I used to work as a QA Engineer @ Transmeta testing software om out CPUs to ensure x86 compatibility. My manager this operated like this. She would constantly look for old software to acquire. One of her favorite activities was dumpster diving outside of startups that had failed to pick up old copies of software on CDs and floppy disks. I remember testing a lot of Diablo 2, Tomb Raider of various versions, Star Wars Episode I Racer, and Risk (for Windows 3.0).
I found a bug where our system would freeze after playing Tomb Raider 2 on a certain CPU/chipset combo. If I remember correctly, it turned out to be a unacceptable voltage drop somewhere in the south bridge.
I both love this story and am worried it’s basically a tale of how someone’s parents sold them on Santa being real. It stinks of a con where she was just day drinking somewhere near an Egghead.
After having traveled the world, hearing "only $5" reminds me of how how far that goes in some places. Right now I have a friend in Nepal renting a 2 bedroom house for $58/month. I have another friend in Nepal that's earns less than $100/month, and is able to afford they're own place to live alone.
I hate to tell you this, but that bridge displayed makes me believe that any starship designed on your site will prone to rocks flying and terminals igniting whenever the shields take a pounding.
A couple years ago in Nepal, a large group of monkeys passed by a window next to my table at a restaurant. They were casually strolling on the power lines.
How are you speeding up the provisioning? Most of my tests run pretty quick, but spinning up a new runner takes probably most of the time. I haven’t tried optimizing this yet.
I have lxd containers already running that have everything the system needs.
When starting CI it's doing a DB SQL dump replacement which takes 1-2s to prep, self hosted github actions.
Its been very cheap to run OVH cloud with the newest and fastest AMD EPYC CPUs that have high single core speeds. Did this as it was cheaper than GCP spot to have these always on.
I'll run many always on lxd containers that all match with the same stacks. Add another one when needing to parallelize more
Personally I’m leveling up on using AI to develop a project. My speed at knocking out PRs has increased a lot, but much of that is massaging the process of using AI, including managing CI bottlenecks and costs. I’ve never had to deal with 15+ PRs being developed in parallel before. It’s interesting work, but there’s a lot of doing stuff to get to the stuff I want to do.
Examples of things I’ve tackled this week:
- GitHub Actions costs exploding and looking into self hosting options (gonna try a box in Hetnzer)
- figuring out how to handle unattended builds
- tinkering a lot of email, from how to manage domain reputation and worrying about bots spamming from my server because they started filling out forms
- figuring out how to manage AI development from my phone
- setting up a process to prevent unintended destructive database migrations
- finding a way to know have to babysit the AI but approving a constant stream of questions and permission requests
- all the random little issues that the AI files to fix an endless amount of little things
- finding the right model(s) to use to most efficiently make use of the limits of my subscription
literally all these things you've listed that you're working on would not be needed if AI didn't exist. which goes back to OP's point about spinning in circles.
I'm doing all this myself, and it's my first time getting a consumer facing product from zero to revenue generating on my own. I wouldn't bother doing this without AI, the project is too big. That being said, doing it with AI comes with a learning curve & many things I've never done before.
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