arthurfirst

> Yes, actually - being right and out of business is much better than being wrong and in business when it comes to ethics and morals.

Yes, but since you are out of business you no longer have an opportunity to fix that situation or adapt it to your morals. It's final.

Turning the page is a valid choice though. Sometimes a clean slate is what you need.

> Being out of business shouldn't be a death sentence, and if it is then maybe we are overlooking something more significant.

Fair point! It feels like a death sentence when you put so much into it though -- a part of you IS dying. It's a natural reflex to revolt at the thought.

> For example, should we let people die rather than use medical knowledge gained unethically?

Depends if you are doing it 'for their own good' or not.

Also the ends do not justify the means in the world of morals we are discussing -- that is pragmatism / utilitarianism and belongs to the world of the material not the ideal.

Finally - Who determines what is ethical? beyond the 'golden rule'? This is the most important factor. I'm not implying ethics are ALL relative, but beyond the basics they are, and who determines that is more important than the context or the particulars.

>> even when mine (that they had already approved) would save them 400K a year You learn lessons over the years and this is one I learned at some point: you want to work in revenue centers

Totally agree. This is a big reason I went into solutions consulting.

In that particular case I mentioned it was a massive risk management compliance solution which they had to have in place, but they were getting bled dry by the existing vendor, due to several architectural and implementation mistakes they had made way back before I ever got involved, that they were sort of stuck with.

I had a plan to unstuck them at 1/5 the annual operating cost and better performance. Presented it to executives, even Amazon who would have been the infr vendor, to rave reviews.

We had a verbal contract and I was waiting for paperwork to sign... and then Feb 2020... and then crickets.

Depends how they are built. There are many embedded/real-time systems that expect this sort of reliability too of course.

I worked on systems that were allowed 8 hours of downtime per year -- but otherwise would have run forever unless there was nuclear bomb that went off or a power loss...Tandem. You could pull out CPUs while running.

So if we are talking about garbage windows servers sure. It's just a question of what is accepted by the customers/users.

>If you ever feel the need that you have so many interdependent services that you need something more complex than RC, then you might have an actual architectural problem to be honest.

Bang on.

If I had gone with the flow in 1995 I would have got my MCSE and worked for a big government bureaucracy.

Instead I found Linux/BSD and it changed my life and I ended up with security clearances writing code at defense contractors, dot com startups, airports, banks, biotech/hpc, on and on...

Exactly right about Github. Facebook is the same for training on photos and social relationships. etc etc

They needed to generate a large body of data to train our future robot overlords to enslave us.

We the 'experienced' are definitely not their target -- too much independence of thought.

To your point I use an old flip phone an voip even though I have written iOS and android apps. My home has no wifi. I do not use bluetooth. There are no cameras enabled on any device (except a camera).

It really is.

Moral arguments are a luxury of thinkers and only a small percentage of people can be reasoned with that way anyways. You can manipulate on morals but not reason in most cases.

Agreed that you cannot be in a toxic situation and not have it affect you -- so if THAT is the case -- by all means exit asap.

If it's perceived ethical conflict the only one you need to worry about is the golden rule -- and I do not mean 'he who has the gold makes the rules' I mean the real one. If that conflicts with what you are doing then also probably make an exit -- but many do not care trust me... They would take everything from you and feel justified as long as they are told (just told) it's the right thing. They never ask themselves. They do not really think for themselves. This is most people. Sadly.

Email is a glorious relic from the truly distributed internet that could have been...

That is why its so useful! It was just designed to work not enslave or en-silo.

The opportunities came after the market was created and adoption was wide-spread because it was just so useful.

The security business opportunities exploded once Microsoft got into the market and things like computer viruses spread via email due to their total negligence and enabling ;)

I can still remember nasty things like Lotus notes or ccmail but once email became widespread and the momentum was undeniable they could not give that sh*t away -- they did try that too.

All good points guys -- but my point was to see what is possible. And it was. And it was fun! Of course I know it will perform poorly and it's not hardware.

YES -- Because "it's one program doing too many things and that goes against the unix philosophy"

THIS ---- Systemd also runs 100% against the Unix/Linux philosophy of composability and single purpose.

I earned their respect over many years of hard work -- hardly a freebie!

I will say that being social and being in a scene at the right time helps a lot -- timing is indeed almost everything.

> still shake my head at IPV6's committee driven development, though. My god, the original RFCs had IPSEC support as mandatory and the auto-configuration had no support for added fields (DNS servers, etc). It's like the committee was only made up of network engineers. The whole SLAAC vs DHCP6 drama was painful to see play out.

So true.

