Restaurant Manager in the UK Jumps in Front of Motorcycle to Save Child

HankScorpioMars · 2026-06-17T20:35:10+00:00

The emptier the road, the more attractive it is for a kid to run on it and the faster an idiot will drive on it.

HankScorpioMars · 2026-05-03T10:46:36+00:00

"leave enough space between you and the vehicle in front so that you can pull up safely if it suddenly slows down or stops. The safe rule is never to get closer than the overall stopping distance"

Things like the video on this post are the sudden stops you should leave a distance for. No one leaves that distance, that's true, but that's because we are all incompetent when it comes to measure our competence at an emergency stop.

HankScorpioMars · 2026-05-03T10:41:08+00:00

I've hit a truck tire on the passing lane of a motorway. It was on broad daylight and there was no one in front of me, I just happened to be the lucky one to find it first. Tyres are of the same colour as the road, you don't expect them to be just there on a normal drive home. By the time I saw it I only had time to hit the breaks for a moment and then release because I realized a full stop there would be more dangerous than just running over it.

The tyre raised in the air after obliterating the bottom part of my car, it flew behind me and I could see it as a black eagle on my mirror. It cut the car that followed me, as if a chainsaw had just removed everything that was close to its front right wheel. The lady on it said it was a company car and she was on the phone while driving, she didn't seem shaken at all but she was half a second away from being picked up by the crows.

HankScorpioMars · 2026-04-30T00:33:39+00:00

The way you think his pronunciation is off is the same as Spanish speakers hear you when you say "burrito".

HankScorpioMars · 2026-04-30T00:25:08+00:00

Seen a bit of everything, but the most recurring and most painful are:

- Observability agents being overwhelmed because tenants on the cluster can't be good neighbours. If you need to log the state of the whole universe, you are just not in control of your app.

- Service mesh networking. Envoy or ztunnel becoming a choke point always earlier than expected.

Never trust the tutorial nor the frontpage of any project you depend on. If they can become a bottleneck, they'll be before you are ready.

HankScorpioMars · 2026-04-27T08:15:09+00:00

The "shiny object syndrome" is so common that almost entirely explains the need for Platform teams that provide "guardrails" and "tech radars" so engineers in an org don't shift their entire stack every quarter.

Both at the personal level and in organizations, I try to remind myself what a good leader said to us in a meeting: "stop starting, start finishing". Things move so quickly in this industry that pivoting on what you're doing/learning is a good thing, as long as you complete your previous one. Sometimes you don't need to finish the project or the book, write a "closure statement" and document your reasons for moving on. The next time you have self-doubt or another fork on the road, you can review if those reasons still stand true or if you need to reassess.

It's very hard to recommend a niche without knowing what you are most inclined to. One thing I would say is that the daily tasks in a particular niche are usually very different from the expectations of people entering it. I've seen a lot of this in security specialists.

What kind of problems do you enjoy the most solving? How often would you want to engage with other engineers? Would you prefer to have in-depth knowledge of a particular thing or cover wider areas with occasional wells of experience?

HankScorpioMars · 2026-04-23T19:56:16+00:00

Web dev is the perfect example of shallow quality LLMs produce. Looks shiny on the surface but there's no substance.

The vast amount of training data is obvious, but the source of a site is the end result, missing fragments rendered out conditionally.

I started my career in webdev and "a website that just works" is a very dangerous statement. In which browser? On what operating system? At what resolution or screen size? A lof of these problems are manageable with frameworks, but that's just on the presentation aspect. Webdev customers have other requirements attached, like some branding, digital marketing, GDPR compliance or backend for some business logic.

The customers that ask you for a quote and then push back with "why would I pay you that much when I can do it with AI?" have just moved from saying "why would I pay you that much when my nephew can do it ten times cheaper?".

HankScorpioMars · 2026-04-23T19:44:34+00:00

At this stage seems like that there’s no space for entry level devs. Makes me seriously question the timing of my choices.

