stego-tech

Lehman failed because of the 2008 crisis; its failure did not cause or precipitate it. Even Wikipedia lays it out in the opening summary (emphasis mine):

> “A liquidity crisis spread to global institutions by mid-2007 and climaxed with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008…”

Letting Lehamn fail was the right call, because it allowed the Fed to bulldoze TARP through and save the wider economy as a result. If anything, I would say the subsequent bailouts were too generous in letting the companies retain controls and returns; the government should’ve kept a permanent, partially-nationalized control of those shares and added them to a sovereign wealth fund instead of selling them back on the market. “You fucked up so bad the entire system almost failed, so clearly you cannot be trusted to self-govern” should’ve been the unambiguous messaging from the Fed.

Fully support it. We’ve had a moral hazard in the USA for half a century with constant bailouts for speculation and gambling by businesses.

We must let them fail, no matter how many jobs it costs, no matter what the harm looks like in the short term, to send a clear and unambiguous signal to others that the government won’t backstop your shitty bets.

The people who understood the Culture utopia novels best are, ironically, some of the fiercest opponents of modern AI precisely because this take of “infinite vacation” keeps getting repeated ad nauseam, and they know better.

The Culture still had businesses, they just didn’t have to turn a profit or operate on fixed schedules. They still had soldiers, diplomats, traders, workers, teachers, scientists, researchers.

The difference was that the exchange was on their terms, generally. They wanted to do this, money be damned. So they opened a bar, or taught youth, or explored the universe, or fought to protect the society so dear to them.

The utopia wasn’t because people didn’t have to work anymore; it was a utopia because people didn’t have to work to survive anymore.

That made all the difference.

Dude, all I want is a private and secure email provider. That’s it. That’s what I pay for.

Everything else - and I mean everything else - is ancillary to that core function. Seeing a CEO openly throw security out the window in favor of Big Tech’s latest drug addiction is bad enough, but the CEO of a company whose entire reputation is bucking Big Tech? Inexcusable.

Already looking for exit strategies. I don’t want to give this prick one red cent of my money.

Excellent read, equipped me with a better way to describe my own skills as an IT Owner rather than an IT Generalist. Also puts better wording around what I’ve been experiencing with local AI models of late via Hermes.

For what it’s worth, I think OP hit the nail on the head for you software devs out there in terms of post-AI changes: sure, specialists who can maintain total comprehensive and detailed knowledge of a single system’s codebase will always be in some demand, but the true generalists (who never do dives) and T-shaped (who never specialize enough) are arguably better replaced with AI in many corporate cases. Those in a position to succeed under AI are the owners who do deep dives on-demand to learn or fix things (hi!) or the T-shaped workers willing to start going on more deep dives.

It’s very similar to the reward structure of the IT industry since outsourcing and visa exploitations became the norm: nobody really has immense in-depth specialty experience in a single system, because that track isn’t often needed in work environments. Rather, specialists often end up leading departments while owners lead companies for the same sorts of reasons the author laid out: fundamentals, breadth, and on-demand depth. It’s more valuable in the marketplace knowing how to migrate off VMware to another hypervisor while also being able to fumble-write the new API calls for your sludge pipe to deploy into the new environment and also supporting the identity/collaboration/SSO stack than it is to just be an Okta or VMware guy specifically.

It also means leveraging AI effectively on-device makes you (or me, in this case) that much more valuable, because I don’t need a Claude or OpenAI or Gemini sub to “work”, I just need compute (which is cheap and plentiful). Because I’ve gone on these deep dives before, I know how to steer my agents to solutions that are adapted to product changes (like a recent Mac keychain issue); the same would apply to software devs who have plumbed problems directly when they could rather than sloughed off blindly to the agents.

Thanks for the write-up. It’s nice seeing the topic written about from the lived-in middle as opposed to the extremes.

Please, please do not trust a chatbot in emergencies. There’s a reason why actual survival and emergency preparedness guides include manuals rather than recommend you just use a chatbot: practicality.

Just look at those specs needed for accurate-ish results. You really think your 128GB Mac Studio or Framework desktop is going to be able to work in a real emergency situation? Even if it is, how long will it last? What about those precious seconds waiting for inference?

The danger here is less hallucinations and more, well, everything else about it. Instead of setting this up, take the time to make sure you have a restocked first aid kit and enough water for a week of use by your household. Stock up on meds and non-perishable food. Plan exit strategies and contingencies. Acquire and store little first aid booklets or manuals of common survival tasks in physical form (or hell, throw onto an eReader - infinitely more battery life than an LLM host in an emergency).

This is one of those “sounds good in my head” projects that folks with emergency experience would bristle at. This is a hindrance, not a helper.

The iMac continues to be an aesthetically pleasing machine I sorely want for my space, yet one I cannot justify because of its anemic innards relative to my desired use cases.

It’s just a really good looking computer, especially with the accessories. Give me one with an M6 Pro and a 128GB memory cap, and they can take my money as I move my homelab and AI compute onto it.

To be clear to the author and everyone else: AI never promised less work, or a better society. Those promises were made by humans with a storied history of misdirection, misinformation, and outright lies, and those same humans have intentionally refused or failed to deliver on those promises because, well, why would they? You bought into their scheme, they got their politicians in their pockets, they have outsized influence in society, and they have blank checks to basically do as they please written by some of the worst humans society has minted.

