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Cake day: September 4th, 2023

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  • The difference is, Devops isn’t a bubble that everyone is waiting for to pop. I’ve been in that field for over ten years now, and properly implemented it is a net gain for everyone who does it. The reason companies are falling over themselves trying to hire ‘Devops’ is because they still haven’t properly cottoned on to the concept but are afraid of falling behind. And yes, I can absolutely attest to the fact that Devops is a tough market to hire in at the moment, that there are a lot of places who don’t have the first clue about what Devops really is, and - similarly to Agile - think they can add some buzzwords to their toolchain and call Bob their uncle. And there are a lot of candidates who somehow acquired a Devopsy title in all that chaos, but all their CVs have are tech buzzwords, and when you interview them they’re clueless. That doesn’t change the fact that Devops is a solid concept with high benefits for those who understand it.

    AI, and more specifically GenAI and LLMs - is more like crypto, in the sense that people are trying to get rich from it without having the first clue what it is. It’s this shiny new thing that everyone is rushing to get on board with, but I have yet to see someone propose a use case that actually makes sense, couldn’t be implemented better without AI, and is a net gain for those using it. Right now it’s all this nebulous bullshit, everyone just slaps their own coat of paint onto ChatGPT and calls it a day. Useful AI-adjacent concepts like Big Data and Machine Learning have been around for much longer than the tooling underpinning the current hype, and already have a lot of very valid use cases.

    By the way, I work with a bunch of high aptitude Devops engineers and none of them are thinking about adding AI to our pipelines, not even to pad their CV.





  • Net neutrality isn’t going to do a thing about this kind of stuff. In a best case scenario, you’ll end up with overall data usage limitations - no more ‘unlimited mobile data’.

    ISPs meter data usage because it’s pretty much the only way they can impose some form of limitation on a finite capacity to provide such data to you and other customers - other than data rate limits (read: slower speeds). They can’t guarantee data rates in almost any setup, because ultimately, while ‘data usage’ is a bit of an artificial construct and ‘data’ is not in any way finite, the pipes that deliver the data certainly are of finite capacity. Mobile data capacity - and in fact, any wireless medium - is a shared medium, the more people try to use it simultaneously, the less pleasant it’s going to be for each individual user. Ask Starlink users in many US areas how overselling limited capacity impacts the individual user.

    Mobile data usage also has different usage patterns than if you’re hotspotting your PC. You’re not going to download massive games or other bandwidth hogs to your mobile. You probably won’t be running a torrent client either. So they can give you unlimited mobile data because you’re simply not going to put as much of a strain on the infrastructure with pure on-device usage than you will with hotspotting.

    This isn’t a defense of what AT&T is doing. But net neutrality isn’t going to force them to suddenly be all ethical. It’s not going to make them provision infrastructure that doesn’t fall over at the first signs of higher-than-usual load. And it certainly can’t change the physical realities of wireless data communication. In an ideal world ISPs wouldn’t be so greedy and/or beholden to greedy shareholders to be cutting corners, and instead provide sufficient infrastructure that can handle high demand.

    And to those who are talking about their workarounds: you may not like it but you’ve signed a contract. That contract stipulates acceptable use, and if you’re found to be breaching the contract terms, the other party is within their rights to terminate the contract. Again, in an ideal world these contract terms would be more balanced towards the needs of the customer, but in the meantime your best recourse against unfavourable contract terms is to take your business elsewhere. And if you can’t do that, everything else is at your own risk.













  • Maybe not the most unfun game I have ever played (I’ve played games since the late 90s), but certainly the most unfun I have played in recent years: Elex.

    I liked Piranha Bytes’ old Gothic series a lot despite its weaknesses and idiosyncrasies. The Risen games weren’t that great, but the reviews for Elex were pretty promising. So I gave it a shot, and tried for about 16 hours to find the fun in it. I stopped playing when I realised:

    • I couldn’t hold my own in almost any battle because I didn’t have good enough gear
    • In order to get better gear, I had to join one of the game’s factions
    • In order to join one of the factions, I had to perform a number of tasks for them
    • The factions were all just dickheads, and I didn’t want to do anything for them, much less their dirty work

    So yeah, no fun to be had with this one.