Posted by tknaup 7 hours ago
oh now i see, the Chinese government is funding the training and release of their best models to pressure OpenAI, Anthropic, and others to do the same for competition's sake. I don't buy it, this seems more like a way to get SOTA models RL'd to comply with Chinese government approved information distribution. If I have to trust a black box of answers to questions i would trust one from a US for-profit publicly traded company subject to market forces over one approved, and heavily subsidized, by the Chinese government.
I had a shower thought on how to counteract this, specifically related to the AI dumping. If China is losing substantial money on every token, why wouldn’t an adversary try to maliciously increase consumption? This strategy is not really viable against physical goods dumping because demand is finite and there are large environmental costs. Software demand is infinite and the environmental costs are quite low compared to the financial cost to make it, even with ultra cheap Chinese tokens
First anthropic guardrails blocked totally normal stuff on fable and knocked you down to opus. At this point, they kick you off fable, then opus, then sonnet. Claude then automatically builds up memories of techniques to bypass the guardrails in my long running sessions (the coordinator agent notices the subordinates got shot in the head and their sessions were pulled from context, so it parses out the lost context from ~/.claude json files, then reformulates parts of the task and uses partial results until the guardrail doesn’t trip.
If I were paying for the API, this dance would cost $50-100 a pop, but I’m not, so whatever (for now).
For instance, I worked at FICO. When I mention this, people wonder what they do. The average person only knows FICO as a “score.”
FICO was founded in Silicon Valley.
The average person doesn’t think about how credit scores work, fundamentally.
It’s just software, at its core. FICO incentivizes certain behaviors.
Ever been banned from an online forum?
Now imagine if a corporation could shut you off from a technology that’s literally indispensable.
Same idea.
There is something special about complex systems that just-work(tm)
The foundation of this is thirty years old:
Mark Andreesen founded a company to do what Amazon did: Loudcloud. This was cloud computing, BEFORE AWS was public. Loudcloud was founded in the nineties; AWS opened its APIs in 2006.
Loudcloud failed and became Opsware. Opsware was server automation.
Its competitor was Bladelogic.
Luke Kanies, from BladeLogic, founded Puppet. Puppet was open source, and steamrollered over nearly every installation of BladeLogic and Opsware in existence, because you can’t beat free.
Folks from BladeLogic migrated to jobs at DCOS.
DCOS was steamrollered by Kubernetes, the same way Puppet steamrollered BladeLogic.
The author of the piece predicts that open weight models will steamroller everything next.
I fear he’s right.
I worked for Opsware and BladeLogic.
I watched it happen in real time.
Financially, Andreesen’s wealth stems from Opsware. He is known for Mosaic, but Opsware put him on the map, financially. HP bought them.
If one wants to follow in Andreesen’s footsteps, study how he did it at Opsware.
Conveniently, there is a book.
“The Hard Thing about Hard Things.”
If you think of docker as "kinda like vms except not really" and k8s as "kinda like deploying and composing docker containers but not really", this may be for you:
https://ojensen.net/infra/understanding-k8s-1
It's actually really neat, i wish i had bothered to learn it years ago.
From my very ignorant standpoint, K8s seems to be about running a "cluster", but I don't know why I would want to do that.
It allows you to stop caring about the individual machines, and just treat them as combined compute, which starts mattering if you leave a single machine setup and need to start thinking about scaling in and out and gluing the individual parts together. Then you have known abstractions to do it.
Of course you can do everything kubernetes does using a bespoke solution, and the concepts aren't new, but having a widely supported technology has a lot of advantages and creating something with even half the feature has a high chance of just being worse.
Professionally, my experience is that certain software components need to run together on an individual machine (e.g. database server, app server, web server), and then those machines need to be networked in a certain way (e.g. web server talks to app server, which talks to database server), so I really need to care about the architecture of individual machines. You can then scale this out horizontally (e.g. add another web server) or vertically (e.g. upgrade your database server).
I'm old, so maybe I'm out of date, but having a cluster of "compute" that I can run arbitrary workloads on sounds neat, but is a capability that I've never needed.
I would take a kube cluster over a bunch of VMs I have to hand wire: wire releasing to, managing processes, restarting crashed processes, log aggregation, load balancing, networking, secret injection, cert management, DNS management, monitoring, etc... Any day of the week.
You just don't know what you're talking about, sorry. Kube is really easy now.
Its 2026 and its the de facto method of deploying software basically everywhere.
You gotta really work for it to not know what its for by now.
That is some really impressive bubble you are living within. Basically everywhere - nowhere near that, no.
[edit]: Maybe containers, but software in general is so much more broad than containers.
I'll agree that (nearly) everyone should know when Kubernetes is useful, but let's not pretend its the default method for everything. Even then, choosing to deploy on K8s falls on the sysadmins/DevOps I wouldn't expect the devs know or do much more than provide the Dockerfile.
We walked in, and it was fine. Because it was all kubernetes and laid out like every other app for the most part.
The kube hate is just sad at this point. You need to know like 15 concepts that are all applied in the same way. It mostly just works.
What 15 concepts? You're making me worry that I missed something. It was straight forward: pods, nodes, hw type, lifecycle, deployment. They run almost the same docker as the old ec2s used.
What did I miss? Is there something important I need to read?
I would say:
- deployments - pods -services - ingress - namespaces - cert-manager - external DNS - external secrets - configmaps - hpa - docker - volumes/pvc
That's the basics
I’ve been running my own personal k8s cluster on digital ocean for the last 5+ years now and it’s dead simple.
Takes me 30 minutes to create a new namespace a deploy an app, love the bonus of having complete flexibility on my stack too — PVC + SQLite ftw
The value built on that stability was probably worth acquiring, and it’s infra will decay.
I'm sorry to do that hn comment thing where we all just race to contradict or talk in opposition of whatever was said before. I'm aware. But really guys, was this article really not just a miss?