> There's an (increasingly small) group of software developers who don't like "magic" and want to understand where their code is running and what it's doing. These developers gravitate toward open source solutions like Kubernetes
Kubernetes is not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of "understanding where their code is running and what it's doing"...
The people radicalized to these actions are trying to destroy the government. They haven't been especially subtle about it in their writing. The ideal outcome is not the same government outcomes but at 70% of the cost. The ideal outcome is the collapse of the federal bureaucracy so that the lords of capital can scoop things up and create their little kingdoms.
Most in-house game engines built after a certain point use a non-trivial amount of third party code, including console stuff which is under strict NDA, so it's a huge hassle to open source them. Most iterations of the Source engine use Havok physics for example.
IdTech probably was only open sourced because Carmack pushed for it, but it helps that IdTech of that vintage was all in-house code exclusively targeting the PC. I think the only thing they had to cut out for legal reasons was the patented shadowing algorithm in Doom 3.
> The biggest problem: developers don’t want GPUs. They don’t even want AI/ML models. They want LLMs. System engineers may have smart, fussy opinions on how to get their models loaded with CUDA, and what the best GPU is. But software developers don’t care about any of that. When a software developer shipping an app comes looking for a way for their app to deliver prompts to an LLM, you can’t just give them a GPU.
I'm increasingly coming to the view that there is a big split among "software developers" and AI is exacerbating it. There's an (increasingly small) group of software developers who don't like "magic" and want to understand where their code is running and what it's doing. These developers gravitate toward open source solutions like Kubernetes, and often just want to rent a VPS or at most a managed K8s solution. The other group (increasingly large) just wants to `git push` and be done with it, and they're willing to spend a lot of (usually their employer's) money to have that experience. They don't want to have to understand DNS, linux, or anything else beyond whatever framework they are using.
A company like fly.io absolutely appeals to the latter. GPU instances at this point are very much appealing to the former. I think you have to treat these two markets very differently from a marketing and product perspective. Even though they both write code, they are otherwise radically different. You can sell the latter group a lot of abstractions and automations without them needing to know any details, but the former group will care very much about the details.
As someone who once built a large coop [1] then just bought a pre-built shed for the 2nd coop, it's definitely _not_ the _monetary_ solution. You will probably lose money overall for quite some time. I'm still probably underwater.
BUT, there are definite upsides:
- Chickens are very sweet animals, and are quite intelligent. You will grow to love all the silly things they do. You can pet them, they are super soft, and can become quite tame. They can purr.
- I'm told the eggs taste way better, I don't really notice it because I really only eat my own eggs, but perhaps I just got used to them
- It's fantastic to get ~8 free eggs per day (from 13, 3 are not laying this winter)
- Morally/ethically, it seems like the best way to eat eggs if you're caring for them in a loving manner (compare to factory farms)
Consider the downsides:
- You may have to euthanize a chicken, likely by hand (literally) via cervical dislocation. It still ranks among the worst things I've ever had to do in my life. Imagine euthanizing your dog or cat by hand...
- Predators, foxes and hawks, you need defenses
- Veterinary services can be harder to find. Most vets don't want to deal with chickens. However, it also tends to be cheaper than a vet for a dog/cat.
- Your wife may one day want a chicken to live inside the house. You may one day agree to this, and then miss it when the chicken is living outside the house again...
- If you really like eating chicken, you may end up finding it difficult to eat them again in the future after you develop a bond with them.
I think there are more upsides than downsides, but you should think about these downsides before taking the plunge. Don't let it dissuade you. Overall, they have enriched our lives immensely and I would recommend it to others!
I found this title confusing. For those who didn't make it toward the end of the article: the leaked emails didn't cost them anything (except their time and ingenuity), and they received 10k as the bug bounty.
First of all, I wholeheartedly applaud Marcan for carrying the project this far. They, both as individuals and as a team proper, did great things. What I can say is a rest is well deserved at this point, because he really poured his soul into this and worn himself down.
On the other hand, I'll need to say something, however not in bad faith. He needs to stop fighting with the winds he can't control. Users gonna be users, and people gonna be people. Everyone won't be happy, never ever. Even you integrate from applications to silicon level, not everyone is happy what Apple has accomplished technically. Even though Linux is making the world go on, we have seen friction now and then (tipping my hat to another thing he just went through), so he need to improve his soft skills.
Make no mistake, I'm not making this comment from high above. I was extremely bad at it, and I was bullied online and offline for a decade, and it didn't help to be on the right side of the argument, either. So, I understand how it feels and how he's heartbroken and fuming right now, and rightly so. However, humans are not an exact science, and learning to work together with people with strong technical chops is a literal superpower.
I wish Hector a speedy recovery, a good rest and a bright future. I want to finish with the opening page of Joel Spolsky's "Joel on Software":
Worth noting that the U.S. Digital Service (USDS, i.e the org that DOGE has now subsumed) has for a long while been experts at building and deploying static websites for the federal government. And doing it completely in the open. Within minutes you can literally clone and re-deploy all of httsp://usds.gov — 150MB of 2,700 assets and documents, built on Jekyll — locally or on S3. They've even written out the complete deployment instructions:
Because there are bigger fish to fry, I think people don’t appreciate the sheer cost of the system rebuild that will be required for security reasons later.