> That being said, most modern IPv6 implementations no longer derive the link-local portion from the hardware MAC addresses (and even then, many modern devices such as phones randomize their hardware addresses for wifi/bluetooth to prevent tracking). So the privacy portions aren't as much of a concern anymore. Javascript fingerprinting is far more of an issue there

JS Fingerprinting is a huge issue.

Honestly if IPv6 was just for the internet of things I'd ignore it. Since it's pushed on to every machine and you are essentially forced to use it -- with no direct benefit to the end user -- I have a big problem with it.

So it's not strictly needed for YOU, but it solves some problems that are not a problem for YOU, and also happens to address space. I do not think the 'fixes' to IPv6 do enough to address my privacy concerns, particularly with a well-resourced adversary. Seems like they just raised the bar a little. Why even bother? Tell me why I must use it without resorting to 'you will be unable to access IPv6 hosted services!' or 'think of the children!?' -- both emotional manipulations.

Actually there is a place to put it... I didn't want to get into this but since you asked:

My prototype/thought experiment is called IPv40 a 40bit extension to IPv4.

IPv40 addresses are carried over Legacy networks using the IPv4 Options Field (Type 35)

Legacy routers ignore Option 35 and route based on the 32-bit destination (effectively forcing traffic to "Space 0". IPv40-aware routers parse Option 35 to switch Universes.

This works right now but as a software overlay not in hardware.

Just my programming/thought experiment which was pretty fun.

When solutions are pushed top down like IPv6 my spider sense tingles -- what problem is it solving? the answers are NOT 'to address address space limitations of IPv4' that is the marketing and if you challenge it you will be met with ad hominen attacks and emotional manipulations.

No profit in allowing people to communicate freely without intermediaries.

How to middle man and gatekeep otherwise?

They signed it for you as there will be 1000x less workers needed so they didn't need to ask anymore.

I have worked with a lot of code generation systems.

LLMs strike me as mainly useful in the same way. I can get most of the boilerplate and tedium done with LLM tools. Then for core logic esp learning or meta-programming patterns etc. I need to jump in.

Breaking tasks down to bite size, and writing detailed architecture and planning docs for the LLM to work from, is critical to managing increasing complexity and staying within context windows. Also critical is ruthlessly throwing away things that do not fit the vision and not being afraid to throw whole days away (not too often tho!)

For ref I have built stuff that goes way beyond CRUD app with these tools in 1/10th of the time it previously took me or less -- the key though is I already knew how to do and how to validate LLM outputs. I knew exactly what I wanted a priori.

Code generation technically always 'replaced' junior devs and has been around for ages, the results of the generation are just a lot better now., whereas in the past it was mixed bag of benefits/hassles doing code generation regularly, now it works much better and the cost is much less.

I started my career as a developer and the main reasons I became a solutions systems guy were money and that I hated the tedium boilerplate phase of all software development projects over a certain scale. I never stoped coding because I love it -- just not for large enterprise soul destroying software projects.

Yes, but we have separated for a while on a few different occasions. FreeBSD chased me away for few years around version 7. I always came back though.

I get the moral argument and even agree with it but we are a minority and of course we expect to be able sell our professional skills -- but if you are 'right' and out of business nobody will know. Is that any better than 'wrong' and still in business?

You might as well work on product marketing for ai because that is where the client dollars are allocated.

If it's hype at least you stayed afloat. If it's not maybe u find a new angle if you can survive long enough? Just survive and wait for things to shake out.

I did not look for a consulting contract for 18 years. Through my old network more quality opportunities found me than I could take on.

That collapsed during the covid lockdowns. My financial services client cut loose all consultants and killed all 'non-essential' projects, even when mine (that they had already approved) would save them 400K a year, they did not care! Top down the word came to cut everyone -- so they did.

This trend is very much a top down push. Inorganic. People with skills and experience are viewed by HR and their AI software as risky to leave and unlikely to respond to whatever pressures they like to apply.

Since then it's been more of the same as far as consulting.

I've come to the conclusion I'm better served by working on smaller projects I want to build and not chasing big consulting dollars. I'm happier (now) but it took a while.

An unexpected benefit of all the pain was I like making things again... but I am using claude code and gemini. Amazing tools if you have experience already and you know what you want out of them -- otherwise they mainly produce crap in the hands of the masses.

Of course not.

But IPv6 is not the solution to Ipv4's issues at all.

IPv6 is something completely different justified post-facto with EMOTIONAL arguments ie. You are stealing the last IPv4 address from the children!

- Dual stack -- unnecessary and bloated - Performance = 4x worse or more - No NAT or private networks -- not in the same sense. People love to hate on NAT but I do not want my toaster on the internet with a unique hardware serial number. - Hardware tracking built into the protocol -- the mitigations offered are BS. - Addresses are a congintive block - Forces people to use DNS (central) which acts as a censorship choke point.

