lykr0n

cannot understand why any sane person would

because it's not the specific action. it's the reason behind the action.

Stop pretending normal people care about this

Stop pretending you're a normal person and it's everyone else who is wrong

factual things Grok model does wrong

It convinced u/highmastdon to go out and be an elon musk dick rider. It also convinced them that "hid[ing] behind morality" is somehow a bad thing, which shows everyone the quality of person they are.

employment opportunities

the 5-7 people they employ during normal operation. High skilled engineers get flown in for setup and major changes/operations.

They add little local economic value.

It's because they're optimizing for a different problem.

Western Models are optimizing to be used as an interchangeable product. Chinese models are being optimizing to be built upon.

AI Data-centers and AI Hardware at cost or cost plus. OpenAI's deal with Oracle is more or less at cost...

OCI's infrastructure design is just good enough to work well enough most of the time, and you can't get cheaper.

Location: Seattle, WA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Oracle Cloud IaaS. CPU & GPU Shapes. BM & VM.

Resume: Upon Request

Email: hn@lykron.mm.st

Seeking: Part time work or an offer I can't refuse.

Are you stuck using Oracle Cloud? Does working with their support team make you die inside? Do you need help on IPv6, OS Image Creation, Oracle Cloud Agent, vNIC management, OKE, or why things suck the way they do and how to work around them? Bump my line.

I've learned more about how to use Oracle Cloud than I would ever like to know and I've also found and gotten fix a few major platform defects.

killer way to market a product.

Here's a blog post with interesting information that just so happens to advertise how you can use our product

The amount of hidden engineering in Analog systems is mind blowing. Imagine how many hours were spent in a lab figuring out the exact right timings, chemical mixtures, and circuit design needed to make modern Cinema exist as we know it.

It's a shame that they can't transition it to a read-only archive type site, where everything is still accessible and playable- jut no new updates or content.

Man. I would buy this in a heartbeat if it was on linux.

Good luck! It looks like an amazing product.

Not really. Nomad is closer, and Mesos (the old one) is closer still.

I wrote my own as a rust library, and I'm in the progress of further breaking it apart. Might get a prototype finished this weekend and if so, I'll share it here.

Same & Agreed. Be aware of what you're doing, and make sure you can realistically be sober 10 out of every 14 days. Dependence/Addiction needs to be avoided at all costs.

I think the part of the discussion that is ignored here is the security aspect.

Apple has hardened their hardware against attackers replacing components of the phone with compromised versions. Sure, at the same time it prevents 3rd party repairs, but I don't think Apple's only motivation for doing this was to screw over 3rd party repair shops.

When the NSA leaks came out, there was some sections that showed how shipments of electronics could be intercepted and backdoored. I would 100% believe there are groups out there that have or are working on chip level attacks for iPhones and other mobile products. Swap Apple's Face unlock chip with a custom one that includes other embedded profiles that can unlock the phone without the owner's knowledge does not seem far fetched.

A lot of the changes to the MacBooks seem to also have been done with device hardening in mind.

I cannot tell you how much damage my iPhone 12 Pro has taken without the screen cracking, which makes me personally think the reasons these changes have been made are not just related to 3rd party repairs.

I'm splitting my time between a Pre-Series A startup, a Series E startup that's my fulltime gig, and developing my own cloud platform similar to AWS in Rust.

The cloud platform is fun. Learning the different components and just giving myself the freedom to do things in the best way I can figure out- writing my own RPC Framework, Scheduler, VM Management Tooling, etc... The end objective is to build a "not for profit" cloud platform for personal and small projects. So you can build awesome cloud-native applications for communities and other areas that are not profit driven.

Also might start trying to build a custom digital rifle scope for my AR-10. Something that can do range finding and basic sight adjustments based on distance and wind. That'd be cool...

Previous Job had an in-house RPC system and there was a desire to move to gRPC.

