HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

quietsegfault

268 karma · joined December 28, 2025

submissionscomments
quietsegfault··on Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage
My state's gasoline refineries use about ~13 million gallons of water each day. It's about .7 gallons of water per gallon of gasoline refined.
quietsegfault··on Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage
People looking for something to run against?
quietsegfault··on Red Hat being phased out of existence?
Jay’s gone. So many other smart people gone. Why dump Jay unless you want to radically change directions?
quietsegfault··on Red Hat being phased out of existence?
I don't know techrights, and reading about them it does seem as if they have a very strong pro-FOSS, adversarial (to put it nicely) bent. So thank you for educating me there!

Reading the post closer, and looking at their other posts, I don't think this is a blog I'd personally put a lot of trust in as a valuable resource. Maybe fun to read, but yeah. Not super trustable.

> "Today the "badge" says IBM,"

Sure, people are getting moved around.

> But the role changed, there's lots of slop ("hey hi") dross or filler

I'm not sure what "hey hi" means, or filler.

> and everybody at IBM knows what PIPs and RA come next

I've been through multiple "silent" and "loud" IBM layoffs. This is 100% true.

> It's not hard to see that the vast majority of redhat.com blog posts sell slop, not Linux. It helps inflate the share price without accomplishing anything of substance.

I don't really think this is true. I feel like as long as I've read Red Hat's blog posts (less frequently now) they've been high quality.

> It's "fake work", just like slop. It cheats the shareholders, but for how much longer?

Based on the last statement, this too seems like it's at best an exaggeration.

> Red Hat's "way" or "culture" or "open source org" is going away, step by step (one step at a time), and some people altogether quit today (or yesterday), not only in Red Hat but also Nordcloud. Some receive money to leave 'voluntarily'.

This is 100% true. When I joined, people told me I was joining a different Red Hat, and the company was vastly different when I left over a decade later.

> The quantum (vaporware) teams are going "the way of the Kyndryl" via Anderon.

I'm not following quantum stuff closely, so I can't judge this, but based on the crappy performance of the Kyndryl stock I got from the spinoff, I sure hope that .. quantum is getting spun off? I don't know, this seems a little wackadoo.

> IBM is imploding 'creatively'.

Gibberish.

After reading it line by line closely and looking at my reaction .. yeah this is a rag of a blog. :D thanks again for knocking some sense into me!

quietsegfault··on Red Hat being phased out of existence?
It took IBM ~0 days to layoff 30% of Confluent upon deal close despite continual reinforcement that any RIFs would be coming months later.
quietsegfault··on Red Hat being phased out of existence?
Untrustworthy blog? This is literally IBM's modus operandi. Look at what they did to Confluent and Hashi. Confluent is seemingly decimated.
quietsegfault··on Red Hat being phased out of existence?
RH pandered to shareholders for the entire decade I worked there. It will not disappear as a brand, that is far too valuable for IBM to buy credibility over their bullshit shovelware.

I left shortly after the IBM acquisition was announced, and I'm so happy I did.

The brain drain happened shortly after the announcement. To me it seems like all the driven, ultra-sharp people started leaving in 2019 and in force in 2020 and early 2021. The people I've interacted with Red Hat since 2020 were not anywhere near as sharp as the folks I worked with prior.

EDIT: I was probably too strong on my statement that "all the driven, ultra sharp people". I know that I have a lot of ultra sharp, smart, engaged friends still there. What I meant to say was that I started to see the drain late 2019.

quietsegfault··on Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)
Spy blimp!
quietsegfault··on I said no and Apple said yes
Red Hat had most employees running a custom corporate RHEL build or Fedora on Thinkpads prior to 2018 or so, and even then most employees moved to Mac as soon as they were allowed to do so.

I was a true Linux believer, and I still switched to a Mac because I needed things to just work. Poor battery life, awful HiDPI support, strange driver issues all contributed. Yes, I could fix them. I opened bugs and could talk to the engineers responsible to get things fixed ASAP. Even so, it was a second full time job keeping up with it.

quietsegfault··on A coffee shop owner used AI to make a menu poster. Then came the angry DMs
My coffee shop barely has a menu. None of the current roasts are listed anywhere, you have to ask and they change daily. No signage. It’s consistently the best coffee I’ve had. Not fussy but very very good.

They do slack off on cleaning the chairs and the decor, that’s for sure. The coffee though is phenomenal.

quietsegfault··on A coffee shop owner used AI to make a menu poster. Then came the angry DMs
Absolutely not. My local kebab shop 100% uses AI for their menus and signage. It’s delicious. He does not have time or the desire to worry about the provenance of the menus.

