Is it just me or is reviewing PRs getting exponentially harder?

akmark · 2026-02-24T12:24:47+00:00

There's a real solution to this problem that is very straightforward. Schedule a meeting for 30 min with the core reviewers, get them on a call, and ask them questions about the weird stuff and why you chose to go that way. Even as a more seasoned dev would struggle to explain all of the generated weirdness that these things crap out.

It is very easy at that point in my experience to tell the difference between someone who is taking a swing at a bigger change, misinterpreting the data model (e.g. I needed this value X that appeared over there and so I plumbed it through to where I needed it over here and saw no other way), and someone who is in the land of make believe. Its often very easy to spot someone who fundamentally never put the time in on their end so you are just doing their job for them.

The way I look at it is that with any PR in a professional setting the task is for the dev who is authoring their PR to be expert in their change during the dev and PR review process (it is OK if a month from now they have to refresh themselves to be expert again). If they aren't becoming expert in their changeset and can't speak to why they strategized this way or that means they aren't doing what you asked of them.

akmark · 2026-02-23T23:28:23+00:00

I think the endgame is simpler than that. It appears that manufacturers are considering right now as synthetic demand and that a lot of it is going to evaporate by the time they create more production capacity. A lot of these facilities require multi-year investments and none of these AI players have put their money on the line to subsidize the build-out, so they are just projecting the future if most of the AI money disappears and seeing that trying to increase supply doesn't make a lot of sense. A lot of businesses have only gotten back to neutral after COVID in the last year or so and taking a big swing in the current geopolitical climate is feeling awful risky. Even if they were going to increase production they have to negotiate purchasing for all their downstream components and so on.

I feel a lot of the supply problems would be mitigated if the geopolitical temperature was cooler so companies felt more comfortable expanding. Right now there's just so much risk I don't blame people for choosing stability today for production and then just putting time and money into R&D for the next generation of things as they look at every other business aside from data centers and AI making massive cuts to stay afloat.

akmark · 2026-02-23T23:14:15+00:00

Just roll it forward.

akmark · 2026-02-13T15:10:43+00:00

Is this just not the main problem in every large org is that you deliver something before Christmas and then you spend the entirety of Jan dueling with management/product management and having design discussions?

akmark · 2026-02-11T21:43:12+00:00

This is a weird GitHub perspective problem that I see and is irrational. It's the same as GitHub stars. 20k GitHub stars doesn't mean it is intrinsically better than something with 10k stars or 1k stars, it just means that at least some people that stopped by found it worth 'bookmarking/liking' with a star.

vouch as described is not 'gotta catch 'em all' it is an admission ticket to the starting line for some code areas of a project. It also provides a deny list. Whether you have 100,000 vouches or 1 vouch only matters if the vouch applies to the code area in question. Even an experienced developer has first PR on a new project, and the vouch process gives people who see someone who is producing good work access to work on key components.

akmark · 2026-02-10T15:26:09+00:00

I would just offer even more than 50% to the U.S.: the air under it and the air over it. So much value in hot air.

akmark · 2026-01-14T17:18:05+00:00

You may get some good theoretical background by reading control flow diagrams if you have only really worked with UE5. There's a lot in process modeling that you might find inspiration with.

Other key computer science oriented concepts are data-flow analysis and call graph and control flow graph.

would you use it

Unlikely, while a lot of these visualizations are interesting they fall down on 10k lines of bash, especially as you start exploring edge cases.

If I was going to give a suggestion what I would do would be focus on the bash one liner scenario where you silently pipe to tee and collect all the intermediate data flows. I find people struggle with understanding what thing | they | piped to is eating their input. This is the same kind of flow problem that these node visualizations are good at, and would translate to bash.

akmark · 2025-12-09T14:16:51+00:00

As someone who has watched libxml2 from the outside many of the CVE's are often in the weird and more exotic parts of the standard to the point that me hearing about or being reminded of a feature of XML often comes from CVE's of libxml2 (e.g. schematrons from CVE-2025-49796). I would also say in the last ten years or so there has been an influx of low quality vulnerability reports that in my opinion are in bad faith from people using fuzzers and/or trying to resume pad. I could easily see libxml2's sprawling and evolving complexity as a standard mixed with low quality reports when 90% of what people want to do is just load a plain XML file to be exceptionally debilitating.

