This is kinda getting at a core question of epistemology. I’ve been working on an epistemological engine by which LLMs would interact with a large knowledge graph and be able to identify “gaps” or infer new discoveries. Crucial to this workflow is a method for feedback of real world data. The engine could produce endless hypotheses but they’re just noise without some real world validation metric.
Cool. I've actually been playing with QEMU internals a lot recently. Specifically with the multi-process experimental features. Although I can't seem to find any consistency on where the main project is headed. They admit that the documentation pages can be well out-of-date with the upstream implementations, but they seem split-brained even within the code.
But I saw some update buried in a mailing list that development of the multi-process system has been superseded by vfio-user, mostly led by nutanix:
https://github.com/nutanix/libvfio-user
The nutanix repo refers to an oracle-led fork of qemu with the full vfio-user implementation built-in:
https://github.com/oracle/qemu
I’ve thought about doing this, but a few reservations came up when I considered getting started with a family friend. I just pictured a contracted ”IT MANAGER” getting rabbit holed into some time-sink extreme;
1. Dedicated operational IT admin:
Dealing with repetitive tasks+requests, like managing customer’s Microsoft environment and on-site infrastructure.. Owning physical and AD infra doesn’t sound like a part-time job.
For e.g; a/v and physical IT asks; like conference room operation maintenance and support, Desktop workstation triage (have you tried turning the monitor on?). The dreaded “can you set up the printer?”…
And what if the customer sets me up as their site’s dedicated AD domain admin? Resulting in repetitive requests for user/access management CRUD operations. And/or micromanagement of tedious things like email and mailing lists…
Or
2. Dedicated software developer, website or business workflows.
Building a website and getting micromanaged or overburdened. (“can you change the logo to blue?” “Can you redesign the whole home page?”)
Or, get pulled deep into providing a business-critical software workflow or application. Fielding sales/exec requests, interpreting their business requirements, and then building AND delivering (for e.g a customer management system) is not a part time job…
How do you operate to keep the scope limited? What steps help buffer yourself from a slippery slope of full-time services?
The word "no" can be very effective. Remember that you control the type of work that you take on.
I have a small side gig building "controllers." By controllers I mean devices that are typically arduino controlled and use peripherals in the arduino ecosystem. They span a very wide range, but are typically very feature-limited. e.g., I have a client who is converting massage chairs to be pay-per-use.
As you noted, it's not easy to keep a service-based business from growing to take over all your time. I manage it by keeping the feature set clearly specified and working on fixed price.
Want to add a feature we didn't discuss? That's another charge. My niche is taking on very small projects that are too small to move the needle for a full-blown engineering services company (I've worked for two) and I always work fixed-price, so I need to be very aggressive about scope creep.
Project scope keeps growing? Either tell the client that it will be a while until I have time to complete it, or, more frequently, that they will need to find someone else. This is pretty easy to say because as mentioned above I'm clear about only taking on small projects.
I've had people who basically want me to be their engineering department. That's a hard "no:" I simply don't have the time.
I don’t take on huge IT projects anymore, or ones that have potential to require lots of changes over time.
Used to do this as an agency principal and it involved a lot of time spent managing clients and projects and subcontractors. Drove myself crazy and took a couple years off after nearly burning out.
I look for projects where the software solves a single targeted business problem and can quickly get to “done”. Then the client is happy to pay for ongoing maintenance/ops, so any additional effort I put into the software is around reducing my ongoing workload.
Linux has been pretty stable for decades now. I’ve been using the same core configs and bulk data in my home compute environment basically since I started using Linux. Remote repos for any syncing needs, then just tar/rsync bulk archive data over. Store longer term or stale data on older decommissioned HDDs.
I’ve been running more or less the same services through hardware, hypervisor, and now kubernetes migrations and revisions. It seems to me doing things “the Linux way”, sticking to open source where possible, is resistant to the fast pace of the consumer innovation market. When anything new comes along, it’s usually relatively trivial to transfer over.
Really? I installed Ubuntu after a 5 year holiday from it - Now you have some kind of Snaps, and flatpak. There is whatever is happening in wayland. To install handbrake, you need to install flatpack.
There used to be 4 different drivers for intel GPU, now there are 7, and I still can't get Quicksync to work in Handbrake. There seems to be some kind of plugin you can download from their website, but that doesn't install.
After tinkering, I realised that Quicksync works in ffmpeg and in Jellyfin, but not in Handbrake
Mind you, I have a home server that runs 20 docker contsiner for things like home assistant. I deploy applications to kubernetes in my say job.
But this shit is still frustrating
Who do I call to fix this for less than $500 an hour?
If you're looking to get away from the massive crowd and the effects of it (new devs aimlessly reinventing wheels) you have to move to something like BSD, and then learn to deal with not having the tools made by said new aimless devs.
