If this is a joke, it's a bad one. If it's not, it's even dumber.
The point could be made by having it design and print implements for an indoor container grow and then run lights and water over a microcontroller. Like Anthropic's vending machine this would also be an already addressed, if not solved, space for both home manufacturing and ag/garden automation.
It'd still be novel to see an LLM figure it out from scratch step by step, and a hell of a lot more interesting than whatever the fuck this is. Googling farmland in Iowa or Texas and then writing instructions for people to do the actual work isn't novel or interesting; of course an LLM can write and fill out forms. But the end result still primarily relies on people to execute those forms and affect the world, invalidating the point. Growing corn would be interesting, project managing corn isn't.
The interfaces, CLI and Podman Desktop, are still not at parity. Podman contributors will be the first to tell you this.
That's not to say they aren't effective, or even good, at least for the CLI. They're just still catching up. It's not and shouldn't be a surprise considering the head start.
> Like everything, the original intentions must have been noble.
It was, ca. 2012-15. Sysadmins making automation tools so they could offload the horseshit, often batshit bash/perl scripting work, of manually provisioning dev environments (on VMs, or even basic configuration of new bare metal) to devs, who were already more comfortable with writing their own automation. Devs can unblock themselves, and devs hate relying on anyone else and everyone worships and fears the devs, so fine, give them the sysadmins' rope and rafters.
Moving to a "cattle not pets" mentality for servers well before the proliferation of containers and microservices, much less the mainstreaming of serverless workflows and cloud compute. CI/CD, to make software release processes scriptable, or even better declarative, tasks that could be tested and verified in version-controlled source _before_ being deployed, just like the software itself.
Better automation and better testing meant devs could ship safer and faster; devs owning pipelines meant devs could fix dev-related problems faster.
A lot of early devops tools were written by sysadmins who were tired of being buried by rapidly growing requests to unblock developers, who were outnumbering them by the hundreds or thousands to one at FANG companies (pre-FAANG, much less the big six).
Puppet attacked config management by turning it into declarative code, Ansible made that easier to deploy; Luke Kanies and Michael DeHaan came from sysadmin. HashiCorp made VM provisioning scalable; Armon Dadgar and Mitchell Hashimoto were compsci students who hated doing ops work with rudimentary early cloud services. Most of their early sales inroads into companies came from IT departments using their open-source products; most of their early evangelists were IT executives.
Google splintering devops into the SRE role they coined mostly reflected how they (thought they) had made the "devs unblocking themselves on provisioning" problem that had inspired a lot of foundation tools simply part of the dev culture, especially through GCS and k8s. They didn't think about "devops" anymore much like people don't think about breathing, and narrowed their focus onto uptime.
That was really the failure IMO, that the idea was mostly a cultural one: people working on a problem should also have a stake in, or ownership of, the things they need to unblock their work. A dev being "blocked" from dev work by IT because only IT can provision a piece of hardware or stand up a VM is a cultural problem; the largely open-source tools made by sysadmins and junior/student devs were a response to an entrenched enterprise culture that showed no interest in doing the work necessary to solve that problem.
The tools forced the culture change, but then the tools created their own culture, and the world that defined the culture also changed beneath them. But the companies built around those tools didn't want to die, so they turned devops into whatever might keep them alive.
The problem isn't that "devops" failed to do the job it set out to do (make sysadmins' lives easier), it's that the entire problem area changed so much, and so quickly, that its goal was no longer relevant. There were no "sysadmins" left to help; there are still systems, and there are still administrators, but their responsibilities have been diced up and tossed into the organizational winds.
Not quite as easy of a narrative for the founder of an ops company selling an ops product to frame in a company blog post, though. Not that things in the post are necessarily wrong, but IMO the problem isn't "devops failed", it's why the fuck are we still talking about devops? The word means nothing anymore, its massive overloading pollutes any discussion about who's having problems, what those problems are, and what the solutions to those problems might be.
Or, IMO the problem is that few to no people are asking the modern equivalent of "how do we make sysadmins' lives better?" They're instead chasing a ghost of a concept that peaked a decade ago, because that's easier than looking at an organization's failures from both a sufficiently high and low level to see the cracks that run all the way through them.
- the Oregonian's newsroom is in all but open conflict with its editorial board, its credibility for breaking hard news was already in the shitter before it sold to ADVANCE, and for several years it stopped publishing a broadsheet edition and shuttered its print facility to cut costs
- the Merc sold out to a Seattle-based group run by a former Washington state legislator in July 2024 that's been buying out alt-weeklies in Seattle and Chicago
- Pamplin/Trib and EO groups got bought out by Carpenter, a Mississippi-based conglomerate, in June 2024 with a rep for cutting everything but sports coverage. Layoffs hit both in July 2025
Only the WWeek is still locally owned, and it started a non-profit and seeking donations in 2024. Maybe 20 full-time employees there, at best, and as of 2024 barely above water financially.