There’s absolutely no telling what additional software has been installed alongside existing, or which systems have been modified that would require audit. Purging this will be an absolute fucking nightmare to the American taxpayer.
This may turn into one of the most significant IT incidents in world history.
> A few days ago, I was prompted to verify my phone number by Google. Immediately after completing the verification, I received an email notifying me that Google had overwritten all my personal information. It turns out that because my mom is the one paying the phone bill, they automatically "verified" the name on my account to be hers and updated everything on my account without my consent.
It sounds like someone at Google (not necessarily a programmer) needs to read "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers:"
> 4. A phone number uniquely identifies an individual
In general, people are going to interpret this EO with their own lens. Unsurprisingly, reasonable people may disagree on the merits of the EO as a whole.
However this part of the EO is pretty concerning
> 'The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch'
and later
> 'No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law'
This can potentially enable an end run around congress and the courts in that the President can easily choose to interpret laws in a manner inconsistent with the intent of congress and courts. Now, we can argue the point and say that presidents have already done so in the past and that congress/courts should have been more specific. However it quickly gets into the issue of the impossibility of congress or the courts anticipating and specifying every detail to avoid a 'hostile' interpretation.
This part of the EO says the president's opinion is the law as far as the executive branch is concerned. Given that the executive branch implements the law, this would imply that the president's interpretation is all that matters. The other two branches have no real role left to play. Given the supreme court's ruling on presidential immunity, this is a dangerous level of power concentration.
Even if you support the current president's goals and objectives, setting up the president as the sole power center is an inherently unstable system. Nothing prevents the next president from having a radically different opinion. There is a very good reason why the founding fathers built in an elaborate system of checks and balances.
This is planned, and important, and we'll fix it hopefully soon, it's long overdue. I'm sorry this hasn't happened yet, it's always a game of priorities that can never satisfy everybody on time. It however ranks fairly high on my personal list.
As one could imagine it's a bit (read: a lot) more complicated than just pausing the AudioContext after some time of silence, but we'll get it fixed regardless, it's possible because others did it. There are tradeoffs we're willing to do.
Source: Firefox implementer of a lot of things around this, editor of the Web Audio API standard.
This is good for modding but don't be misled, this is the TF2-specific code which sits on top of the still-closed-source Source engine. For example you couldn't port TF2 to a new platform with this, at least not without reimplementing Source or wrangling it into working with one of the leaked Source codebases and dealing with the legal fallout of that.
Anyone who isn't aware of this is either
- Lying.
- Paid by the oil industry.
- Tricked by the oil industry.
All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor.
We continue to see companies and politicians claiming it's feasible and will help us become "green". We should call them out on their shit. If we had the renewable power budget to use proper carbon capture on a large scale, we would already have a fully green grid.
---
Well... There are other methods than reversing c02 back into carbon chains.
Capture of CO2 and storage as CO2, mostly in compressed gas form in underground, has been proposed by a lot of companies. This is a logistical nightmare that has to be kept up for forever. Better keep that pressure chamber leakproof for 1000 years with likely upkeep. (setting aside how inefficiently that actually stores the carbon even if grabbing it from the air was free)
Ideas to shove c02 air bubbles in concrete are promising but barely enough to offset the c02 generated from creating the concrete itself.
One promising approach is to grow plants and turn them into charcoal. Charcoal is great for keeping fertilizer in the soil so that we can spread it over crop fields for a small increase in yield. Napkin maths on that makes it just require about Australia of farmland (if I remember) to offset the world's CO2 emissions. Almost feasible. (bamboo, algae, and sunflowers seem to be the highest biomass generators, but perhaps a slower crop that can handle worse climate is preferable)
But these are still worse plans than just building a green grid.
Marcan links to an email by Ted Tso'o (https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250208204416.GL1130956@mit.ed...) that is interesting to read. Although it starts on a polarising note ("thin blue line"), it does a good job of explaining the difficulties that Linux maintainers face and why they make the choices they do.
It makes sense to be extremely adversarial about accepting code because they're on the hook for maintaining it after that. They have maximum leverage at review time, and 0 leverage after. It also makes sense to relax that attitude for someone in the old boys' network because you know they'll help maintain it in the future. So far so good. A really good look into his perspective.
And then he can't help himself. After being so reasonable, he throws shade on Rust. Shade that is just unfortunately, just false?
- "an upstream language
community which refuses to make any kind of backwards compatibility
guarantees" -> Rust has a stability guarantee since 1.0 in 2015. Any backwards incompatibilities are explicitly opt-in through the edition system, or fixing a compiler bug.
- "which is actively hostile to a second Rust compiler
implementation" - except that isn't true? Here's the maintainer on the gccrs project (a second Rust compiler implementation), posting on the official Rust Blog -> "The amount of help we have received from Rust folks is great, and we think gccrs can be an interesting project for a wide range of users." (https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/11/07/gccrs-an-alternative-c...)