This process largely turned into "name and shame" because there was no incentive for some teams to put in the effort to make the changes. They had other objectives to complete, and swapping RPC frameworks was not one of them. The only way the change happened was putting a hard deadline before the old system was shutdown (by SRE), which is not the right way to do it.

There were a lot of stories like this. One team owned user information, but the business needs shifted this ownership to another team. This resulted in the ownership being split between three teams, and applications turning into transparent proxies for other applications. One service was a REST interface that provided a bit of logic on top of forwarding the request to a gRPC service.

The make up of the company was a bunch of loosely coupled product teams, and the only common connection was SRE and Data who worked with everyone. SRE became the team that had to work to resolve these "what the fuck, why can't you just sit down and figure out who should own this" issues. There really needed to be an architect or someone who could look at the big picture that could say "Why do we have this one internal REST service? Ok. Team A and B. You have this quarter to stop using Service Q and migrate to Service W."

$NewCompany, SRE is doing the course correcting (just due to small size), but we have a Principal Developer who is dictating that "Yes, we're going to implement new business logic in lambdas following this pattern." And they work to make sure that everything is done in a standard way, but at the same time take ideas for new patterns and make sure they are done in a smart way and don't conflict with anything else. He doesn't stand as a roadblock, but someone who can make sure teams are not going off and doing weird things (like use MySQL when we're a Postgres shop) that can cause issues later.

I'm not saying that they should not be active developers, but people who can enforce change across the entire organization.

Previous Job (2500+ devs by the time I left) had an in-house RPc system that was being moved over to gRPC. That project was taking years because teams had no coordination on this process. The decision was made at some level and trickled out to everyone else. There was no single person or group who was in charge of:

- How services would be discovered - Implementation Patterns of how Services & Methods will be defined - Standardization of which libraries to use - Examples and Pre-build shared libraries that provide the stuff like tracing, monitoring, retries, etc... - Advocating for the changes

SRE seems to fall into the position of advocating business value for development practices that compete with business objectives that can provide value as well. At large organizations, if you don't have a central point that can set development objectives and be the one who teams can go to with "this pattern doesn't work for us, we can do this but we need buy in from other teams" issues and have directives handed down.

Unless you operate in an environment where the only cross-team communication is well versioned public APIs, then you will run into issues where you have to conflicting needs between teams and need someone to set a vision (this can be a group of people, rotating people, or a single person. how is not the issue)

Yep. SRE is not a substitute for high level, overarching architects and designers.

One pattern I see is that, as the company grows the development gets split into different product groups which will organically diverge unless there is rigid enforcement of design patterns. In some places, SRE does this implicitly because they will only support X, Y, or Z but in others each product group will have their own group of SREs.

There becomes a point when you need one or a small group of people who are the opinionated developers who can make design decisions and who have the authority to cause everyone else to course correct. If you don't have this, you'll wind up with long migrations and legacy stuff that never seems to go away.

A very solid article giving a very good technical answer to the question of which should you pick.

PHP & Perl come to mind. You write your program, scp it and it's dependencies to your www/cgi-bin folder on your server, and then navigate to the URL.

You give CloudFormation a list of instructions. It accepts it and gives you an ID to watch for updates, then it goes off and executes them.

Terraform executes a list of instructions. It executes them in front of you while you wait.

Both are fine until you run into something like this:

I'm pushing a Elastic Container Service Task Definition change via CDK. A CloudFormation change is submitted, and I wait for it to finish. In the background, it's trying to do the update but the update fails due to some misconfiguration with the new container.

CloudFormation doesn't fail or return an error. It times out after an hour and reverts the change. I have to know to dig into the AWS console to find my failed tasks to view the error.

If I did this update via Terraform, I would get the error back in my console quickly as Terraform is directly telling ECS to make the change. With CDK, the CloudFormation changeset is generated, it is submitted to CloudFormation, then the tool polls the AWS API for progress updates. Sometimes you get specific messages back, sometimes it fails and you need to go in and see what it failed on.

Begun. The way for us to actively make changes is to do donation projects today. The speed of government is not an advantage here.

