I had a call the other day with a consultancy to potentially pick up some infrastructure work/project type stuff. Asked about timezones involved and they said a lot of their clientele are US based startups. "So it's mainly Kubernetes work" they said.
I personally would suggest the vast majority of those startups do not need Kubernetes and certainly don't need to be paying a consultancy to then pay me to fix their issues for them.
The problem with kubernetes is that containers just aren't quite enough.
You have an app which runs, now you want to put it in a container somewhere. Great. how do you build that container? Github actions. Great. How does that deploy your app to wherever it's running? Err... docker tag + docker push + ssh + docker pull + docker restart?
You've hit scale. You want redis now. How do you deploy that? Do you want redis, your machine, and your db in thre separate datacenters and to pay egress between all the services? Probably not, so you just want a little redis sidecar container... How does the app get the connection string for it?
When you're into home grown shim scripts which _are_ brittle and error prone, it's messy.K8s is a sledgehammer, but it's a sledgehammer that works. ECS is aws-only, and has its own fair share of warts. Cloud Run/Azure Container Apps are _great_ but there's nothing like those to run on DigitalOcean/Hetzner/whatever. So your choices are to use a big cloud with a simpler orchestartion, or use some sort of non-standard orchestration that you have to manage yourself, or just use k8s...
My son Oliver was born with mitochondrial disease and was killed by conditions associated with it at the age of 19. Some of the people mentioned in the report here were involved in his diagnosis and care.
His life deteriorated from that of a normal, fun loving intelligent kid to an isolated bed-bound disabled teenager, fed by total parenteral nutrition and suffering a variety of awful complications. His eventual passing was cruel and brutal. I'm not sure we will ever get over it as a family.
This treatment does now at least offer me a glimmer of grandchildren (my daughter having decided she would not risk children of her own until now). It's a remarkable achievement.
As a parent of teenagers it pained my heart to even read this. I cannot fathom what it is like to endure it and live with it after the fact. I am very sorry for what you experienced and what Oliver experienced.
I remember the knowledge/idea of illegal opcodes for the C64 slowly making their way through the hacker/cracker community. Like secret knowledge being distilled back then via BBS
they were quite useful. I distinctly remember there were undocumented NOPs consuming a different number of cycles than the default one EA. These were fe used to pad raster line interrupt routines with cycle precision. (damn, I'm old)
It's not like it's hard to find a harmless 3 cycle instruction.
For example Store A/X/Y to any unused/scratch Zero Page location.
Or condition branch to the next instruction using a condition known to be true .. BCC/BCS is often the most convenient. Or just JMP to the next instruction, though it's 3 bytes of code instead of 2.
INC/DEC of a scratch Zero Page location is useful for a 5 cycle delay in 2 bytes of code if you don't mind changing NZ flags, but the store/branch/jump alternatives don't even do that.
I love the C64 but the Atari 8-bit line was fine indeed (one of my first exposures to home computing was Star Raiders at a family friends house - blew me away). Archer Maclean, author of Dropzone (and other titles) famously labelled them the 'Porsche of home computers'.
Where I think the 64 had the edge was in the incredible SID chip and I'd argue the amazing hacks that were found for the system over the years that enhanced what the 64 was capable of.
I bought a Logitech MX Ergo a couple of years back and genuinely love it for many of the reasons other trackballs users cite in this thread - but I have noticed in the last few months that my thumb joint will get 'stuck' and makes a click when I unstick it. Definitely related to the MX Ergo and the thumb navigation like you say. I'm an older gentleman which likely contributes.
So might be tempted by an all finger alternative - at the moment I'm attempting to up my use of a terminal window manager to minimise pointer use
It seems like a lot of the opposition to this I’m seeing online is because Trump is the one that granted it.
Ridiculous hyperbole about Ross ‘inventing the Dark Web’ or ‘Trump freed a sex trafficker’ is a great reminder that for some people, their ideological opposition can never do anything right and they’ll condemn anything they do without even a second of consideration.
I’m not an avowed Trump supporter (or even American) but believe this was the right call to make. The sentence was overly harsh and he has both served his time and reformed. I’m glad he has been released.
I was considering this just last night lamenting the state of my Twitter/X feed. The paid engagement incentive has had the unintended effect of ruining what’s on offer and clearly much of it is bot/AI created. Lots of threads of crap just to inflate engagement numbers. The funny, witty and sarcastic 140 char posts are still there but buried seemingly in a pile of templated and autogenerated junk.
I personally would suggest the vast majority of those startups do not need Kubernetes and certainly don't need to be paying a consultancy to then pay me to fix their issues for them.