33 karma · joined November 21, 2022
I started self-censoring on HN because I knew some very normal and on-topic things to say would be voted to oblivion because they had the shape of a controversial topic that the average HN commenter can not relate to except through some mainstreamed right-leaning cultural narrative. The mere mention that I was an affected party in some culture war adjacent thing was treated as if I had invoked a thought-terminating cliche. It was very... anti-curious.
So I principally agree on the conclusion, when emotions get activated this site gets worse. I just see the impact differently - anything that deviates from the libertarian-right leaning default is pushed away. I'm still relieved I had my pseudonymous account with a lot more HN internet points wiped and don't have to care about this site on an emotional level anymore.
This is not how politics works here.
(It's does not. It made me so much worse. I have nothing but bad things to say about the medical "professional" who catastrophized my diagnosis to "wake me up" and then shrugged when my response was depressed resignation.)
CPU requests still protect you from something using all the resources, because the weights correspond to your number vs all the other pods on that node, and the scheduler will not schedule pods so they exceed the total available resources.
So more accurately, requests prevent exceeding limits under contestion, and limits always do.
I've handled outages of CPU time available getting suddenly compressed (we were running pod priorities with staging/prod on one cluster and up to 70% spots in 2019) and then learning that some very important applications outgrew their original requests, gone unnoticed because limits were removed a year or so prior. You can fix this with monitoring/right-sizing tools, but that requires your org to not be dysfunctional, and my style of platform engineering usually has to account for the org being very dysfunctional.
At my work, the average quality has gone up with "blindly trusting Opus". The failure modes are horrendous and the code is verbose as shit, but it still works better. Most "engineers" aren't very good at writing code.
If you want to have a horrible time, try reading some of the runner code. It's early 2010s-style Windows-First, MSFT C# crud that has trouble not racing several threads to inconclusive status codes.
i do this: https://github.com/acuteaura/universe/blob/main/overlays/cla...
How people use AI is a structural problem. Just because you have an easy time using it to learn (good for you, genuinely) doesn't mean that such a product existing in a free market capitalist society isn't going to end in disaster where people will at best fall victim to the dunning-kruger effect constantly and stop valuing their peers' time and at worst roast their brains by unlearning how to acquire actual skills.
And it's not like the AI labs don't know this is happening. Their research arms regularly publish papers confirming dependence and deskilling are not uncommon in very carefully worded language. And still Anthropic is happily extending your Fable trial!
Yes sure, my coworkers are the tip of the iceberg here, but that doesn't mean AI is value-neutral. And we're not even discussing the ethics axis (because honestly, tiring; capitalism doesn't value ecology or any ethics when inconvenient and AI isn't special there)
and those that don't fall into this trap will be dragged in sooner or later by peer pressure and bullshit KPIs.
people around me use models to replace their critical thinking though, and i consider this a structural issue - with how incentives are laid out at my workplace but also as a cognitive trap where you think you get more done, but you're actually unlearning fundamental skills instead of supplementing your existing ones.
this is a good summary: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-025-02686-z
I feel like the only sane person left in my team, like everyone else has stopped giving a shit, pretending to get work done at insane velocity on borrowed time.
It's no longer "can AI be useful" to me, it's "how do we avoid people frying their fucking brains".
[1]: https://notes.acuteaura.net/posts/github-enterprise-security...