Tech

Could We Not

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Tech

What job interviews taught me about Kubernetes.

This article is wrong. I’ll explain why below.

First, Kubernetes really sucks. It’s just terrible, terrible technology. The networking stack is atrocious. The Kubeclowns took something that should be a routing table and an iptables rule someone could actually read and buried it under three layers of abstraction that all lie to you in different, incompatible ways. And the networking stuff in there is just so slow. Of course it is — it was created by programmers who understand networking about as well as a llama grasps astrophysics.

I could easily write a 5,000-word rant about how shitty Kubernetes is, and how poorly-designed, about how it incompetently relocates abstractions to inappropriate places that make anything 1,000 times harder to troubleshoot. YAML is also a horrid config language that is ridiculously ill-suited for this purpose.

There are so very many insane and terrible decisions in the architecture of Kubernetes. It is one of the worst technologies I’ve ever used. It’s designed by idiots and a suitable choice only for doofuses.

Back to the main theme, though. Kubernetes became stylish to use and that explains part of its adoption.

But the main reason the article is wrong and that it doesn’t understand what is happening with all the Kubernetes BS is that it ignores the power shift that occurred over the last decade or so in the IT space. The dominance shifted from sysadmin types to developers. And Kubernetes is very friendly to developers. It allows them to package and ship broken nonsense with very little real testing. Of course, devs love that because who wants to test, amirite?

Also, devs are inherently very attracted to complexity. Kubernetes is exceedingly complex so this causes them to love it. It has endless (and pointless) knobs to turn, sliders to move around, switches to clickity-clack, endless dials to twiddle and tweak. All worthless and counterproductive, but devs absolutely go gaga over crap like that.

As I said, Kubernetes won because developers are now dominant. It allowed them to ignore security, good networking practices, compliance, and push absolute garbage to production “reproducibly1.” It’s trash technology2 that achieved preeminence because it allowed devs to run amok in areas they did not understand and hated to deal with.

And yes, I use Kubernetes every day in production. Not my choice, but I am not just guessing about how much of a crapfest it is. I live it.

  1. Kubernetes configs are not nearly as reproducible as advertised.
  2. We sysadmins could do all the things Kubernetes does 20 years ago more reliably and faster with better tech. Devs just didn’t control it so didn’t like it, or even know about it.

Scaled Out

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Tech

I’ve been running TrueNAS Scale on the new NAS, the one that is home-built (not from a vendor). And I don’t like TrueNAS itself much. It’s yet another power user tool that has removed or gimped its most important and useful features for no apparent reason.

For instance, they’ve removed the recycle bin on SMB so that “Previous Versions” in Windows no longer works. I don’t even run Windows at home on my daily use endpoints, but that’s a real loss. And moronic. Their “solution” is to use ZFS snapshots, but this is a totally different tech that is not as easy and is far more dangerous.

TrueNAS also doesn’t handle certain files generated on the Mac correctly — specifically ones with Alternate Data Stream stuff going on — while commercial NASes seem to deal with these files fine. And no, the supposed common fix did not correct the issue.

The GUI is also pretty bad. It manages to be both too simple and too confusing at the same time somehow, and is missing many features and capabilities (many of which did exist previously and were removed for ideological reasons).

Of the major NASes and their OSes/GUIs I’ve used recently, I’d give QNAP’s a 7, Synology’s an 8.5, and TrueNAS a 4. It feels amateurish and like something I used in the early 2000s.

I will keep using it for now but it’s pretty meh.

Please Try Harder

Chill Annoying, Tech

Everyone just seems so dogmatically dumb about too many things. It’s why I can’t help but be so insulting.

People claim that there is no future in which AI models improve and that we get better at building the underlying infrastructure supporting them. However, right now, AI runs mostly on chips that were designed to play Half Life and Final Fantasy in data centers built to provide a place for an SAP or email server to operate. And the frontier models are about as optimized as a 1979 Chevy Pinto.

To think all of that won’t get better…fucking ludicrous. Are you even thinking? Are you even trying to think?

Asymptote Bag

Chill Gutter Philosophy, Tech

The difference between acting in every way like you understand something and actually understanding something is far less than people think or want to believe.

As AI approaches “pretending” to understand something with near-perfect fidelity to actually comprehending it, the collapse of certitude around what “understanding” means will cause people to hate AI even more. Fear will overtake all, and dread.

Be Ept

Chill Annoying, Tech

Why are developers some of the most IT inept users?

That has always puzzled me too. My partner is a dev and is extremely competent, but some of the worst users of all are devs. One of the most memorable is requesting a developer to go to the command line in Windows and the person having no idea what I was talking about. Getting them to find and provide their local IP address was beyond frustrating, as they also did not know what an IP address was.

