zzyzxd · HackerTrans

قبل 22 ساعةdiscuss

Those people are designers. And they don't necessarily understand software, data, or security. When I explained to my non-technical friends about how they were being tracked by website cookies, it sounded like a sci fi story to them. But yes, it's dumb.

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.

zzyzxd

أمسdiscuss

In my experience, those operations require understanding, judgement, and taste. But all of that only matters if I care about the codebase enough for it to matter.

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.

zzyzxd

أمسdiscuss

The author had 27 years of experience but still found "babysitting git" was painful.

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.

zzyzxd

أول أمسdiscuss

My water heater once emitted a cryptic warning light. I called a local contractor, the person came and spent 10 seconds inspected the appliance, then start dialing the appliance vendor's support number. Support asked him to press some buttons in a fixed sequence and the tiny display on the water heater showed an error code. Support said "yeah, that means part X is not working, but we don't know why" and the solution was replacing that part entirely.

"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.

zzyzxd

قبل 12 يومًاdiscuss

I think the blog post's target audience were people who already embraced vibe coding. It's not for you (or for me).

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.

zzyzxd

قبل 15 يومًاdiscuss

That's my point. It's not about the technology itself, because that's never cut and dry. It's about having a process to evaluate and criticize a technology before fully embracing it. Socrates was in a position with loud voice. Critics of technology exist today too, but they aren't loud enough. Instead, there's a far stronger force coming from private companies and their investors to push whatever they want onto us.

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!

zzyzxd

قبل 16 يومًاdiscuss

It's a thread border router and matter controller, providing Remote access to local-only devices, scheduling, automation... with better track records on security and privacy than competitors.

zzyzxd

قبل 16 يومًاdiscuss

I think nowadays the Apple TV is more about smart home than TV. But as long as they keep calling it a "TV", most of the people will compare it with the built-in apps in their smart TVs and think it's unnecessary. Even if you tell them that it can do much more than watching TV, they will think the money they spend on the TV related functionalities is a waste. The old price was already hard for them to justify, the new price is almost impossible.

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.

zzyzxd

قبل 16 يومًاdiscuss

Well I didn't say it was achievable at the time. But is it really that unimaginable?

> 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.

zzyzxd

قبل 16 يومًاdiscuss

They already learned to use light and fire to transfer data over long distance. How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable?

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#...

zzyzxd

قبل 17 يومًاdiscuss

It's totally fine to not to use k8s. Personally, I think I have made several good decisions in my career to use/avoid k8s in different scenarios.

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.

zzyzxd

قبل 17 يومًاdiscuss

If this creation stays as is, then it's not very complicated and pretty easy to understand and support. But that is a big IF, and very likely won't be true. Over time people will add more useful features to it, then it becomes another Kubernetes (and if you don't have a strong engineering team, it will probably be much worse than Kubernetes).

zzyzxd

قبل 23 يومًاdiscuss

The biggest concern about Ubiquiti to me is still its software/infrastructure quality.

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

zzyzxd

قبل 26 يومًاdiscuss

I totally believe this works for you. But in your case, isn't NixOS just another declarative orchestration system like Kubernetes? Similarly I can just run a standalone nginx, caddy with acme, and a coredns pod in a bare minimum k8s cluster.

Personally, I think the complexity is on the same level.

zzyzxd

قبل 26 يومًاdiscuss

> One thing that I think people new to it don’t realize is that it’s not at all batteries included - to get a basic managed cluster setup, you’re still going to be installing a bunch of additional controllers (ingress, cert-manager, external dns to start).

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.

zzyzxd

الشهر الماضيdiscuss

IMO that is not a rockstar developer, but a junior developer rocking LLM agents.

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.

zzyzxd

الشهر الماضيdiscuss

Automation should always be the serialization of understanding of the system, which can execute on its own under normal conditions. When it breaks, your reaction should not be removing the automation and asking humans to get back to manual operation, that is the wrong approach. Instead, you should ask humans to leverage their understanding to step in, reason about the automation system, and fix it.

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.

zzyzxd

الشهر الماضيdiscuss

If they are ok with shortcuts being vibecoded, maybe it's time to expose a proper programming language to the end users as well.

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.

zzyzxd

الشهر الماضيdiscuss

I never care about AI usage disclosure, because I don't believe that human produced code is necessarily better than AI produced code, unless it's someone I personally know.

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.

zzyzxd

الشهر الماضيdiscuss

It would be nice if I could talk to my parents in person everyday, feeling their touches and temperature. But we live in different countries, so instead I talk to them over FaceTime everyday. TBH, even if they live next door, I may not always find time to visit them everyday. So having a way to use a device in my pocket to talk to them is nice. It's a compromise I accept.

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"