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CloudDruid

Things That Caught My Eye

  1. DuckDuckGo Fights Data Brokers
  2. US House Considering Copyright Mentions in AI
  3. Apple Forced to Allow Repairs
  4. BYD Pressures Automakers
  5. Groq goes SaaS
  6. Making Chips: No Experience Required?…
  7. Software Fragility
  8. Butternut AI… Wix on Steroids?
  9. Wordpress Buys Beeper
  10. RaspberryPi Laptop
  11. OpenTofu Strikes Back
  12. git stash
  13. Shell as a Source of Truth
  14. Terraform Updates
  15. K8s News

✨ Mental Bookmarks

DuckDuckGo vs Data Brokers

DuckDuckGo now provides a bundled service of VPN, PI removal, identity theft restoration! While I do not believe the data broker service is as extensive as DeleteMe, these sort of resources are vitally needed in an age where privacy seems to be more of a privilege rather than a right.

The US House appears to be thinking more about copyright not as a means to necessarily protect the holder, but to force visibility in AI. While this feels more like a half-hearted step in the “right direction”… the United States depressingly is nowhere close to EU-type reforms.

Meanwhile, the New York Times recently published an article exposing big tech’s unethical and legally dubious data harvesting practices.

Apple Forced to Share Repair Responsiblities

Ars Technica describes how Apple will now allow some forms of parts pairing, but they have been incredibly cryptic about how and which devices will be accessible to easier repairs outside of their ecosystem. iFixit CEO give a great breakdown that is on my to-read list.

BYD Pressure Continues

Chinese automaker, BYD, continues to pressure United States car manufactures who currently are continuing to refuse to compete with their bargain EV prices. It will be interesting to see if pricing pressure will eventually impact US EVs.

Groq Hardware Supplier No Longer

Groq has decidedly moved towards providing SaaS services for AI developers, and is no longer in the business of selling custom AI chips.

You get the sort of developer traction we’ve gotten, and people want to buy hardware, but we are no longer selling hardware, because why would we at this point?” Ross said. “It’s not a pivot—we always intended to have a cloud service, we just expected we would do both.

Speaking of Chips

In two weeks an engineer with 0 experience in chip-making, built a computer chip using AI software specialized for chip manufacturing. This same engineer has already moved on to building a gpu 🤯.

Fragile: Handle with Care

Coverage of xz’s backdoor continues to unfold, and one engineer describes the perilous state of software maintanence. It’s all fairly grim.

Similarly, another engineer shared a conversation he had with his mother, a Cobol engineer, who helps keep a major banking system from crumbling on a small and rapidly aging team.

Butternut AI, et tu Wix?

Butternut AI is a SaaS service that asks its users if they are ready to “build” the website of their “dream[s]“. I perused their FAQs and tried to figure out if there were options to self-host and run the code on your own cloud instances after building said “website”. With that said, these low level details from a cursory glance, appear to be abstracted away from the user… I immediately have questions (high level they definitely revolve around PII, security, vulnerability management…) lol. Consequently, I don’t know if this is something I would ever take seriously. However, it caught my eye though and looks super enticing!

Beeper Purchased.

The owner of Wordpress has acquired Beeper and intends to integrate it into its offerings, this will be an interesting development to watch as Beeper is known for being service agnostic.

PiDock

I just want to build and own this laptop-style raspberry pi kit… no news here 😂.

OpenTofu Strikes Back

OpenTofu is defending its feature parity techniques, and does not believe it has infringed on Terraform’s copyright.

git stash

I stumbled across a few git related resources that I want to dive into later:

Shell Guides

Some more interesting articles, this time around shell. These articles certainly scream K.I.S.S. to me, and I am always looking for more elegant approaches to incorporate into my development practices:

Terrraform Updates

Terraform has a new minor release worth checking out, and AWS has integrated more terraform testing functionality with its cloud platform.

K8s News

Some more news related to K8s that caught my 👁:

Guide to Caching w/ GitHub Actions

Catppuchin for Nix

  • You can automagically add Catppuchin using Nix flakes, I tried it out and it works like a charm!