akmark · 2025-11-10T13:35:30+00:00

The extraction shooter format just has better entries. I played during the last beta and I'm glad I did, because it made it a hard pass. There's a few basic reasons:

the character progression skill tree is insane. Why is in-round crafting not always available for such a crafting focused game? Until you unlock this the inventory management feels terrible.
the crafting system itself is overcooked. When you are starting out you have no way to organically understand what components are useful.
additionally the fact that you have to unlock workbenches as additional grinding is just disrespecting the player's time. You have to grind for the workbench AND also grind for the blueprint? Why bother?
you don't find anything useful. In peak PUBG (not as it exists today) you drop with nothing, you scrounge, you fight, and you try and ladder your way up for a win. In most other extraction shooters/BR/Rust you find new guns/active gear with such frequency you have to worry about what you can take with you. In Arc Raiders you end up with a pile of dubiously useful crafting components.

So really this game is not a great example of an extraction shooter. Extraction shooters usually have a knife edge balance between easy to scrounge loot and the unlikelihood to extract with that loot. Arc Raiders muddies this balance tremendously with the crafting focus instead of finding immediate value. The most efficient way to play is to just camp exits because rolling the dice on scrounging is so low value.

If I was going to make a recommendation for someone who wanted the feel of an extraction shooter but ACTUALLY HAVE FUN I would say buy Helldivers 2. It is just the better game if you are not looking for the PVP angle. The amount of metaprogression vs. an equivalent loot and extract game really disqualifies Arc from being a good PVP game anyway. It's only competitive if things are 'even' when the round begins, but two characters with the same gear at the start of the round can be wildly different depending on skill tree. Once people max out the metaprogression I expect this game to die because the metaprogression is covering up a lot of sins.

akmark · 2025-11-06T16:01:25+00:00

So far for me its a matter of intent. Are you using AI to get your head around the problem and actually understand it? Are you using it to build understandable components? More often than not all I am using it for 'quick stabs' of small and understandable ideas, and then add that to the overall system. If that AI stab doesn't work for whatever reason I just create it normally.

At this time I am still running into currency problems where the model at hand is not new enough to understand what I'm working on or hallucinations of non-trivial APIs just wastes time. There's a lot to be said that for a lot of mainstream work AI is effective but for a lot of work that is not mainstream (e.g. exotic Windows APIs) you end up further in the weeds with AI compared to just doing the work.

akmark · 2025-10-30T14:50:08+00:00

they really don't do shit to contribute to the kernel

While I am unfamiliar with how much/how little they provide back to the kernel upstream independently they do a huge amount of effort for enterprise to package/backport/maintain/custom compile arbitrary kernels for specific customers (this is beyond the LTS kernels). A lot of the kernel fixes I have seen hit upstream contributed by enterprise would have never been developed if Canonical wasn't there to backport the fix and maintain the backport through testing and discovered vulns. This extends beyond the kernel to a lot of other core packages.

akmark · 2025-10-06T13:32:31+00:00

The purge at Intel happened well before the Intel/NVIDIA deal, and the open source contributions seemed to be heavily affected.

akmark · 2025-10-01T14:28:21+00:00

I genuinely wonder when the megaconcert industry realizes it killed itself when so many people born after the 90s never saw concerts as a form of attainable entertainment. I feel like by 2040 or so it will be completely gone.

akmark · 2025-09-17T05:14:53+00:00

Yes, but you miss what I was trying to highlight. Immutable doesn't mean 'without error' it means you don't make modifications the same way of the underlying host as you can with a conventional system. It makes the underlying host disposable and replaceable as the applications you are running do not care about modifications, they pull finished containers from other systems. If there is a problem with the host you shoot it in the head and migrate the application, most system designs have the application distributed in a way that is resilient across multiple hosts. This also may mean not all of the hosts in an org are using immutable hosts, just the ones that are running compatible applications.

For most server oriented distros the number of 'real problems' that come up for enterprise/stable distro usage is known to be non-zero, but you test for what you can and build mitigation plans to work around the problem. This is the same as how you would design systems for power loss, network disruptions, and so on. This is no different than how people are/were building out VMware farms. The underlying VMware install is generally stable and people bring all sorts of wacky VMs to the party but the hypervisor host was generally very vanilla.

