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xgbi

1,166 karma · joined March 7, 2014

meet.hn/city/45.5432973,3.2502213/Issoire

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xgbi··on Atrocious AI-Written Tests
I've seen the exact same in my reviews of some PRs on my team. The one with the static array and tests of presence/absence in this array is often appearing for some reason.

The most insulting: I once commented on the review that the test wasn't testing anything, an my colleague promptly launched his skill on my review and let claude remove the test. He didn't even read my comment.

Our hierarchy pushes for unrestricted AI use; now I just stop reading and refuse to review that kind of shit.

xgbi··on Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes
How can you claim that this is an experiment when you deploy it everywhere all at once, and have semi-autonomous, paying versions of it (Muse, https://dev.meta.ai/) in the hands of 1000s of people?
xgbi··on As A.I. makes law firms more efficient, clients ask: 'Where's my discount?'
I like that metaphor, because it translates well into software:

- You have a problem.

- Someone takes the time to fix that problem for $10k worth of coding time.

- Now they sell 1000s of clients the same software for $99, with 0s of work.

What's is the difference with your case?

xgbi··on Show HN: An open-source manufacturing ERP/MES/QMS
One comment on the auto language translation: the french version is comically bad :)

I'd rather read it in english where the wording is (kinda, Claude is visible) more on point.

xgbi··on Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?
I'm trying to understand why the C suite is reaching for AI. I mean, what is driving them to force people to use it so much ?

Is it fear of the business being copied elsewhere?

Is it because monetary incentives to lessen the workforce?

Is it just all rich people's clubs laundering the same idea that AI will solve their problems, and the Cxx come back from their retreats and make it their stance that all company should use AI because muy buddy at the golf course said it?

Is it the promise of x10 the productivity?

My company has been holding on raises for a few years, but it's open bar on AI usage. And I feel it in the reviews: some are expedited without even a human in the loop. It also outs people that have no care for the result, they push things they don't even understand. The C suite has words like "every developer pushing a MR should be able to explain why and how", and in the same week, push for full automation of the Spec -> Implementation -> MR -> Review flow.

I don't quite understand the endgame here.

xgbi··on Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude
Did you just use metaphor to show insight of the subject instead of exposing the real mechanism?

What would be the reason for the model to respond this? Can you explain for us plebs that don't have intimate knowledge of LLM internal architecture?

xgbi··on A big win for Android interoperability
Show us recent rulings in the federal level in the US in favor of people/consumers and ill bail.
xgbi··on EU will mandate labels on authentic-looking AI content starting August 2
AI is capable of generating things that are nearly indiscernible from reality, with almost any input, be it adversarial or other. Photoshop at least involved some manual trimming and lengthy process that couldn't be applied to "literally anything you can thing of".

See these:

- https://www.instagram.com/p/DTDKbhflVRO/ - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg8wvz427vo#:~:text=Accor...

And many, many examples in day to day reporting.

I'd rather have the laywork already there to punish sensationalist publishers that abuse AI to forge alternate realities than nothing.

Manipulating information is going to be the plague of the post-GPT/post-Midjourney era. We are entering an era where trust if going to be hard earned, and I don't know how you can trust for-profit or politician/billionaire owned companies anymore. What prevents WaPo from manufacturing information?

xgbi··on Lobste.rs is now running on SQLite
Way more technical, way smaller. HN is a lot more wide in terms of audience and subjects, Lobsters is mainly programming.

I love it.

xgbi··on Rocketlab acquires Iridium
How is Rocketlab valued 57B? They made $500M of revenue in 2025. This is 100x their entire balance sheet.
xgbi··on Accelerando (2005)
One of the founding books that really blew my mind and drove me on the path of software and hacking.

I was 17 in 2005 and discovered it by chance, and I’ve been binging on hard sf since then. Matrix and this were really transformative for me.

Also, for the longest of times I thought lobste.rs was a reference to this book :-)

Charles has very interesting takes on the modern world on his blog. I still read it with great passion.

xgbi··on Italy investigates Activision Blizzard for pushing in-game purchases
What are you talking about ?

