Posts

Previously, on Adversarial Psychology In my previous investigation, I subjected an AI therapy chatbot to a series of increasingly ridiculous scenarios to see whether its commitment to empathy would override its capacity for critical reasoning. The results were spectacular. It believed I’d owned a dog for fifty years. It investigated an alleged conspiracy involving six successive dogs called Rex. It described my parents’ supposed deception as a “legitimate theft”, and eventually entertained the possibility that I was a Time Lord with access to a TARDIS. ...

In which I seek professional help I’ve been experimenting with an AI therapy chatbot. Not because I particularly needed therapy, but because I was curious about something. What happens when a language model is instructed to be relentlessly empathetic, supportive and non-judgemental, and somebody starts feeding it increasingly ridiculous information? Would it recognise the absurdity? Would it challenge implausible claims? Or would its commitment to emotional validation override its ability to reason? ...

Stop wasting senior engineers’ time I declined a coding challenge recently. Not because I couldn’t do it; because I shouldn’t have to. The brief was to parse a multi-document Kubernetes YAML file in Python, find resource policy violations across Deployments, and group them by team and service labels. There was a CoderPad link and a timer. The role was Staff Platform Engineer. Here’s the thing: no platform engineer solves that problem in Python. You solve it once, at admission time, with a Validating Admission Webhook or an OPA/Gatekeeper policy. The violation never reaches the cluster. The YAML never needs parsing after the fact. The exercise doesn’t test platform engineering; it tests whether you know PyYAML’s safe_load_all and can iterate nested dicts without hitting a KeyError under pressure. That’s a different skill set, and frankly, a less useful one. ...

Or: what “self-contained binary” actually means, once you have to do TLS yourself. I had an n8n workflow that ran at 05:00 every morning, fetched a five-day forecast from OpenWeatherMap, asked GPT-4.1-mini to write me a fun summary of the day, and posted it to a Mattermost channel. It worked. It was also doing maybe three syscalls’ worth of useful work inside a n8n runtime. So I rewrote it in Go. Single binary, static link, scratch container. 10.3 MB image, 7.7 MB binary. Comfortable. Done. ...

EKS clusters rarely start inefficient. They drift there. What begins as a reasonable number of small nodes slowly becomes a fixed cost floor. HPAs are set optimistically. Storage is over-provisioned “just in case.” Instance types are chosen for safety, not fit. Recently, I revisited an EKS environment that had evolved into: 14 × t4g.medium nodes Predominantly gp2 volumes HPA minimum replicas set to 3 or 4 across multiple services Nothing was on fire. Services were stable. But the cost profile didn’t match the actual workload behaviour. ...

AWS NAT Gateways are frequently treated as a default component of VPC design. They are simple to deploy, highly available, and largely invisible once in place. In multiple Availability Zone environments, the recommended pattern is to deploy one NAT Gateway per AZ and route private subnets to their local gateway. While operationally convenient, this approach comes with a fixed and often under-examined cost. This post documents an alternative approach: replacing three managed AWS NAT Gateways with three self-managed NAT instances running FreeBSD on t4g.nano EC2 instances. The focus is on the mechanics of the design, the operational behaviour of FreeBSD as a routing platform, and the financial implications of the change. ...

🚀 How I Used a No-Code Backend to Power a Fake Startup Certification Platform Recently I launched S Corp™ — a parody certification for startups that want to look ethical without the burden of actually doing anything. You type in your company name, click a button, and get a downloadable certificate that looks suspiciously legit. It’s satire. It’s fast. It’s 100% nonsense. Behind the scenes, the app is powered by React, Tailwind, and a healthy disrespect for real sustainability certifications. ...

The AI MCP Protocol: An Ambitious Idea - But this feels like VHS vs Betamax The AI Model Context Protocol (MCP) burst onto the scene in late 2024 as an Open Standard, introduced by Anthropic, suggesting a simple way for AI-powered apps—especially chatbots and assistants—to dynamically plug into external tools and data at runtime. Sounds great, right? But after some digging, it turns out MCP might not be as practical as it initially seems. ...

Did this earlier today for a client. You can’t directly upgrade from 1.29 to 1.32, so instead have to repeat these steps for each version. Upgrading Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a crucial maintenance task that ensures security, stability, and access to the latest Kubernetes features. Given AWS’s recommendation to upgrade one minor version at a time, this guide walks through upgrading EKS from version 1.29 to 1.32 in stages. ...

Connecting GitHub Actions to AWS Using OIDC and an Assumed Role When deploying applications or managing AWS infrastructure through GitHub Actions, using OpenID Connect (OIDC) provides a secure way to authenticate without requiring static AWS credentials. This guide will walk you through setting up an AWS IAM role, configuring an OIDC identity provider, and updating your GitHub Actions workflow to assume the role. Step 1: Create an IAM Role for GitHub Actions Navigate to the AWS IAM Console. Click on Roles > Create role. Select Web identity as the trusted entity type. Choose OpenID Connect (OIDC) as the identity provider. Enter the OIDC provider URL: https://token.actions.githubusercontent.com Set the audience to sts.amazonaws.com. Click Next and proceed to configure permissions. IAM Trust Policy After creating the role, update the trust policy to allow GitHub Actions to assume it: ...