I do:

1. Run a small solar array on my balcony, with recycled lithium batteries for storage. I've made ~100kW of power which I use to basically charge all my devices.

2. Growing Algae two do two things- producing biomass to convert into bio-fuel down the road, and remove carbon from the air.

Rooftop solar & going electric (and destroying your gas car so you're taking it off the road) is the easiest to do, followed by helping others do the same. Off the top of my head, if you own your house see if you can work out a group deal with your neighbors and subsidize their cost. https://ecologi.com and https://www.arcadia.com can give you a feeling of doing something (while actually doing something, even if it's very small.

None of these things really move the needle. If you want to do something, the cold reality of it is some constructive destructive actions need to be taken against the largest polluters- energy companies, major food conglomerates that consume large amounts of plastic, commercial shipping, and others. Pick your poison.

Yoooo. So here's an actual, legit idea I have. A community platform to raise money to donate roof-top solar systems to public schools. Has to be focused, where it's clear the goal and the target area. "We're raising $1,000,000 to fund a solar system in this region. Here are our candidates and our local contract partner." Once that's accomplished, you find a school and get the green light. You work with the contractor to secure an actual cost, and then fundraise for the rest. Then it's installed. Target schools and districts in areas of high coal/dirty power and fund-raise for a full roof-top system for them with some energy storage.

This does two things- allows the schools to spend money elsewhere which helps improve the quality of life in the are (and I'm sure it will be known where the money comes from, but also removes a fairly large consumer of municipal energy.

I wish IBM had a massively lower barrier to entry.

They have a lot of amazing products and tech, but the only way you can use it is to buy a license. When I want to make a simple application, I'm not going to even consider paying for unknown software. But if I can get a version that gives me very good insight into how it works, and a license that would allow me to use the product for a good amount before paying- I'd be much more inclined to adopt it.

POWER CPUs are great, but they're quite hard to get for a developer like myself. I'm sure you could make some cool software on POWER9 or one of these, but they're impossible to get your hands on to play around with.

Yes.

If I need to learn a specific product/tech, I build something with it. If I need to learn a library we're going to adopt, I'll take one of the ideas I have floating around implement using the specific product.

Not using any specific documentation, just try and execute an idea and figure it out.

What a sad state of the web, when websites are so resource intensive that a service can exist that you can offload the computation onto.

Hell. Fine with me.

Flatpak, with all of it's issues, gives me something I did not have before- cross distro packages that work. Maintainers have to do one build for their application and can ship it, and then it works on Fedora, Ubuntu-types, Arch, and others. Ta-da!

Sure, doing package management yourself isn't that hard- but the barriers for the users are higher and it's not as easy to use. You could also get your package into vendor's repositories, but now you have to triage issues from a bunch of distros that might have other issues. It gets messy, vs the solution Flatpak offers.

I believe it.

I got a reMarkable 2 tablet, and holy wow is that thing amazing. Amazing writing experience, solid OS, and fully modifiable. You can just SSH into it and away you go.

I also got an Onyx E-Ink tablet with Color screen of Aliexpress. The device was underwhelming due to poor software and perfectly smooth screen, but the e-ink screen was legit. If this device is able to combine the flawless execution of the reMarkable 2 with an e-ink screen, that would be something to see.

EDIT. The reMarkable 2 has one problem- it needs a backlight.

Ooh. New project for today. Deploy this locally and figure out how to make this a public service where people can run their devices and the data is uploaded to a central database in real-ish time so people can see suspect changes.

EDIT: This should have a 2017 tag, as the code is 4 years old and I assume the same is true for the website.

There are a fair number of "app first" banks like simple was out there. But the problem is that you might not be able to keep using them in a few years...

Varo, MoneyLion, Empower, Chime, and others that can be found by browsing around on the app store are good. MX powered Credit Unions (like BECU) also are really good.

Marcus Inights is also a good app to use, but it's not super advanced.

Hacked in the "I figured out how to modify the device" since and not the "You can exploit it to track someone" way.