sadops

Can't your operating system manage your CPU resources for you already? Why does Kubernetes need to be involved in process scheduling?

Why, by 2030, computers ought to be even slower!

I'm sorry, in what way are modern servers not fast enough to serve a few hundred CRUD requests per second?

Ha! Always end with a joke, I love it.

Surprised nobody went for "dug", à la DigDug.

Except package repositories have maintainers, who tend to be trustworthy parties. Compare the number of supply chain attacks Debian's apt repos have compared to, say, npm.

From where I sit, it's usually the people writing the bugs who are so averse to code reviews.

I didn't read the article, so I too thought the title was something unrelated and ridiculous.

The cheaper alternative is a regular mattress.

Have you considered talking to people instead of imagining their response? Because regular people seem kind of fed up, and we're still over here cramming insecure computers into everything.

What about programs that run on your computer so you don't even need the Internet for them?

In what way? Good luck using this thing if the network is down, or if the website is down, or if DNS is down, or if the domain expires, or if the author disappears. A program you download and run is yours forever, a website can disappear tomorrow, or get acquired and get enshittified. It happens every single time, and then there's a thousand-comment thread here, until the next web app that everyone loves, and the cycle repeats itself. Do we never learn? Am I taking crazy pills?

Break the cycle.

This only works on Google's OS, Chrome.

Probably the same features that computers have had since the 1960s, but nobody writes native applications anymore. Guess I'll have to pass on this one. I wish Chrome weren't the only operating system people chose to write software for.

I'm critiquing their functionality. I know they aren't literally Markov chains... Ask ChatGPT about humor as a tool of criticism.

"Our product doesn't work, but please use it anyway."

Fine, I'll say it: this is what ruthless cost-cutting gets us. But it's fine, I'm sure the stock buybacks are going so well for all involved.

Devs don't know how to write software that doesn't immediately balloon to gigabytes of memory use for a "hello, world" application. Seriously, they've just never done it.

Slack was designed to get a fat return for the VCs that funded it. By that measure, it was a success.

Look on the bright side: they'll be practically giving those GPUs away.

I really wish we'd stop anthropomorphizing these things. They're not hallucinating, the program simply returned an error. Remember, y'all, this stuff is just Markov chains with extra steps. An incorrect answer from any other computer program is called an "error", and apparently LLMs are the only piece of software in which significant amounts of them are tolerated, because they look just like a mechanical Turk, and are sufficiently convincing as to be a really neat parlor trick. But write a program that generates random integers and returns -1 for even numbers, and it's the exact same thing. LLMs are crap, because programs aren't supposed to return errors.

"On two occasions I have been asked, — 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?'... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Creativity and lack of a developer monoculture.

Just don't publish it, and you can kinda do whatever. Remember, just because you build or learn something doesn't mean you have to broadcast it. Edification can be its own reward.

YAML over SSH, primarily.

Pouring out for QA over here. My first gig ever, we had lovely QA people who spent all day just... using the application and trying to make it break. When it did, they'd fail tickets back to us, and we'd fix them. It worked so amazingly well. Now? Hurried, bored devs do it to get the next release out the door, and it shows.

I think you know what they're arguing. It couldn't be clearer.

Kubernetes is just a poor Linux clone with extra steps. Seriously, it has all the basic parts of an OS, just half-assed: the scheduler, the networking, the state management. We already had way better operating systems that can, you know, schedule workloads and talk to the network, and it didn't require gigabytes of YAML and string templating to make it happen.

This is the elephant in the room: all "new" technology isn't fundamentally new. Terraform is just curl with state management for lots of different websites, Andible is just a YAML to Bash converter, and so on. If you have good fundamentals, not only are these things easy, they're also incredibly frustrating, because you can easily see their limitations. You can always tell how experienced someone is by how well they know what a given tool is actually doing under the hood. People who exhibit shock and awe will just mess up your codebase, because they have no clue how the machine actually works.

No, I want to hire the grumpy, cynical greybeards, because they know their fundamentals, and they're immune to shiny bullshit.

There's no substitute for skill and experience, despite what the modern tech discourse says. "Anyone can program!" And yet, we have threads like this, where we find out, SHOCKER, that the best codebases are the ones maintained by like... four senior developers, half of whom contributed to several Internet RFCs, and half of whom used to work at Bell Labs.

I feel like we are through the looking glass.