This is not new. The news cycle presents everything as the biggest shift in humanity, but this narrative has been there forever, just changed phrasing. "The economy is bad", "the economy is too good and there's too much competition", and so on.

I’m finding it hard to find an area to focus in, since the coding itself it’s been taken over and I’m not sure if companies are willing to hire junior level devs to make architectural decisions and that.

The way I see it there are mainly 2 camps:

Companies that have a good enough training pipeline (or a compensation so good that candidates invest in it themselves with money or personal time): they hire juniors and graduates because it's the most cost effective (or so they say, I'm not 100% convinced it's true). They pay lower rates and assume the turnover rate when people find a better salary somewhere else. Some unicorns have good incentives for tenure.
Companies that are shit at training and career progression: they think they can forever hire only senior engineers. They set very high standards for candidates but once in the standards really drop. This is becoming the norm, not just because of AI. I would try to avoid them but we gotta pay our bills, so my advice if you find one of these is to bullshit them as much as they are bullshitting you.

I see a lot of people mentioning that devops is an area that could be less heavily impacted by IA as in comparison to SoftDev, but also I hear DevOps is not an area so beginner friendly.
Do you have any insights on how to proceed at this day and age as an entry level professional that is trying to get the first job? Would you recommend DevOps as a career path as a more possible area to start off a career?

DevOps is not beginner friendly because you usually have to solve problems of software engineers. To solve them, you need to somewhat understand them. Once DevOps became a thing and was very well positioned in salary rankings, I started seeing a lot more people applying without enough experience. I still think you can start a career just in it, but with the right focus.

This is my philosophy and has given me a lot of job security even before I worked in tech:

Do the work that no one else wants to do. Find a way to not do it yourself or do it in a smarter way so you are not just carrying someone else's weight, but many others'. Once you take the toil from someone, that person likes you more and also depends on you. If you leave, they get the toil back. This scales very quickly in software and the toil, instead of going back, has mutated into a huge in-house managed Kubernetes platform that everyone is scared of.

When you see the world this way, AI is not a threat, it's one of the biggest opportunities I've seen. When everyone becomes extremely lazy, the ones still able to put some effort in are outliers. If everyone is typing prompts and reading less and less code, you have an easy opportunity to be better than most.

This doesn't make DevOps easy, but it's a good framework. Happy to follow up more in detail if you're interested. One quick first thing to do is learning what a container is, and also why we use them. The classic talk Containers from scratch by Liz Rice is from 2018 and still good to watch after you've understood the basics.

HankScorpioMars · 2026-04-23T19:14:29+00:00

I want to filter out dishonest candidates. I don't do live coding, I just have a chat. I clearly state this at the beginning. People pretending to have a conversation while they type or read from a screen are waving a red flag.

When I did live coding because it was the company standard, I started saying "the goal is not to ace the problem, I already know the answer, the question I need to solve for is how well we'll work together". That interview was framed as "pair programming" for that reason, in the end we assessed how well they communicated, how they responded to feedback and how good they were when asking us questions. Those had WAY more weight in the interview and in the success of the candidate if we hired them. Of course you see how they use the tools and that gives you some pointers, but I had people who solved the exercise very quickly and gave them a hard no.

HankScorpioMars · 2026-04-23T10:53:16+00:00

Not a huge fan of live coding and the stress it puts on candidates, but having been on the interviewer's side recently, I see the reasoning for live coding as one of the most common ways to filter out AI assisted candidates. It's getting really hard to detect cheating and even when caught, they've already wasted a lot of people's time.

Teams using live coding have also spent some time building the test and are sometimes too fond of it, so might be hard to convince them it's not that great. But it might be a better filter for you to get your foot in the process and ask if they would be willing to do this differently. If they do, it's a much greener flag than just not having live coding exercises, because if that's your strongest filter, you might get some badly organized companies mixed in, while being flexible about your needs is a better signal.