It says that the parental settings (when enabled!) are just letting children do whatever they want by default:

- buying overpriced objects - chat without any restriction online - play without interruption for long time

I think the first one is probably the most poignant: piping children into disguised gambling addiction by default seems like a major fault. Borderline illegal, if you ask me.

It looks a lot like a phony feature "let's add a parental control, it will make people feel like we're trustworthy and bring back more revenue. And please don't disable ingame purchases by default, this is our cash cow".

xgbi··on [dead]
I just can't.

We shouldn't be saying "if an individual chooses to do so, we could achieve political harmony".

At what point does the government says: twitter/X has attained a critical mass and should adhere to strict political neutrality and enforce net-neutral policies, otherwise be dismantled ? I know, your current US government benefits from this. But in general, a government should be working towards neutrality. Otherwise this is a power grab.

Apart from very specific people, that want to manipulate masses, having such a great power over opinion by manipulating what people see should be strictly controlled.

xgbi··on Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash
I want to subscribe to your AI wars news please!

Joke aside, the strategic choices here and there hint at the blood lust of all other actors to dethrone Nvidia, it’s fascinating.

xgbi··on Unifi Travel Router
She's her own boss and shares her office space with 4 other people in medical space, no shadow IT there.

Since her desk is far from the internet router, I added this little guy for her to have less cables and allow more connectivity.

xgbi··on Unifi Travel Router
My wife’s work WiFi is handled by a gl.inet 150 (https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-ar150/) which is tucked behind her desk since at least 2019. Vanilla openwrt on it, provides WiFi from an Ethernet slot in the wall.

Uptime is in years, it’s invisible and chugs along without visible power draw. All her devices connect to it, including her Cisco voip phone. It autossh to my ovh server with remote port forward for remote admin. Cost me 15€ in 2016.

xgbi··on State of AI-assisted software development
Same, I use LLMs to figure out the correct options to pass in the AZ or the AWS CLI, or some low-key things. I still code on my own.

But our management has drunk the Kool Aid and has now everybody obliged to use Copilot or other LLM assists.

xgbi··on State of AI-assisted software development
Cause the codebase wasn't in my scope originally and I had to review in emergency due to a regression in production. I took the time to understand the issue at hand and why the code had to change.

To be clear, the guy moved back a Docker image from being non-root (user 1000), to reusing a root user and `exec su` into the user after doing some root things in the entrypoint. The only issue is that when looking at the previous commit, you could see that the K8S deployment using this image wrongly changed the userId to be 1000 instead of 1001.

But since the coding guy didn't take the time to take a cursory look at why working things started to not work, he asked the LLM "I need to change the owner of some files so that they are 1001" and the LLM happily obliged by using the most convoluted way (about 100 lines of code change).

The actual fix I suggested was:

    securityContext:
  -    runAsUser: 1000
  +    runAsUser: 1001
xgbi··on State of AI-assisted software development
Rant mode on.

For the second time of the week this morning, I spent 45 min reviewing a merge request where the guy has no idea what he did, didn’t test, and let the llm hallucinate a very bad solution to a simple problem.

He just had to read the previous commit, which introduced the bug, and think about it for 1min.

We are creating young people that have a very limited attention span, have no incentive to think about things, and have very pleasing metrics on the dora scale. When asked what their code is doing, they just don’t know. They can’t event explain the choices they made.

Honestly I think AI is just a very very sharp knife. We’re going to regret this just like regretting the mass offshoring in the 2000s.

xgbi··on Parsing JSON in 500 lines of Rust
Meta: github is now requiring a login to see gists?
xgbi··on Prometheus 3.0
Hey robinhood, any feedback on Talos?

We've been using Talos for our internal clusters for a while, but with quite small ones (3 kube node, 5 worker nodes).

Upgrading has been generally a non event, and we're quite happy with them.

How do you deploy Thanos ? In one of the clusters ?

xgbi··on Fly Kubernetes
I have so many questions, it is a very good article!

My most important one is this: can I build a distributed k8s cluster with this?

I mean having fly machines in Europe, US and Asia acting as a solid k8s cluster and letting the kube scheduler do its job?