All we needed was an extra pre space to set WHICH address space - ie. '0' is the old internet in 0.0.0.0.10 --- backwards compatible, not dual stack, no privacy nightmare, etc

I actually wrote a code project that implements this network as an overlay -- but it's not ready to share yet. Works though.

If I were to imagine my self in the room deciding on the IPv6 requirements I expect the key one was 'track every person and every device every where all the time' because if you are just trying to expand the address space then IPv6 is way way way overkill -- it's overkill even for future proofing for the next 1000 years of all that privacy invading.

THIS. Also what problem does it solve that RC scripts can't accomplish? They are much more readable and less complex. What is the benefit of all that added complexity? Even more to the point the business case for it in a professional setting? I've been wondering that for a long time.

Fair question! But why am I -1 on this?

Risk is relative and not just about THAT security. I worked at an AV vendor and the joke internally was our security threat lists were the scoreboard for bad actors. But if you asked our salespeople you are an irresponsible hack if you don't keep up to date. They never account for the person who really can do it himself -- that is not their customer.

Yes I used to build custom FreeBSD kernels a lot. I manually made security patches on a few occasions and I put in many work-arounds by reading the security mailing list etc. Yes I went well past EOLs a few times for sure.

Always behind a firewall, workloads always in a Jail.

IIRC the release cycles used to be longer and it was less of an issue ~10 years ago. Can anyone confirm?

Most of my downtimes started with a power issue in the datacenter or a need for a hardware upgrade.

Yes. Over the years I've used just about every linux distro from Slackware and RH up to nix + arch, as well programming on Solaris, IRIX, SCO, OS/400 and even Tandem --look it up it's pretty obscure! But I just use FreeBSD mostly now.

There's pretty much nothing I can't do on FreeBSD that I would get with one Linux or another. Not much of a gamer so maybe that factors in..

Veteran sysadmin of 30 years... UNIX sysadmin and developer...

I use docker+compose for my dev projects for about the past 12 years. Very tough to beat the speed of development with multi-tier applications.

To me Dockerfiles seem like the perfect amount of DSL but still flexible because you can literally run any command as a RUN line and produce anything you want for layer. Dockerfiles seem to get it right. Maybe the 'anything' seems like a mis-feature but if you use it well it's a game changer.

Dockerfiles are also an excellent way to distribute FOSS to people who unlike you or I cannot really manage a systems, install software, etc without eventually making a mess or getting lost (i.e. jr developers?).

Are their supply chain risks? sure -- Like many package systems. I build my important images from scratch all the time just to mitigate this. There's also Podman with Podfiles if you want something more FOSS friendly but less polished.

All that said, I generally containerize production workloads but not with Docker. If a dev project is ready for primetime now I port it to Kubernetes. Used to be BSD Jails .

THIS. As bad as launchctl on Macs. Solution looking for a problem so it causes more problems -- like IPv6

ZFS is amazing and while there are many would be clones there is only one ZFS.

I used (and pushed) it everywhere I could and first encountered on Solaris before FBSD. Even had it on my Mac workstation almost 18 years ago (unsupported) -- aside I will never forgive that asshole Larry Ellison for killing OpenSolaris. NEVER.

Systemd is the worst PoS every written. RCs are effective and elegant. Systemd is reason enough to avoid Linux but I still hold my nose and use it because I have to.

Docker did work. AFAIK the APIs are there. Someone needs to grab the bull by the horns.

Jails and BHYVE vms are excellent -- but I use Docker every day and if I could use BSD as my docker host I would.

Good thing my docker servers are all built with terraform so I do not have to touch.

Regularly (every 3 years or so) had 1000+ days of uptime with FreeBSD rack servers on Supermicro mobos.

I built the servers myself and then shipped to colo half way around the world.

I got over 1400 once and then I needed to add a new disk. They ran for almost 13 years with some disk replacements, CPU upgrades, and memory additions

26 years of FreeBSD and counting...

IIRC in about 99 I got sick of Mandrake and RH RPM deps hell and found FreeBSD 3 CD in a Walnut creek book. Ports and BSD packages were a revelation, to say nothing of the documentation which still sets it apart from the haphazard Linux.

The comment about using a good SERVER mobo like supermicro is on point --- I managed many supermicro fbsd colo ack servers for almost 15 years and those boards worked well with it.

Currently I run FreeBSD on several home machines including old mac minis repurposed as media machines throughout the house.

They run kodi + linux brave and with that I can stream anything like live sports.

Also OpenBSD for one firewall and PFSense (FreeBSD) for another.