I’ve also done way more troubleshooting of dev code in my day than anyone who is not an actual programmer should ever have to do.

And no, the “can’t open the command line” dev was not junior; he had at least 10 years of experience, and this was well before coding bootcamps became a thing.

Some devs are just no better than regular end users. I’d say about 60% or so.

It is funny in that thread how many devs are like, “I should be able to use my specialized tool used by three people only and never security audited because if not I am being oppressed!”

Like, get over yourself. If I allowed every dev to use their shit-level “necessary” tool, we’d have more Chinese malware than Windows XP pre-SP2 put on the open web.

There’s a reason security exists, and almost no dev gives a crap about that.

Vuln Shift

Chill Tech

That has some advantages, really. Vulnerabilites discovered are vulns fixed and then not available for exploitation. The transition, though, will be rough.

Spring Summer Autumn Winter

Chill Tech

I’ve been messing around with the Vivaldi browser today. It’s quite good! A new version was just released and it has nearly all the features (by way of extensions) the Firefox devs claim are “impossible” but that FF very much used to have. Such as the ability to change the order and presence of context menu items:

Somehow, the FF devs have convinced themselves that if you let someone customize this that dear ol’ Gramma is going to immediately wire all her money to Nigeria. Which is fucking insane, but they are right clowns.

Of course, they don’t care about Gramma. They are about power. They also despise their user base.

Vivaldi — an organization with far fewer financial and other resources than Mozilla — has managed to create a browser with 100x the customizability of Firefox. That’s all you need to know to determine Mozilla is full of shit and the Firefox devs are crap.

Will I switch? Perhaps. I have very hard-won workflows and custom extensions/tweaks in Firefox that will be difficult to get working anywhere else. But I’m considering it.

Client Side

Chill Annoying, Tech

Exhausted Everything – Mail Disappearing.

Some of the commenters are correct. This is clearly a client-side rule running on some other device (personal computer/laptop, tablet, something). I’ve seen it too many times. It always looks just like this.

Find that and problem will be solved.

Worst one of these I got was in 2013 or so where a user had some rule set up on a tablet that he had not used in two years. I tracked it down by making him assemble all his devices, even ones he “didn’t use,” and go through mail rules+settings over the phone with me device by device.

Found the rule deleting email on a first-gen (IIRC) iPad and all was well. I was the ninth or tenth person to work on that problem over the course of a few months and I solved it in a day.

Subside

Chill Annoying, Tech

People asserting that because AI is heavily subsidized now by capital inflow it automatically in their minds follows it will be more expensive later are committing an enormous error in logic and reasoning.

There is no necessary connection at all between initial subsidization and later market price. In this case, AI will probably be cheaper overall after subsidization ends. At least for a good while.

Believing what you want to believe is a good way to end up dumb and poor while looking stupid the entire time.

286

Chill Tech

The computers I built back in the 1980s were always a Frankenstein’s monster of whatever my dad and grandpa handed down to me. I didn’t have enough money then to buy anything myself. So I had to make it work, whatever it was.

Compy stuff was 10x as expensive then as it is now, for reference.

I was incredibly grateful for anything they gave me at all. Back in those days, they could’ve just as easily sold it for fairly high prices.

So I accepted with thanks whatever they wanted to donate to me and got it to run. I was really freakin’ proud of my little 286 I built from parts all by myself when I was 10. It was slow, it could barely dial into a BBS even at 2400 baud without crashing, and it took an eternity to launch anything, but it was mine.

Ransom

Chill Amusing, Tech

One of the best feelings in my career I’ve ever had is when I was doing part-time work for a small company — handling their networking, infrastructure, and all tech-related stuff outside of programming.

The owner called me up in a panic saying the company would probably have to cease operations because all their data was completely gone, encrypted by ransomware. The owner was taken aback when I laughed and said I’d have them back up in a couple of hours, max.

And I did have them back to full operations around two hours later. If in my field you do not have great backups, you have nothing. And my backup game is beyond solid. I will never lose your data if you put me in charge of it, or allow it to be lost.

It’s just not gonna happen.

Right On

Chill Amusing, Tech

Having worked for a FAANG, I can tell you they are incredibly poorly-organized and most of their people are self-impressed and strivers, but not very good. The people I worked with at a much smaller non-prestigious hosting company were far smarter, and had deeper knowledge.

AI Mag

Chill Tech

The main problem with AI is that it amplifies intelligence but also amplifies dumbassery.

The cutoff is not hard and fast, but is somewhere around 115 IQ. Above that, AI makes you smarter — perhaps as much as 1000x. Below that, it makes you worse and more dunderheaded.

That’s not new for tech, but the magnitude is new. And that matters.