In the article he supports Tommy Robinson[0], who I think most people in the UK would consider a fascist. He started the EDL (english defense league) which was a more violent extreme version of the BNP (british national party), which the ADL article I just linked describes as "fascist".
I only found out about his views the other day too, so can't say I've noticed any articles that are explicitly fascist, but given what I've read and his support for fascist figures I wouldn't necessarily be surprised at the moment to be honest.
I am from the UK and know about Tommy Robinson in passing. I read the ADL article and am struggling to see how he is a fascist, he is anti-islam and anti-immigrant but how does that translate to wanting a dictatorial leader, autocracy, forcible suppression etc like Russia?
The EDL is basically a union of street thugs, fascist politicians who split off from the BNP, and political opportunists like "Tommy Robinson".
Fascist is an accurate enough term for their politics, the stated political positions may not align 100% to historical fascism, but given all the fascist associations most objective observers would say that's likely to be a product of political positioning rather than any genuine ideological differences.
you don't think of Tommy Robinson as fascist? that's surprising to me. Ok, so I've grabbed a random definition of fascism[0] (first thing that came up googling).
> a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition
now, let's think about tommy robinson and the EDL.
* exalts nation and often race above the individual - check.
* wants a centralised autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader - check.
* by forcible suppression of opposition - I mean... it's the EDL, big check.
I am not sure how I was being a bad actor, I asked the same question three times and was not getting an answer.
> how does that translate to wanting a dictatorial leader, autocracy, forcible suppression etc like Russia?
> > * wants a centralised autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader - check.
> Where did this come from? I don't think that article said anything about this.
You responded to this with a wikipedia article, which said he denounced fascism/neo-nazis & banned people from events.
> So has he ever expressed anti-democratic ideas? Such as wanting a dictatorial leader, autocracy etc that kind of is a key component of fascism.
I don't see how my follow up question was unreasonable given the wikipedia or ADL article you linked never said he expressed anti-democratic ideas.
However, projectazorian has convinced me that while they may not have expressed fascist views directly, with their deep connections to neo-nazis/fascists they could be hiding it to be electable.
Alright, I wasn't planning on posting any more, but let me editorialize, and simplify:
How is DHH fascist?
- here he is espousing ethno-nationalist viewpoints (one key fascist ideology).
How is that fascist?
- ok, here he is supporting a fascist. See this article specifying that he was a member of a fascist organisation for 5 years, and then started a more extreme offshoot of it.
How is tommy robinson fascist?
- Here are some reasons.
How is the EDL fascist?
- here is an article discussing fascism and the EDL
Maybe not Aussie bartender but even a lot of typically 'white' Europeans have very different cultures than English and Australian. For example when it comes when it comes to punctuality or queuing. Even stuff like how contracts are treated can be very different depending on the culture. DHH is Dutch and maybe closer to English culture than Italian/Spanish/French.
"Do you really think he's complaining about the white Aussie bartender who comes over here?"
-> Theres little complaint about the "white" Ausie bartender, BECAUSE he probably speaks great English, came there legally, isn't consuming wellfare resources, isn't advocating for Sharia law, and might even end up going back to Ausie land.
It's not about *skin color*, it is about culture/crime/wellfare resources and legal double standards.
If an Ausie entered the UK illegally, he would be deported. If an Ausie committed a crime, he goes to jail and/or deported. With these other people, they enter illegally but then get placed in tax payer funded hotels and politicians conspire with police to cover up their crimes (see the rape gang scandals) and they literaly arrested the victims.
At one point there were plenty of complaints when *too many Polish white dudes* rocked up in the UK and competed for jobs and didn't always speak good English.
Not about race - it is about Language, culture, job competition, crime rates, wellfare resources, values (sharia-law / treatment of women), social integration vs enclaves.
And only when it involves so many millions of people comming in that it rapidly alters the local culture. (or shifts votes! or whatever other thing people care about - overwhelming of infrastructure / housing availability)
Why is DHH a racist for sympathising with some Britts whom are unhappy with the 60% cultural transformation that is occuring in London?
You are reading between the lines to hastily conclude that DHH is a racist. You need more than just "he wasn't complaining about white Ausie bartenders".
