HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

VirusNewbie

1,857 karma · joined June 5, 2021

Done lots of OSS. Scala, big data, infrastructure and more. Telco engineer at one point. Read lots of books instead of college. Currently at Google as a Sr. SWE SRE on the cloud. I think about computation, resilient software architecture, category theory and PLT for fun.
submissionscomments
VirusNewbie··on AI isn't replacing SREs, it's deskilling them
RCA of complex bugs? Writing infra software?
VirusNewbie··on AI isn't replacing SREs, it's deskilling them
i'm not questioning your setup, I'm saying that if you need a 10,000 machines to run a system you're going to have kernel bugs and hardware bugs and you have no choice to treat machines like cattle.
VirusNewbie··on AI isn't replacing SREs, it's deskilling them
>Machines (esp. Virtual Machines) are ultimately predictable and crashes don't "just randomly happen".

Uh, I can literally see thousands of crashes happening all the time. You think there isn't a .01% chance of hardware going bad or hitting kernel bugs?

VirusNewbie··on AI isn't replacing SREs, it's deskilling them
If you look at the history of SRE, it was distinctly NOT sysadmins, Google specifically wanted software engineers hired to automate scaling as well as sysadmin type ops work.
VirusNewbie··on AI isn't replacing SREs, it's deskilling them
SRE at google works closely with devs to architect and build systems together. Most of them are on the SWE ladder, are able to bug fix and scale directly. They're not just ops.

The point of SRE is to have a team dedicated to scaling/resilience to balance the tension between product pushing to ship features.

If SRE cannot throttle the release cadence or fix bugs or change architecture in binaries, it's not really SRE.

VirusNewbie··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
I work with people from Waymo (they use GCP), Analytics, Core, and GDM and they all work hard.

It's not amazon or meta, but it's not a 'chill job' like I hear about MSFT or other places. YMMV, just my experience.

VirusNewbie··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
At Google they did voluntary buyouts and gave managers BACKFILLs.

It wasn't a 'instead of layoffs' it was 'ok if you're burned out, here's your exit'.

VirusNewbie··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
I work at google and our team has too much work and is expanding constantly. Anyone I meet in GCP is working 45 hours a week minimum. It's not a death march but I've yet to meet the people who just don't do anything.

Maybe they were L3s? Maybe it's EU?

VirusNewbie··on eMudhra ignored Mozilla Root investigation deadline; blames social media
Is it work ethic or is it nepotism/corruption?

I mean if I'm going to make really large generalizations about Software Engineering talent by country, Swiss people are the absolute bottom of the barrel maybe followed by the cheap outsourcing countries next, but ymmv.

I'm also sure i've worked with a lot more very good Indian engineers than German engineers here in America, but that might have more to do with who immigrates here.

VirusNewbie··on Google Cloud outage affects almost all banking and other operations in Europe
honestly more often than not the customer has a weird setup that doesn't handle it more than it being a GCP issue. I've seen some customers with awesomely redundant systems with their...cache all in one zone.

Also keep in mind GCP has a global network so it's possible some other regions are seeing disconnects/packet drops, though the source of the issue is contained to a single datacenter.

VirusNewbie··on Demographic "doomsday" misses the mark
>doing so because their other ambitions don't align with raising a family,

Are your peers more ambitious than mine or are their ambitions to travel for cheap and watch as much netflix as possible?

(This is obviously not true of my coworkers/friends from work who can all afford kids and most choose to)

VirusNewbie··on Google Cloud outage affects almost all banking and other operations in Europe
Yes that's a good strategy if someone wants to get some face time with TK.
VirusNewbie··on An ESPN producer who quit because of sports gambling
it's a good question, that's why I was wondering if some legalization would scratch enough of an itch that the unregulated and untaxed markets would remain small.
VirusNewbie··on An ESPN producer who quit because of sports gambling
Right, it's helpful to know anecdotes. I like playing poker here and there but i've never been much of a sports better.
VirusNewbie··on An ESPN producer who quit because of sports gambling
Are there safe ways to regulate gambling? If we capped everyone's yearly gambling budget to some % of tax they paid, (with some floor), does that solve anything?

I'm honestly curious if it's better to have some outlet for people who love gambling, and just have some cap, vs trying to ban it altogether.

VirusNewbie··on Banks are now trying to offload the AI data center debt they just underwrote
But if Oracle crashes and burns, is that going to tank the whole industry, or is it more likely that the bigger players just eat it up and take its customer?
VirusNewbie··on Gemini 4 Argon
I've found it on par with Opus 5.5, what don't you like about it for coding?
VirusNewbie··on Muse Wonder
Why is "effective altruism" in your mind more of a religion than say, Trumpism or Progressivism?
VirusNewbie··on Chamath says open AI models are "commoditize your complement." Agree?
Google about as much money from ads as meta does, chamath is dumb.
VirusNewbie··on Gemini 4 Argon
-
VirusNewbie··on Gemini 4 Argon
It's fucking insanely good.
VirusNewbie··on Neal Stephenson responds with wit and humor (2004)
The “made up language” is directly tied to the plot and overall themes, and leads to an “aha” moment.
VirusNewbie··on MongoDB CEO resigns to join Meta
Postgres does not scale. I have extensive experience in some of the largest databases ever built, postgres doesn't even come close.
VirusNewbie··on Ask HN: Any nerds out there who've read a lot of research papers?
"Theorems for free!" taught me that not all abstractions are leaky, and sometimes they're extra powerful.
VirusNewbie··on AI safety is mostly a sex cult
lol I certainly think so and thankfully my wife agrees with me there.

I was just pointing out that there's a bit more than meets the eye when it coems to the spectrum of monogamy.

VirusNewbie··on California is chasing wealth that has feet
Not if there are either substitutes or financial incentive to make more. Capitalism is pretty great, it just doesn't work for certain natural resources that have a very finite supply.
VirusNewbie··on California is chasing wealth that has feet
Using up land is an externality, and thus should be taxed accordingly.
VirusNewbie··on Pentagon says overreliance on AI contributed to missile strike on Iran school
I'm not anti-war, nor do I find all military intervention immoral, and I even support countries attacking back to disable military targets for good reason.

However, I'm absolutely against mistakes that kill children, and I hope that people are held responsible. This is not OK.

VirusNewbie··on AI safety is mostly a sex cult
One might also argue this is more mainstream in some cultures, and it's just not talked about. In countries such as Japan or France it's not uncommon to have a mistress (or male equivalent) but also having a primary family. That's hierarchical polyamory with uh, less steps.
VirusNewbie··on AI safety is mostly a sex cult
>he author's bizarre worldview

what is the author's bizarre worldview, other than the AI will make us extinct view?

Page 1 of 34Next →