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GauntletWizard

3,939 karma · joined April 20, 2010

Site Reliability Engineer

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/gauntletwizard; my proof: https://keybase.io/gauntletwizard/sigs/WLBbW433_lqvZr3EFcUj8sCaut00PcbdQ5dKfxC0TV4 ]

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GauntletWizard··on PG Auto Upgrade – Docker (and K8s) container to auto upgrade your database
Yes, but that's workloads || operator, not workloads && operator - you don't need four nines for your control plane just to keep your workloads alive. Your control plane can be significantly less reliable than your workloads, and the workloads will keep serving fine.

In real practice, it's so cheap to keep your operator running redundantly, that it's probably going to have more nines than your workloads, but it doesn't need to be

GauntletWizard··on PG Auto Upgrade – Docker (and K8s) container to auto upgrade your database
This is a persistent myth that is just flat out wrong. Your k8s cluster orchestrator does not need to be online very often at all. The kube proxies will gladly continue proxying traffic as last they best know. Your containers will still continue to run. Hiccups, or outright outages, in the kubi API server do not cause downtime, unless you are using certain terrible, awful, no good, very bad proxies within the cluster (istio, linkerd).
GauntletWizard··on The decline of high-tech manufacturing in the United States
The problem is that the two are equivocated regularly for political points. We want both - highly automated factories for productive output, and middle class jobs. Building the factories will bring some middle class jobs - not a lot, but there's a decent number of maintenance and operating staff even at lights out factories, and the expertise building those factories is a bunch of valuable jobs and experience that we've let China hoover up.

The problem is that these two concepts are treated as one.

GauntletWizard··on Model intelligence is no longer the constraint for automation
You would think, but you've never seen drama like single-speedrunner games. They know they're unfulfilled and kings of a molehill, and as soon as there's the slightest competition - a single other "run" from someone who bothers with a little practice - there's a blowup. Super-niche-ing is not the solution you think it is.
GauntletWizard··on Model intelligence is no longer the constraint for automation
We can automate plenty in physiological needs, and in fact have already. There's plenty of food and housing for everyone to have them, but a bunch of people will immediately destroy them if provided with such. I don't think "Dispose of a full house every 3 months" will ever be practical, but we might be able to "solve" physiological needs.

Safety needs might be possible to solve. Totalitarian states with ubiquitous panopticons can leave you "safe" in a crime sense, and AI gaslighting and happy pills will make you "feel" safe.

Love and belonging we have "Plenty" of already - If you're looking for your people, you can find them. Plenty aren't willing to look.

But once you get up to Esteem, it all falls apart. Reputation and Respect are not scalable. There will always be a limited quantity of being "The Best" at anything, and many are not willing to be "The Best" within tight constraints; There's always competition. You can plausibly say that this category is inherently competitive. There's no respect without disrespect. There's no best if there's no second best, and second best is first loser. So long as humans interact with each other - So long as we're not each locked in our own private shards of reality - There will be competition, and there will be those that fall short.

Self Actualization is almost irrelevant at this point. It falls into exactly the same as the above. You can simulate a reality where someone is always the best at whatever they decide to so, but I think it will inherently feel hollow. Agent Smith said it best: https://youtu.be/9Qs3GlNZMhY?t=23

GauntletWizard··on Meta backtracks on rules letting chatbots be creepy to kids
Don't expect they'll follow these new guidelines they're promising. The previous rules were an accurate reflection of the business and "Trust and Safety" culture at Meta.
GauntletWizard··on Meta's flirty AI chatbot invited a retiree to New York
There's no teeth. They're making money hand over fist on ads, and there's nothing and nobody who wants to stop them in the government, because they're incredibly useful as a social monitoring and control tool.
GauntletWizard··on Meta's flirty AI chatbot invited a retiree to New York
Average, "perfectly normal" San Franciscans. This kind of belief is incredibly common there, we've just not been forced to confront it until now.
GauntletWizard··on Fuse is 95% cheaper and 10x faster than NFS
Anyone who knows filesystems would have said "No Duh". Caching on NVME will always be significantly faster than remote, simply because of network latency hops - Even at microseconds per! There's really not a huge difference between modern PCI-E Architecture and modern networking - but the length of the cables matters a lot at these latencies.

