Slightly with which I make new posts, it has been my most recent post for a while. And I think it deserves
an update.
When that post was made:
Opus 4 was the best of the Claude models
Claude-Code had only been GA for about a month.
OpenAI were also in their 4 series, GPT-4o, GPT-4.1 and o3/o4-mini.
Codex CLI had also only existed for a couple of months
Google Gemini was on the 2.5 series
I think my initial feelings were fair and accurate for these models. In addition, Opus was more-expensive to
use, so I was more likely to be using Sonnet for things unless I thought it really needed something.
As mentioned in that post, I had a new-and-fresh claude-code subscription. I had only intended to have it
for a couple of months… Turns out I’ve never stopped paying for it, and have been using it for various levels
of things since.
It’s crazy how fast the state of this has all changed, and how much my use and experience has changed…
The TL;DR here is that I am no longer sitting close to “Hype” and I now sit much closer to “Incredibly
useful Tool”, but read on for a more fleshed out version of this!
AI in coding, Hype or genuinely helpful? I’ve always leaned towards ‘hype’ but a recent dive into using it
for some real-world tasks started to shift my perspective… slightly.
I’ve long been generally skeptical of “AI” in all its forms. The idea behind it is fun, the technology is
fun (if ethically problematic), but overall I’ve been rather underwhelmed.
I’ve pretty much had access to ChatGPT from the beginning. I’ve asked it questions and felt underwhelmed by
the replies (I know it has gotten better). I’ve seen the hallucinations on things I know about, so I
feel like can’t really trust it on things I don’t. It talks confidently, it sounds convincing, it’s probably
entirely hallucinated. I have however also then seen friends using it to analyse games of online werewolf and summarise that day’s activities and chat to
help them keep up when they’re too busy. It’s usually at least able to follow and accurately report on 50% of
what is happening (it can’t read people though yet, so ymmv).
On the image side, I’ve used Stable Diffusion to generate images. I’ve also used image generation tools like
Midjourney since the early days and seen it go from strength to
strength. I’ve used it for quick throwaway joke images, but never really managed to get it to do quite
what I had in mind (though usually good enough for a joke). I’ve also used and seen friends using Bing Image Creator to great success to generate meme-images for
in-jokes among friend groups.
And while these tools are usually “good enough”, I’ve also then seen them generate 6-fingered people or
obviously fake images. I’ve also laughed at the Will Smith eating spaghetti test (and then
been impressed at the later improvements to this) or the fact LLMs can’t spell strawberry.
And I know other people have more success with it. I’m constantly being bombarded on social media by posts
from people saying how AI is going to put people out of jobs, and that if you’re not spending 50% of your day
in ChatGPT you’re wasting your time. But despite this I’ve just not succumbed to the hype, all my experience to
date was very firmly at the level of “Meh, It’s ‘ok’. Not good. Certainly not a tool I expect to use all day
every day”.
But earlier this month I finally dipped my first toe into the LLM/AI Coding pool…
What if I told you I’ve tracked every single night of sleep for the past 14 years using an app that’s
basically been dead for over a decade?
If you actually know me, then it probably comes as no surprise at all. Anyone who has spent any considerable
amount of time chatting with me will know a few things about me:
I don’t like change.
I like graphs and data.
I do not always have the best relationship with sleep.
So when I say “I’ve been tracking my sleep and graphing” the response is likely to be one, or both, of “of
course you have…” or “but, why?”
The app in question is SleepBot which is one of the
early arrivals on the sleep tracking scene and the initial premise was fairly simple. You press a button to say
you went sleep, and another when you finished. And then you can rate the sleep and write some notes about it.
This button can be in the app itself or a widget on your homescreen. Importantly - it also drew
graphs.
Eventually you could also put the app on your bed next to you and it would record any unusual sounds you
made, or motion you made. And it had a smart alarm feature, and it had web-sync capabilities. I never really
used any of these features other than the basic tracking.
I’ve blogged before about Advent of Code and how I’ve been doing it each year since it began in 2015 and
wrote a benchmarking tool for it - AoCBench.
A few years ago when I first wrote AoCBench, there was limited formal guidelines from Eric with regards to
repo content, specifically, the closest thing to “offical” guidelines for commiting inputs to repos was a
couple of social media posts that essentially stated that it was fine, but just don’t go collecting them
all:
In general I ask people not to publish their inputs, just to make it harder for someone to try to steal
the whole site. The answer is probably fine, but also probably not very interesting since they vary per
person.
I don’t mind having a few of the inputs posted, please don’t go on a quest to collect many or all of the
inputs for every puzzle. Doing so makes it that much easier for someone to clone and steal the whole site. I
put tons of time and money into Advent of Code, and the many inputs are one way I prevent people from copying
the content.
And also other comments
where it wasn’t actively discouraged, but preferred not to.
