@zac.direct
DevOps, platform engineering. Bread and butter tech that isn't AI (mostly) or blockchain. Blog: https://www.zac.direct Democracy Project: https://www.democracycandidate.us Internal Tools : @pulumi.com Opinions my own, etc.
Here's Sus Scrofa. Port of long dormant photo forensics software Ghiro. Useful for detecting forged photos, and cataloging evidence of people doing crimes.
Especially useful for identifying people that cover their faces while committing crimes across multiple cities.
github.com/zacdirect/su...
Related... I decided to see if I could bring the core of a 10-year-old image forensics program into the modern age.
Moved from python 2 to 3, updated all styles and reports to modern libraries, added AI/ML detection, and closed all of its open issue feature requests in a few days of casual prompts.
Approximately 6 months ago agentic coding moved into the "not dogshit" category.
That's enough for the industry to move on. The art of great coding will always have value, but not monetarily... Not anymore... At least not at scale.
Thanks, I hate it.
Tell any of the scientists you know who have remained on the site everyone still calls Twitter, even though it's nothing like Twitter.
Calling the requirement for a judicial warrant before entering a person’s home one of the Democrats’ “new restrictions on federal immigration agents” crosses the line into outright falsehood. It’s in the Bill of Rights! A rule as old as the republic.
I had heard "The Fate Of Thomas Light" as an end to a years long story where the good guys lost.
Reading the notes while unavoidably tearing up... My wife looked up and said "are you tearing up over your MegaMan rock opera right now?!?... Good for you!"
Hope is coming back.
#protomen #actiii
My long ago ordered physical CD of Act 3 arrived today, and I immediately read the liner notes alongside listening to it. I've been listening to the complete album for awhile now, and based on audio alone I've been mourning Thomas Light. There's not been a good vibe in this story since 2005. 🧵1/2
Thanks for writing this up, eagerly awaiting my physical copy 😎
How is this not the onion?
GabeNCube? Nah. They got the name right. youtu.be/0sa2R-PM0Uk
Anyways... Just sitting here wishing that my controller doesn't drift like whoa...
Matt Stoller being very Matt Stoller, calling someone else a "classic left poseur snob"
Matt Stoller being eviscerated by @dieworkwear.bsky.social
I really love that a catfish was chosen for this cover.
What's that sound? Is it the death nell of ads in my start menu?
www.winboat.app
Yes... Yes it is.
I feel this in my bones.
Jane Goodall with monarch butterfly scarf
“It actually doesn’t take much to be considered a difficult woman. That’s why there are so many of us.”
― Jane Goodall
💙 RIP to a real one. My childhood hero
I recently had to connect Azure DevOps to Pulumi Cloud via OIDC and wrote a brief guide for those who need to do the same in the future.
www.zac.direct/post/2025/09...
Unfortunate follow up question. WTF is a desktop?
2025... The actual year of Linux on the desktop.
I do feel like part of the hatred extended toward Bluesky is a function of preferring to think that the alarm about the state of the country that’s common here is misguided or exaggerated. Dismissing the site as liberal doomers allows you to dismiss those concerns, too.
2 truths and a lie.
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I once brought prod down with a script that routed all traffic through a network that did not exist.
I always turn in my compliance training 1st.
My colleagues and I once met at a warehouse in the middle of the night to fix a prototype for a major held that weekend.
I find it hard to tell the difference tone-wise once I prompt a few basics. Never use emojis for anything. Please stop using thesis statements. Etc.
Maybe I'm odd in that because most people seem to want to give them personality and names. I want them to just be a robot.
The other side of this is as a consumer of the models, I'm finding I have absolutely zero loyalty to any of them. While GPT gives me good results I'll use it. When Sonnet does better I stop using GPT.
Billions of dollars invested, and the industry is already commodified...
Agreed. What I'm starting to wonder about though is how much it might chip away at all the supporting systems. E.g. new model promotion.
Feels like we're at the place in the story where John Henry is fine, but not everybody is John Henry and not everything needs someone as good as John Henry.
The problem I've been finding is knowing exactly enough to question it in all the right ways. It's not just skeptical thinking required to keep this stuff in line, but James Randi level debunking skills.
What's becoming interesting though, is that those James Randi controls are easily copied...
You can't trust it is right. I've been exploring this model a lot, and it's really good, but wants to over promise.
For code, coming up with some basic 'do not bullshit me' unit tests, like writing a mock http client and counting web requests has become something of a secret sauce.
I've been using agent mode with Claude for a couple of weeks and I already feel myself getting lazy about actually reviewing it's work.
This is despite egregious errors on the occasional prompt. Somebody get Frodo over here I need to talk to him about this.
😂 That's how you know it's getting closer to real human behavior.
"IDK what the problem is let me allow all and see if it's fixed."
It's fixed. Backlogging investigation and moving on.
This is pretty cool stuff! Have you looked at github.com/pulumi/pulum... to see how some of your examples compare to official answers for this?
Not too many apples-to-apples between them, but things like the vpc module are interesting.
I've not had a lot of time for side projects and blog posts so just keeping things really simple. I love building stuff in the cloud with @pulumi.com. That is all.