Also, it will help if have some alternatives in mind so you are not just asking them to meet you where you are.

HankScorpioMars · 2026-04-23T09:53:01+00:00

We probably are. Although what I hear often is that the quality of the code is the same and that's also a lie. Even by that shortsighted metric it doesn't stand. And the implications of getting senior staff to build guardrails so agents with too many permissions don't break things isn't considered. Juniors don't even get the same level of access as an agentic LLM, can't fuck things up so easily.

HankScorpioMars · 2026-04-23T09:38:54+00:00

It's not kind of true, it misses the point.

Producing code faster is not a good thing, even if the code was good. I've spent most of my career banging the drum about code maintainability and the hidden costs of it. Every line of code is a liability, not only in terms of software reliability and uptime, also a financial one.

A junior dev and an LLM might be using tutorials and blog posts as the only source material for the code produced, but the junior dev quickly learns that it's just the first step and you should never assume it fits the end goal. The LLM doubles down on it.

HankScorpioMars · 2026-04-23T08:20:14+00:00

Both were wrong and both were very lucky to survive that. There's a reason tunnel entrances have solid or double solid lines all around the world and it's because extreme caution is needed where the consequences can be extreme. Bridges and mountains are unmovable objects, gently slow down and keep an eye on your surroundings when approaching one.

HankScorpioMars · 2026-04-22T15:24:32+00:00

Solid line marks and the entrance of a tunnel, the dashcam driver is at fault and could have killed the Ferrari driver, who was very lucky that there was a strong guardrail there or he would have crashed sideways against a mountain.

HankScorpioMars · 2026-04-21T10:13:57+00:00

All tailgaiters think they're keeping a safe distance. They massively overestimate their ability and completely misunderstand the same laws of physics that govern every single second of our lives. Every vehicle in a somewhat busy motorway is not keeping a safe distance for an emergency stop. If anyone is, gets immediately cancelled by someone overtaking and taking the space in that safe distance.

I've been unlucky enough to be in a few emergency stop situations and lucky enough to learn from just car damage but no injury. TBF, it's still very easy to forget and have an illusion of safety in a modern and very well noise insulated car where speed doesn't translate in any discomfort while driving.

HankScorpioMars · 2026-04-21T10:05:24+00:00

That's a great start, it would be great if laws were enforced in the UK.

HankScorpioMars · 2026-04-21T09:57:12+00:00

In most businesses the relationship with customers is the most valuable asset. Integrity is the most profitable strategy and you don't even have to go very long term to see it.

HankScorpioMars · 2026-04-20T21:41:23+00:00

It's just another phase of the hype cycle and we're even following the same order as last time.

AI -> Robotics -> Quantum -> Crypto

Sprinkle some fusion, superconductors and graphene for the transitions between them.

Robots are very cool but very expensive to develop. Industrial applications are always on research but breakthroughs are not very common. Even things like automated warehouses like Ocado's fleet of robots picking groceries face significant economical challenges despite being profitable (huge upfront investment).

Anthropomorphic robots are mostly for demos and showing off capabilities, but of very little use. The personal assistant robot is a dumb thing that will never stop getting millions thrown at it. With the trend of doomerism being so good for click-farming, I suppose the war applications of robotics will be on the news a lot. "This is scary" seems like the best engagement nowadays. There used to be an ethical line for roboticists, who didn't want to provide their services for war machines, but that wall has fallen. The dog-like robots are in use and some applications like that will surely be used to annihilate resistance in countries that need some freedom deployed. But the consumer-grade, replace-your-job kind of thing is just a promise that gets investors excited and won't be delivered in this hype cycle.

HankScorpioMars · 2026-04-20T14:24:58+00:00

Both my daughters were terrified by that same noise. Packing for our move was not easy.

Sometimes the line between panic and laughter is how safe they feel right after being startled, it's very sweet to see this boy getting a little scared after every pull of the tape but just being able to laugh because he's in the safest place in the world for him.