So AoCBench was designed around all the participants including their own inputs in the repo and this allowed
nice things like testing of solutions against different inputs to ensure validity (something you otherwise
can’t really do.)
However sometime last year shortly after the start of the month this policy changed (Before / After) and an explicit request
was added to the site not to:
If you’re posting a code repository somewhere, please don’t include parts of Advent of Code like the
puzzle text or your inputs.
This policy was also codified on the official subreddit and
moderators (and other users) started actively (and often aggressively) checking the repos of anyone who posted
and insisting they immediately remove any inputs (and purge them from git history) and sometimes resulting in
users being banned for not complying. This also hurt a bit with debugging solutions where sometimes different
inputs have different properties that may trip some people up.
I don’t want to get too much into any legal technicalities around this and if the inputs are or aren’t
copyrightable, or how it has been handled and the negatives around it. I just want to continue enjoying Advent
of Code each year with my friends and our benchmarking tool, and if I can respect the request then I’ll do that
as well.
For the first year (last year) we continued as-is, but this year people using AoCBench felt stronger about
not including inputs in the repos. So how can we do this?
Since my previousposts about running docker-swarm with ceph, I’ve been using this
fairly extensively in production and made some changes to the setup that follows on from the previous
posts.
This post is a followup to an earlier blog bost regarding
setting up a docker-swarm cluster with ceph.
I’ve been running this cluster for a while now quite happily however since setting it up, a new version of
ceph has been released - nautilus - so now it’s time for some upgrades.
Note: This post is out of date now.
I would suggest looking at this post and using
the docker-compose based upgrade workflow instead, up to the housekeeping part.
(It’s worth noting at this point that this guide was mostly written after the fact based on command history
so I may have missed something. It’s always a good idea to do this on a test cluster first, or in a maintenance
window!)
This all started with a comment I overheard at work from a colleague talking about a 2FA implementation on a
service they were using.
“It works fine on everything except Google Authenticator on iPhone.”
… What? This comment alone immediately piqued my interest, I stopped what I was doing, turned round, and
asked him to explain.
He explained that a service he was using provided 2FA support using TOTP codes. As is normal, they provided
a QR Code, you scanned it with your TOTP application (Google Authenticator or Authy or so), then you typed in
the verification code - and it worked for both Google Authenticator and Authy on his Android phone, but only
with Authy and not Google Authenticator on another colleagues iPhone.
This totally nerd sniped me, and I just had to take a look.
I’ve been wanting to play with Docker Swarm for a while now for hosting containers, and finally sat down
this weekend to do it.
Something that has always stopped me before now was that I wanted to have some kind of cross-site storage
but I don’t have any kind of SAN storage available to me just standalone hosts. I’ve been able to work around
this using ceph on the nodes.
Note: I’ve never used ceph before, I don’t really know what I’m doing with ceph, so this is
all a bit of guesswork. I used Funky Penguin’s Geek
Cookbook as a basis for some of this, though some things have changed since then, and I’m using base-centOS
not AtomicHost (I tried AtomicHost, but wanted a newer-version of docker so switched away).
All my physical servers run Proxmox, and this is no exception. On
3 of these host nodes I created a new VM (1 per node) to be part of the cluster. These all have 3 disks, 1 for
the base OS, 1 for Ceph, 1 for cloud-init (The non-cloud-init disks are all SCSI with individual
iothreads).
In previous years, Myself and Chris have been fairly informally trying to
see who was able to produce the fastest code (Me in PHP, Chris in Python). In the final week of last year to
assist with this, weboth made our repos
run in Docker and produce time output for each day.
This allowed us to run each other’s code locally to compare fairly without needing to install the other’s
dev environment, and made the testing a bit fairer as it was no longer dependant on who had the faster CPU when
running their own solution. For the rest of the year this was fine and we carried on as normal. As we got to
the end I remarked it would be fun to have a web interface that automatically dealt with it and showed us the
scores, but there was obviously no point in doing that once the year was over. Maybe in a future year…
Fast forward to this year. Myself and Chris (and ChrisN) coded up our Day 1
solutions as normal and then some otherfriends started doing it for the first time. I remembered my plans from the
previous year and suggested everyone should also docker-ify their repos… and sotheyagreed…
DNS Hosting - Part 3: Putting it all together (This Post)
In my previousposts I
discussed the history leading up to, and the eventual rewrite of my DNS hosting solution. So this post will
(finally) talk briefly about how it all runs in production on MyDNSHost.
Shortly before the whole rewrite I’d found myself playing around a bit with Docker for another
project, so I decided early on that I was going to make use of Docker for the main bulk of the setup to allow
me to not need to worry about incompatibilities between different parts of the stack that needed different
versions of things, and to update different bits at different times.
The system is split up into a number of containers (and could probably be split up into more).