I know that this is a typical HN post, assuming everyone should become a Linux sysadmin. But related to the parent, and recent developments in Zero Trust Access products, I wonder if there is a pathway towards neighborhood-scale sysadmin services.
I mean, I essentially provide that to my small social community with a private media tenant.
With ZTA systems in place to accommodate remote access, maybe there is an appetite for neighbor-to-neighbor network sysadmin services? Hard to compete with the sleek silos of big box brands and their infinite marketing budget, plus 5 9s of service, though.
If only there were some sort of regional authority, a local group of people to whom we all gave money to, that could hire someone to administer such a system. This group could take on the responsibility of running, not just this neighborhood network system, but also, I dunno, the fire department and the police department and maybe also the schools?
I know it's an "out there" crazy silicon valley leftist idea but maybe something like that could work?
USPS might be mired in fed scale problems. Maybe a Library is more appropriate? At least, more directly accessible at the local level. I’m just not sure how exactly that would work, or operate thru existing library organization…
I think the incentive of a trade/artisan economy would make more sense, and justify individualized labor (house calls for NAS reconfiguration, for instance). Like a plumbing contractor vs inspector… I like the socialized idea, but I don’t see how the implementation would work under current social service labor system and organization…
The posted article is about the problem presented by police overreach into data that the average person has a mistaken expectation of privacy for. I may be misunderstanding what you're proposing, but it seems to me like having the same organization run things for both the neighborhood and police would actually facilitate police access to this kind of data moreso than provide any benefits in privacy.
Which is exactly why I proposed the USPS as a solution! They are an independent agency of the executive branch, and are the perfect fit for such a service.
It's not clear to me from that article, what the supposed crime the USPIS committed here. Maybe I'm butchering the reading, but it sounds like they looked for, and read public Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/etc posts by extremists, looking for threats made against the USPS; their buildings and their workers, the hard working mailmen and women who deliver the mail, and also the mail itself. which like, good? That's literally their job! I know ACAB and all but like, be real. If you're making a plan, in public, to commit violent crimes against mail carriers, then shouldn't the cops investigate? Instead of waiting for someone to shoot up a post office and then realizing they left a cry for help and warning signs after they've already committed their henious act?
Am I just totally misunderstanding the situation here?
....would you give your video footage to the neighbour?
....would you want to as sysadmin now manage them any time police comes and wants some footage ?
I think that can definitely work for stuff like internet access, but anything where "private files" and copyrighted content comes to play will be messy
Seems like a lot of ongoing o&m and sustainment of an existing product, similar to any other day-to-day.
Do you have insight on what the proposal, design review, and first commits look like when architecting a brand new project? Like what do the first 30-60-90 days look like from product idea up to those o&m and sustainment activities?
Im building with featherjs[0] right now and I love it. Jwt, user handling, routing, and (most notably to me) real-time functionality is all built in. Probably the most rails-like backend framework I’ve worked with in Node so far.
Except the Spotify model is also rife with issues. Artists generally hate Spotify and hardly make a living off of “pay per stream”. Most of them still very much depend on tours, merch, and, at the higher level, brand deals to make any money off of their craft.
Spotify isn't a replacement for tours. It's a replacement for cds and/or radio, both of which make artists similar amounts of miniscule amounts of money.
For programmers, you'd be correct. That only really be a replacement for patreons, tips, and donations, which would typically be a miniscule amount. It just redistribute it instead. (Your $x subscription just automatically gets allotted instead of manually allotted).
I recently had an issue where my UDP service worked fine exposed directly as a NodePort type, but not through an nginx UDP ingress. I _think_ the issue was that the ingress controller forwarding operation was just too slow for the service's needs, but I had no way of really knowing.
Now if I had this kernel level network monitoring system, I probably could have had a clearer picture as to what is going on.
Really one of the hardest problems I've had with learning/deploying in k8s is trying to trace down the multiple levels of networking, from external TLS termination to LoadBalancers, through ingress controllers, all the way down to application-level networking, I've found more often than not the easiest path is to just get rid of those layers of complexity completely.
In the end I just exposed my server on NodePort, forwarded my NAT to it, and called it done. But it sounds like something like ContainIQ can really add to a k8s admin's toolset for troubleshooting these complex network issues. I also agree with other comments here that a limited, personal-use/community tier would be great for wider adoption and home-lab users like me :)
Ha, this is great. I just spent the holiday break launching a kubernetes cluster in my home lab, on which I’ve deployed a Minecraft server to play with my friends. I guess with this I could manage my Minecraft kubernetes deployment WITHIN the world itself. One creeper and the whole server comes crumbling down. It would be a very risky game.