Quote me an actual paragraph or sentence where DHH says he dislikes anyone because of their race ? Or stop calling people racists without hard proof. The tone of that DDH London article seems quite radical. But tone is not enough to indict.
Calling people racist is cheap.
I literally just explained how people can have legitimate concerns about illegal migrants entering in large numbers, concerns which are COMPLETELY UNRELATED to skin color, and all you do is call these things racist talking points.
He says "non-native brits" and says there are "about a third" and links to a page showing 36% "White British"[0] (note: explicitly excluding non-white british)
he excels in this kind of dog whistling. it confuses people who were born yesterday, but it is loud and clear to people who agree with him or are the intended victims.
Agreed, but being a conservative or right wing person does not equal being a fascist. We should be reserving those words to the people that really deserve them, otherwise the word loses the meaning.
We as a society keep coming up with more and more esoteric definition of "fascist" just to avoid having one that fits modern day political actors. I feel like the word has far more meaning here, where it's used to describe a set of policy prescriptions than it is as only referring to a list of groups with all criteria for entry erased.
Personally it seems the other way round, more and more esoteric definition of X so you can label your opponent it and discount everything about them without having to debate. Hence why I had to ask if he actually is one.
Let's start with the simplest definition I could find, just to walk you through it.
> "(n) an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization."
Is this what DHH is advocating for? Absolutely. I'll skip past right wing because that part is obvious. Nationalistic in terms of "non-Londoners" being used interchangeably with immigrants, a person from Birmingham meets his "Native London" criteria, and using that criteria for social organization.
Pretty cut and dry for anyone using just the basic dictionary definition. Obviously, there's a version with more stipulations and exceptions you'd rather use but those can be safely filled under "overly esoteric".
And this is why these very serious words have lost their power. Racist, Sexist, Fascist.... When half the country is deemed to support "literal" Himler, or when Elon Musk, or Jews with family impacted by the Holocaust, are called Nahtzees, then these words have been diluted to mean nothing.
I hope people who so overused&misused these words are happy with what they achieved.
Congratulations you made these words lose all power. I would have preferred a world where these words still had serious meaning attached to them.
Interesting it says knife crime for 23/24 was up 16% for London. I wonder if they only record convictions so the 19% decrease will change as people are convicted.
Also West Midlands is that not Biringham etc? Is that not one of the other mostly non-white places in the UK? You could have pointed to number 3 on the list Cleveland being mostly white(95%+ I think) and not being much lower than London.
It's almost like crime isn't that strongly correlated with the ethnic mix of a place! I'm sorry reality doesn't support your racism.
Of course, if you don't believe the police data, that page suggests you look at hospital admissions.
Again, as I said, London is lovely. You said there was a problem with knife crime. I pointed out that London is lower than a comparable major US city. It's also lower than several areas in the UK.
Come and visit - don't believe the lies being spread.
> It's almost like crime isn't that strongly correlated with the ethnic mix of a place! I'm sorry reality doesn't support your racism.
How is what I said racist? I was agreeing with you but saying London being #2 and pointing to #1 is not really proving your point. You should point to #3 to make your point.
> I pointed out that London is lower than a comparable major US city.
Again, you can not compare across countries you don't know the difference in how the data is recorded. For example is a murder not recorded in the USA for every suspious death where as the UK it is for every murder conviction?
> It's also lower than several areas in the UK.
It is #2 on that 23/24 list.
> Come and visit - don't believe the lies being spread.
I lived on London's outskirts for multiple years and have to visit multiple times a year. I wouldn't describe it as great, I dread going everytime.
This blog feels like a poor ad, I was hoping for technical details but seems like this tool just swept in and 'saved the day'. I have no idea how
* Provisioning time dropped from hours to minutes.
* Debugging speed improved because we could fix it in real time.
happened.
Seems like the problem of a long feedback loop would have been solved by pull request preview environments and or enabling developers to have their own deployed instances for testing etc.
Thanks for the feedback. My plan is to spend a little more time to dive into the details on a follow up post.
I'll try to explain our experience here in a little better detail though.
