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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 5th, 2023

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  • I’ve been in love with the concept of ansible since I discovered it almost a decade ago, but I still hate how verbose it is, and how cumbersome the yaml based DSL is. You can have a role that basically does the job of 3 lines of bash and it’ll need 3 yaml files in 4 directories.

    About 3 years ago I wrote a big ansible playbook that would fully configure my home server, desktop and laptop from a minimal arch install. Then I used said playbook for my laptop and server.

    I just got a new laptop and went to look at the playbook but realised it probably needs to be updated in a few places. I got feelings of dread thinking about reading all that yaml and updating it.

    So instead I’m just gonna rewrite everything in simple python with a few helper functions. The few roles I rewrote are already so much cleaner and shorter. Should be way faster and more user friendly and maintainable.

    I’ll keep ansible for actual deployments.








  • To be fair though, they just need to make everything USB-C anyhow.

    Careful what you wish for. Putting advanced electronics into very simple devices will just make them fail a lot faster.
    Some old device just needed 12V over a barrel jack to run some motor or light and charge the battery and it lasted a decade - only failed because the battery got old. New one now needs a state of the art power delivery chip to negotiate the right voltage and current, and all over a very fine pitch connector that will fail if you look at it wrong. Not looking good on the durability front at all.