ps

I have Django project with 50 kLOC and it is pretty capable of understanding the architecture, style of coding, naming of variables, functions etc. Sometimes it excels on tasks like "replicate this non-trivial functionality for this other model and update the UI appropriately" and leaves me stunned. Sometimes it solves for me tedious and labourous "replace this markdown editor with something modern, allowing fullscreen edits of content" and does annoying mistake that only visual control shows and is not capable to fix it after 5 prompts. I feel as I am becoming tester more than a developer and I do not like the shift. Especially when I do not like to tell someone he did an obvious mistake and should fix it - it seems I do not care if it is human or AI, I just do not like incompetence I guess.

Yesterday I had to add some parameters to very simple Falcon project and found out it has not been updated for several months and won't build due to some pip issues with pymssql. OK, this is really marginal sub-project so I said - let's migrate it to uv and let's not get hands dirty and let the Claude do it. He did splendidly but in the Dockerfile he missed the "COPY server.py /data/" while I asked him to change the path... Build failed, I updated the path myself and moved on.

And then you listen to very smart guys like Karpathy who rave about Tab, Tab, Tab, while not understanding the language or anything about the code they write. Am I getting this wrong?

I am really far far away from letting agents touch my infrastructure via SSH, access managed databases with full access privileges etc. and dread the day one of my silly customers asks me to give their agent permission to managed services. One might say the liability should then be shifted, but at the end of the day, humans will have to deal with the damage done.

My customer who uses all the codebase I am mentioning here asked me, if there is a way to provide "some AI" with item GTINs and let it generate photos, descriptions, etc. including metadata they handcrafted and extracted for years from various sources. While it looks like nice idea and for them the possibility of decreasing the staff count, I caught the feeling they do not care about the data quality anymore or do not understand the problems the are brining upon them due to errors nobody will catch until it is too late.

TL;DR: I am using Opus 4.5, it helps a lot, I have to keep being (very) cautious. Wake up call 2026? Rather like waking up from hallucination.

Datacenters in my country usually had some rooms with tower servers 20 years ago here, well my first colo was for the tower server I brought in the large backpack:-). But density requirements, cold/hot aisles etc. prevailed and towers are generally considered inefficient for the datacenter purposes.

And then you have Hetzner datacenter that probably all people running DCs I know would ridicule, but they would not be able to respond to fan replacement at the same time. I wonder how many rack server chassis are recycled each year because the manufacturer just won't let you reuse them with new motherboard, power supply due to new shape, design, ports placement etc.

It is not just about a fresh machine which hopefully sits in each datacenter. I can imagine they needed the clone of the system due to the design of the fly.io service and that's where the "fun" begins.

I don't understand how datacenter SSD manufacturer can so blatantly ignore Linux.

My early 2020 16inch required lots of tweaking to prevent complete discharge every night and battery is sub 7500mAh now. It still happens several times a year and I am not sure why. I am probably not paying over 4000 EUR next time. User since the 2006 MB Pro.

“One of the issues is that the officially recommended way to install it seems to be rook-ceph with kubernetes.“

I believe the recommended way is using cephadm.

I have been using ceph-ansible since luminous and had to deal with nasty issues or quirks as well caused probably by complexity and human errors.

Switching apps is often plagued with at least noticable up to utterly annoying lag. Starting even optimized apps sometimes feels surprisingly slow. If the CPU is even under the light load (20 % reported by Activity monitor), these issues happen more frequently and overall responsivness gets much worse. It is not due to the low memory which I try to spare on Mini.

Yeah, Safari is fast, even faster than on the iPad Pro. But I am developer, often use multiple browsers, many docker containers, might spin up IDE and I am certainly not the one who they made it for.

I was initially impressed, but the quirks got more and more frequent and I actually hate the broken switching now.

We recently moved one rack to the different DC in the same city and used Digitalocean droplets to avoid downtime. Services running on Linux were migrated without high-availability (e.g. no pgsql replication, no redis cluster, single elasticsearch node...) and we just turned off Windows VMs completely due to licensing issues and no need to have them running at night.

The price of this setup was almost 4x higher than what we pay for colo. Our servers are usualy <5 years old Supermicro, we run on Openstack and Ceph (S3, rbd) and provide VPNaaS to our clients.

AWS/GCP/Azure was out of question due to cost. We considered moving Windows servers to Azure with the same result - the cost of running Windows Server (AD, Terminal, Tomcat) + MS SQL was many times higher than the price of colo per month. It is bizarre that you can buy the server running those VMs approximately every 3 months for the Azure expenses (Xeon Platinum, 512GB RAM).

