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bionsystem

719 karma · joined May 3, 2018

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bionsystem··on MongoDB CEO resigns to join Meta
They changed licensing.
bionsystem··on Don't couple your Go code to GitHub
braid has been a treat for us to manage external dependencies. Much cleaner than submodules.
bionsystem··on What About Rails?
I have more trust in my senior dev without an LLM, than in my junior ops with one ; I saw the MRs ^^. But that's beside the point, because eventually the LLM will be good enough to operate, with or without my junior ops, myself, or anyone really, maybe.
bionsystem··on What About Rails?
oh I meant "reading" is slower not "running", but I guess you may still be right for large context. The article is about that though (a dev giving up on reading code entirely because that would be too slow).
bionsystem··on What About Rails?
Why would any of this make you a jerk ?

I guess it all depends on context, where I work ops stuff is clearly the bottleneck for a variety of reasons (technical debt that we are constantly working around, secret management for compliance reasons, etc). We self-host everything from bare metal. Some people would need to rethink the infra from the bottom up before it is "LLM ready".

That doesn't mean my job is not threatened mid/long term, in fact, thanks to LLM it is possible to rebuild that in a reasonnable amount of time I think. It's actually one of my side projects to offer this as a service. But if that doesn't work maybe I should have a plan C.

bionsystem··on What About Rails?
As an SRE I would be very interested on experienced devs point of view on that stance, "we don’t even necessarily need to read the code the LLMs produce". To me, that is the only way a single dev can manage > 1 agent. Because I feel running the code will always be slower than a single agent generating it. On the other hand, it implies lack of human understanding on what is going on under the hood. Which is fine if you trust the LLM to write great code, and great tests for the code, but fundamentally you have to have 100% trust, 99.9% is not going to be enough in any serious industry, would it ?

Also eventually you'll also have to trust it to write the deployment code or even run the deployment itself, otherwise SRE is going to be the bottleneck. And only then should I feel anxiety about the rest of my career (that, or my employer decide LLM are good enough to get rid of me, even if they are imperfect).

bionsystem··on Doing Everyone Else's Job
I also saw entities (mainly gov agencies) where it has a disastrous result. Because management know they will be out in 3 years, they spend as much budget as they can to initiate as big projects as they can and have them on their resume, plan beyond their 3-y stay here, and leave with a big bonus. This way they never get asked why it is not complete ("because it's plan for a couple more years"), the project fails eventually (people actually working on the stuff end up leaving too at some point), and the cycle repeats with the next guy.
bionsystem··on Distributed Systems Classics (2017)
Ah, I wouldn't know of any actionnable way to unlock this for yourself unfortunately. I think those people are gifted. There is definitely research (and documentaries around that research), you can look for Julian Stanley "Quick learners" or Maryam Mirzakhani and there are of course plenty of it. But again, it's not actionnable to watch a 13yo solve a very hard problem in 4 different ways in 20 minutes.

Unfortunately I think it is as much a curse as it is a gift. One of my parents' friend is a math researcher. He is not at the absolute end of the spectrum, but he is the kind of people who will write on the bathroom walls because he has an idea NOW and it cannot wait a minute to explore. He forces himself to do competitive cycling and can't enjoy more casual hobbies because if he does not spend 100% of his energy and focus to something, his brain will just do math.

bionsystem··on Distributed Systems Classics (2017)
I'll add my stories to the 2 brother comments, in my prepa my best friend was by far the best in class. He did the 2 year program in chemistry in the first 2 months by himself. He arrived once in exams after a full night of re-reading the 3 LOTR books and still nailed the best grade effortlessly. And to his own admission, he was far from the most productive / smarter guys he knew.

