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throwawaaarrghon Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist (2021)

I think it's that few people can see its potential. When I first started using immutable infra like 10 years ago, and saw how many problems it solved, my mind was blown. Until I saw the difference myself, it just looked like some trivial CS concept.

It's not apparent that problems X, Y and Z will be solved by immutability. Once it's applied everywhere, whole classes of problems just disappear. But until people see the problems disappear, they won't implement it. Catch-22.

throwawaaarrghon Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist (2021)

The one thing I want, that doesn't exist, and won't for at least 10 years: immutable infrastructure.

Oh, the concept exists. I can make some infrastructure mostly-immutable, myself. But the cloud doesn't give me it out of the box. What the cloud gives me are APIs. If I write software to call those APIs, predict what the allowed values are, predict the failures I might see, write about 5,000 lines of code to handle the failures, attempt to reconcile differences, retry, store my artifacts, reference them, after implementing a build system, etc, I can get one or two things to be immutable. But for the vast majority of services it's actually impossible.

Take an S3 bucket. Can you make an S3 bucket immutable? The objects inside it might be versions, sure. Can you roll back all the objects in the bucket to Version 123? Can you roll back the S3 policy back to revision 22? Can you make it also roll back the CORS rules? Can you diff all these changes and see a log of them? Can you tell the bucket to fix itself back to the correct expected version of itself? Can you tell it to instead adopt 3 new changes, as part of a version of the S3 bucket you tested somewhere else? The answer is "no".

You can fake it, with a configuration management tool like Terraform. But that's as immutable as a file on your filesystem. Any program can overwrite your files at any time; you have to have Puppet configured to monitor your files, and constantly fix the files when they get changed, track the Puppet code in Git, keep your own log of changes, etc. That filesystem isn't immutable, it's mutable! If it was immutable you wouldn't have to use Puppet (or Terraform). And the sad thing is we're all stuck on Terraform, which is actually terrible for a configuration management tool, because it mostly refuses to reconcile inconsistencies (the way every other configuration management tool in history has). It just bombs out and says "Oh shit, that wasn't a change I planned, and you didn't write this HCL code to handle this weird condition, so I'm just gonna bail and not fix this. Good luck getting production working again." Puppet wouldn't stop working if something other than Puppet updated a file. But nobody seems to mind that we literally regressed in functionality, because a company made up new marketing terms for their tools.

Sadly this desired built-in immutability, and the declarative nature of it, won't be built into S3 or other tools for at least a decade or two. They would need to effectively build something akin to K8s just to manage their own components immutably and expose an entirely new API. So we are doomed to do Configuration Management in the cloud, until the cloud starts implementing immutability out of the box.

throwawaaarrghon Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

Or, rather than creating more regulations, people could read the contracts they agree to when they get service, and use a competitor if they don't like it

throwawaaarrghon New car buying guide: the algorithm (2021)

This has happened to me, except there was a couple looking at the same car on the lot, and they didn't try to negotiate, they just took the higher price, while I was negotiating. So by the time I got the lower price it had been sold. I ended up later buying a different car for a lot more money than even the sticker of the first car.

throwawaaarrghon New car buying guide: the algorithm (2021)

Almost all cars lose 20% of their value within first year of ownership. https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/how-to-beat-car-depreciation/

Go do a search for 2019 and 2020 Ford F150s or Toyota Tundras. They almost all list at half MSRP.

throwawaaarrghon New car buying guide: the algorithm (2021)

Not sure who needs to hear this, but you can buy a nearly new car used and save 1/3 to 1/2 of the cost. One big benefit is you let somebody else find out if new models are lemons. Another benefit is you don't need to haggle, as there will be many different options at different prices and you can quickly find out if the price is reasonable by checking KBB.

throwawaaarrghon Best Rain Jackets in the World Will Soon Be Illegal

Fwiw, for being outside in extended downpours, the best rain coverings are short ponchos and rain skirts. You stay dry but there's plenty of ventilation so you never get sweaty. I make them out of garbage bags. Only costs a few pennies, and is the most packable covering. Can even make gaiters. It'll never catch on because it's not fashionable, but that's fine with me.

throwawaaarrghon Hallucination is inevitable: An innate limitation of large language models

LLMs literally just place words one in front of another based on a probability and the "goodness" of training data. Of course it's going to make stuff up.

throwawaaarrghon Certain dogs are capable of learning the names for more than 100 different toys

Clicker training

throwawaaarrghon Certain dogs are capable of learning the names for more than 100 different toys

Everybody thinks their dog and/or child is a genius. But I've had a lot of dogs. Even within the same litter, some are bright, and some are dumber than a box of hammers. If your dog is smart, that's great, but your next one of the same breed might not be. Some individual dogs also don't take well to training, while others do. It's way more about the individual than the breed.

throwawaaarrghon Tyler Perry Puts $800M Studio Expansion on Hold After Seeing OpenAI's Sora

The only parts of movies or TV that this will be useful for is non-character-driven filler that doesn't move the plot along. It will be great for things like action scenes and car chases, or staring wistfully at the ocean. But they still need actors and a story, and to tie those together seamlessly with whatever is generated. We're very far away from doing that in a way that will look or feel good.

