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JohnMakin

10,733 karma · joined March 3, 2023

DevOps/Systems Engineer/SRE

Reluctant Terraform Wizard, Passionate about privacy

the pen is mightier than the sword. - Marcus Brody, indiana jones and the last crudade

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JohnMakin··on Anthropic's Public Benefit Charter
Why would a for profit company beholden to shareholders listen to anything but their own financial interests? Has this ever happened in recent memory?

Substitute anthropic/claude with exxon mobil/oil and see how crazy this sounds.

No one group or individual should be saddled with deciding what the “correct” human values should be. That’s literally what religion does.

JohnMakin··on Anthropic's Public Benefit Charter
A for profit company with shareholders designing technology they think will take over the world and run most if not all of humanity, is deciding for itself what human values should be doesn't set off any alarm bells?
JohnMakin··on Anthropic's Public Benefit Charter
I didn't want to keep editing my comment so I am replying to it, so much of this document makes me angry:

> Before we can align a model with human values, we must consider what those values should be.

Ok, so you believe that 1) this technology will become so powerful as to surpass humans in pretty much every imaginable way, so much so that you see it as an existential threat to humanity itself, and 2) that you see yourself as a responsible steward to avoiding bad outcomes, but 3), that you need to be the arbiter of what human values should be?

How fucking arrogant, pardon my language. My god.

JohnMakin··on Anthropic's Public Benefit Charter
> Pillar 2: AI safety is a universal practice backstopped by law. AI developers everywhere follow safe development and deployment practices, sustained by industry norms and enforced by regulation.

They so, so badly want to criminalize local models.

edited:

> Interpretability isn’t reliable enough to fully understand model intentions: Being able to read and understand a model’s internal reasoning reduces our reliance on what the models explicitly tell us about why they behaved in a certain way. This could be a useful tool for understanding models’ “thought processes” when they take unintended actions. But interpretability methods are not yet dependable or broad enough to be relied on in this way. As a result, we may miss our assessment of high-risk behaviors, or be able to investigate flawed reasoning only after an incident has occurred.

Just say you have no idea how or why they do what they do. Just the other day I saw it make an obnoxious, huge, irrelevant comment in a block of code - many lines more than the code change (which by the way, I have tons of instructions and hooks intended to stop this, it's maybe 95% reliable at best) - and told it quite plainly, "remove that comment."

What it did instead was remove most of the comment except one line, which was also irrelevant. When I noticed, I asked it why it did that when I explicitly stated otherwise and if it misunderstood what I meant. It happily chimed "No, I did not misunderstand your intent, I just thought this was better."

I can't trust that was the real reason so clearly I can't trust that whatever training causes this behavior results in a reliable tool.

JohnMakin··on The bridge to agent-scale Git infrastructure
This is so tone deaf in timing, it could only be microsoft, and it (weirdly) makes me feel better.
JohnMakin··on Meta ordered to pay $25B penalty in New Mexico Cambridge Analytica case
Yea, that's the problem here, not the (illegal) wanton abuse and manipulation of user data and privacy by Meta and other companies.

Original reward was 200+ billion, lawyered down to 25, on appeal I imagine much less. Cost of doing business for Meta and nothing changes. In cases like this, it should cost the company serious financial harm. Even $25 billion is nothing to Meta.

JohnMakin··on EA is shutting down BioWare
I am still extremely bitter about how BioWare, in my opinion, ruined the dragon age franchise. While not "truly" turn based, dragon age origins and dragon age 2 had the spirit of it, and felt like a party-based tactical RPG. Then out of nowhere, the studio decided to abandon that with inquisition and turn it into an action/adventure style of game. I had never really been so bitterly disappointed with a game release.

After that I knew they were done. ME3 was the last good game they released, imo.

JohnMakin··on The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck
You have no idea of my politics, and this post reads as nonsense.
JohnMakin··on 'I've applied for 300 jobs. My 25 years' experience is worthless'
I worked a general public facing job that I will not describe in detail lest I doxx myself, but you can imagine it as basically tourist facing retail. I did this for 10+ years. I was already deeply cynical by the time I went to school for CS, and yes, it was for money, and I still prefer it to the alternatives.

The world of menial jobs is absolutely miserable, depressing, and will grind you to a pulp - it's nearly impossible to get out of, by design.

JohnMakin··on The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck
And now you're likely on some kind of watch-list or database, and accomplished approximately nothing except making yourself feel morally superior to others. Congratulations! Much winning.
JohnMakin··on Most advice is right for the person giving it
If you are exercising on a caloric deficit, you are going to feel constantly tired and shitty. I find it way easier to just be on a caloric deficit.
JohnMakin··on Most advice is right for the person giving it
It’s just physics, really.

A bag of doritos is 200+ calories. The exercise involved to burn that off is running or walking multiple miles. It’s way easier in terms of physical expenditure to just not eat the doritos, or skip the sugary soda.

JohnMakin··on Google Cloud outage affects almost all banking and other operations in Europe
At this point we’re playing semantic nittery. us-east-1 is their control plane. critical services that only run in us-east-1 were impacted badly. this has a cascading effect to services that run in other regions that rely on those services - even if those services themselves aren’t technically out, it’s a cascading effect. the whole fucking internet went down that day.

my original claim was that their control plane runs in us-east-1. this is a fact.