In a traditional IAC tool (tf for example). The flow would go something like this (YMMV)
Update TF -> Plan -> PR -> Review (auto or peer) -> Merge -> TF Reviews State File -> TF Makes changes -> Updates State.
Some issues we could run into:
- We support multiple customers each with their own teams that may or may not have updated infra so drift is always present.
- We support customers over time so modules and versions age, and we aren't always given the time to go make sure that past tf is updated. So version pins need to be updated among other dependencies.
Each of those could take a bit of time to resolve so that the tf plans clean and our updates are applied. Of course there are tools such as HCP Cloud, Spacelift, Terrateam etc. But, in my experience it shifts a lot of the same problems to different parts of the workflow.
The work flow with SI is closer to the following:
Ask AI for a change -> AI builds a changeset (PR) -> Review -> Apply
The secret sauce is SI's "digital twin". We aren't just using AI to update code, we're actually using it to initiate changes to AWS via SI. While I would never want to have a team make changes directly to AWS without a peer review or something similar, it is sitting closer to what the actual infrastructure is. Even with changes that are happening to the infrastructure naturally.
This has allowed us to move quite a bit faster in updating and maintaining our customers infrastructure. While still sticking as close as possible to best practices.
So basically the product is "Custom IaC with AI agent" Sounds like a great business model if you can convince companies to go for it.
However, as SRE, pass. I'd rather keep IaC in one of our pre existing tools which much wider support and less lock in. Also, since I'm in Azure/GCP, this tool won't work for me anyways since it's AWS focused and when you go multi cloud, the difficulty ramps up pretty quickly.
Essentially. I'm not sure you could call it IAC specifically, but the same ideas apply.
Regarding lock in: I don't necessarily think there is anything here that is stopping you from writing TF and importing objects. Conversely, SI is great for importing resources into their model.
So the objects are essentially modeled in type script on the back end so support for other vendors is available. It's just whether or not they are created yet. I'll let the SI folks dive into details there.
It's absolutely AWS focused today - but one upside of the approach is that building the models is straightforward, because we can build a pipeline that goes from the upstream's specification, augments it with documentation and validation, etc. We'll certainly be expanding coverage.
I think as you are a professional services company that imposes a certain workflow on you. For regular software engineering you'd just make the IaC/code deployable from the developers machine and or on a pull request take the branches code, deploy it and post back a link to the PR.
Ryan can give you more details about his own experience. (I'm the CEO of System Initiative) But a lot of it comes from switching to a model where you work with an AI agent alongside digital twins of the infrastructure.
In particular, debugging speed improves because you can ask the agent questions like:
`I have a website running on ec2 that is not working. Make a plan to discover all the infrastructure components that could have an impact on why I can't reach it from a web browser, then troubleshoot the issue.`
And it will discover infrastructure, evaluate the configuration, and see if it can find the issue. Then it can make the fix in a simulation, humans can review it, and you're done. It handles all the audit trails, review, state, etc for you under the hood - so the actual closing of the troubleshooting loop happens much faster as well.
When you say 'digital twins of the infrastructure' you mean another deployed instance? So if they'd just made a preview environment created upon a pull request they'd have just got the same speed up.
> It handles all the audit trails, review, state, etc for you under the hood.
So there is no more IaC SI now manages everything?
Nope - I mean we make a 1:1 model of the real resource, and then let you propose changes to that data model. Rather than thinking of it like code in a file, think of it like having a live database that does bi-directional sync. The speedup in validating the change happens because we can run it on the data model, rather than on 'real' infrastructure.
Then we track the changes you make to that hypothetical model, and when you like it, apply the specific actions needed to make the real infrastructure conform. All the policy checking, pipeline processing, state file management, etc. is all streamlined.
Yes hitting apply would update the production infrastructure, but what if I want to run automated testing to check a change/new feature? I can't do that on a simulation.
Right - obviously, if you need the actual code deployed to run your test, there is not much anyone can do about that. But let me tell you how you would set that up, from scratch, in System Initiative (assuming you have a working deployment at all).
I assume the use case here is 'I want to deploy the application on every pull request to net-new infrastructure, then run my test suite, and destroy the test infrastructure once the PR is merged or the code is updated'.