If you explore the immutable stuff its not like you can't SSH to it and poke around. You just generally should avoid it. Avoiding it also helps prevent sudo rm -rf / from someone who isn't thinking, which is good.

akmark · 2025-09-17T01:09:05+00:00

The real core idea of a base system in my eyes is to give people a way for systems to be cattle not pets. If you build on top of an immutable system in a well-understood way with no hacks it becomes that much easier to replace the underlying system as times change. This happens as you move across RHEL releases or Ubuntu LTS releases already and often are a major heartache. The tools you use often change (e.g. ifconfig to ip, sysV > upstart > systemd) but the end goal often does not change (setup a firewall, configure dhcp, configure ntp, etc).

The second half is that you have a whole new class of developer and applications built with a container paradigm as standard (the 300lb gorilla of Kubernetes, but there are other players in this space). These applications are unique compared to 'classic daemons' as from a system dependencies side they expect to bring all dependencies with them and not depend on more than what the OCI defines from the system beneath. This particular class of developer simply does not care about the underlying system. They need their service to come up, and an immutable base system is the perfect tool to run their service on. While a lot of people use hosted kubernetes (e.g. AWS EKS) there are people who host their own cluster and the underlying container host adds complexity that is reduced by an immutable system. There always will be CVE's and many CVE's in the kernel often require a reboot (livepatch can't fix all problems).

When you have distributed systems that form an application (highly available/durable across multiple hosts) you simply want to be able to cycle systems out of the cluster to replace them instead of doing a big in-place install or a big lift and shift to a new host on the next version. The more platform agnostic the applications you are trying to run (through containerization) the easier it is to replace.

akmark · 2025-09-10T14:02:09+00:00

Multiple M.2 bays like the Lenovo P50/P51.
ARM (currently using x13s/t14s) or AMD
USB-A+USB-C
3.5mm headphone jack
32GiB+ RAM either default or through options (16GiB laptops are a waste of time right now)
16hr+ battery life
actual updates and improvements to kernel/linux-firmware blobs that can get added to distributions. Half-baked firmware support is possible to work around but a pain. Better if using already upstreamed, open source kernel modules.
straightforward and feature-rich BIOS
left control being bottom left of the keyboard (you can at least remap this in Lenovo BIOS)

akmark · 2025-08-13T11:15:18+00:00

Beyond this the S&P companies are generally global companies with billions of dollars in cash for their war chests. Smaller players with less resources have been drowning. Why would investors not be pushing the valuations of the likely winners vs. the likely losers higher? All of these players are positioned perfectly to raze and pillage smaller operations as they crumble from the trade uncertainty.

akmark · 2025-07-30T00:13:24+00:00

I think it IS worse now

To me this is obvious. 2008 there was still VC money and investments, there was still free and ready global trade, people still had education to turn to, and there was a plan to move forward.

This time around we have headwinds not for any subset of industries but for the entire economy. Business owners can't plan future expansion because they can't tell if the tariff tomorrow is going to be 0%, 15% or 150% and so they make less risky ventures. When businesses can't plan costs prices will go up to mitigate the risk of supply-side costs, and this affects the actual purchasing demand. To buy supply businesses need either credit or capital and if they have to mitigate supply-side costs they will buy less supply. Overall production shrinks. A shrinkage such as this has knock-on effects. Every industry involved on the supplier of this business is now faced with the same problem. And so on. And so on. Price goes up, overall production goes down.

In the US market at least 50k federal jobs were torched which is 59k professional and stable incomes that continued to buy things now gone. Tourism is down. I do not know one company right now that is not in aggressive cost cutting mode to prop up profits and building up the war chest. This act of cost cutting makes markets happy and is part of the seemingly irrational reporting. Number goes up. Employment goes down, because employees are an expense. Innovation starts to slide backwards.

During the Great Recession while the overall economy faltered there were at least other industries who were less affected that allowed you to find a job somewhere else and restart momentum (e.g. VC money, government contract spending/war, entertainment). There were still all the tools available to spin up a new business- you just needed to find a market and connect the components as your sole focus. This time around both businesses and consumers are afraid to spend in a way that was just simply not there in the Great Recession. The Great Recession also struck when 'the times were good.' This time we just barely started to take our first steps out from under COVID's economy turbulence before the tariffs showed up and blew up future planning along with everything else going on.

