Aptira | Fully Remote US/CA/UK/EU/AUS/NZ | Full-time | SRE

We're an Australian consulting company currently building out a multi region baremetal Kubernetes cluster for a client experiencing explosive growth and looking for SREs to help keep it running.

At the base: Kata Containers, Kyverno, Cilium, TopoLVM and Ceph

Workloads: Python microservices, Kafka, Postgres, Valkey and MongoDB

Observability using Grafana LGTM and automated using Ansible, Helm and BitBucket.

If you're a Linux nerd with a few years of experience under your belt and you're looking to dive deep into platform engineering, get in touch with us via careers <at> aptira <dot> com

> which is what actually matters, why does anyone care about raw power?

Raw power determines whether games run smoothly, how fast things compile, how fast a render takes etc. The performance per watt determines battery life but for some people that isn't particularly important. I can only run the Unreal Engine Editor for about an hour before the battery runs out on my laptop (5800H/16GB/3070). The raw performance when plugged in is much more useful to me than trying to squeeze another 20 minutes out of it. Of course I prefer using my desktop for those tasks, but sometimes I need to travel or demo so laptop (with charger) it is.

> Did it make a meaningful improvement to the environment?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-07/most-plastic-bags-gon...

It's not completely clear from this article if the measurement includes the thicker bags, but my guess is yes.

The RTS example is even worse - Starcraft: Brood War and Age of Empires 2 are still unmatched in terms of multiplayer. The Relic games he mentions are fun but they're not exactly timeless classics and Relic have generally struggled to balance their games.

> It's like telling a guitarist that AI will empower them because now the computer will play music for them.

I don't need AI for that - we've had drum machines for ages and now VSTs that can emulate pretty much any instrument. They do empower me because now I can create music that isn't limited to the instruments I own and can play without needing to hire an orchestra.

That's not empowering a guitarist to play guitar in some new or better or more efficient way.

Drum machines and VSTs are tools for any composer to synthesize a composition. They solve a different problem for a different set of people that can include but is not limited to guitarists. And as you pointed out they predate AI.

How do drum machines and VSTs make you better at playing guitar, or allow you to do that more efficiently or for higher pay? How will AI do that?

Don't guitarists record themselves playing a tune in a hundred different ways before settling on one that is the most appropriate?

What did you do about Reaper? I'm in a similar boat and I'm not super excited about moving to another DAW.

EDIT I didn't realise there's a linux build for Reaper now! I guess I'll still have to sort out how to run my VSTs but that's probably a case by case thing.

> in every form of adverse driving conditions known to man

I don't need, for example, a self driving car to be able to handle snow particularly well, because it does not snow where I live. I don't need it to be able to drive well off-road because there are roads everywhere I go. I don't need it to be able to tow a trailer or a caravan, or drive a heavy vehicle. Self driving technology does not need to surpass humans in every single driving condition in order to be useful to a large number of people.

It sounds like you need buses, subways, and trains.

And if self driving cards are cordoned off to special areas, they are just another extension of buses, subways, trains, but with less manual operation needed. The criteria that self driving vehicles perform very well everywhere is extreme when we already have so many modes of transportation designed for specific contexts.

Then call them and market them as something other than "car". Because if you call it a car and market it as such folks will treat it like one, which means exposure to every type of road and weather condition known to man with potentially lethal consequences if the software can't keep up.

Vehicles get sold to people that live in places with snow. Snow exists in the world ergo self driving tech is dangerously incomplete if it can't cope.

> You do make me wonder, though, about who the vocal users are: RHEL is not important enough to license, but important enough to not move to a different distro?

The scientific community, who run extremely high core counts and thus get a raw deal on licensing, but need the drivers for their hardware to be completely reliable as well as software compatability to work with anything from proprietary vendors that their community might need. Eg. CERN who are backing Alma linux.

I don't know anything about CS, but in the Starcraft scene the meta is always evolving because new maps come into rotation that push players to develop new strategies. I guess LoL does something similar by adding new characters.

I see Qantas, which is a western airline by most definitions.

Though it's worth noting that Qantas have been acquiring smaller companies then slapping their badge on the planes and their uniforms on the pilots. It's only a matter of time before they start to slip down this list and regress to the mean.