zbentley

23 ms·

451.
by zbentley 7mo ago
Eh, as someone generally on the skeptical end of the spectrum for a lot of AI-assisted ops tasks, exploratory query generation is a great use case for it. I’m highly proficient in code, only average at SQL, and am routinely tasked to answer
452.
by zbentley 7mo ago
Yeah. This seems like an area where a “tiny” (2-4GB) local model would be more than sufficient to generate very high quality queries and schema answers to the vast majority of questions. To the point that it feels outright wasteful to pay a
453.
by zbentley 7mo ago
Say more about this? Do you mean that if you use a dynamic output in a foreach, Terrafom can error? Or are you referring to “dynamic” blocks and their interactions with iterators?
454.
by zbentley 7mo ago
Transitive deps , not steps . Random examples off the top of my head: Puppet has a ton of transitive Ruby libraries and config files/caches that it leaves around; Terraform leaves some very big provider caches on the system; plan or
455.
by zbentley 7mo ago
I agree re: fuel taxes, but it’s a complete nonstarter: passengers would be voting against their wallets, and airlines would lobby against it since it’s a vote against their business model.
456.
by zbentley 8mo ago
No argument here!
457.
by zbentley 8mo ago
> Docker ships a "filesystem in a box", i.e. an opaque blob, an image. Nix and Guix ship the package definitions from which they derive what they need to have populated in their respective stores, and either build those require
458.
by zbentley 8mo ago
The loose integration between the declarative tools and the container build system drags down performance and creates a lot of footguns re: image size and inert declarative-build-system transitive deps left lying around, I’ve found.
459.
by zbentley 8mo ago
Bash is pretty darn abstracted from the OS, though. Puppet vs Bash is more about abstraction relative to the goal . If your dockerfile says “ensure package X is installed at version Y” that’s a lot clearer (and also more easy to make perfo
460.
by zbentley 8mo ago
> the Dockerfile has continued because of its flexibility I wish we had standardized on something other than shell commands, though. Puppet or terraform or something more declarative would have been such a better alternative to “everyone
461.
by zbentley 8mo ago
But they’re roughly the same paradigm as docker, right? My understanding of the Nix approach is that it’s still reproducing most of a user land/filesystem in a captive/separate/sandbox environment. Like, docker is using names
462.
by zbentley 8mo ago
> fixing the actual problem is just too hard. I think it’s laziness, not difficulty. That’s not meant to be snide or glib: I think gaining expertise in how to package and deploy non-containerized applications isn’t difficult or unattaina
463.
by zbentley 8mo ago
I mean… not curtailing leasing concentrates power with sketchy rent seekers and empowers the enterprises which use them (many of which range from “sketchy” to “evil and criminal”). So I guess I’m having trouble envisioning a world without
464.
by zbentley 8mo ago
That’s still only as good as the ability of the trusted model to delineate instructions from data. The untrusted model will inevitably be compromised so as to pass bad data to the trusted model. I have significant doubt that a P-LLM (as in
465.
by zbentley 8mo ago
Okay, assuming that’s the case for the sake of argument, that’s still a huge problem right? Kids raised by bad parents suffer, which is inhumane. And if you don’t care about that, they also cause problems or costs for society at large (espe
466.
by zbentley 8mo ago
Yes. In a huge majority of cases, I’ve seen it used as a weasely, subjective synonym for “more than one thing being done”.
467.
by zbentley 8mo ago
Yeah. Another big benefit of this approach is that it can use or trigger OS-level permissions approval prompts (eg UAC or MacOS’s “do you want to let this program access the desktop?” approvals).
468.
by zbentley 8mo ago
Many, many other programming languages’ package managers don’t (or can’t) do this, though. Even big complex desktop apps can, on first run, request initial setup permissions or postinstall actions via the OS’s permissions approval system. G
469.
by zbentley 8mo ago
Yep! Minor nitpick: prepared statements aren’t the important property here; driver/protocol-level separation of code and data is. Even without using a prepared statement, if you run the parametrized query “select col from table where x
470.
by zbentley 8mo ago
Sanitization isn’t enough. We need a way to separate code and data (not just to sanitize out instructions from data) that is deterministic. If there’s a “decide whether this input is code or data” model in the mix, you’ve already lost: that
471.
by zbentley 8mo ago
This is substantially worse. SQL injection still happens a lot, it’s true, but the fix when it does is always the same: SQL clients have an ironclad way to differentiate instructions from data; you just have to use it. LLMs do not have tha
472.
by zbentley 8mo ago
That’s definitely the right call in some cases. But as soon as there’s any high-interconnect-rate system that has to be in cloud (appliances with locked in cloud billing contracts, compute that does need to elastically scale and talks to yo
473.
by zbentley 8mo ago
What should they do instead? Like, assuming they need the data and it's inconveniently large to fit into RAM, where/how should they store and access it if not the primary disk?
474.
by zbentley 8mo ago
> I solved this at one point with token fencing Could you expand on that? Even if it wasn't the approach you stuck with, I'm curious.
475.
by zbentley 8mo ago
You need to have both. Training/credentialing and pay. Just one is insufficient. Longer/better educator training both increases skills/outcomes and is a gate for the poorly-suited. Higher pay makes the training seem worthwh
476.
by zbentley 8mo ago
I know. I'm surprised that the modifications were each so different in tone. Some seem opinionated, some seem like "typical AI voice", some seem like a teenager typing, some seem like a pushy/angry person.
477.
by zbentley 8mo ago
You'd be surprised. I've worked on a municipal/local-area webapp that launched with auth and a create-account form. Userbase in the low 100ks, a few interactions a year. It was an ordinary create-account form: name, address,
478.
by zbentley 8mo ago
It's a few things (source: I've worked on some large online B2B systems and seen signup flow funnel data for some even larger B2C systems): 1. Ease/laziness as others have mentioned. Even for a service that answers a real nee
479.
by zbentley 8mo ago
This might seem too suspicious, but that SOUL.md seems … almost as though it was written by a few different people/AIs. There are a few very different tones and styles in there. Then again, it’s not a large sample and Occam’s Razor is
480.
by zbentley 8mo ago
> Do not enable container scanning, it just increases your bill, nobody ever looks at the scan results. God I wish that were true. Unfortunately, ECR scanning is often cheaper and easier to start consuming than buying $giant_enterprise_s

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