I remember listening to him and a teacher, the teacher would give some anecdotes on what he's seen at the ENS. People reciting world chess championship games at night to fall asleep. Reading massive math books (1000+ pages) in an afternoon. Another story I heard in a different context from another teacher, math students were assigned a python project, after an introductory course. They never did any programming before. One student wrote 300 LoC in a single function and showed it to the teacher. It didn't have a main function, so the teacher asked him how he tested it. The student didn't know what he was talking about. They added what's needed to run the function and it worked.

bionsystem··on Pkgsrc Is Cool (2022)
It is. Probably an even greater gift to earth from the NetBSD community than NetBSD itself. The ability to run recent packages on most arch without them forcing you to use NetBSD, but allowing you to keep the original OS in many cases if you want, is mind-blowing.
bionsystem··on France is banning unsolicited telemarketing calls starting next week
We have that in France already it is called bloctel
bionsystem··on Marimo now runs in PyCharm
As an SRE/ops (and I'm talking some years ago) it was often a pain point, especially with devs with a "works on my machine" attitude ; you would never get the exact requirements from them, I even saw a team of 2 who worked together with different versions of stuff on their respective machines. I also worked in some "offline" environments where once in prod you cannot pull anything from the internet, and you cannot install a compiler too, so it's quite hard to ship because some pip packages require to be built.

I found a way using (can't remember the tool name) which if you loop through the imports and gives it to the tool you get the package name, then I would build wheels to have all binaries and build a container or a VM with all that's needed, thus working completely around python package managers. This was a good enough workflow for the kind of deployment we needed.

Jupyter added a layer of complexity, I deployed it alongside RStudio as browser IDEs in docker swarm. Everybody wants a different set of deps and versions, so you have to keep track of everything, and also people may use things just for development that must not be shipped to prod, so you have to keep track of that too. Also some would develop notebooks on windows and expect them to work in linux VMs/containers and even in prod.

Nowadays devs ship container images anyway through a CI so it is less of an issue. In this era docker was far from being the de-facto everywhere, some people were still afraid of this, security didn't like it, etc.

bionsystem··on French parliament approves landmark assisted-dying bill
The whole thing takes a lot of time and multiple round trips and stays which is expensive.
bionsystem··on French parliament approves landmark assisted-dying bill
I'm glad that my country is doing this. On one hand, we have free healthcare and there is the argument that we don't need this and that it's just a way to save money on the weakest of us all. But in practice it is not the case.

I have 2 grandfathers who have been denied certain surgeries because they are too old, not because it would be dangerous, but because there are waiting lists of several years and they never get priorities. Now, none of them are in a hurry to use this procedure of course (only one mentionned going to Switzerland when he almost lost total mobility, but of course cannot afford it), but both of them are in pain, and when it will become excruciating and quality of life will converge to 0, I feel it is a much better prospect than staying for weeks in a hospital room, suffering despite the morphine, with the spouse having to book taxis for visits because of course nobody is going to pay for that.

We are talking about people who have enjoyed near 40 years of happy retirement and a slow but very steady health decline at the end, with lots of time to think and discuss this topic. To me it's a relief to think that I will have this option for myself eventually.

bionsystem··on IBM is on pace for its worst day ever
What if the market expected 25% more then reported ? Nobody "knows" what the market expects. People infer it by looking at forward valuation, company guidance, investor expectations, and many many other things happening in the world, in competition, in the value chain. And of course the market does its thing and figures that this company has x% chance of beating (or missing) by $y, and when it's wrong the moves can be huge.
bionsystem··on IBM is on pace for its worst day ever
Well, the answer is in your question, it's all about expectations ; the market wanted more, didn't get it, and re-rates.
bionsystem··on Running Windows Games on a Hobby OS with Wine
I remember reading about the minecraft port earlier, very impressive work ; those writeups are a great read too.
bionsystem··on Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation
Ah there is liquidity too, but your brother comment makes my point clearer.

About liquidity, yes most people with a million net worth actually have more than half in their house, so technically it is much harder for them to throw cash than somebody with a billion and a much smaller % of their worth in illiquid assets such as property or unlisted companies. I wish I had made this point too.

bionsystem··on Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation
Thanks, that is much clearer than my wording.
bionsystem··on Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation
A few things to note. 1 billion isn't a thousand times a million. If you make a conservative 5% let's say out of your net worth, you still need to work with a million, whereas you don't with a billion. So, technically, $400 with a million is some amount of work hours, whereas $400k with a billion is just pocket change taken out of more than most people lifetime's of earnings that is just 1 year of your interest.

