My tech friends and I cannot wait for this agentic bubble to pop. Much like the dotcom bubble, there's absolutely value in AI but the hype is absurd and is actively hurting investments into reasonable things (like just good UX).
The hype and zealotry remind me of a cult. And as I go higher up the chain at my big tech company, the more culty they are in their beliefs. And the less they believe AI can do their specific jobs, and the less they have actually tried to use AI beyond badly summarizing documents they barely read before.
AI, as far as I can tell, has been a net negative for humans. It's made labor cheaper, answers less reliable, reduced the value we placed on creativity and professionals in general, allows mass disinformation, and mostly results in people being lazier and not learning the basics of anything. There are of course spots of brightness, but the hype bubble needs to burst so we can move on.
The reason I ask is I homelab “hardcore”; i.e. I have a 25U rack and I run a small Kubernetes cluster and ceph via Talos Linux.
Due to various reasons, including me running k8s in the lab for about 7 years now, I’ve been itching to change and consolidate and simplify, and every time i think about my requirements I somehow end up where you did: Nix and ZFS.
All those services and problems are very very familiar to me, feel free to ask me questions back btw.
What does your persistent storage layer look like on Talos? How have you found it's hardware stability over the long term?