karlmdavis (u/karlmdavis)

karlmdavis commented on Design and Implementation of Sprites fly.io/blog/design-and-im... · Posted by u/sethev

karlmdavis · 2 months ago

I love absolutely everything about this… except for the lack of cross-platform support. I know how ludicrous it is to expect that, but… most workflows I’m considering solutions like this for are crippled by their inability to run Xcode or a native Windows build. Heck, I’m pretty sure I’ll even run into glibc version mismatches that block work I care about.

Frustrating that the best solution is still, “well, if that’s important to you, then set that up in your home lab or rent some extra (pet) VMs in the cloud.”

karlmdavis commented on Comparing AI agents to cybersecurity professionals in real-world pen testing arxiv.org/abs/2512.09882... · Posted by u/littlexsparkee

tptacek · 2 months ago

Honestly I'm just trying to be nice about it. I don't know that I can tell you a story about the 90% ceiling that makes any sense, especially since you can task 3 different high-caliber teams of senior software security people on an app and get 3 different (overlapping, but different) sets of vulnerabilities back. By the end of 2027, if you did a triangle test, 2:1 agents/humans or vice/versa, I don't think you'd be able to distinguish.

Just registering the prediction.

karlmdavis · 2 months ago

I would take the other side of that bet.

  # if >10 then was_created_by_agent = true
  $ grep -oP '\p{Emoji}' vulns.md | wc -l

karlmdavis commented on SQLx – Rust SQL Toolkit github.com/launchbadge/sq... · Posted by u/stmw

karlmdavis · 8 months ago

I find it kind of baffling that this toolkit is so popular when it makes handling database joins so difficult. After bashing my head against it for a while, I moved to Diesel, and while that has its own set of problems, I am generally able to get through them without resorting to horrible hacks or losing compile time checks.

karlmdavis commented on Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation (2019) blog.danslimmon.com/2019/... · Posted by u/tehnub

natch · a year ago

What’s a censorious as a noun? Hadn’t heard it used that way before.

karlmdavis · a year ago

I suspect they meant “scenario”.

karlmdavis commented on Axum 0.8 tokio.rs/blog/2025-01-01-... · Posted by u/minimaxir

LeftHandPath · a year ago

I've enjoyed what I've done with Axum thus far. I ultimately opted to use Leptos on top of it, so I don't really use it directly at this point. But it's neat.

For a long time, I used PHP and JS/TS for web projects. Now I'm using Rust with Axum/Tokio/Tower/Hyper (web server), Leptos (SSR using "Islands" flag, which also allows WASM generation for front end; JSX-like syntax), and Diesel (ORM and query builder that expects you define your schema using raw SQL). (I also leapt from DB2, MySQL and MariaDB to PostgreSQL)

It's heaven.

karlmdavis · a year ago

I almost gave up on Leptos, because I was trying to use it with Actix, which it supports less-well than it does Axum (and I’m too stubborn for my own good and wouldn’t switch).

I came back to it recently after the Leptos 0.7 release, though, and it’s MUCH smoother.

Still early days for a framework like this, but I think it’s got a lot of magic.

karlmdavis commented on PostgreSQL High Availability Solutions – Part 1: Jepsen Test and Patroni binwang.me/2024-12-02-Pos... · Posted by u/wb14123

karlmdavis · a year ago

What an absolutely delightful little project and write up.

karlmdavis commented on Show HN: COBOL-REKT, a toolkit for analysing and reverse-engineering COBOL github.com/avishek-sen-gu... · Posted by u/armorer

robin_reala · 2 years ago

So obviously there’s been a lot of legacy COBOL kicking around, but is this still the case? Would a new COBOL project have been started in the last 20 years? I kind of imagined that Java (or at least the JVM) has eaten its lunch.

karlmdavis · 2 years ago

A number of US federal agencies still have astonishing amounts of it. The world’s largest insurer, Medicare, uses 10M+ lines of COBOL to process the claims it receives — total dollar amounts that make up 3% of the yearly GDP.

Maintaining and modernizing these critical systems is important work.

karlmdavis commented on SPQR 1.3.0: a production-ready system for horizontal scaling of PostgreSQL github.com/pg-sharding/sp... · Posted by u/denchick

ThinkBeat · 2 years ago

How far can one get these days with vertical scaling of Postgres? I dont know how well the engine could make use of the extra resources. If it scales well vertically, I expect it to cover 80% - 95% of use cases for people using Postgres. Probably with less complexity, and less overhead than scaling horziontally

karlmdavis · 2 years ago

From personal experience, it scales very well vertically. Have a system in production with tens of billions of rows and north of 12 TB of storage total. That system is read-heavy with large batched inserts, not many deletes or updates.

Biggest limiter is memory, where the need for it grows linearly with table index size. Postgres really really wants to keep the index pages hot in the OS cache. Gets very sad and weird if it can’t: will unpredictably resort to table scans sometimes.

We are running on AWS Aurora, on a db.r6i.12xlarge. Nowhere even close to maxed out on potential vertical scaling.

karlmdavis commented on It's not microservice or monolith; it's cognitive load fernandovillalba.substack... · Posted by u/DevOpsy

konschubert · 2 years ago

It’s hard to enforce api contracts between components of a monolith.

And when performance tanks, it’s hard to pin the root cause to a component.

Both of these could probably be fixed by tooling. Could be z as fun research project or maybe a company.

karlmdavis · 2 years ago

You and I must work in very different contexts, as these questions are so obvious that they first seemed like satire to me.

You enforce API contracts in a monolith (or any codebase, really) via an at-least-modest amount of typing and a compiler. You diagnose performance issues via any number of tools, prominently including metrics and profilers.

My context for this is a lot of years working with backend languages like Java, Rust, etc. though the same assurances and tooling are available for most every platform I’m aware of.

karlmdavis commented on Matter, set to fix smart home standards in 2023, stumbled in the real market arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/Bender

ahaucnx · 2 years ago

It's true that the trend in the industry definitely goes towards subscriptions and closed eco systems.

We at AirGradient see that very well that more and more companies force their users into the cloud and some monitors even refuse to show current air quality when not registered to the cloud. Imagine you would need to register your fever thermometer with an app in the cloud before you could measure your temperature...

Part of the problem is not only the investors in Matter but also VC funded smart home equipment manufacturers that are pressured to go down the recurring revenue business model.

At AirGradient [1] we want to demonstrate a counter example. Our fully certified air quality monitors are open source hardware and thus we provide the firmware code and they can be easily re-flashed with whatever software you like to use. With this openness a great community has emerged that maintains integrations to various systems like Home Assistant via ESPHome.

[1] https://www.airgradient.com/

karlmdavis · 2 years ago

Looks perfect for me with one show stopper: no Home Kit support. I love the idea of Home Assistant but do not have the free time to pick up another service to support in our house.