everforward

I also work in the space.

I think you’d be surprised if you look at the younger (post-2000-ish) companies. Specifically about this part:

> If you run simple workloads, it’s probably not necessary but then you’ll probably be paid for that.

You would be surprised how many workloads either are simple, or can be ham-fistedly shoved into a “simple” architecture.

Eg I’ve seen a lot of Postgres-on-k8s solutions that are basically just Postgres on bare metal with a bunch of useless abstractions. It writes to local disk, moving the pod to a new host is basically restoring from backup. Wrap it in some tool that ingests YAML and call it a day.

k8s is sort of the king of this. I hear people say they understand k8s and I can’t help but furrow my eyebrows. I don’t even pretend to, there are so many insanely complicated edge cases.

Eg if I’m sending UDP packets to a service and scale the deployment from 2 pods to 4 and the host for one of the new pods crashes and comes back up with a bad iptables rule, what are the range of potential behaviors k8s would show? What’s the difference between blocking say all traffic vs only traffic to one or two of the etcd instances? What if it’s blocking half the hosts in the cluster?

Storage has its own weird vagaries around single vs multi mounts and race conditions therein.

k8s is the king of “I don’t have to know that, the platform will do it”. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone outside networking talk about whether a pod will saturate a NIC. Just chuck it in the cloud and let it figure itself out.

I’m personally using it to augment my coding more than replace it. I find joy in it.

I use my agent to prototype a rough version that mostly works, and then I iterate through (with or without my LLM) to clean it up. Then back to the top with a new feature until I’m satisfied with the project and code.

I do tend to like it. My real selling point is that I’m not “locked in” to any choices until I’m happy with how it looks. I used to have to build the thing to see how it looks and acts, and going back on those choices was painful.

I do think there will be value in it, but I’ve been wrong before. My agent occasionally makes stupid choices that make every prompt after that 4x as hard to fix. Like I screwed up a pydantic model in an unreleased library and it supported a “legacy” path no one would ever use for like the next 5k LoC. By the time I noticed, legacy handlers were like 25% of the codebase.

That’s gonna burn a looot of tokens if you scale it up to a million line of code app.

That’s what companies hire for. I’ve learned those skills and no one ever really wants them.

If you build tools with that context, they’ll have to replace you with someone that has that context. There’s few of them, and they’re expensive.

It’s easier to hire folks that should be interns or juniors that know that one tool, and then replace the whole department every decade.

It’s why everything is YAML now, despite it being horribly verbose and clunky. Can’t have our people needing to know how load balancing works, just add another 95 lines of YAML boilerplate so they don’t need to learn 5 lines of nginx config.

Coming from the Ops side, “full stack” usually translates to “our entire infrastructure stack is managed AWS services, we don’t know how they work”.

It turns out about as well as if you set the Ops team to shipping features.

Eg I’ve seen more than one full stack dev team build a synchronous RPC-over-message-bus framework because they can’t figure out how to make HTTP or actual RPC calls reliable. It is hands down the most poorly and overengineered thing I have ever seen on a service that takes single digit qps.

The ops teams fight that shit tooth and nail because if it blows up, they’re the ones who get called. And it is 100% too late to fix it by then. Ripping it out will take months, and the dev team will say they’ll do it, but they never will because the VP is leaning on them about some feature.

You either say no early, or you are forever on the hook for whatever abomination the intern has cooked up.

I don’t disagree there are people doing good things, but they’re doing them for bad people. Doing good things for an evil dictator doesn’t remove that they were done for an evil dictator.

Also, practically and sadly, they’re precisely the people you’d lean on when you want change because they’re more likely to funnel that pressure upwards in the form of quitting or demanding raises. The ICE folks are “true believers” and I suspect their faculties are immune to the power of logic.

It seems reasonable to me to ask, since otherwise they have no way to ask you to stop breaking the site.

There are better ways to do this, they just haven’t been built yet.

Eg this may not need actual contact info. Wikipedia just wants a way to ask you to stop. Anthropic could add an opaque agent/session identifier that Wikipedia could flag, and Anthropic just forwards that on to you in the UI.

If you don’t have free text fields it’s usually not super useful for spam. There are ways to get a binary “good/bad” signal back without that though.

That’s why esp-idf has components. I have a bunch of components that are basically “compile if this SDK config is set, otherwise pretend you’re an empty file” using macros.

Then I just pull in all my components. The ones I use will get compiled, the ones I don’t won’t.

Mostly works fine. Eventually you will run out of NVRAM to save binaries on, but another esp-32 is like $3.

I’ve said this other places but an x64 processor is probably better value these days unless you need video and GPIOs on the same device for some reason.

Even then, you can get a USB to GPIO adapter. I don’t use RPis much these days and it’s kind of a shame because RPi + Python usually has a quicker dev loop than C + esp-idf. I need 5 of some of them though, and I’m not buying a dozen RPis these days.

My not is that having a slant is perfectly acceptable, having tech companies so large that their comment policies affect the Overton Window isn’t.

I don’t have to care if the Washington Post or Financial Times have a political leaning, there are alternatives. Less so with Instagram. You can pry Facebook out of my mothers dead hands when that day comes.

Agreed, but it's worth calling out that some niches more or less require resin.

Anything small and aesthetic is going to basically require resin. Warhammer minis and jewelry (tiny filigree) come to mind.

FDMs have gotten better, but you're still not going to get those fine sub-millimeter details like you can with resin.

A lot of the extant harnesses are built around interaction, which adds a bunch of complexity.

Eg an agent that only runs off a webhook trigger doesn’t have a use for all the UI stuff Pi does (and you may not want the local state like Pi does by default).

I’m still sort of with you, I’d generally do ACP to an open source agent. You do get much finer grained control if you use one of these agent SDKs (there’s a bajillion of these as well).