It’s a pretty good indicator the owner bought a ChatGPT or Canva subscription, that’s about it.

quietsegfault··on A coffee shop owner used AI to make a menu poster. Then came the angry DMs
My local coffee shop not only doesn’t have social media, but they don’t even bother decorating the store. Truly unique and amazing coffee, absolutely no design inside. It’s amazing and it really turns people off!
quietsegfault··on A coffee shop owner used AI to make a menu poster. Then came the angry DMs
What about the pictures of Chinese food above the counter vs. the actual food you get? There has ALWAYS been a big difference between advertisements and menus and what the food really looks like.
quietsegfault··on A coffee shop owner used AI to make a menu poster. Then came the angry DMs
This is so weird. Small businesses like delis and pizza parlors and Chinese food joints have been using stock photography and pre-made advertisements for decades. That ageless “GYRO” poster, FFS. People have lost their absolute minds over this.

It’s disgusting and unhinged behavior to threaten and bully people about this. Who cares how a local cafe made their menu? I truly don’t understand what’s going through people’s minds who attack people like this.

quietsegfault··on Devastated father says his 9-year-old son spent $118,000 on YouTube ads
I love my kids. But I would never ever buy them robux. And I would never ever buy shit like that on a corporate card. Imagine just explaining that.
quietsegfault··on Devastated father says his 9-year-old son spent $118,000 on YouTube ads
I have always had company cards. I never used them except when forced. It’s not a mistake to use it unless you have no business working in a job where you have access to someone else’s money.
quietsegfault··on So you want to use OpenRouter?
The way that OpenRouter frames it with having calls routed to whatever provider is handy encourages you to think that they’re all the same in basic functionality. Really sours me on OpenRouter.
quietsegfault··on Apple Watch Series 12
https://youtu.be/tEBYHHiQ4ps

Home stenographer!

quietsegfault··on Apple Watch Series 12
Good. Don’t say things around me, an Apple Watch wearer, that you don’t want getting out.
quietsegfault··on Apple Watch Series 12
Good. I wish we had the “home stenographer” sketch from the Chapelle Show in real life. Now we do.

https://youtu.be/tEBYHHiQ4ps

quietsegfault··on Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads
I too ran a large VDI, server, and scientific computing cluster based on Linux - libvirt in my case. I saved a bunch of money over VMware. When I quit to go to a higher paying job, they had to rip and replace everything with vSphere because they couldn't find anyone willing to work for .edu money with the skills to manage that despite the massive cost savings.

I had asked for vSphere to avoid this problem, and they balked at the licensing costs even in the good ol' days.

quietsegfault··on Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users
Can you talk more about what changed in the last two months? I use open router for when I run out of limits, and I’ve done better than buying an additional sub for my uses. I thought about looking at a more niche player, but it’s not a priority for me yet.
quietsegfault··on IBM Bob
What makes you proud about IBM currently? IBM’s “RA” culture fostering Machiavellian politics, singleminded view of next quarter’s success, and asinine yet draconian bureaucracy are three out of MANY reasons why I’m embarrassed to have had IBM forced into my career and got the hell out as fast as possible each time.
quietsegfault··on IBM Bob
You get more bobcoins by using your old allowance and running out, then submitting GitHub issues that get ignored.
quietsegfault··on IBM Bob
Are you allowed to use Cursor, Codex, Claude, or OpenCode or is Bob all they allow?
quietsegfault··on IBM Bob
I used Bob extensively at an IBM acquisition, it was absolutely dreadful. Bobcoins.
quietsegfault··on U.S. sanctions against the A/I Collective
It doesn’t even need to be secret or underhanded. The government can simply foster the media that drives their strategic goals. Same kind of idea as stochastic terror.
quietsegfault··on Over 5,200 Ebola cases recorded in Congo
One big risk with Ebola is how the dead are handled in some parts of Africa. I understand the dead are cared for at home by family members which increases the risk of exposure. In western countries, death care is far more formalized with exposure protections, so Ebola is much less likely to spread as it does in other countries without that formalized care.
quietsegfault··on Scrap (2006)
Stop repeatedly changing definitions and accounting rules until the desired conclusion becomes true. It's tiresome.

In U.S. policy terminology, Social Security and Medicare are social insurance programs. Medicaid, SNAP, SSI, and housing assistance are means tested safety net programs.

Yes, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense make up a majority of federal spending. But your conclusion only works by relabeling Social Security and Medicare as welfare, dismissing the rest of government as noise, and then assigning an arbitrary share of decades of accumulated interest expense to those programs.

Your last move is especially egregious. Federal debt reflects the cumulative gap between all federal spending and all federal revenue over time. You can't figure out what caused it by looking at today's largest spending categories.

Social Security's current shortfall is primarily the result of a demographic imbalance Congress has known about for decades and repeatedly declined to fully address. That makes it particularly silly to retroactively assign some arbitrary share of the rest of the federal government's accumulated debt to Social Security.

The accurate way to talk about this is that Social Security and the major health programs are a very large share of federal spending. "The social safety net is most of the budget" is a conclusion manufactured by your definitions.

quietsegfault··on Scrap (2006)
You only get to a majority by doing two misleading things… blaming the national debt on entitlements instead of general fund deficits, and counting Social Security (which is funded by its own payroll taxes) as a welfare program.

The actual means-tested safety net (Medicaid, food assistance, SSI, housing) is only around 15% to 20% of federal spending.

Page 1 of 10Next →