You would fire up the AI Agent and ask it to discover an existing deployment of the application. Probably give it a hint or the boundaries you care about (stop at the network layer, for example - you probably don't want to deploy a net new VPC, subnets, or internet gateways). Once that's done, you'll have a model of the infrastructure for your application in System Initiative.
Then you'll turn that into a repeatable template component, by either asking the AI to do it for you, or selecting the related infrastructure in our Web UI and hitting 'T'. You'll add some attributes like 'version' to the template, and plumb them through to right spot in the code we generate for you.
Then you're going to call that code from our GitHub action on every PR, setting the name and the version number from the branch and the artifact version, naming the change set after the PR as well. You'll let the action apply the change set itself, which will then create the infrastructure.
The next step will be to run your tests against the infrastructure.
On merge you'll have another GitHub action that opens a change set and deletes the infrastructure you just created, so you don't waste any cash.
Notice what I didn't tell you to do - figure out how to create new state files, build new CI/CD pipelines, or anything else. Just started from the actual truth of what you already have, used our digital twins to make a repeatable template out of it, then told the platform to do it over and over again with an external API.
Nope. Terraform/OpenTofu state has several big differences.
The first is that Terraform/Tofu can drift. This is why people suffer when a change gets made outside of IaC, and the statefile no longer tracks. That's because IaC tools are by design unidirectional - change should only ever flow from the IaC to the Infrastructure. In SI, this is fine - the resource state can update, and then you can decide if it was beneficial (at which point we just update the component side of the equation, and you're done) or not (at which point you would decide what action to take to revert the change.)
The second is how it gets generated. In Terraform/Tofu, it's a side effect of the 'apply' phase - basically a compile time artifact. In System Initiative it's the heart of the system - the code you write is operating on that model, not generating that model. This makes programming it much simpler. You can change the model through our Web UI, you can change it through an API, you can change it with an AI Agent, the resource can change because the underlying cloud provider changes it, and it all just works.
State can drift in SI as well unless you are subscribing to events from AWS that alert your system as soon as resource is changed so you can update your side.
>the code you write is operating on that model, not generating that model.
What are you talking about? That model is not reality because reality is whatever the state of resource is in AWS. If your model says my S3 bucket is not public but someone changes it in AWS to make it public, who cares, it's public and that's what's important. Sure, your system may update itself more frequently than only when I run "tofu plan/apply" but at end of the day, it doesn't matter.
All I'm saying as SRE, you have done poor job selling this to me. I'm telling you what I would tell my boss if he came to me with this product.
"This is some custom IaC system with AI Agents sprinkled on top. I guess if you want to get rid of SRE team and replace us with their consultants, whatever, I won't be here to care. If you want us as SRE team to use it, nope, it's a waste of money since OpenToFu has much better support. Can you approve my SpaceLift purchase instead?"
> Sure, your system may update itself more frequently than only when I run "tofu plan/apply" but at end of the day, it doesn't matter.
Correct me if I'm wrong here. In my experience you have to "apply" before state is updated. This would mean we weren't quite operating on the source of truth. (aws in this case).
100% it's a solvable problem with a TF centric tool chain. But it's still a problem that needs solving.
In my experience with SI it fades to the background. Now, I'm sure there is an edge case where someone edits something outside of SI while I'm trying to simultaneously update it in SI where things might break. I haven't run into it yet.
> All I'm saying as SRE, you have done poor job selling this to me
Can't argue this, but I would say like any other new tool, it's worth checking out. :)
Yes, at apply stage, the state is updated. All the state is useful for is finding the resource for big 3. In fact, I'd argue for TF, they could do away with state file beyond
resource "s3_bucket" "thebucket" -> arn:aws:s3:us-east-2:000:0123455 since they pull down the current state of system as is and then show you the "This is what you want and with current state, this is what it will change."
> I would say like any other new tool, it's worth checking out. :)
I don't see the need for a couple of reasons:
1) How? If you want me to try something, either big "TRY ME" unless it involves becoming a client which that case, I see you as replacing me so my motivation is zero. :D
2) I'm on Azure for most part so it's useless anyways.
