN.

They weren’t global outages, more like issues triggered by new deployments. In one case, our homepage suddenly showed a huge Microsoft banner about a “post-quantum encryption algorithm” or something along those lines.

Kinda wild that a company that big can be so shaky on a CDN, which should be rock solid.

I was drinking too much and i started to feel like maybe i had to drop it. But yeah, not quitting again.

Quitting coffee was a really bad experience for me.

I had what felt like withdrawal symptoms: a strong headache, muscle aches, and I was really cold. It lasted for two days, until I took a minuscule sip and everything went away within five minutes.

That made me realize the extent to which I was actually addicted, and how dependent my body was on it.

I managed to quit and stayed caffeine-free for about a year.

But one day I said, “Just one cup won’t hurt,” and oh boy... it was like having superpowers. I was so focused, so wide awake. Of course, I’m an addict again. :(

Some people reading this (systems engineers with a career) could probably retire, or at least downshift. Work just enough to pay for groceries, and spend your days doing what you actually want.

Today we can access, easily and cheaply (often free), almost every song ever recorded, every book ever written, every movie ever filmed, every video game ever made. You can write and reach thousands. You can film and reach millions. Twenty years ago, that was a millionaire’s life.

It’s the need for more and more and more that alienates us. Do you really need that shiny new car? Do you really need to take a vacation? Do you really need that promotion?

For some, work (and the status that comes with it) became their identity. Take it away and there’s nothing left. Others keep constant noise and stress around just to avoid hearing themselves think.

What if you chose a peaceful life?

Sad news. I played a lot of Dead or Alive 2 on the Dreamcast.

He was always on the cutting edge of boobs physic engines.

Great find! and I don’t want to underestimate the discovery by any means, but...

We humans are predisposed to see anthropomorphic shapes in things. I understand why that could be interpreted as a face, but at the same time, it could just be a random shape. It’s just a “T” shape. Sure, it could look like a nose and a pair of eyes, but it could also just be... something.

My first introduction to Linux was through Knoppix, the first “live CD” if I recall correctly. Maybe there was something before it, but I remember it as something new and magical at the time: being able to test a full Linux desktop directly from a CD.

From there, as I was learning Linux (I was 16 years old), I used KDE a lot. It was such a cool experience. I especially loved how easy it was to create custom themes, the desktop widgets, and Amarok! the big “killer app” back then. A music player that could show you song lyrics, album art, and even the band’s history by pulling data from Wikipedia and other APIs. It felt futuristic.

Later on, I switched to GNOME as it became more popular in the mid 2000s, but I’ve always had a soft spot for KDE. It’s been part of my Linux journey for nearly three decades.

Happy birthday, KDE!

I’ve been thinking about the impact of LLMs on software engineering through a Marxist lens. Marx described one of capitalism’s recurring problems as the crisis of overproduction: the economy becomes capable of producing far more goods than the market can absorb profitably. This contradiction (between productive capacity and limited demand) leads to bankruptcies, layoffs, and recessions until value and capital are destroyed, paving the way for the next cycle.

Something similar might be happening in software. LLMs allow us to produce more software, faster and cheaper, than companies can realistically absorb. In the short term this looks amazing: there’s always some backlog of features and technical debt to address, so everyone’s happy.

But a year or two from now, we may reach saturation. Businesses won’t be able to use or even need all the software we’re capable of producing. At that point, wages may fall, unemployment among engineers may grow, and some companies could collapse.

In other words, the bottleneck in software production is shifting from labor capacity to market absorption. And that could trigger something very much like an overproduction crisis. Only this time, not for physical goods, but for code.

In my experience, LLM-generated code is only as good (or as bad) as the software engineering skills of the “vibe coder.” A seasoned engineer will not only craft clear, detailed prompts that specify how something should be implemented, but will also review the AI’s output on the fly, correcting major derailments—things like: “Don’t create a new function for that; just modify X to add support for this case.” They’ll even do an initial review of the code before opening a PR.

The real problem arises when non-technical people use an LLM to generate a full project from scratch. The code may work, but it’s often unmaintainable. These people sometimes believe they’re geniuses and view software engineers as blockers, dismissing their concerns as mere technical “mumbo jumbo.”

It’s strange that you can patent gameplay mechanics. After all, gameplay mechanics are what define a genre.

It’s like in literature if someone could patent the idea of a detective investigating a murder.

How could the "pokemon-like" genre even exist if you couldn’t create a game that uses “summoning and battling characters”?