Macbook Pro has been my companion since 2005 and I feel like Apple is doing everything they can to make me switch to Linux. My current, fully loaded 15 inch MB Pro from late 2013 started having serious battery issues and I hope it will survive until redesign is introduced. Although given the recent breakthroughs in Apple product lines I suppose they will drive me even further away from them :-(

Bad interface design is the culprit not the device. I did not need to read manuals for my iPhone, Polar watches (touch), more complicated machines in the garden, washing machine, fridge, coffee machine nor my Tesla Model S.

On the other hand using my ventilation unit controls at home was impossible without manual (non-descriptive menu items, non-circular menu starting in the middle so up/down matters and remembering where is the entry you need when there are many of those you almost never need is painful).

I love my Model S and I am satisfied with its UI design with some remarks like "Quick Controls" content I never use. There is no bullshit, no attempts to look too fancy and hinder the experience. Complete game changer of this car is the possibility of improving UI with software updates.

I am yet to encounter the car without touchscreen that has intuitive controls. My current list of the cars and quirks I remember the most:

2007 Kia Ceed I do not know remember to change C to F degrees or setup clock after owning the car for the 12 years and driving it daily for almost 5 years. IIRC holding the Trip button (one of four in the main row of computer controls) changes something depending on the current context. Kids like to touch and hold buttons and I am doomed afterwards.

2011 Ford Mondeo Alerts present somewhere in the Settings. Paring the phone requires you to push the Phone button and the Menu button. Arrows are only for cycling, Enter is useless.

2017 Peugeot 5008 Rented it for a week on holiday, physical controls. Interface design was complete mess - confusing icons, excessive layers combined with "innovative"/unique naming of menu entries etc. I quit trying to comprehend it after a while. This was one of the worst interfaces ever encountered, on par with the Ford SYNC in the latest models I had the opportunity to use as loaners.

2017 Mercedes GLA Same holds for Audis I've driven. Graphic design is consistent and quite polished which might confuse you that the interface will be intuitive and carefully designed. Animations and images accompanying any task are definitely made for marketing purposes and sales people showing off and to hide the difficulty of achieving the tasks you are up to. Visual clues are often missing and using the control wheel was like spinning the roulette and waiting for the outcome. I believe people who drive Mercedes whole live like it and are used to it. Btw numerical keyboard in the car, really?!

2018 Volvo XC 60 Had it only for a day as a test drive, quite good, no major issues, definitely one of the best interfaces. However the graphic design was inconsistent and this car has touch screen.

2018 Hyundai Ioniq One weekend, no major issues for me, bad graphics design. Do not recall if it is touch based or not, but some buttons were present.

Route planners (ABRP, previously Tesla) will not let you drive 300km without charging, because you would arrive with less than 10 % SoC.

But my infrastructure is fairly complicated, some bare metal services, many VMs, several docker hosts with dozens of various app containers, private Openstack and some public cloud services (VPNs), Ceph cluster, nagios, ELK etc.

Ansible does not watch and maintain the infrastructure and services state - it is a passive tool (I am not sure if Tower is different). You definitely could configure your monitoring to invoke Ansible script if your app server goes down and reschedule services that ran on that host to a different one and reconfigure other parts of infrastructure as needed (dependencies, VXLANs, security rules, service discovery db update, load balancing update etc.) But you would essentially copy the Kubernetes controller functionality.

Kubernetes can take care of the service discovery, load balancing, deployment, configuration and networking and other parts of your infrastructure and it does it pretty well in my experience. It maintains the declared state and reacts to its changes.

Somebody posted here that it takes just several hours to learn it. YMMV but deploying a resilient cluster in my environment took me much more time. And I have to agree that documentation is pretty weak. E.g. provisioning Cinder volumes and connecting them to the VMs running Kubernetes nodes was a real horror.

Btw Ansible generates many of my k8s YAMLs and deploys them.

Values in the post are pretty arbitrary and useless as their comments in postgresql.conf used to be.

I am using PostgreSQL in production since 7.4 and the best source of performance tuning tips for me has been PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance by Gregory Smith. These days PostgreSQL wiki is pretty good as well.

Btw I have to take my eyes off the road when I check the speed and the mirrors and that is something I do quite often and considering the behavior on the roads more drivers should.