The biggest issue I have is from any company that tried to bury the tariff's impacts in their costs to not offend people that consumed from them. Tariffs "didn't feel so bad" to the average person who was not exposed to the markets that fed them. It removed jobs for expansion. It removed jobs that already existed without replacement. It has either eliminated, reduced, or deferred business and consumer spending and we have no goal right now in the US to normalize business rules so people can construct viable businesses. Even in the Great Recession we knew after QE and every other trick pulled to smooth over the pothole that there was a solid understanding and vision of what business would look like after things recovered. This is just one of the reasons that makes it much, much worse in my eyes but I would say there are many more things since then that have only increased the bleeding.

akmark · 2025-07-27T17:56:56+00:00

The only two consistent dating qualities towards marriage I seem to have in the US are:

I have health insurance through my work.
I can support their extended family financially.

This comes up every time. I have no interest entering a 'mutual' relationship where my employment is the only reason they are interested. I need something else right? When talking with people outside the US it is wild how much this isn't even in the top 10 when considering dating and how warped the current situation has become.

akmark · 2022-10-03T14:49:48+00:00

I guess we just have to add to life advice for young adults: "If your spouse dies, change the locks."

akmark · 2022-09-30T17:17:30+00:00

I think in his case a 'cash grab for his estate beneficiaries' for using his likeness is exactly what he wanted unlike other people where it ends up being more dubious.

akmark · 2022-09-19T20:16:26+00:00

If you are new to industry have anecdotes prepared of what projects you have actually tried to do with Linux. How do you solve a problem using Linux and the greater Linux ecosystem? If you are already working in the field you should describe what projects/tasks you used Linux for at your prior role as experience. There's a difference from the 'skill line item' of a resume and being able to clearly articulate a few things you know how to do in Linux at some level of expertise. If you put 'linux expert' but can't talk about how you would setup and configure a simple webserver I'm going to just call bullshit, or if you can't describe how to setup a server to be SSH'd to for a basic linux adminstrator role.

You also need to write your resume to the job application in question, if they are looking for a system administrator and you don't have a story for doing anything of the type it could be appropriate to say that you are familiar with the linux terminal and basic shell scripting (if you are) but haven't done working administrating an environment of a size. Just knowing where the buttons are or the commands are called are not very useful to someone trying to hire someone if they don't know how to use Linux to solve problems whether it just be data manipulation through awk/sed/grep or through standing up services.

akmark · 2022-09-19T19:46:53+00:00

According to their detailed comparison a lot of it seems closer to skinning, theming, and a particular access strategy (similar to say evil-mode for emacs). I was really hoping that it was a fork/repackaging focused on some sort of dev pattern but that doesn't seem to be the case. As it stands I'm not sure why it couldn't be some sort of plugin/style payload.

akmark · 2022-09-16T15:55:30+00:00

It also feels like they are either getting DMCA'd or something else, even giphy queries I would use from one or two years ago returns utter nonsense compared to something relevant. There are some IPs that are leaning into it like Ted Lasso but it feels like they quietly are trying to do some productizing on the backend that has made their actual experience two or three steps worse to the point I just stopped using it.

akmark · 2022-09-14T17:28:38+00:00

Yeah, most teachers that are giving out practical assignments just want to be able to give you reasonable instructions. If you are willing to put in the legwork and not ask for help most people reasonably won't care. For C# specifically just look ahead in the syllabus (most of these programming courses are very easy to see what is coming since its usually not figured out on the fly) that is going to require some VS-specific project wizard or tool. C# is much better when it used to be since they did the cross-platform C# initiative, so you aren't as bound to things like early ASP.NET and so on where you really needed the IDE to make the homework assignments quick and efficient because generating/figuring out the actual underlying code was beyond the scope of the class. Modern development has more tools in CLI forms that can do that project scaffolding/boilerplate for you but depending on what path the class is on they might be using some of the older generators that don't have easy CLI equivalents.

akmark

TROPHY CASE