Even worse, that description alone applies to multiple genres... JRPGs, or even fighting games with multiple characters (something like Marvel vs. Capcom) could fit that description.

I can understand intellectual property rights for very specific technical implementations (for example, the raycasting technique used in Wolfenstein 3D) but you shouldn’t be able to patent the concept of the first person shooter itself. That feels more like restricting freedom of expression.

Oh the memories, i worked like... 20 years ago! on EDS for the Sun Microsystems account as a Solaris System Administrator.

It's hard to explain how advanced was Solaris at the time, specially Solaris 10 which had something named "Zones" which were actually some initial form of containers. With Zones you could run another instance of the OS completely isolated from the main Solaris (the kernel was shared, but for your apps would look like a native OS). You could even run another Solaris version! that was a cool approach to migrate a really old solaris 8 app to solaris 10 without having to change the app code.

Zones, combined with Sun Cluster or Veritas cluster would give you the ability to migrate those zones from one node of the cluster to the other (with it's own lun -external scsi disk/volume attached-) giving you some reaaaaaly interesting and new approaches to system design.

You can think about it as your dad's kubernetes.

Nothing like that could be done in linux at the time, and no one would use linux for any critical task, only for lamp servers.

Time has passed.

Agree completely, the title is misleading. I was amazed by it by just watching the video, but this is actually a fan project. Which is cool, but not a prototype of the original game as the title implies, or something that should be "recovered".

yeah, i suppose we bought "a license to use the car", like a really expensive entry fee. If the car was free and i was just renting it then maybe it makes sense, but capping something you bought is crazy and asking recurring money to unlock it is crazy.

The idea of a service is that you pay a monthly fee and can use it during that period. It implies that the vendor has some kind of ongoing or recurring cost, or that they need to continuously provide or produce the service in some way. For example, in software they need to keep the servers running, push updates, and so on. If the service is related to goods, they deliver you a set of products that you’ve subscribed to on a recurring basis.

This new approach, however, often means you need to pay to use something that has already been produced, with its functionality fully available, but locked unless you subscribe. In that case, they are not really providing a service, they’re just holding a feature hostage until you pay. That isn’t a service; it’s basically extortion. If the car were free, I could understand having to pay to unlock it. But needing a subscription just to use my own car at full capacity? That’s dystopian.

I can totally see a TV that refuses to turn on until you’ve paid Samsung, a fridge that stays locked until you cough up more money, or a toilet that only lets you flush twice a day.Unless, of course, you upgrade to premium.

This bug report is absolutely right

Don't worry, just press and hold the power button on the satellites until they turn off, then release and press it again to power them back on. Should be fine.

i know a friend that... (imagine adult joke here)

This will happen in production at a large company in the near future.

I keep seeing more and more vibe coded AI implementations that do whatever... by anyone. And managers celebrate that the new junior engineer created something that "saves a lot of time!" (two full time positions in their heads)

I agree it can be useful for some tasks, but the non deterministic nature of AI will inevitably impact production once someone plugs an AI tool into a critical part of the system, thinking they’re a genius.

The example in the article:

// TODO: If the user triple-clicks this button, the click handler errors because [xyz]

looks more like a comment than a real TODO to me. I agree that comments like those are useful, but shouldn't be a TODO.

A TODO implies a specific type of comment. One that implies a task, points to something that should actually be done (like TODO: This function should return another value with XYZ). And I agree that the proper place for that is a tracker, not buried in the code.

In the example just documents a bug. , there is no actual action.

In my experience, TODOs are often a way to get quick and dirty code approved in a PR. They usually never get done, they're just a way to push the responsibility onto some future developer who "will have more time" (which means it will likely never happen).

It was so hyped by Sun Microsystems that they even called their implementation of GNOME on Solaris the "Java Desktop System", even though there wasn't a single line of Java in it.

Well, but they are controlling that, the fact that they fail to check it shouldn't be on you.

But besides that, if they consider that aliexpress is selling illegal stuff, they can easily block access to ali express in the country, decline all credit card transactions to ali express, block in customs any package coming from ali express... since is basically a criminal organization. I mean, they are selling the product in amazon.it and you put in jail a reviewer?

https://www.amazon.it/portatile-illuminazione-Joystick-integ...

I don't think putting in jail a customer that is just reviewing what he bought is the way to go.

