seniorThrowaway (u/seniorThrowaway)

seniorThrowaway commented on Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves 404media.co/flock-exposed... · Posted by u/chaps

afavour · 8 days ago

The US government is a democracy and can be replaced should it exceed people’s limits. The CCP… uh, not so much.

I’m not trying to say the US government is faultless but it amazes me how often I see this kind of anti-democratic institition sentiment.

seniorThrowaway · 8 days ago

Maybe it isn't the US government we need to worry about. What's stopping Flock from compiling and selling personal dossiers on every citizen like all the other big tech companies? They're just a private company so nothing to worry about, right?

seniorThrowaway commented on Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions resources.github.com/acti... · Posted by u/kevin-david

maratc · 14 days ago

Slack posting is literally one-line curl with a token. That's what the fancy marketplace action does behind the scenes.

seniorThrowaway · 13 days ago

Yep and a good example of how using the convenient best practice pushed by the vendor (the marketplace action) isn't a good idea. But I did.

seniorThrowaway commented on Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions resources.github.com/acti... · Posted by u/kevin-david

fbcpck · 14 days ago

I don't know how much of that 6 hours build is tangled up in github workflows, but if it's a single contiguous block, you probably could make it near zero by making the self-hosted runner do only the preparation and only the final upload process (workflow_dispatch when the build is complete).

seniorThrowaway · 14 days ago

Most of it is just time waiting either while the source assets are downloaded (I clean slate it, that's the point of CI after all), the build itself runs, or the artifact is uploading to it's storage home. I'm sure it could be re-architected to use less actions minutes but if I'm going to redo it I will probably just move away from actions altogether because it's only loosely linked to Github anyway (runs on a schedule) and that way I am insulated from any future changes they come up with. The hardest part will likely be figuring out the Slack bot posting, I do use the marketplace action for that, but that's probably low lift. With LLM assisted coding I'm leaning more and more to little in house apps for stuff like this, it keeps you from dealing with lock in and other extractive gotchas.

seniorThrowaway commented on Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions resources.github.com/acti... · Posted by u/kevin-david

BugsJustFindMe · 14 days ago

Everyone in this thread has gone absolutely insane. $5/month gets you 41 fucking _hours_ of continuous operation. If you're not utterly abusing the platform, this falls extremely below the threshold of caring. And if not, what the fuck are you even doing with all those hours? The new per-minute charge is less than one millisecond of engineer labor cost.

seniorThrowaway · 14 days ago

I have a nightly software build of a piece of software that takes 6 hours to create a 70GB artifact. The build process requires a GPU so it runs on my own HW. That's ~180 hours per month for this job alone. Is that really so hard to imagine?

seniorThrowaway commented on Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions resources.github.com/acti... · Posted by u/kevin-david

Kydlaw · 14 days ago

I have a love-hate relationship with GitHub Actions. Love because they are right there in my GitHub repository. Hate because they are very brittle once you move out of the happy path.

It seems GitLab has a much better experience in this department, but their pricing is hard to justify for us...

Genuinely curious if folks here had better experiences or recommendations for a smooth CI/CD experience.

seniorThrowaway · 14 days ago

Love-hate for me as well. Love that there is native github integration for triggering events and other github bits. Hate the brittleness and anymore the reliability even if you are just using the control plane. I've always sought to keep my actions as mainly just calling existing scripts, that is keep logic out of them and make them relatively dumb wrappers but it would still be some effort to get off it.

seniorThrowaway commented on Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions resources.github.com/acti... · Posted by u/kevin-david

seniorThrowaway · 14 days ago

I've been running self hosted runners for my company using Actions Runner Controller (ARC) on my own kubernetes infrastructure. Could never really get the devs invested in GitOps style dev cycles so I may just chuck actions and use a more nightly or on demand style build server since that seems to be what they desire and expect. I always expected this day to come so my actions use very little github/actions specific stuff, mainly they just kick off scripts already. I do wonder how hard it would be to create my own github API pollers etc but not sure I want to invest any further in anything github specific. Good news is the effective date is March and the initial prices for my usage will probably be very low but I fully expect them to push further price increases / monetization / lock-in.

seniorThrowaway commented on It’s time to free JavaScript (2024) javascript.tm/letter... · Posted by u/pavelai

garyrob · a month ago

> POTS = Plain Old Telephony System I worked for NY Telephone for years in the '80s, and it was referred to there as "Plain Old Telephone Service" not System. Not that it's a big deal at this point!

seniorThrowaway · a month ago

I started my career as a telecom tech in the mid Atlantic (late 90's) and can confirm it was that for me too

seniorThrowaway commented on A $1k AWS mistake geocod.io/code-and-coordi... · Posted by u/thecodemonkey

antonvs · a month ago

> But not as easy a maintenance story

That's my whole point. Zero maintenance.

For a tinkerer who's focused on the infra, then sure, hosting your own can make sense. But for anyone who's focused on literally anything else, it doesn't make any sense.

seniorThrowaway · a month ago

Cloud is not great for GPU workloads. I run a nightly workload that takes 6-8 hours to run and requires a Nvidia GPU, along with high RAM and CPU requirements. It can't be interrupted. It has a 100GB output and stores 6 nightly versions of that. That's easily $600+ a month in AWS just for that one task. By self-hosting it I have access to the GPU all the time for a fixed up front relatively low cost and can also use the HW for other things (I do). That said, these are all backend / development type resources, self hosting customer facing or critical things yourself is a different prospect, and I do use cloud for those types of workloads. RDS + EKS for a couple hundred a month is an amazing deal for what is essentially zero maintenance application hosting. My point is that "literally anything else" is extreme, as always, it is "right tool for the job".

seniorThrowaway commented on Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues cloudflarestatus.com/inci... · Posted by u/imdsm

GuB-42 · a month ago

Another one that worries me is Let's Encrypt.

It is not as bad as Cloudflare or AWS because certificates will not expire the instant there is an outage, but considers that:

- It serves about 2/3 of all websites

- TLS is becoming more and more critical over time. If certificates fail, the web may as well be down

- Certificate lifetimes are becoming shorter and shorter, now 90 days, but Let's Encrypt is now considering 6 days, with 47 days being planned as a minimum

- An outage is one thing, but should a compromise happen, that would be even more catastrophic

Let's Encrypt is a good guy now, but remember that Google used to be a good guy in the 2000s too!

seniorThrowaway · a month ago

Agree, I’ve thought about this one too. The history of SSL/TLS certs is pretty hacky anyway in my opinion. The main problem they are solving really should have been solved at the network layer with ubiquitous IPsec and key distribution via DNS since most users just blindly trust whatever root CAs ship with their browser or OS, and the ecosystem has been full of implementation and operational issues.

Let’s Encrypt is great at making the existing system less painful, and there are a few alternatives like ZeroSSL, but all of this automation is basically a pile of workarounds on top of a fundamentally inappropriate design.

seniorThrowaway commented on Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues cloudflarestatus.com/inci... · Posted by u/imdsm

tempest_ · a month ago

Unfortunately the internet sucks in 2025.

If you have a site with valuable content the LLM crawlers hound you to no end. CF is basically a protection racket at this point for many sites. It doesnt even stop the more determined ones but it keeps some away.

seniorThrowaway · a month ago

Yep for anyone unaware of how awful things truly are, look up what a "residential proxy" is. Back in my day we called that a botnet.