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cmdrk

213 karma · joined March 1, 2022

Lead SRE, MIT

email: username at protonmail.com

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cmdrk··on Anthropic S-1
depends on the framing.

if the chinese models have this aura of inferior quality around them, then sure.

if they manage to frame it instead as open source, sovereign AI, the calculus changes.

cmdrk··on A skeptic's first contact with Kubernetes (2024)
YAML abstracting YAML abstracting YAML abstracting..
cmdrk··on Tracing Mystery Network Traffic with eBPF Across HRT's Global Compute Cluster
The high volume site-to-site data transfers for running simulation etc reminds me strongly of the high energy physics computing world. no wonder so many HEP folks ended up at HRT!
cmdrk··on A Dynamic and Distributed Virtual GPU Cloud Built on Idle Apple Silicon Devices
Apple has reinvented cycle scavenging about 40 years later.
cmdrk··on How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs
I'm hardly AI-pilled but these are lovely parent/child apps. Kudos
cmdrk··on What Sun got wrong
when I was a student in the waning days of Sun, the SPARC/Solaris machines were impenetrable Big Iron guarded closely by the greybeards -- not to be touched by the likes of mere undergrads. Never really did get beyond noodling around with cast off gear from eBay, though I did get to enjoy a bit of it via the Sun DNA in SmartOS years later.
cmdrk··on Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment
Drat, I was hoping this article would be about outlawing Kubernetes.
cmdrk··on Anthropic apologizes for invisible Claude Fable guardrails
The invisible guardrails are a test run for the invisible enshittification. Just wait til they start dialing down ability to better absorb peak demand or simply to have more profitable inference
cmdrk··on Is that song AI-generated? UChicago scientists create tool to check
IIRC, this is the same lab who created Glaze.
cmdrk··on I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit
Do you think this will be a trend for larger companies as well?

The decadal move to all-cloud-all-the-time killed off in-house hardware teams while the C-suite chased their OpEx dreams.

It would be interesting if we come full circle on this.

cmdrk··on Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them
My observation is that the true believers really don't want to think of models as an inert pile of weights. There's some mysticism attached to imagining it's the ship's computer from Star Trek, HAL-9000 or C-3PO. A file loaded into memory and executed over is just so... _pedestrian_.
cmdrk··on Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again
100% the same problem here.

I have to show people extremely zoomed-in screenshots of how $VENDOR default monospaced fonts get rendered compared to Terminus at the correct size in order for them to understand my pain. The hinting is just blurry bleh.

These days, because I am also old, I want a comparatively large pixel-perfect font. I've yet to find a good one but haven't looked much beyond Terminus honestly. Maybe I can render it an acceptable integer multiple without it being too large?

cmdrk··on Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
Bellringing, specifically change ringing. It’s a type of church bell ringing that is rather algorithmic in nature. Tends to attract mathy types. Religion not required or expected!

If you have English-style tower bells near you, it's worth checking out, even if only to listen.

cmdrk··on Mark Zuckerberg Is Building an AI Agent to Help Him Be CEO
> Their only original idea was Metaverse

surely you must be joking.

cmdrk··on Oxide raises $200M Series C
> too expensive for our internal server needs; not the right fit for our datacenter partners/customers

You and me both. They're doing neat stuff, but I wonder how many other potential customers feel that way too.

What is Oxide's market? It feels a bit like advanced alien technology that is ultimately a little too weird and expensive for most enterprises to adopt.

cmdrk··on SmartOS
bcantrill gave a great talk many years ago about compute-data locality. would be nice to know if those ideas panned out for some customers, but it seems the world has by-and-large continued to schlep data back and forth.

it's too bad too. The concepts behind Manta were such a great idea. I still want tools that combine traditional unix pipes with services that can map-reduce over a big farm of hyperconverged compute/storage. I'm somewhat surprised that the kubernetes/cncf-adjacent world didn't reinvent it.

cmdrk··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)
Random assortment of projects as time allows with the $JOB.