Special effects are nothing new. But we all know special effects don't make a good movie.

throwawaaarrghon I don't think the cheapest APC Back-UPS units can be monitored except in Windows

Doesn't that kind of prove they're messed up, if no other USB cable works?

throwawaaarrghon Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users

Occam's razor says it's none of those things. The simplest explanation is somebody just fat-fingered a change, which happened to coincide with a lot of other things to result in a big outage. Happens all the time.

throwawaaarrghon Scientists discover underlying cause of "brain fog" linked with Long Covid

Leaky brain. Well that's terrifying, how would one treat that?

throwawaaarrghon Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users

"A Verizon spokesman reached by CNBC said there was no issue with the Verizon network and their customers are only impacted if they try to reach out to the carrier experiencing the problem."

Sounds like only one had an outage

throwawaaarrghon Tech has graduated from the Star Trek era to the Douglas Adams age

What would you consider agency? The machines already decide for themselves what something is or isn't, and then tell a human, who might believe it or not. It's not really different than if a human made something up and told their superior.

Here's a case where we often just trust the machine, and how that ends up going: https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-algorithm...

throwawaaarrghon SSDs have become fast, except in the cloud

Yes, that's what their purpose is in cloud applications: temporary high performance storage only.

If you want long term local storage you'll have to reserve an instance host.

throwawaaarrghon SSDs have become fast, except in the cloud

Instance storage is not networked. That's why it's there.

throwawaaarrghon SSDs have become fast, except in the cloud

> SSDs in the cloud are attached over a network, and fundamentally have to be

SANs can still be quite fast, and instance storage is fast, both of which are available in cloud providers

throwawaaarrghon OpenAI Deal Lets Employees Sell Shares at $86B Valuation

I'm not sure when investors are going to get that tech bros are fleecing them for billions and not making anything that actually helps people or the world. It's like there's no adults in the room. Just bobble head monopoly men hoping if they give away enough cash, someone's problem will finally get solved. But I am little jealous that I'm not also getting rich on flash-in-the-pan tech startups.

throwawaaarrghon Fitness trackers find new symptom of depression: body temperature

I don't know if this is a wide phenomenon, but when I get angry or frustrated, my body temp skyrockets. I have to take off clothes I get hot so fast. Happens mostly when I'm working from home and getting pissed off at the computer.

throwawaaarrghon Why software 'security debt' is becoming a serious problem for developers

Lol, I haven't noticed software developers caring about security any more than they used to. 99% of them don't care, and 1% of them are responsible for 75% of secure code. Moreover, there is no consequence if they write insecure code, just like there's no consequence if they write unreliable code. They get the same paycheck regardless of the outcome.

throwawaaarrghon I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

Nothing! Confluence is literally just a Wiki with a REST API and a hundred plugins. You could replace it with a different Wiki, but that won't have as much useful plugins and won't be integrated with the other Atlassian products.

throwawaaarrghon I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

Terrible experience for anyone who isn't already a contributor to that repo.

Docs exist for people other than those that wrote them. The people that wrote them don't need to know the information, they already knew it.

throwawaaarrghon I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

The only valid reasons to hate Jira or Confluence are when you work for a company that has no governance structure for them. You do have to use the tools correctly for them to not suck. This is true of all tools.

When you learn how they are supposed to be used, and use them that way, they work really well. Sadly I have only met three people in my entire career who did so. Their job titles were scrum master, release manager, and project manager. They had to learn how to use the tools because that was their job.

And so they did. They could do literally anything we asked them to. They showed us all kinds of amazing things we didn't know we could do. All because they took a few hours of training and read the docs. That's when I learned that my own parroting of "I hate Jira" was just my own ignorance showing, and I grew up a bit. I really like Confluence now; I didn't even realize it was a Wiki before.

throwawaaarrghon Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

Do Duolingo users actually want to speak the language? Or just read it? Because it does the latter a bit, doesn't do the former.

throwawaaarrghon Show HN: Statusduck – Website monitoring tool where the data is public

You'd get quite a few false positives

throwawaaarrghon Why software engineers like woodworking (2021)

Code is a craft, woodwork is a craft. Woodwork is more logical than other crafts, and practical. You can easily spend all your time just futzing with tools without ever getting anything done, or you can churn out easy stuff that isn't interesting. Woodwork is actually a large variety of subcrafts and specialties, so many different people can find something they like about it.

throwawaaarrghon Why software engineers like woodworking (2021)

Most people end up doing carpentry/subcontracting to make ends meet. If you make very artistic or high concept pieces and can develop a following, that's a good way to make much better margins. A bit like selling paintings.

throwawaaarrghon Why software engineers like woodworking (2021)

Rock climbing isn't the new golf. There's no country club, it involves problem solving, there's nobody coming up to you to offer you drinks and snacks during the activity, you don't weight train for golf, CEOs don't take each other to a rad whipper to discuss a merger, there's no insane conspicuous wealth on display.

Tech douchebags will be tech douchebags no matter what sport they play. If you don't want to be branded a "techfuck", maybe move out of the bay area to where people don't care what you do for fun? Or stop caring if someone thinks you're a techfuck? Be yourself and let the people who don't understand you go away.