All that said - There's still a ton of room for NFS to be the backing store, but more importantly there's room for distributed filesystems with intelligent caching to displace all of this.

GauntletWizard··on A brief history of the absurdities of the Soviet Union
The theory is a perfectly spherical cow - impossible in practice, laughable in imagination. We have a firm understanding from historical data of how it fails, even if it doesn't match the imagination of its proponents.
GauntletWizard··on How to Not Build the Torment Nexus
I took the same professional ethics course as you in school (Hi from another RIT anime nerd), and I found that even by mid 2000s, most people coming into the program openly mocked the lessons of Therac-25 and the Hyatt Regency Walkway Collapse as heavyhanded, but a disturbing few viewed these as lessons in how you could cut corners and avoid getting charged.

Google used to have ethicists ethicists and a culture of don't be evil. They were fired by the AI ethicists, who for the most part were among that latter group - Rationalists who were supremely good at rationalizing their choices rather than making good ones.

I don't think that any of the current efforts at regulation are going to work. The latter culture has taken over the institutions, and that's why you see so many baying for the institutions to be taken down.

GauntletWizard··on My ancestors fought in WWII. Hiroshima is plagued by shallow reading
https://archive.ph/8DTod
GauntletWizard··on Encryption made for police and military radios may be easily cracked
It's still illegal to point out that the emperor has no clothes
GauntletWizard··on AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was
Amen.
GauntletWizard··on Uber's Festering Sexual Assault Problem
I don't want that either. I do want them to hand over driver information to the police when they have a case number and the customer's request. That is what the deliberately created a process to stall. That should not require a warrant - in fact, the process of getting a warrant should require the identity of whom they're looking for, provided by Uber as a mediating third party to prevent fishing expeditions. But they've proven to be an untrustworthy partner in this matter.
GauntletWizard··on Uber's Festering Sexual Assault Problem
Uber actively works against police trying to investigate these incidents, in ways that are almost actively malicious. They require warrants - not simply police inquiries, nor customer consent, but warrants issued by a judge, to turn over any data, even the identity of the driver. They purposely delete this data on an accelerated basis so that they can say "We don't know" - doing dirty tricks like making receipts that don't include enough information to identify drivers (and intentionally obfuscate). They have ordered and made it both official and unofficial policy for their agents to stall police inquiries until they hit those data deletion dates.

At some level, they are attempting to avoid bad press, but their methods go far beyond "Washing our hands of it, not my problem" and into "Trying to obfuscate and cover up crimes so that we can't be tied to them".

Source: Worked at Uber for about six months and quit in disgust.

None of this is to exonerate the NYT for their biased reporting, because the crime rates in conventional taxes are almost as bad, and closure rates are worse. It's an ugly industry that Uber could have cleaned up but decided the pragmatic approach was to spin doctor.

GauntletWizard··on Eaton fire could have been prevented, utils fought removal of old power lines
The utilities know that as soon as they give up these lines, they will never get that right of way back, and both need the backup capacity and have been administratively prevented from bringing them up to modern standards by the requirements for new environmental review.
GauntletWizard··on The internet wants to check your ID
This is an insane take in a world where you cannot access basic public services, pay bills, or really do business at all without an internet connection. Connecting your house to a public road is not an invitation for biker gangs to throw drug parties in your backyard, and connecting to the internet is not a free-for-all either.
GauntletWizard··on 2,500-year-old Siberian 'ice mummy' had intricate tattoos, imaging reveals
I was taught in school that Perspective was invented in the Renaissance, and before that all art was flat. This is obviously not true to anyone who's studied greecian art beyond a pop-culture level, but that's the level most people have.

