949 karma · joined September 26, 2018
https://forums.plex.tv/t/2026-20-0-beta-ios-and-tvos-4k-dovi...
Plex stopped working on any DoVi/HDR10 videos I have, and today I found this thread.
My photos and videos are the most important files I have in my self-hosted storage system. Being end-to-end encrypted buys some peace of mind knowing that it's not end of world if my homelab is compromised. And I can backup the data to whatever public clouds without worrying too much about leaking data.
If you have high level understanding of the tech behind it, this feels like a threat. But if you don't, this sounds like an honest message from someone who genuinely wants to protect you.
A regular user log into Google account and see their photos today. Tomorrow they log in and see the photos again. And they would assume this system will always work like this.
I was more surprised by how they managed to keep using work devices after termination. This sounds to me like a failure of their manager to do their job to follow the standard exit process.
So I don't think the disagreement is really about git. It's about how much of the thinking you're comfortable outsourcing. I do have some repos that's highly vibed up, in those repos I just let AI do whatever it want.
I couldn't remember what's the last time git got in my way. I guess such benefit from AI is probably very specific to their setup. I don't know, maybe the author had some really complex workflow or used some super advanced git features.
"Wouldn't it be nice if the water heater comes with hundreds of sensors monitoring each part and emit metrics? You can diagnose with historical data and see what was working and at what time which part showed anomaly". As a person doing SRE in my day job, this was what I had in my mind at the time.
I am not saying that I want spyware in all the appliances in my house. But if I am an appliance manufacturer, I would always want the capability to manage appliances just like how software engineers managing software lifecycles.
The reason you can comfortably say this is exactly because we orchestrate our society around what someone "could" do.
Operating a drone is not that easy, today. And killing someone has consequence most people don't want to face.
What if we enable every human to be able to kill someone anonymously by pressing a button?
But still, between the lines the blog seems to want to picture an imaginary AI agent that has somewhat predictable behavior ("if you do X with your agent, you will achieve outcome Y"), which is definitely wrong expectation.
But I want to admit that I was indeed shoehorning my rants about AI (not the technology itself, but how it is being adopted) into this topic. Let me stop steering the discussion further. I do think the fact that we could recover Herculaneum papyrus like this is amazing!
Every friend I asked about why they don't buy Apple TV, "I don't need TV apps" was the reason. Guess what, many of them still wanted smart home integrations so they brought smart home hubs from Google/Amazon or other vendors for not much lower price, even when they already use and like iPhone and other Apple devices.
> assuming nobody fell asleep on watch, the wood was dry, the fog cooperated, and the enemy hadn't already lit a fake beacon to mess with you.
So you are talking about dealing with "packet" loss and data encryption, right? Those concepts were not new to them.
But I think they would be more surprised by how we managed to invent things like social media and AI, which destroy our brain. Ancient societies valued wisdom much more than us and were much more careful when introducing new technologies. It was fascinating for me to learn that even writing, as a skill considered universally good these days, was once subjected to scrutiny[1].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_unwritten_doctrines#...
But if someone wrote a blog to brag about not using k8s, they can't stop people from wanting to compare their work against k8s. If there's any arrogance in the air, it feels stronger on the other side.
Off top of my head, besides all the UI/UX glitches:
- They once allowed a human employee to access static AWS root access key.
- Their employee once claimed "remote access" was end to end encrypted, but later people figured out they probably just meant TLS in transit.
- They had a configuration error that allowed some users to access other users' camera feeds. They corrected the error, but never explained how the hell was it even possible or if they made any architecture design change to prevent that from happening again.
Now, ZFS is nice. But even after years of iterations, I still need to do 50% of my operations via SSH on my Truenas system. I can't imagine Ubiquiti to do any better
Personally, I think the complexity is on the same level.
And if you can do this again, what's your solution to reverse proxy, certificate management, DNS...etc? I guess you can docker-compose some custom stack on a single machine, maybe add one more machine then you can say it's HA enough for small scale. But you can also spend the same amount of time to install those kubernetes controllers with zero customization. In my experience, if you go with the default configuration, most of the well-maintained k8s components are boring as hell these days.
> (if you’re on EKS, make sure to read about scaling and monitoring CoreDNS)
If load to your service increases, you need to scale up/out your service. This is universally true. Do you have a proprietary solution that's easier and more reliable than bumping up the replicas count in kubernetes?
There are lots of design decisions in Kubernetes that I hate. But if you want me to choose between Kubernetes and any proprietary stack, in 2026, I would definitely choose Kubernetes.
Completing each individual programming task is easy. Engineering the system in a sustainable way that changes can be traced, understood and reasoned about is difficult.
The problem is, as many other comments have pointed out, typically the business doesn't value this.
This is how I have been doing SRE for the past decade. And the inability to practice this under-the-hood reasoning is the main reason why I don't trust any modern AI based automation systems. They are helpers for some manual work, but they can't be automation.
All my automation shortcuts can be easily explained in pseudo code under 5 minutes, but it took me ages to put them together because that weird UI/UX forcing me to drag-and-drop squares around to manipulate data structures. Programmers hate it, non-programmers can't understand it, it is not designed for anybody.
People need to be responsible for code they commit and push anyways. This has never changed. Whether the code is written by hand, by their cat walking over keyboard, or by AI, is not my concern.
A project's code quality can decline for all kinds of reasons. I don't think it's productive to laser-focus on whether it's produced by AI or not. That's a distraction. If a person just want to find excuse to criticize AI, and another person wants to fight back and defend AI, sure, go for it. But that's not how you would want to assess a project's code quality.
On the other hand, if I live in 150 years ago where telephone had not been invented, I may never make such decision to live so far away from my parents at all.
"Technology giveth and technology taketh away"
That's good. I don't want a single company to control everything in my house. Having multiple vendors with different implementations is healthy for the industry.
The real problem is there's nothing "smart" about those "smart home devices" to begin with. They are just remotely controlled devices. Technically, someone or something still has to control them because these devices can't really make decisions on their own. And then, to make those decisions remotely (either in the cloud or in a home local controller), every home installation needs to be highly customized. There are several light switches in my house that I never need to touch -- their states are automatically shifted based on like ~15 conditions: time of day, light conditions, occupancy, human activities(iOS focus modes). Non technical people can't do that.
I would want those devices to make simple decisions on their own (I have a few "dumb" light switches with motion+light sensors and they are pretty good already), and for complex decisions, they expose some APIs for other devices/controllers to call. Matter seems to be the right direction, but it is still controlled by a handful powerful players.