- Prototyping a cute little SSH-based sorta-BBS, inspired by the Spring '83 protocol, but terminal-centric rather than web-based. It's called Winter '78, and if we get another Great Blizzard this year, I'll be able to make some progress on it!

- Another prototype, for an experimental HPC-ish batch system. Using distributed Erlang for the control plane, and doing a lot of the heavy lifting with systemd transient units. Very much inspired by HTCondor as well as Joyent's (RIP to a real one) Manta.

cmdrk··on TernFS – An exabyte scale, multi-region distributed filesystem
CephFS implements a (fully?) POSIX filesystem while it seems that TernFS makes tradeoffs by losing permissions and mutability for further scale.

Their docs mention they have a custom kernel module, which I suppose is (today) shipped out of tree. Ceph is in-tree and also has a FUSE implementation.

The docs mention that TernFS also has its own S3 gateway, while RADOSGW is fully separate from CephFS.

cmdrk··on Apertus 70B: Truly Open - Swiss LLM by ETH, EPFL and CSCS
Does their training corpus respect copyrights or do you have to follow their opt out procedure to keep them from consuming your data? Assuming it’s the latter, it’s open-er but still not quite there.
cmdrk··on The Quiet Disappearance of Skeptics in the AI Gold Rush
I feel that the article draws a false equivalence between skepticism and doomsaying. If anything, thinking AI is as dangerous as a nuclear weapon signals a true believer.
cmdrk··on GPT-5
just wait for the AI summary
cmdrk··on Nova: A New Web Framework for Erlang
Not to pick on you, but there are always posts like this in every Erlang thread. One is not strictly superior to the other, and the BEAM community benefits from the variety IMO.
cmdrk··on Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"
I wouldn't mind the Erlang-dominated front page coming back :)
cmdrk··on Basically Everyone Should Be Avoiding Docker
Containerization is amazingly great for scientific computing. I don’t ever want to go back to doing the make && make install dance and praying I’ve got my dependency ducks in a row.
cmdrk··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
This sounds super cool! Any public code you can share?
cmdrk··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
Broadly: Still forging ahead building a game server framework in Erlang. I've shifted my attention away from Godot integration (which AFAIK is still working) and toward LÖVE and Lua. Godot is great, but having to write GDScript on the client and Erlang on the backend has caused me many headaches in my game logic. My current goal is to have a beautiful, concurrent, Erlang-based control plane with Lua-based game logic running on both the server and the client.

To that end, I've most recently been hacking on Robert Virding's Luerl (https://github.com/rvirding/luerl), working to adapt the Lua test suite to chase down some small compatibility issues between PUC Lua and Luerl. While Lua is a lovely language, it would also be swell to get Fennel working under Luerl. I wrote a game for the LÖVE jam a few months ago in Fennel and it was a pleasant way to dip my toes into lisp-likes.

I've also been adding things to control plane software, Overworld, here and there: https://github.com/saltysystems/overworld Happily all of the Protobuf and ENet stuff that I've already built nicely carries over into the LÖVE world.

cmdrk··on Show HN: Easel – Code multiplayer games like singleplayer
How does this compare to something like BYOND? I realize it’s dated now but conceptually there are some similarities.
cmdrk··on Lua for Elixir
My understanding is that Luerl can remove various modules from being used, like preventing use of the IO library for instance.

I would say BEAM itself is not particularly sandboxed, and certainly clusters of Erlang nodes assume a lot of shared trust.

cmdrk··on Marc Andreessen Says One Job Is Mostly Safe from AI: Venture Capitalist
“My job safe from obsolescence by new technology”, says man directly threatened by new technology
cmdrk··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)
Godot has a nice netcode story with ENet, WebSocket and WebRTC integration. If you just want a off-the-shelf product instead of bespoke Erlangy stuff, I think there are a lot of good options out there like Godot's native high-level networking, products like Nakama, etc.

Server backend framework: https://github.com/saltysystems/overworld

Chat server implementation (Erlang): https://github.com/saltysystems/chat_server_example

Chat client implementation (Godot): https://github.com/saltysystems/chat-client-example

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