"Ia! Ia! K8s fhtagn! The ingress writhes! The pods churn! The autoscaler weeps in the void!"
Things are looking bleak people; We're headed over a cliff, and I would know because I almost drove off of one last year in a state of late night delerium caused by outdated maps and confusing ass signs.
Things are overabstracted in the industry, theres a rot and its proliferated heavily across the gamestate. We used to be engineers driven by the creative mind, the wozniacks and carmacks of the world building because they knew better could be made. Not some fools chasing a profit margin, but artists in their own right! Their canvas was a textbuffer or some protoboard, their brush a sharp mind. Look at what we have now? What is on the front page of HackerNews week by week? Some Shit GPT wrapper? Maybe ANOTHER KV store?!? (because enough of those didnt already exist) How about ANOTHER fucking useless ass framework for javascript that will be abandonware 20 minutes from now? This is what happens when the MBA infinite growth deathcult mind drives innovation.
It's all so exhausting and I'm already a damn skeleton!
On that call me a momento mori for the scene, defcon is an overpriced disneyland expierience for 9-5ers who couldnt write a single line of assembly or have ever touched a compiled language; let alone a soldering iron. And lets not forget the people who "had work send them". At a point going to defcon was a point of reverence, I remember when I was younger it was always a big deal to meet someone who "Goes to DEFCON" it was a decent signal that the person in question knew their shit. Now larping shitbag sophists like piratesoftware (AKA THOR/JASON THE NEPOBABY / THAT CREEPY SECONDLIFE FERRET FURRY DUDE) namedrop it for clout; setdressing.
On the other end of the spectrum we have the actual industry outside of culture; The stuff they ramble about on MSNBC. Lets start with the current AI bubble, its all a giant waste. Thinking from first principles the current transformer arcchitecture has hit a wall with scaling and honestly should've been abandoned once openAI proved it needed an eyewatering amount of money to attain any form of competence. Now altman runs a smoke and mirrors show and talks out of his ass and the majority of the people who funnel money to these things are either too technically illiterate or just outright stupid to see the emporer wears no clothes. Just looking at financials and listening to anything he says about funding afterwards should have people running for the hills. If we look deeper at the technology behind it we've solved a lot of the same problemspace with markovian chatbots and we could reapply all the ML lessons learned to a markov architecture with some slight adaptation to get results very close with the compute of a fucking smartfridge.
The parts to build the future lay bare in the dirt and nobody has the tenacity or intellect to pick them up and use them.
Lets move a layer lower than AI though, lets look at platforms themselves, the AI models have to be written in something right? I've seen a lot written in python to take advantage of CUDA, good luck running any of it though because you're gonna be fighting a dependency hell unheard of since the days of slackware for the next 5 hours. Thankfully we have conda/pip/whateverotherbrokenshitthatcameoutthismontheveryoneswitchedtofornoreason to spit esoteric errors into your buffer to feed to an LLM someone else is running. (must be nice). And what do you get for that pain? If you have consumer grade hardware you're waiting for inference that sounds like it hit its head falling off the shortbuss because you dont have a terrabyte of vram handy.
Even discounting that monstrosity of shit package management for most modern langs we still have operating systems!
Which fork of centos am I supposed to run now? Oh wait I need to start a whole codebase to maintain a nix config because of course state management needs turing completeness (Let's add dynamism to a thing thats supposed to make sure everything is the same! What could possibly go wrong?). But wait I heard about this kubernetes thing and I have 3 services I gotta have running for 100 users so I better abstract everything into that, because who cares about capacity planning when you can waste months and months of your time changing how your app fundementally works into a bunch of "microservices". The absolute fools have inherited googles techdebt from borg and will not only pay but eat up every once of shit they put out so they can get certified in it.
And where do I deploy my server? I wanna make sure its somewhere that charges me 2x what metal and a colo would cost for a year, but EVERY MONTH! I'll just pretend it gives me free security and just deploy to section8 PAAS which has 0 risk of sidechannel attacks! Who needs dedicated hardware when you can have a VPS made up of ram storage and CPU fragmented across a bunch of servers piecemeal like some frankensystem!
This isn't innovation, its mental illness.
Dont worry though your local devbox which doesnt even use the same architecture has sufficient resources! it has more resources than most webservers had decades ago. Too bad most of it is taken up by your bloated ass operating system. Atleast it has enough headroom to play terribly optimized UE5 games with all those raytracing cores your GPU has (Too bad RT cores cant do CUDA!).
This is just my surface level glance at whats been happening; I could write for days without break in excruciating detail about any of these issues with nuance and even provide solutions, but they're all boring tech so nobody cares.
I'll end this now before I blow up on crypto trying to build a non-commercialized internet on a technology designed to facilitate commerce and the army of larpers that inhabit the space siphoning value from low-skill labor types who have no clue whats going on and just think putting half of their bank account into lolfunnypisscoin is gonna make them overnight millionaires. And I definitely wont badmouth the social media psyop because that actually makes my blood boil.
In fact I'll end this on a good note.
Have a QUALITY day my dear reader; I wish you happiness and prosperity wherever you may go.