To me, it's kind of strange that buying and showing something that is sold legally (like a console purchased from China, which I assume went through customs, or even sold on Amazon in some cases) can make someone a criminal. I believe this should be protected under freedom of speech: he's legally buying a product and demonstrating what it does. Maybe posting a referral link and profiting from it could be considered questionable, but come on... If you want to stop piracy, start by blocking these devices at customs and investigating the businesses that import and sell them to the public. Never put someone in jail for what is, after all, a form of journalism.

A few days ago there was a similar message from Xbox, saying that AMD will power it's future hardware project, talking about a strategic alliance and so on.

So, Mark Cerny is contributing on the next Xbox? At the end, today all consoles are basically PCs with different frontends and storefronts (and that is also opening up, starting with xbox but probably PS will follow eventually)

It always makes me laugh this millionaire rhetoric about “THE MISSION.” I once had a CEO who suddenly wanted us to be on call 24/7, every other week. His argument? Commitment. The importance of "the mission". Becoming a market leader, and so on.

As AlbertaTech says, “we make sparkling water.” I mean, what’s the mission? A can of sparkling water on every table? Spreading the joy of carbonated water to the world? No. You sell sparkling water because you want to make a profit. That kind of speech is just a way to hide the fact that you're trying to cut three full-time positions and make your employees work off-hours to increase margins. Or, like in this case, pay them less than the competition with the same objective.

Sam Altman might actually have a mission, turning us all into robot slaves, but that’s a whole different conversation.

worked at HP at the time. It was one of the most important companies in the world—comparable to what Microsoft or Google are today. A true tech and market leader.

First, HP bought Compaq to gain full ownership of the home computer market. That merger didn’t work out very well. Later, HP acquired Ross Perot’s EDS, attempting to enter the services business. The integration was, at best, chaotic and took several years.

It was a time of turmoil—every other morning you’d receive an email from Mark Hurd announcing layoffs affecting a percentage of employees.

Hurd’s focus was on increasing the company’s share value. He aggressively cut staff and reduced R&D investment (one of HP’s strongest traditions), essentially putting HP on life support. For example, HP-UX, which was relevant in the server market at the time, was completely abandoned.

When Mark Hurd was fired—accused of using company funds to give gifts to occasional partners (you know what I mean)—he immediately joined Oracle as an advisor, one of HP’s strongest competitors in the enterprise market at the time. Employees saw him as a traitor to the HP brand. Internally, many people hoped things would finally change.

What came next was completely unexpected. Leo Apotheker, from SAP, took over. He had this idea of transforming HP into a software and services company, essentially abandoning decades of tradition and letting one of the strongest brands in the industry fade away. He lasted only a few months—it clearly wasn’t working.

Then Meg Whitman came in. There was some initial hype around a hardware project called “The Machine,” which was supposed to revolutionize the data center by relying on memory instead of CPU power. That was never released. AWS had already emerged, and HP had no way to compete.

Whitman decided to split the company in two: HP (consumer hardware) and HP Enterprise Services (enterprise hardware and services). HP-ES eventually migrated most of its operations to India. Around that time, I accepted a WFR (Workforce Reduction) plan—since it was clear I’d be laid off sooner or later. Later, HP-ES was split again and became DXC Technology for services.

It’s incredible how a company that was once one of the strongest brands in the world—a tech giant and market leader for decades—went to hell in just three or four years. Bad management, a focus on short-term share price, and a complete lack of vision can bring even the most powerful company to its knees.

At the time, many said HP was simply too big for its own good, that it was impossible to succeed in so many markets. I don’t think that’s true. Amazon, Microsoft, Google—they all do what HP did in the 90s and 2000s, and more. It was just bad management. As always.

Using Azure here, no issues reported so far.

Specially since Model 2 was a complete revolution years ahead of anything existing on the gaming namespace (or almost anywhere really). Daytona USA was made in 1993 and still looks kind of acceptable in 2025. At the time was a complete revolution, nothing compared to it.

I agree that Military Companies are nasty thingys, but there is nothing INFAMOUS about SEGA model 2.

If a firm needs to perform project X that previously cost 10 engineers to do, but they only have the budget for 2, they will not tackle that project. Engineers used = 0.

0 on that Project, but those 2 engineers will still be used on a different Project that needs just 2 Engineers.

BUT a company that sees that project as a critical part of the bussines and MUST tackle that project, will only need the 2 engineers in the payroll. Or hire just 2 instead of 10.

Engineers not hired = 8

Or.. maybe they don't really need that project that needs 10 engineers. They are ok as they are today, but they realize that with AI, they don't need those 2 engineers anymore to produce the same output, probably can be handled by just one with AI assistance.

Engineers fired = 1