I still don't understand what this breaks. I use a LE certificate for my smtp service, but as I understand it, other mail servers don't connect to it using a client cert, they just check that the cert deleivered is trusted. Or am I missing something?
I usually feed all the documentation to an llm and ask the question to the llm that fetches the info with rag. For example:
> how do i configure Traefik to proxy traffic to two backend services?
Configuring Traefik to proxy traffic to multiple backend services is a common use case. You can achieve this by defining multiple entry points and routers in Traefik's configuration, each pointing to a different backend service. Here's a basic example of how you can configure Traefik to proxy traffic to two backend services:
Can you describe more on your process? Which LLM are you using? Are you doing soething specific to make it us RAG or is that automagic (might be obvious depending on which LLM you are using but)? How do you feed the documentation in? for example, when the documentation has more than one page, how do you get that content in to the LLM? Is it part of the prompt or something you've tuned it on? have to clone the docs site, turn it into plan text and feed that in to the prompt or can you pass a URL and have it crawl ahead of time or something?
This is the system I've been dreaming about but haven't had time to dig into yet. I've got ollama and openwebui set up now though, and with OpenAI getting bigger context windows it seems like it might be possible to inject the whole set of docs into the prompt, but I'm not sure how to go about that
This might be an additional way to quickly iterate on the content of the documentation itself. If I were the one writing, an easy test is passing the documentation to a lay person and asking them if they have what they need to perform X by following the documentation.
Perhaps having a focused LLM generate the steps could help catch some documentation deficiencies.
> If I were the one writing, an easy test is passing the documentation to a lay person and asking them if they have what they need to perform X by following the documentation.
What kind of documentation is this though? Is this how to bake a cake or tie a necktie, or is it how to setup a reverse proxy for the services in your k8s cluster?
If it's something a lay-person could do then I think this is a good strategy (though depending on the size/scope of the project/documentaiton it does seem like a pretty big effort to undertake without compensation), but if it's something highly technical like Traefik, I expect a lay-person to not even understand half the words/vocabulary in the documentation, let alone be able to perform X by reading it and following it.
If we push this into the software development domain, my expectation would be something like "documentation should allow a software developer to do this thing without knowing the underlying tooling".
> how to setup a reverse proxy for the services in your k8s cluster
Going off this specifically. I don't know how to do this. I actually have a k8s cluster on a home server waiting for me to do exactly this. Ideally there would be a doc that would start with ingress selection, and then guide a user through how to get it set up with common use-cases. Or something like that. Like others in this conversation, I've been leveraging LLMs with varying degrees of success to try and navigate this.
I did this with Tailscale, which I have endless problems getting to work reliably. Their documentation is a joke. The process is pretty simple: scrape, than concatenate into a large text file and submit.
I do something similar[1] with rsync --link-dest and hard links, so that I can go back in time if I delete something. OP seems to just have a copy of his actual files, but if he sees a file missing after 2 weeks after deleting it, he has no way of recovering it.
> From the moment the driver hit the gas pedal, everybody was on their phones. From the back row, I watched my friends scroll their social media feeds with ferocious intensity.
Sorry, but I think you should change friends. Or your friends have a serious problem with social media that you should help them overcome. There are tons of other interesting venues on the internet. This is one of them. And here you have articles from the past, as from the present. No need to live in The Never Ending Now.
But this site is still biased towards the present, and towards short-form takes like this very piece.
One thing that has always seemed significant to me is that copyright, by intending to subsidize the creation of long-form work, has also put a huge tax on the consumption of long-form work, one that's almost infinite relative to the marginal cost of distribution.
With an near-infinite tax on reading books, is it any wonder most people don't read books?
I mean subsidize in the sense that it's an artificial transfer from the public to the private, in the form of an artificially-created monopoly.
Copyright is a subsidy in the way a trade barrier is a subsidy. There's nothing natural about granting a monopoly on stories but not recipes, or on melodies but not the shape of a jacket or a building. It's just a hand-out that certain industries fought for, successfully made the status quo, and expanded over time.
And it goes far beyond paying people for creative work. Mathematicians are paid for their creative work and so are fashion designers. But neither have the right to say what others who weren't party to any contract with them can do with their creative work. If you want to share a mathematical formula or a fashion design or use it in new work you're free to, and the world benefits immensely from that. Books, films and songs are much more encumbered.
When I say the tax affects long-form work more than short-form, that's just based on the observation that books and films are typically locked away behind paywalls and off the open Internet, while the kind of ephemera the article talks about is free for everyone forever.
If books were free for everyone forever after 2 or 5 years, more people would read books, and it would be easier to build habit-driven products out of books. Lower the tax, increase the consumption.
How is it a transfer from the public to the private if I privately create something and want to privately sell it?
Copyright allows me to monetise my private creation. If it did not exist, my first customer could distribute it to everyone else without penalty and I would make no money.
That is why it is an incentive, not a subsidy. Without it, I will not invest the effort to create it. No public property is used to subsidize my creation.
In the absence of something like copyright, subsidy would be required in order for much creative activity to occur. You have it backwards!
