719 karma · joined May 3, 2018
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I would absolutely not count on that, if and when it drops it will drop hard.