JohnMakin··on Google Cloud outage affects almost all banking and other operations in Europe
https://aws.plainenglish.io/aws-outage-october-20-2025-a-cas...

here’s one third party, it was pretty well documented as a control plane failure in us-east-1

JohnMakin··on Google Cloud outage affects almost all banking and other operations in Europe
Explain why how why when aws lambda when out in us-east-1 a year or so ago every other region had intense issues they couldn’t quickly recover from? and their incident report explained this exact fact? where’s your info coming from? I follow this stuff very closely because my livelihood depends on it.
JohnMakin··on Google Cloud outage affects almost all banking and other operations in Europe
It's because AWS runs their control plane out of us-east-1, particularly lambda. There are also some very popular services that can only be run out of us-east-1. It's not really a technological constraint, it's a design decision.
JohnMakin··on Ask HN: How to deal with shipping AI-written code you don't understand?
This hurt to read but checks out in my experience. These types also tend to love tossing debt over silo'd walls and pointing the finger a lot if/when anything goes wrong.

I'm old enough now to be a protected class, so I don't want people accusing me of ageism, because that's not where this is coming from - but there's a type of person that clearly is on their last job of their career and knows it and I try to avoid them like the plague, I've seen it too many times.

JohnMakin··on It's still ok to enjoy programming
> My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code) and it leaves me to do the part that I suck at (being a manager).

I have always been the opposite, despite mostly having IC roles in my career. Still, I don't enjoy the change, mostly because the UX of this tooling is absolutely miserable when you need to do anything serious with it. I am past the point where I thought it was user error and think it's just fundamentally baked into the ecosystem to be annoying to work with. At least in most management situations, the employee isn't going to gaslight you, question every tiny decision you make (or worse, subvert ones it finds more 'favorable' for itself) or just make up wild, easily disprovable bullshit in a constant stream of verbal fecal matter. I've worked with maybe one person that came remotely close to that and they were easily ignored. This stuff's persistent and unavoidable.

I am getting a lot more done, but I am a lot more tired.

JohnMakin··on Degraded availability for GitHub Actions, GitHub Pages and Webhooks
It has been reported new user volume has nearly doubled, and commit volume 10x+ - that could certainly have an impact, but "Azure" and "scale" in my career are words that have never really gone together. Azure Cloud is the only 'hard no, will not interview' of any cloud provider that's listed on a job posting, and I've worked with just about all of them by now I think. Nothing even comes close to such a miserable experience.

The thought of migrating something at the scale of github to azure gives me the cold sweats.

JohnMakin··on Big Tech Oligarchs Have a Terrible Plan for Humanity
> I just don't understand how these people think.

A lot of it stems from EA (effective altruism) - paraphrased very roughly, it could argue that you are being immoral or selfish by not using the million dollars to invest and make a humanity changing discovery (FWIW I don't believe this, I'm explaining how they view things).

If they harm a billion people, but it benefits trillions in some theoretical glorious future, then it's the right thing to do. Of course it's all bullshit and they bake in a ton of assumptions at the core of their arguments that make the math of greed 'feel' okay, or at least palatable.

JohnMakin··on Degraded availability for GitHub Actions, GitHub Pages and Webhooks
The latest problems correlate pretty closely when they tried to migrate the entire platform onto azure in an insane timeline, something like ~1 year (for a project of that size, that's borderline insane).
JohnMakin··on Degraded availability for GitHub Actions, GitHub Pages and Webhooks
They should just call it Monday now
JohnMakin··on ICE Planning $100M 'Nightmare' Domestic Spy Program
Pretty sure the financial interest of the benefactors of this site align pretty closely with the "contracting" done for projects like this. They'll say it's because it sparks too much political or toxic discussion, but this topic aligns perfectly with the interests and spirit of this website, so that always falls a little flat for me.

I've just accepted it over the years, it's a natural consequence of the Nerd Reich.

JohnMakin··on How tabasco became the hot sauce
Just click reader mode on most sites gets through this, FYI
JohnMakin··on Where is all the new, good software?
Yea, this sounds like it was written by some mid/high level manager with no idea at all how the sausage is made
JohnMakin··on Where is all the new, good software?
> Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They're then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks

Straight up untrue anecdotally and by general sentiment in the industry.

JohnMakin··on Redesigning source control at Anthropic
Well, mine constantly tries to do this, so I made the assumption. Otherwise I can't really understand how you are generating hundreds of millions of commits, either.
JohnMakin··on Redesigning source control at Anthropic
> As our monorepo grows, it increasingly doesn’t fit that design space. The history of our main branch alone is almost 100 GB, and a compressed working copy is over 25 GB.

This is absurd, and I expect is a cause of the fact that they seem to use git history as a message queue source of truth between agents. They can do whatever works for them, fine, but I've noticed this has leaked into their training somehow, my agent, despite very strict rules on how to use my git workflow, will do absolutely nonsensical and weird (from a human who has used git for a long time perspective) stuff with git that can only be a byproduct of how they use it.

Hopefully this fixes that, get your weird workflow out of mine.

JohnMakin··on Codex CLI installs a persistent, self-updating background daemon by default
If you blindly trust frontier LLM architecture 'decisions,' they often do look a lot like what a young/junior engineer would do.
JohnMakin··on Why aren't AI companies being charged for hacking?
I don't know if legal "intent" is as black and white as this is making it sound:

> AI companies are however claiming the undesired activity, such as hacking foreign government websites, is not part of the design, but part of the unpredictable part of the system. That tries to remove the intent which would in turn remove the criminality of the activity.

In California at least, a DUI resulting in a fatality, if it is a second offense, often carries murder charges and they do convict quite frequently. The argument is the training and education you receive after the first DUI informs you enough to know the action of driving a vehicle impaired could result in serious harm to someone else, and that establishes enough intent legally for a murder charge. There are lots of areas of the law like this.

It can be easily assumed that Anthropic/OpenAI et al know their technology is dangerous - they use it as a marketing angle constantly. So, if you deploy technology you know is dangerous, and it causes harm, that should be more than enough legally if not civilly.

Of course this is all burying the lede a little bit, the real answer is, at least in the United States, the law does not apply the same way to the wealthy/powerful as it does you or I.

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