The doom was never about the tools, it was always about the shitty humans shoving it down our throats to their own benefit.

I mean, I’m not really surprised by the outcome given that humanity has consistently loathed its own failures and the recent corpus of human interaction (social media, internet forums, etc) has an overwhelmingly negative view of our fellow man.

AI is trained on our data. Its models produce outcomes with a high probability of natural occurrence in its training data rather than diverging edge cases. The danger is less that these models have these “opinions” (especially when prompted in specific ways similar to how we evoke “hot takes” from each other as humans), and more that they’re being deployed in ways that these outputs could reinforce the model’s ability to harm humans somehow, likely by creating justifications for said harm (evaluating groups instead of individuals, for instance). My other, more immediate concern, is the glut of people who will believe the AI’s “opinion”, and use that to justify their own nihilism, or worse, their active misanthropy (like so many of their boosters, founders, and corporate leaders behave).

The machines aren’t the problem here, so much as the humans misusing them. Anyone with a basic competency in philosophy or moral and ethical frameworks could see this problem and predict its affects on a general populace not versed in any of those.

While I love the post, I just kinda have to lol that it all ends up back where we started with ext4 atop a block device.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Now look, I’m not about to try and stop folks from finding new ways of solving problems, especially in infrastructure. Far from it, I love seeing what you beautiful diamonds come up with that works for you. They make for amazing reads!

Except 99.999% of infrastructure needs to be boring, bland, basic, and bulletproof. Most Infra folks will take the minor inefficiencies associated with object storage because we’re not a unicorn startup where solving such a problem could save us millions of dollars a year in write calls to our hypercloud provider; we’re far too busy trying to get our internal customers to stop overscheduling VMs or implement the latest executive shiny project. We need our underlying abstractions - hypervisors, storage arrays, network cores - to work, without fuss and with minimal maintenance.

So while it’s super neat that Fly.io has shared this, and they absolutely have a relevant and beneficial use case for reinventing the proverbial wheel, it’s important to note they are the edge case, not the norm.

I disagree with your disagreements.

World leaders influence planetary agendas and ideals on a daily basis, deciding who lives and dies with the flourish of a pen or the screed of a late-night tweet. That doesn’t even touch the random encounters online or in person that irreparably change who we grow into as people and the decisions we make that affect others. In fact, it has never been easier for any single person to have an impact across the planet, even if it’s as small as one-on-one.

I also vehemently disagree with happiness being infinite on a single-planet species. We have finite resources, finite materials, and finite people, all with finite time. Infinite cannot emerge from the finite, though we often mistake vast expanses as infinite because we cannot calculate or visualize limits for ourselves. It is not physically possible for everyone on the planet to live like the richest Americans, in palatial estates with private jets and dedicated servants, and therefore (material) happiness is finite and must be budgeted and balanced. In that sense, instilling a sense of “enough” in children and adults both is crucial to the balancing of our species and maximizing happiness.

Said folks about the telegraph to letter carriers, about the radio to live performers, about the television to radio personalities, about the internet to all manner of companies.

You lot keep parroting the same schlock generation after generation because you hope it’s true, and yet you’re dim enough to conflate work and labor with somehow being optional to existence.

My god, man, read a book. Go outside, pursue a passion with the fire in your heart, do something with your time beyond merely pursuing empty luxuries and a hollow life of non-existence. Nothing you say to me can convince me that this time, this invention, will finally be the one that destroys work and enables utopia, because to remove humanity from existence - be it in labor, or work, or passion of pursuit - is a utopia for nobody but those cretins who abhor their fellow humans.

If I were to distill my educational opinions into a soundbite, it would sound very similar to the rule of happiness on submarines:

“Teach them to create more happiness than they destroy, for others as much as themselves. For we are a finite planet, with nowhere else to go, and thus we all have an obligation to make this sole home the best and happiest place it can be.”

It’s to not bet that tomorrow’s solution might solve today’s problems, but to fix them as they arise. It’s cleaning up your own messes rather than relying on others to clean up after you. It’s not self-sufficiency, but planetary sufficiency, and navigating the impossibly complex systems that influence and impact those outcomes.

Let the children choose their specifics, and connect them with educators and mentors who will nurture their unique learning styles and growth patterns to full blossom. Otherwise, teach them that there is a finite amount of happiness on this planet, and we must do our best to ensure there’s always enough to go around for everyone.

And most importantly of all, never let someone else convince you that you or your passions are irrelevant or replaceable. Machines may do tasks, but they can never do work, for that toil and sacrifice is an innately human action that we’ve staunchly refused to surrender.

Just wait until the USB-IF starts naming it…

Oh goodness, I would never make this thing into a NAS. It’s a compute node with bootable storage and a second SSD for temporary storage of transcodes, nothing more.

Speaking of transcodes, I haven’t had an issue with either unit despite both handling hardware transcoding on a semi-regular basis (one for Plex, one for Jellyfin). The system cranks through them pretty decently provided you’re doing one or two at a time, and I’ve had no heating issues with them jammed in a rack with my NAS and network kit. The hardest part was getting Intel’s proprietary drivers working for such a feature, and that was more a (lack of) skill issue on my end than anything else.