Linkblog/2025/03/16

I am always eager to get more compute into my homelab Kubernetes cluster. Say what you will about Kubernetes, but it’s a platform I’m familiar with to the point it’s legitimately the easiest way for me to spin up a container to host some software. I have a fair number of workloads in my homelab now, and my cluster isn’t exactly resource constrained, but when I have unused compute lying around I feel an urge to put it to work.

And so when I remembered that I had a OnePlus 6T in a drawer doing nothing, and vaguely remembering some articles about running Kubernetes (with k3s) on postmarketOS, it gave me an idea that would quickly suck away an entire day of my life: Let’s put it in the cluster.

I’m sure most things can be put into a cluster.

However the real question, is should it be put into the cluster?

Gabriel’s answer to that seems to be a default, bold, yes.

Extremely cinematic content by Jepi, a recently laid off software developer.

Really good short watch.

I noticed at one point he shows his resume on camera, I was curious to see if it was actually his real resume with his details on it:

Nope! (123) 456-7890, no_reply@example.com, very nice attention to detail!

Update March 14, 2025 5:00 PM UTC: Most versions of tj-actions/changed-files are compromised.

Yiiikes, big attack chain oopsie with a seemingly popular GitHub action getting taken over for malicious purposes.

Some people today are discouraging others from learning programming on the grounds AI will automate it. This advice will be seen as some of the worst career advice ever given. I disagree with the Turing Award and Nobel prize winner who wrote, “It is far more likely that the programming occupation will become extinct […] than that it will become all-powerful. More and more, computers will program themselves.”​ Statements discouraging people from learning to code are harmful!

• Andrew Ng

Well said.

From Simon Willison’s Webblog.

On Jan 31st, users reported that, similar to an occurrence in 2022, CloudFlare’s captcha/“i’m under attack” mode had started failing and looping instead of passing and letting browser users through. It soon became clear that this time, any UXP browser wasn’t the only being denied access to the sites being “protected” by CloudFlare. Even Firefox ESR 115 was affected.

Alternative browsers having issues connecting to sites hosted on CloudFlares network / behind its WAF.

Not epic.

Discussion on the orange site.

** Try accomplishing the following hacks on the game Quake 2:**

Hack at least one of the preexisting monsters or player models and modify its behaviour. e.g.. Make a zombie sing Oh Canada when it gets shot instead of falling over. This will require editing the source code. Make the behavior easy to provoke.

Provide a textfile “readme.txt” describing what you did, some of the problems that you encountered, and how to compile and run through the program.

I was on a Quake II-related dive, and ran into this course website from 2005, in which your task is to modify Quake II’s game code to affect game logic.

I love the “Make a zombie sing Oh Canada when it gets shot” example.

Quake II-related dive brought me to here, the best resource on the high level architecture of Quake II!

I didn’t know until I saw this article, that the approach Id Software made with Quake II was for its game code to be in a DLL loaded at runtime.

Quake I had QuakeC, Quake III Arena was q3asm, and Doom III had its own bespoke scripting system, but I had no idea Quake II was basically scripting / ASM-less, and instead you could make your own DLL if you really wanted to in whatever programming language you want!

Hey @klukaszek, after discussing with some of the other maintainers, we’ve decided we’ll go in a different direction here and take a stab at implementing the WebGPU backend ourselves.

No! I was pretty hyped to see progress being made on Kyle’s approach to WebGPU support in SDL, but the SDL3 GPU maintainers made the right call here…

There was some chatter from the maintainers in the FNA Creators Club discord:

TheSpydog:  the very first API call you have to make for WebGPU (creating an instance) isn’t fully implemented in emscripten. it asserts if you try to use it idiomatically 🫠

TheSpydog: this does not inspire confidence

Cursed!

I hope we get this someday.