This is par for the course I guess, and what exhausts folks like marcan. I wouldn't want to work with someone like Ted Tso'o, who clearly has a penchant for flame wars and isn't interested in being truthful.
I was really swept up in this article and the portrait of Amanda Barrows - what a unique and strong person and this city is incredibly lucky to have her.
Unlike some here, I came away with a deep sense of empathy, and today’s HN snark and frustration bounced off me pretty hard. The public order issues - homelessness in parks, the challenges of shared spaces—have certainly impacted me. But more than that, I struggle with how to translate the state of the world to my boys. I always remind them: every unhoused person was once a little boy or girl. We might be older now, but we’re still kids inside, and nobody dreams of growing up in these circumstances.
What struck me most was the balance of compassion and pragmatism that Amanda brings to her work. It’s easy to be frustrated with the policies and bureaucratic inefficiencies that slow down real solutions - but they are, in some ways, understandable.
The biggest frustration for me is the gap between the mental state of many unhoused individuals and the requirements needed to secure housing. The city surely understands the long-term costs of its policies, and it’s run by highly pragmatic people with limited budgets. But rules are rules, and at some point, top-down accommodations (including medical interventions...) are necessary to bridge this gap.
Remember the Arab Spring and how Twitter was hailed as a tool for the masses to fight against their oppressors? And remember how Elon bought Twitter, loudly proclaiming he was doing so to defend free speech?
I'm mildly curious to see how X tries to justify this, but I suspect they've reached the stage where they don't even need to pretend to pay lip service to their notional values.
> But then also came the entitled users. This time, it wasn’t about stealing games, it was about features. “When is Thunderbolt coming?” “Asahi is useless to me until I can use monitors over USB-C” “The battery life sucks compared to macOS” (nobody ever complained when compared to x86 laptops…) “I can’t even check my CPU temperature” (yes, I seriously got that one).
This sounds so rough. I can't imagine pouring your heart out into this labor of love and continue to have to face something like this. Back in the early days of Quora, when it used to be good, there used to be a be nice be respectful policy (they might still have it), I wonder if something like that would be helpful for open source community engagement.
Regardless, major props to Marcan for doing the great work that he did, our community is lucky to have people like him!
All I know, is if I was worth $200B and owned the island of Lanai, you would never hear from me again. Ellison, Musk, Zuckerberg and the rest of these weirdos are deeply damaged human beings.
Tariffs are a tax on the low and middle class. Upper income people will be fine with a 10-25% increase in cost of things they purchase. Regular income taxes are progressive. Tariffs are not.
There is a reason why rich prefer tariffs over a progressive income tax.
I'm reminded of the story of the Air Force designing cockpits for the "average" pilot, only to find that
> out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all 10 dimensions [0]
Surely, there are so many employees in general that probationary employees aren't needed. And surely, most government employees don't need to purchase things on a daily basis, so we can inhibit their credit card use. And most contracts about XYZ aren't crucial, so we can cancel them.
But, my goodness, there is so much nuance and breadth to the things a government does, let alone the government that is responsible for the largest military and that props up a big part of the world economy, that compounding these rash decisions will have far-reaching and serious blowback. I'm all about efficiency, but why be stupid about it?
The plane that we're all on is being dismantled midair, the engines have been turned off, and we're just gliding now. Gliding or falling, anyway
This new administration lays bare what we've known all along - the legislative gridlock and dysfunction in the house of representatives and senate has made them completely incapable of governing -- the least productive in a generation.
This is opened up an opportunity for a well funded strongman, and the checks and balances that were intended to protect our democracy are now mere suggestions.
As an embedded engineer in a new position I always volunteer to take up an old crusty legacy product that nobody else wants to touch. It's a quick education into how the company approaches projects and all the ghosts they had to fight along the way. All the business logic is there, and sometimes it's even documented.
And once you have a semblance of knowledge about how the thing works and how to make fixes, you've built a small moat around your career there.
For some reason quite a number of people seem to believe the purpoted goals of DOGE, removing waste and increasing efficiency of the government.
I can't really understand that as it seems obvious to me that they're just destroying parts of the government they don't like. And while there is certainly room for improvement in many areas, whatever they're doing is not going to improve anything, it's only destruction.
Kobo are giving you root access with telnet from the start. You can flash modded firmwares, change the backend servers to phone your own calibre-web instance, install ssh, koreader and even a tailscale vpn on it. They even have UART pins labelled on their board. These are amazing devices to play with. And they read pretty much everything you throw on their storage: epub, cbz, cbr, pdf..
This EO, combined with his proclamation that "He who saves the country does not violate any law" paint a very concerning picture. This has, historically speaking, been the language of tyrants. No President is above the law, nor does the President "interpret" the law; that is the domain of the Judiciary.
On top of that, Musk said he "deleted"[1] 18F, which built out the IRS direct file system (online tax filing is an area where the US lags far behind other countries).
This is a moral crusade carried out under the auspices of a tech overhaul of government operations.
Dumbest change ever. The employee charge cards are there to get rid of red tape. Now workers will have to spend $100 of their time filling out forms to buy $50 worth of office supplies.
Kubernetes is not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of "understanding where their code is running and what it's doing"...