If yes then it is better than what the current cloud offerings are, with their region-based implementation.

My second question is obviously how is the storage handled when my workload migrates from the US to Europe: so I still profit from NVME speeds? Is it replicated synchronously?

Last but not least: does it support RWM semantics?

If all the answers are yes, kudos, you just solved many folk’s problems.

Stellar article, as usual.

xgbi··on SSH3: SSHv2 using HTTP/3 and QUIC
Can't you simply `proxy_pass` the traffic with any load balancer or reverse proxy (that you probably have anyways if you use TLS)?
xgbi··on Rivian software update bricks infotainment system, fix not obvious
From what I read somewhere, Tesla was able to do that because they have remote ssh capability.

In at least one instance, they fixed the cars manually by running a massive remote command on all cars after a messed up update: https://lobste.rs/s/v42zil/former_tesla_employee_ssh_d_as_ma...

I wouldn’t call that very reliable , but they indeed do it regularly

xgbi··on Microsoft Azure CTO Headhunted for SDE II Position at Amazon
Reading your comment, my first thought was "how entitled??", but I see that this meeting was set up by the DO founders? Aoutch.
xgbi··on Quadlets might make me finally stop using docker-compose
Say what you want about docker compose, but when I see the amount of scaffolding necessary for this, with so many catch words like butane or ignition, I’m happy with my good ol’ docker composé file where everything is neatly organized. In one glance I can see what is deployed, depends on what and what net / volume is used.

For simple projects, it’s hard to beat

xgbi··on Kopia: Fast and secure open-source backup software
I need to store on Azure for DRP reasons: we would DRP to azure and need the bandwidth.

Also, storing the ZFS snapshots on Blob storage would still require us to retrieve the entirety of the 80TB before being able to use it. I need native ZFS at Blobstore-competitive prices

xgbi··on Kopia: Fast and secure open-source backup software
We are trying to use it for large backups of a production item, and it has not been a complete smooth ride all along.

We have many files (millions) and lots of churn over ~80Tb total.

Kopia has exhibited some issues:

- takes about 120GB (!) of ram to perform regular maintenance & takes about 5hrs to do so. There are ideas floating around to cherry pick the large inefficiencies in the GC code but it’s yet to be worked on. I’ll try to have a internship accepted to work on this in my company.

- there’s a good activity on the repository but the releases are not quick to come and the PRs are not very fast to be examined

- the local cache gets enormous and if we try to saddle it, we have huge download spikes (>10% of repo size) during maintenance. Same as above: pb is acknowledged but yet to be solved

- the documentation is very S3 centric, and we discovered too late that the tiered backup (long term files go into cold storage on s3) is only supported on S3, while we use azure. We contributed a PR to implement it in June, yet to be merged (see point 2)

So, not too bad, especially for a small-ish project maintained by mainly one person (from the looks of my interactions on slack and seeing the commit log). The maintainer is easy to reach and will answer, but external prs are slow. If I could use zfs cheaply on azure via s3, I’d use it over kopia, but as of now, it works.

xgbi··on NHS world first rollout of cancer jab that cuts treatment time by up to 75%
Ah yes, rituximab, the R in R-CHOP. Welcome to the club!

The very first infusion in my case triggered such a nasty allergic reaction that they settled on a 24h infusion duration, thank god I had a port. Fun times

xgbi··on Ubus (OpenWrt micro bus architecture)
Story time.. I coded a similar thing when I started working after graduation for a DTV software company; we needed to have an IPC on Linux and I whipped up some very crude equivalent of protobuf (which I didn’t know about), based on an RLE lib i stumbled upon and without any form of discovery.

It was circa 2009, I had only been exposed to plain text protocols and didn’t know about json. In hindsight, we might’ve been better using standard dbus, of protobuf, but I was a rookie and it provided the performance we needed (for DTV metadata).

I’m happy to see that these can still thrive, and I just recently figured out that discovery is a net multiplier in these projects; doing this really proved me that any problem is solvable if you can have some time to think about it and can prototype.

I long for these moments now, I feel like nearly all computing issues have been solved and we are now just plumbers, connecting libraries and software modules through config files instead of building things.

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