It does seem to have waxed and waned; going in and out of popularity to the point of being a lost art multiple times. Wikipedia doesn't go so far as to divide it into eras, but given the time gaps, it's possible that there were multiple "inventions" of perspective in the sense of formalized techniques and pedagogy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_(graphical)

GauntletWizard··on Micron rolls out 276-layer SSD trio for speed, scale, and stability
It's plenty fast enough for my N+2 ZFS Raid, but I'll admit that that time is still measured in days.
GauntletWizard··on The Disappearance of Saturday Morning (2003)
I am really hoping that the "Coyote v. Acme" movie set to release next year, as well as "The Day The Earth Blew Up" from last year, revive interest in The Looney Tunes. They are iconic Americana, omnipresent for nearly a century, but mismanaged for the last 10-15 years. What could have been with Space Jam 2...
GauntletWizard··on Hiding secret codes in light protects against fake videos
Yes, I think that the state of modern video generation has made an uncomfortable truth more clear - All Evidence is hearsay, only as trustworthy as the people you're getting it from. For a brief shining moment video evidence was easy to produce but hard to forge, but that's not been the case for most of history. That's why the law has so much detail about evaluating the trustworthiness of witnesses.
GauntletWizard··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (August 2025)
SEEKING WORK | US | Remote OK

I am a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Google Style, with experience at both large and small organizations. I can help you build a Platform Engineering practice from the very beginning. I'm looking to help small dev teams increase their velocity by implementing best-practices of Devops: CI/CD, Kubernetes Deployments, and effective Monitoring frameworks.

My resume: https://resume.gauntletwizard.net/ThomasHahnResume.pdf

My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-hahn-3344ba3/

My Github: https://github.com/GauntletWizard

GauntletWizard··on Fast and cheap bulk storage: using LVM to cache HDDs on SSDs
The same for ZFS; there's provisioning to make a "zil" device - ZFS Intent Log, basically the journal. ZFS is a little nicer in that this journal is explicitly disposable - If you lose your ZIL device, you lose any writes since it's horizon, but you don't lose the whole array.

The next step up is building a "metadata" device, which stores the filesystem metadata but not data. This is dangerous in the way the ext4 journal is; lose the metadata, and you lose everything.

Both are massive speedups. When doing big writes, a bunch of spinning rust can't achieve full throughput without a SSD ZIL. My 8+2 array can write nearly two gigabits, but it's abysmal (roughly the speed of a single drive) without a ZIL.

Likewise, a metadata device can make the whole filesystem feel as snappy as SSD, but it's unnecessary if you have enough cache space; ZFS prefers it, so if your metadata fits into your cache SSD, most of it will stay loaded

GauntletWizard··on American sentenced for helping North Koreans get jobs at U.S. firms
It doesn't work, so it must not be communism.
GauntletWizard··on Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail
I often also actually get other people's mail. Not every day, not even every month, but a couple times a year.

I don't consider this a vulnerability, per se. This is the the usual level of uncertainty when dealing with physical objects.

GauntletWizard··on How YouTube won the battle for TV viewers
I ditched Chromecast recently. They made YouTube too heavyweight for the Chromecast Ultra, to the point it regularly crashed. The new "Chromecast With Android TV" is barely more specs and has broken the interface by being... Android TV. Rather than take a well deserved second place, they chased Apple's design and ruined their niche.

Worse still, the best replacement I could find... Was Apple TV. So now I'm on that ecosystem.

GauntletWizard··on Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
I only read Shakespeare in the original Klingon
GauntletWizard··on New study offers clues about what makes someone cool
This makes a ton of evolutionary sense. Success begets success. Those that don't need outside help are successful; those that cooperate and build on it are more successful. Unfortunately, it also leads to local maxima- those that are good at gathering from neighbors and happen to have good neighbors reach highest success, regardless of their own intrinsic ability.

Neither "Attempt to split success equally so everyone gets the same results" nor "Give all the resources to those that have the most" are good ways to run a society, or good long term evolutionary strategies.

GauntletWizard··on In a Milestone for Manhattan, a Pair of Coyotes Has Made Central Park Their Home
Dingoes are a good percentage smaller than Coyotes on average and maximum (Dingoes 22 – 33 lbs, Coyotes 20 – 46 lbs). Dingoes are small, to the point where "Dingoes ate my baby" was a common and sarcastic joke after a reported attack - And yet that attack was extensively proven[1].

Yes, a small group of Coyotes could easily corner or snatch a small child and pose a danger to such. Is it likely? No. Is it reasonable to relocate the coyotes? Absolutely. It might also be reasonable to manage and not relocate the coyotes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_Chamberlain-Creighton#Ev...

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