captainkrtek

IPv6 is almost fully adopted, for reals

It feels as if every CEO used ChatGPT once and said “wow this is incredible, pivot hard to make our product use AI”, and that’s about all the thought has matured to.

It feels like AI investment and product focus is now a religion or cult. You have to be so fully invested, blind from any data, and throwing billions of dollars at it, otherwise you’re not “in”.

Meanwhile, no one in my sphere of tech and non tech people is wanting “more AI” and sees the pros/cons of chatgpt, using it as kinda fancy google search..

Where’s the “killer app” that’ll generate literally trillions in revenue to offset the costs? How do the economics work, especially when GPUs are depreciating?

When the baby passes through the birth canal, the pressure forces any fluids (ideally) out of the baby's lungs, then the contact with air, the temperature drop, and other physiological changes trigger the first breath/inspiration. However, the baby is still attached via umbilical cord to the placenta, and is still receiving good oxygenated blood from mom until the placenta detaches, then the pulse of the cord stops (this can take minutes). But yeah, an apneic baby is a very time sensitive emergency.

> So by definition, if a service is large enough to serve a zillion people, it is probably big and bloated and complex.

Totally agree with your take as well.

I think the unfortunate thing is that there can exist a "goldie locks zone" to this, where the service is capable of serving a zillion people AND is well architected. Unfortunately it can't seem to last forever.

I saw this in my career. More product SKUs were developed, new features/services defined by non-technical PMs, MBAs entered the chat, sales became the new focus over availability, and the engineering culture that made this possible eroded day by day.

The years I worked in this "goldie locks zone" I'd attribute to:

- strong technical leadership at the SVP+ level that strongly advocated for security, availability, then features (in that order).

- a strong operational culture. Incidents were exciting internally, post mortems shared at a company wide level, no matter how small.

- recognition for the engineers who chased ambulances and kept things running, beyond their normal job, this inspired others to follow in their footsteps.

Something like a major telco going out, for example the AT&T 1990 outage of long distance calling:

> The standard procedures the managers tried first failed to bring the network back up to speed and for nine hours, while engineers raced to stabilize the network, almost 50% of the calls placed through AT&T failed to go through.

> Until 11:30pm, when network loads were low enough to allow the system to stabilize, AT&T alone lost more than $60 million in unconnected calls.

> Still unknown is the amount of business lost by airline reservations systems, hotels, rental car agencies and other businesses that relied on the telephone network.

https://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~jdalbey/SWE/Papers/att_collap...

I believe they mentioned ClickHouse

Reflecting on the last decade, with my career spanning big tech and startups, I've seen a common arch:

Small and scrappy startup -> taking on bigger customers for greater profits / ARR -> re-architecting for "enterprise" customers and resiliency / scale -> more idealism in engineering -> profit chasing -> product bloat -> good engineers leave -> replaced by other engineers -> failures expand.

This may be an acceptable lifecycle for individual companies as they each follow the destiny of chasing profits ultimately. Now picture it though for all the companies we've architected on top of (AWS, CloudFlare, GCP, etc.) Even within these larger organizations, they are comprised of multiple little businesses (eg: EC2 is its own business effectively - people wise, money wise)

Having worked at a $big_cloud_provider for 7 yrs, I saw this internally on a service level. What started as a foundational service, grew in scale, complexity, and architected for resiliency, slowly eroded its engineering culture to chase profits. Fundamental services becoming skeletons of their former selves, all while holding up the internet.

There isn't a singular cause here, and I can't say I know what's best, but it's concerning as the internet becomes more centralized into a handful of players.

tldr: how much of one's architecture and resiliency is built on the trust of "well (AWS|GCP|CloudFlare) is too big to fail" or "they must be doing things really well"? The various providers are not all that different from other tech companies on the inside. Politics, pressure, profit seeking.

hard yes, all of the technical discussion aside, the constant advertising deluge of every company touting AI is mind numbing.

It’s true.

My girlfriend and I both have ADHD and are medicated. I will run laps around her tidying up her place, but struggle at my own place.. its so hard to understand

This sounds interesting, do you have this written up anywhere?

Been happily working in Go since 2014. My career has spanned C, Python, C#, Ruby, and a smattering of other languages, but am always quite fond and preferential towards Go.

AI as a word now even puts me off. Every podcast ad read, every news story, every linkedin post. It’s exhausting

I can’t roll my eyes any harder when I hear some ad like “How can agentic AI reshape CRM for your workforce?”

> Possibly-imperfect knowledge is being self-censored for legal concerns

It’s not out of legal concern. I do not know how one tests an allergy, I’m not an MD..

Im sure google could suggest some options or maybe a test.

Id encourage you (generally, outside of hn) to lookup the symptoms of a heart attack and aortic aneurysm.