3) You have not shown me how SI is that much better than Terraform. If I'm going to invest time over yelling at Kubernetes, I need to know my time is worth it.
At the end of the day, we all want the same. Here is defined infrastructure, be it YAML, JSON, HCL, some GUI, API call to a system, Whatever AI is smoking. Ability to see what changes and make those changes. HCL/ToFu is what most of have picked because it's pretty open and widely supported across all the providers. You have to overcome all that. This blog post reads, we have this great new Windows Server thing that will blow your Linux Server stuff away completely with GUI and Siri.
Maybe that's what your customer base needs. However, at technology companies I work at, we don't need that. People editing outside IaC is done very slowly, deliberately and almost always backported. If not, you will get called out. It would like Dev writing code and no tests.
Thanks for responding. I love these conversations.
>1) How? If you want me to try something, either big "TRY ME" unless it involves becoming a client which that case, I see you as replacing me so my motivation is zero. :D
To be clear, I don't see this as having the capability to replace engineers. This is a new way to interact with your infrastructure.
But it also feeds into larger AI conversations as well. (probably out of scope for this conversation :) )
> This blog post reads, we have this great new Windows Server thing that will blow your Linux Server stuff away completely with GUI and Siri.
Now you crossed a line :D
Jokes aside, there is a HUGE community in the TF and now OT space, you can't argue that. The ecosystem of third-party tools to help support workflows is gigantic. Putting all of that aside, will that be the best way forever? I'm not saying that SI will replace either one of those, but I would say it's a new and refreshing way to tackle a similar problem space.
However! Folks with big IaC deployments can still use all the discovery and troubleshooting goodness, and then make the change however they want. System Initiative is fine either way.
Personally moving away from IaC is a big yikes, for something so critical to my company no way would I let myself be locked into your product. I have already been bitten before when a developer productivity startup fails/pivots(as they often seem to do).
That's cool. For what it's worth, the software is all open source, precisely because it's critical in this way. I realize that's like telling you that you can take care of this puppy yourself if you want. :)
Even if you don't move away from IaC, you can still get benefits from the approach by having SI discover the results, and then do analysis.
> You can make a build that includes our trademarks to develop System Initiative software itself. You may not publish or share the build, and you may not use that build to run System Initiative software for any other purpose.
That feels a bit different from what many developers expect when they hear "open source." Nothing wrong with that, just pointing it out.
Sorry maybe my last reply was a little harsh now I understand it isn't a priority IaC under the hood anymore.
I still have major reservations around dropping IaC and just working on a simulation of what is deployed, I don't see how this can work for more complex deployments such as multiple region/AZ deployments, blue/green deployments, cell based deployments etc etc. Seems like dropping IaC would only work for very simple environments.
It works great. If you think of it as 'dropping all the reasons we chose IaC', then yes - that's obviously dumb. If you think of it as 'getting all those benefits, plus faster feedback loops, AI agents, and an easier programming model' then.. not so much.
> I think I may have identified a better canary here. If the CI/CD process takes so much CPU time that we are consciously aware of the resulting bill, there is definitely something going wrong.
CPU time is cheaper than an engineers time, you should be offloading formatting/linting/testing checks to CI on PRs. This will add up though when multiple by hundreds or thousands, it isn't a good canary.
> The last few B2B/SaaS projects I worked on had CI/CD built into the actual product. Writing a simple console app that polls SCM for commits, runs dotnet build and then performs a filesystem operation is approximately all we've ever needed. The only additional enhancement was zipping the artifacts to an S3 bucket so that we could email the link out to the customer's IT team for install in their secure on-prem instances.
Shame, I am not sure how others use actions but I like really small granular ones to make it easy to see what's wrong at a glance. E.g. formatting checks per language per project in my monorepo etc. Each check is like 10 seconds and I have like 70+, so the per minute is biting me ATM.
Come check out RWX :). We have per second billing but I think it won't even matter for your use case because most of those checks are going to take 0s on RWX. And our UI is optimized for showing you what is wrong at a glance without having to look at logs at all.
* Your per min billing is double blacksmith's
* RWX is a proprietary format? vs blacksmith's one line change.
* No fallback option, blacksmith goes down and I can revert back to GitHub temporarily.