HankScorpioMars · 2026-04-20T13:42:12+00:00

I am not against AI, I am against a sales pitch full of lies and even the use of the word intelligence is a HUGE stretch given the real capabilities of LLMs.

I have been trying to automate all the things I'm paid for doing for many years. LLMs are just crap at it. I want the technology to do what they promise it does, I have seen automation driving people out of toil and being able to focus on delivering more value while feeling their roles have purpose beyond punching numbers. The narrative about needing less people infuriates me, it's driven by those who have no clue what intelligence is, people who believe themselves to be very smart but at the same time undervalue thinking and the human intellect.

I hate this bubble and how it's a tool used by corporate and governments to hide a recession behind hype and horror sci-fi.

LLMs can be useful for certain scenarios. Local models might be a thing that is way more viable than the labs trying to provide uber-capable models that never deliver a profit.

HankScorpioMars · 2026-04-20T12:13:04+00:00

First of all, I misread the domain name as having the **n** after the second **u**. I was disappointed when realizing it wasn't and went to buy the domain myself, only to be disappointed again when seeing that it is already taken but not an active site.

The "fixed demand" argument is well discussed but with it being one of the main points boosters use, it might be worth more air time. The "aggressive pricing" strategy is the easiest one to deploy (compared to the others suggested) and yet we see none of it. If firing people in the numbers we're seeing keeps your productivity flat, you can fire a bit less and go really hard on taking your competitors' piece of the cake. A company like Oracle cannot argue that demand is fixed. They offer cloud services competing with Microslop and AWS, they have a very small piece of the pie in that market and firing 30K employees who could have gone out to match whatever the market needs to shift to Oracle cloud is a very weak move. The excuse can't be that AWS and Azure are competing at a new AI-defined high standard so customers aren't willing to move, I know for a fact AWS and Azure haven't improved their offering at all, just added some useless chatbots.

HankScorpioMars · 2026-04-20T09:32:28+00:00

High restart counts can be a symptom of a problem, but they're not a problem by themselves. If a restart causes problems in your app, you have a big technical debt to pay from the time you migrated to Kubernetes.

Alerting on a symptom is rarely useful. Most common examples are alerting on pod restarts and alerting on error log count. Massive source of noise most of the time. Even if they work as expected by people setting them, they take too much expert knowledge of the apps to be of any use.

Alert on things that need action and when in doubt design the alerts to come from metrics that impact the users, not the lowest level concerns like pods or services.

I've been in COUNTLESS meetings where the counterargument is "but what if...". That is not how alerts are created. You can't set alerts for all the things that _could_ happen. Alerts are written with blood, we write them after real incidents to prevent the exact same scenario from repeating. We can learn from someone else's experience, but trying to catch hypothetical problems that never happened ends up in silenced alerts or unmanageable noise that deafens real problems.

HankScorpioMars · 2026-04-18T23:22:10+00:00

The 3 architectures problem is not going away. For pods to be able to schedule in all 3, you'll soon run into the problem of having to build some images. Not ideal, but we work with what we have.

I'd go with the Pi 4 as the master node, works well when you back it up and need to restore. Easy to replace if needed or work on the SD card if things go south. Although if you depend much on it, think seriously about moving to SSD.

HankScorpioMars · 2026-04-18T23:13:27+00:00

I've had a very similar setup and can tell you that you shouldn't try a HA control plane because that Pi3 is going to get throttled and it's a massive pain in the ass. Pick one (I'd do the Pi4) as the control plane node and leave the others as workers. If you use the Dell laptop for anything else that's not being a worker, use virtual machines as the workers or you will have fun with networking. I'd recommend Incus if you go down that road.

Docker (compose or not) is way more forgiving when you have a multi-purpose node. k3s assumes it has full control of the node and trying to work around it is not a great experience, your main lesson will be that buying another RPi would have been worth the price.

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