A aortic aneurysm can present with a pulsating mass in the abdomen, and is more common in older people and smokers. The inner lumen of the aorta starts to separate and blood can flow differently or be restricted, eg: right arm bp may be different than left arm. But absence of that doesn’t rule it out entirely.

Whereas a heart attack is going to feel pain in the chest, perhaps radiating to the jaw, shoulder, back, maybe nausea, sweating, and an impending sense of doom.

Automated bp cuffs are pretty inaccurate imo, we use them at the tail end of transport to the hospital and they usually spit out wild numbers. An auscultated bp with a stethoscope and sphygmomanometer is the gold standard.

Bottom line, If you are having chest pain, call 911.

Yes! These patients are critical and we would not let them ambulate themselves to the ambulance, we would insist on loading them and moving them ourselves to limit exertion. Extra exertion could tip them into cardiac arrest.

There is a chain of things that need to be done

- early recognition - early administration of aspirin and/or nitro if indicated - activation of, and transport to, a hospital with catheterization capabilities.

If medics can show up and do multiple ekgs to confirm and en route, thats even better. But critically the blockage needs to cleared, and they need definitive care (cath lab).

As an EMT, I’d say to ask your primary care provider :-)

Don’t want to suggest you do something and end up with anaphylaxis.

Depends on protocols, but hence why EMS’ job is recognition of the right issue (the best we can do), there are things we can evaluate to determine if we think its an aortic aneurysm even at the emt level to rule that out before making the determination to give aspirin (eg: comparing bilateral blood pressures, checking for pulsating masses)

a heart attack is far more common than an aortic aneurysm.

Certainly protocol dependent, and likely more in the paramedic realm.

I’d say no if it were my family, and I know the response times in my area, but the story in the blog is a nightmare scenario.

People can go from heart attack to cardiac arrest quickly, and you don’t want to then tell medics you’re on the freeway and now need to do CPR.

See: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mxUqHwHbNtk&t=1520s

Around the 11 minute mark this man went into cardiac arrest, a moment prior was still talking.

Yes you could (assuming no allergies or gi bleeds) and just inform the incoming EMTs

My condolences, very sorry for your loss.

I work as an EMT (911) and resourcing is certainly a problem. In my small city, our response time is around 5 minutes, and if we need to upgrade to get paramedics, that’s maybe another 5-10.

However, if we are out on a call, out of service, or the neighboring city is on a call, now the next closest unit is 15+ minutes away.. sometimes there can just be bad luck in that nearby units are already out on multiple calls that came in around the same time, making the next closest response much further.

for a heart attack or unstable angina, the most an EMT will do (for our protocols) is recognize the likely heart attack, call for paramedics to perform an EKG to confirm the MI, administer 4 baby aspirin to be chewed and/or nitro (rx only), and monitor closely in case it becomes a cardiac arrest. If medics are far away we will probably head immediately to a hospital with a catheterization lab, or rendezvous with medics for them to takeover transport.

The few goals though:

- recognition (it could also be something equally bad/worse like an aortic aneurysm).

- aspirin to break any clots, assist administering nitro if prescribed.

- getting to a cath lab.

Its very depressing that we’re almost quite literally converting money into BTUs via GPUs and not even making a buck, meanwhile the ocean gets hotter

I’ve done this when I remember too, but the fact I have to also feels problematic like I’m steering it towards an outcome if I do or dont.

Id have more appreciation and trust in an llm that disagreed with me more and challenged my opinions or prior beliefs. The sycophancy drives me towards not trusting anything it says.

Nearly nothing left unexploited in the pursuit of profits.

I can try to expand on this a bit, and respond to your thoughts.

> What you say makes total sense. But for some personal reasons the social part of the job has always been my weak side and I'm just not interested in playing that game.

I don't mean to imply playing politics or empire building. I've probably capped my career in some ways by not playing into that either. However, in roles I've had, I've built up good capital by being very helpful, jumping into incidents, etc. There are ways to build that social muscle without it being negative or selfish.

> That's something I have also learnt from experience, and I am more often than not the one pushing for boring tech against the last fancy trends.

I think this is valuable, and it has worked for me as well. Though the eternal struggle of taking on debt for speed is fundamental. By building up some of the social capital and trust, I think it makes navigating these discussions easier and being able to negotiate in time for projects to do things right. That's the only way I've found this piece to be successful.

Agreed.

I've also found the proliferation of "AI film director" created "films" funny.

The output is a strung together set of 2-3 second clips telling some story. The characters changing between clips, the scenery changing drastically, etc. There is nothing cohesive. I imagine its a similar "context window"-like problem, if you have to keep many minutes of visual context.

I think still images have improved remarkably, though some things still look off for people (they look too-flawless). Whereas video suffers from the strange fluidity and unnatural motion of things.