I live in Portland, OR. The Oregonian/Oregon Live actually broke the story that the mayor was quietly pushing shelters out. Their news broke before I got the city mandated postcard I should have received living next to the proposed shelter.
KGW broke that the shelter process was occurring without community involvement and feedback processes. Frankly, the Mayor and three district councilors came to our neighborhood meeting. That just doesn't happen in East Portland and was not possible without the involvement of local news.
Willamette Week is a gem, I agree. They broke the Shamaya Fagan story as well as numerous others. I'm saying it's not all bad, especially compared to other localities.
Imago Dei? KGW didn't break anything that the Oregonian hadn't run two weeks prior on Dec. 3, and they got scooped by OPB on it in November. The best coverage KGW (owned and operated by Virginia-based TEGNA, which TIL is in the process of getting Nexstar'd) has had of homelessness was covering their news van getting broken into by a homeless couple and stealing their gear.
Yes that one. They definitely did. I know the people who were interviewed and I know what they said. That neighborhood meeting was because the neighborhood learned that the Mayors office had side stepped the public input process. The mayor admitted it that night. Reporting can be better but my point was that politics does not move East of 205 and for the first time I saw it. The reporter and the photojournalist both lived in Portland. The difference was local media regardless of who they're owned or operated by.
A lot of these comments are indexing on ownership. While I agree ownership plays a factor I think whether the actual journalist is from here plays a more outsized role in how they present and investigate the news.
Every 4K external display I've connected to every M1- and M2-series Mac running macOS has a known flickering issue with Display Stream Compression that Apple knows about and has been unable or unwilling to fix.
The only reliable fixes are to either disable that DisplayPort feature if your monitor supports it, or to disable GPU Dithering using a paid third-party tool (BetterDisplay). Either that or switch to Asahi, which doesn't have that issue.
I have been experiencing this on my 2k monitors as well (Also BENQ). I tried every "fix" under the sun, eventually it stops after enough voodoo (reboots, unplugs) and cursing.
One of the many random issues on the OS with the best UX in the world (lol). Like music sometimes stopping and sometimes switching to speakers when turning off Bluetooth headphones, mouse speed going bananas randomly requiring mouse off and on, terminal app (iterm2) reliably crashing when I dare to change any keybinding, and many other things that never happened in years of working on Linux.
If you're looking for high quality text at 4K, your options are more limited than if you're looking for gaming. This is a good roundup, and the leading Dell is superb:
We use pairs of these Dells per MacBook at our offices and provide them for WR as well. There've been no issues on this Dell or prior models on M1 through M4 (M5 iPad is fine too).
As for DSC, that's been a complaint for a minute… Example HN reader theory on DSC, from Aug 2023:
The best option was the LG UltraFine 24” 4K, which sadly was discontinued years ago.
In my opinion a QHD 23.8” panel is the next best option for developers (any M-series chip handles scaling without issues); I find the common 27” and 32” at 4K a weird spot - slightly too large, slightly too low resolution – and 5k+ options are still rare.
My Dell Ultrasharp 4K also doesn't flicker and has DSC enabled according to the on screen menu. At work there are a few old Iiyama 4K screens that flicker though, but I don't know if they even understand DSC.
I've got a 4K Samsung Odyssey that I have come to hate because of it's extreme slowness and weird behaviour (I do not recommend this line), but I haven't had any problems with flickering with either M1s or M3s.
I use two 4k displays with an M1 Pro MBP. They work without any flickering. They’re using HDMI rather than DisplayPort.
I’m also, to get the two external displays without them being mirrored, using a docking station and a display driver from Silicon Motion called macOS InstantView.
This is of course not ideal if you need DP and DSC.
It works over the HDMI ports on Minis and some Pros, and this monitor is connected to the Mac via HDMI. Source: Me, my M1 Mac mini, and my Samsung Neo G8
The point could be made by having it design and print implements for an indoor container grow and then run lights and water over a microcontroller. Like Anthropic's vending machine this would also be an already addressed, if not solved, space for both home manufacturing and ag/garden automation.
It'd still be novel to see an LLM figure it out from scratch step by step, and a hell of a lot more interesting than whatever the fuck this is. Googling farmland in Iowa or Texas and then writing instructions for people to do the actual work isn't novel or interesting; of course an LLM can write and fill out forms. But the end result still primarily relies on people to execute those forms and affect the world, invalidating the point. Growing corn would be interesting, project managing corn isn't.
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