SBD: We Have a Filesystem at Home(fly.io)
34 pointsby torutofu4 hours ago5 comments
  • bennettnate5an hour ago
    > I have unkind things to say about people who make their own pasta

    You lost me on the first sentence; my significant other's homemade ravioli is unparalleled. Homemade pasta is a delight to make and tastes so much better than $1 cardboard box pasta

  • dangoodmanUT2 hours ago
    I really like fly.io posts, they're usually written in such a way that feels so human. I used to read all of them, because the writing was interesting, and secondarily sometimes the topic was.

    Except seeing sentences like this:

    > The difference is that a Sprite now stops and says so instead of carrying on with a disk it can’t vouch for

    Makes it feel distinctly LLM written. Maybe I'm being RL'd to identify LLM authorship, maybe the author was RL'd to write like that by reading so many Claude-written works, but I'd like to see the humanity of fly.io blog posts come back.

    • pixl972 hours ago
      I wish we'd stop getting replies like this to articles. It's just as tiring as LLM written articles.

      People seem to forget that LLMs copied human writing. They also tended to copy people with more proper or formally trained writing styles. There are so many journalists and writers that talk about how they've had to 'stupify' how they write so they don't get accused of being an LLM.

      It's like we're running idiocracy on fast forward.

      • Banditoz2 hours ago
        Why? Why should we give up being critical of things we read?
        • cadamsdotcom34 minutes ago
          Criticising something for sounding like an LLM is like criticising a gas-guzzler for being blue.
        • iugtmkbdfil8342 hours ago
          Because being critical in those instances is more like going to mcdonalds and complaining about burger not being cooked to your specs. No one says you can't, but it does get tiring.
          • axus23 minutes ago
            Like going to an "independent" restaurant and being served a McDonalds Spicy Chicken Crispy Deluxe . Good sandwich, but I could have just gone to McDonalds.

            And if McDonalds started mass-producing the restaurant's signature burger, I would hope the chef has enough pride/business sense to make a new signature burger.

          • masfuertean hour ago
            We expect McDonalds to be consistently mediocre because they do a lot of work to achieve this. Why should we expect every blog post on the internet to be consistently mediocre?
            • iugtmkbdfil834an hour ago
              Um.. have you looked at most blogs? A vast, vast majority is not merely mediocre. I am not even exaggerating. Pareto principle applies. Post AI, triply so.
              • masfuerte44 minutes ago
                Sure, the vast majority of blog posts these days are AI-generated SEO slop. But this site isn't supposed to be a random sample of the web. The idea is that people upvote quality, but that doesn't seem to be happening. I don't know. Maybe HN is over and I should just give up on it.
                • iugtmkbdfil83432 minutes ago
                  It is a reasonable objection. I think I agree with that one.
        • yodon2 hours ago
          >Why? Why should we give up being critical of things we read?

          Remember how pre-AI everyone used to complain about hating how this or that website hijacked scrolling? Countless words were written about hijacked scrollbars and back buttons. Zero conversations were improved by the comments and zero websites were changed as a result. It was just complaining.

          "Boo hoo AI" is the same kind of low-effort, complain about everything while adding nothing to the conversation post.

          Instead, try to say something more substantive than "I found a word or phrase that I think was AI."

          • pixl972 hours ago
            I wish I would have saved it, but there was something posted here a number of months back that people were saying had AI generated text and pictures (they could tell because of the pixels). Turns out it was an article from 2017.

            It's just ironic to me how so many people are confidently incorrect about it, we are the LLMs in this case spouting 'facts' that we are sure of.

      • blandflakesan hour ago
        Choosing how you write is a part of writing.

        > It's just as tiring as LLM written articles.

        It's not even as tiring as reading one unedited LLM article.

      • tom_an hour ago
        If it'd be any consolation, I for one find it interesting, even if you don't. I like to keep my AI writing detector honed, and others' opinions help. Even if I clicked figuring I wouldn't necessarily find the article all that interesting, I might end up reading it anyway just to see what I think of the writing style.
      • bmachoan hour ago
        > I wish we'd stop getting replies like this to articles.

        I wish we got more such replies like that to articles. This is a confusing times, and social interaction helps in several ways.

        > People seem to forget that LLMs copied human writing.

        This is literally not true, but more importantly the conclusion you trying to use it for is blatantly false.

    • jedbrookean hour ago
      I’d cut them some slack if that’s the only example you found in the whole article. A lot of the “LLMisms” are actually valid english constructs* , it’s just that LLMs will use them in every sentence. I noticed while reading older stuff that’s way pre-llm, occasionally a sentence will jump out to me as LLM written, but it’ll be like once per chapter. When it’s every other sentence only then do I discount the entire thing as LLM written.

      *: Except for the “Random label: sentence that has nothing to do with the label” construct. That one drives me crazy and it makes no sense

    • raro11an hour ago
      Noticed it too. Feels like an LLM that ingested all old blog posts and did it's best to match the style. But it doesn't feel human anymore.
    • dspillett2 hours ago
      It is always worth remembering that LLMs use certain phrases and patterns because many source materials in the training set did. One or two smells does not a cesspool make.

      As anti-AI as I am, people pointing out that they've spotted an AI are getting quite tiresome too. If you think people won't spot it without you telling them, then it is good enough for them no matter who or what generated it.

    • 0gs2 hours ago
      people are just going to have to turn the accursed spell-check off and start writing like psychos again. said modality was second nature online for like the first 15 years of the web. phones ruined us
    • 2 hours ago
      undefined
    • direwolf20an hour ago
      Reads like AI to me, or AI-shaped corposlop
  • aftbitan hour ago
    I'll be honest, I don't understand what Sprites are, or why they need their own kind of block device. All of the pain seems to come back to trying to map a linux filesystem running on a block device into an object store. They could just ... not do that?

    Here's why they do:

    https://fly.io/blog/design-and-implementation/

    But it feels like maybe they made the wrong tradeoff here.

  • xyzzy_plugh37 minutes ago
    So it's like Archil or ZeroFS but more proprietary and less useful. Got it.

    Look, we get it: anyone can write a filesystem now. It doesn't mean you should.

  • themgt2 hours ago
    A story which may or may not be based on lived experience: one day a Sprite stops booting. JuiceFS is asking object storage for a chunk and getting a 404. We wanted to go fast, so we ran JuiceFS in writeback mode. It records a chunk in its metadata first and uploads the bytes after. If the machine is killed at any time between those two steps, the metadata points at a chunk that doesn’t exist.

    So we built a harness that drives fleets of Sprites through write, checkpoint, sleep, wake and restore, over and over, verifying every byte that comes back. We pointed it at 400 JuiceFS Sprites for about 5,000 cycles. A nonzero number of them permanently lost the ability to checkpoint. Well … fuck.

    Enter: the Sprites Block Device (SBD). It takes a bucket and presents it to the Linux kernel as a block device, over NBD. The Sprite formats that device as ext4 and mounts it, the same way you’d mount a disk on any Linux box. Duh.

    This blog has has a strange vibe like "the last BRAWNDO we made in a bathtub may or may not have killed some customers lmao, try NEW BRAWNDO 2.0 TODAY!" that I didn't realize could work for corporate messaging around an in-house CoW cloud filesystem.