Also, a lot more people (more than 1000x) have $400 to give than $400k so in a sense if people with $400 to give were all being very generous, they could amount to a lot more than what billionnaires could give.

bionsystem··on What job interviews taught me about Kubernetes
So you agree that it is not kube specific, then ?
bionsystem··on What job interviews taught me about Kubernetes
I give a counter example to a general statement, in logic, it is enough to debunk the original statement. My point is, SOME things wouldn't run predictably inside the cluster (in that case without pinning to nodes, which the article says isn't necessary, and which in general defeats the purpose), so you'd need to run some things outside of it.

As per standardized knowledge, I can't see how somebody even proficient with kube, could jump into any app and troubleshoot bad behavior. Apps each have their quirks and subtleties, specific components that behave a certain way. The layers still exists, the kube cluster itself (which again has many component options at every layer of the stack ; hard to know them all), and the app (which will require at least some specialty knowledge).

If it's just about pushing helm charts we wouldn't need SRE anymore, just a CI.

bionsystem··on What job interviews taught me about Kubernetes
None of those arguments make sense.

Uniformity ? Try deploying openbao inside kube, if kube decides to restart your pods, you're in for unsealing them at 3am, waking up everybody who owns a Shamir key. So bao stays out of the cluster, or pinned to certain nodes, defeating the purpose entirely. Also, with the ultra wide variety of tools at every layer of the stack, uniformity is a joke ; there are no 2 kube cluster deployment that are the same really.

Standardized knowledge ? The operating system is standardized knowledge. Any competent SRE should be able to login into a Linux box and figure out what's running there. And if you let your previous ops shadow it all you're just a pretty bad CTO.

Tracing who does what ? First of all anybody with admin access can run one time jobs just like anybody with sudo can run one time commands. That's like chapter 01 of the kube doc. Also again at the kube layer itself, below the helm chart, the ops who set that up or updates it can and will change stuff that breaks stuff.

Kube isn't necessarily bad and has it's purpose but it's not a product. It's like Linux, a complex piece of tech that requires a lot more knowledge than "just push this helm chart" to work.

bionsystem··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)
I'd be happy to try some more, I used to play this seriously (even studying with solvers) and I also know and trust a couple of pros, will share with them as well.
bionsystem··on The Last Surviving Japanese Porsche 912 Police Car
Alpine is (was ?) a Renault brand, which is a French company, so it is a little less exotic than a Japanese police force buying a German car (Japan being such a massive car exporter themselves).
bionsystem··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)
Tried daily puzzles on pokerchallenges.com ; 2nd one is "jam or fold" 5bb deep, from the big blind. But no information on what other players do, and we are last to act on this spot, so the question doesn't make sense.

Edit : another one didn't make sense, it asked for my equity with A5o on KK7 or something, but I have no information on opponent's hand or range or betting pattern. Apparently it assumed villain had any2, but pretty much nobody has any 2 here.

bionsystem··on Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
I work with junior ops "engineers". Even though some of them won't admit it, they want to do everything with AI, and they do not care much about testing. Even their peer review is done by AI, you can tell by the way the comments are written. They want to deploy stateful clusters, manage VM lifecycles, and even deploy our own Kube cluster, probably entirely vibe coded.

One of them tried to use tabs in yaml instead of spaces, didn't know what a virtualenv was, and didn't know why Kube jobs asked for xp in writing operators ; yet he is pushing multi-files features in less than a day that are meant to manage our backups, and is pushing for managing our own kube clusters in front of management (which finds that it is a lovely idea). At this point I am not sure what to do but it won't end very well I feel.

bionsystem··on Stop Ruining It
I tried win 11 for 11 minutes and switched to Linux and never looked back.
bionsystem··on Was my $48K GPU server worth it?
> "Worst case" is back to more "normal" depreciation.

I would absolutely not count on that, if and when it drops it will drop hard.

bionsystem··on Was my $48K GPU server worth it?
Funny, they have the "honesty" to cancel the transaction and not take your money, just to keep their ebay reputation high ?
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