iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Best compliment I have received all week: "I was reading some substrate mds and was pretty impressed that it sounded like it’s coming from a human" They ARE coming from a human! We put a fair amount of work into them. They are "artisanal, hand-crafted docs", if you will.

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Awesome! That's the best reaction I could hope for. Join the group, look at the code/docs, try the demos (they work in KinD, and file issues! We have a bazillion decisions to pin down.

One of the interesting discussions to have, and a good reason for going open super early is: Is the process snapshot actually important? Or is the filesystem continuity the real thing people care about. Early feedback is mixed.

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An actor is a single writer, so we can side-step RWX storage with snapshots (consistent across process memory and filesystem). RWX may be an optimization but we haven't explored that yet. Some agents (will) want real RWX (simultaneous multi-writer) and that's a tomorrow problem :)

For this phase, "idle" means it is done with a "turn" and waiting for a new input. Over time we can get more aggressive with that, but it's tricky when moving around means IP changes. Baby steps :) Snapshots are stored in GCS/S3 for now. We know we need local caching and locality in assignment. :)

The effective result is: 1) an agent can run on one worker, be suspended, and be resumed on another worker very quickly 2) we can multiplex many agents onto few workers This is not PhD level insight, of course. It's trying to bring together a set of fairly established ideas into a working model.

Actors: things that can be suspended/resumed Workers: "stem cell" pods that can resume any actor Proxy: Assign inbound requests for a particular actor (think "chat session" = actor) to available workers When an actor goes idle, suspend to storage & unassign. Most agents are idle most of the time.

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GitHub - agent-substrate/substrate: Agent Substrate: the core system

I am happy to share a little thing we have been cooking up: github.com/agent-substr... Problem statement: How can we effectively host a bazillion mostly-idle agents in a regular-sized Kubernetes cluster? This is *demo-grade* software, but it shows some ideas.

github.com

Agent Substrate: the core system. Contribute to agent-substrate/substrate development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Tim Hockin @thock.in · 16/05/2026

Every week I find some new glitch. Last week it was not redrawing window borders. This week it randomly resizes and moves windows when I wake from sleep. Now I am told there's a new terminal app SPECIFICALLY for Wayland. Why? Who cares? You know what worked great? xterm. In 1994. On my 486.

Tim Hockin @thock.in · 16/05/2026

Wayland is 100%, in every way, not ready for prime time. :(

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Tim Hockin @thock.in · 13/05/2026

Every post on /r/kubernetes which concludes with "Curious to hear..." will continue to be removed with prejudice. Just stop with the BS, please.

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Tim Hockin @thock.in · 13/05/2026

There are things I can "disagree and commit" on, but NOT using the Oxford comma is not one. To my dying day, I will keep reinserting it into any doc that gives me editor access.

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Tim Hockin @thock.in · 13/04/2026

"We are experiencing high demand, please try again later" on an airline's website is pathetic. Tell me you don't give a shit about your customers without telling me you don't give a shit about your customers.

Tim Hockin @thock.in · 26/03/2026

That's not true. I am rewriting it in English. Gemini is rewriting it in C#

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Tim Hockin @thock.in · 21/03/2026

If anyone wants a game, slack me. If I am free I will join! Note: mobile support is ...pretty broken, sorry. I am really not a webdev expert.

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Tim Hockin @thock.in · 21/03/2026

Sadly, I will not be at KubeCon this week. To show all my kubernaut friends just how much I miss you, I have a small gift. If you missed out on getting a deck of Exploding Clusters cards, well now you can play online. exploding.k8s.io Go easy on me, it's just a "free time" project. Have fun!

exploding.k8s.io

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Tim Hockin @thock.in · 17/03/2026

Same here, almost. The window is 65 inches away, but she hid pretty well in the center of the tree, so a partially obstructed view. I want to just sit and watch. She seems unfazed when we walk past her.

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Tim Hockin @thock.in · 17/03/2026

A tiny hummingbird has made her nest in the dwarf satsuma tree outside my front door. Now I feel obligated to protect her from neighborhood cats. You should have picked a taller tree, mama bird!

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Tim Hockin @thock.in · 17/03/2026

I bought what I thought was a 12 foot loop of specialty cabling for $20. What I got was 12 INCHES. mea culpa, I guess.

Tim Hockin @thock.in · 13/01/2026

I spent my holiday vibe-coding a web game. Perhaps uninteresting except that I don't know anything about a) games; b) web-dev; c) Typescript, React, CSS, etc. The goal was to not write code. What actually happened is that I learned a new language "by accident", mostly coding tests.

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Tim Hockin @thock.in · 11/12/2025

"Our website is currently experiencing heavy demand. Please try again shortly." It's almost 2026 - there's just no excuse for this.

Tim Hockin @thock.in · 24/11/2025

I am sure we can find one for you. :)

Tim Hockin @thock.in · 23/11/2025

I won a round of Exploding Clusters against my kids! I thought you might want to know.

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Tim Hockin @thock.in · 10/11/2025

Blame KubeCon -- we should stop trying to have it in the south. First Austin, now Atlanta.

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Tim Hockin @thock.in · 08/11/2025

I packed shorts, jeans, and sweaters. I hope I am covered.

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Tim Hockin @thock.in · 08/11/2025

Believe it or not, I still have some special Kubernetes stickers left from KubeCon's past. If you see me around, say hello and ask for a sticker!

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Tim Hockin @thock.in · 08/11/2025

For the moment my flight is alive and on-time. See you all soon!

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Tim Hockin @thock.in · 26/10/2025

Anyone else worried about the air traffic control situation, what with KubeCon just around the corner?

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Tim Hockin @thock.in · 18/10/2025

Sarted with windows. That reveals roof leaks, roof is 30 yrs old, so new roof. Roofer hit fire sprinkler so fix that, but they are 30 years old, so replace them. 30 year old PVC tends to break, so now we have holes in the ceiling. git reset --hard HEAD^ my_house

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Tim Hockin @thock.in · 18/10/2025

Home maintenance is not for the weak of spirit. Or of wallet. JFC, this project never ends. It's one thing after another. We should have just moved.

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Tim Hockin @thock.in · 22/09/2025

I cannot find a good Chicago dog anywhere in California EXCEPT the lone Portillo's down in Orange County.

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Tim Hockin @thock.in · 17/09/2025

It's 2025. If your project's "how to install" document tells me "curl <url> | sh", you are dead to me.

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Tim Hockin @thock.in · 15/09/2025

When you find an interesting product online but it's just a little too expensive to YOLO, so you scour the web for reviews or comparisons or just the technical spec and find NOTHING...do you really want to buy that product? The "locate a dealer" vibe is off-putting. I guess this one is not for me.

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Tim Hockin @thock.in · 28/08/2025

I can't tell you how much fun I am having, making Gemini and/or ChatGPT edit a picture of my house to change the color. We need to re-paint, and this is so much better than collecting paint cards from Home Depot.

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Tim Hockin @thock.in · 12/08/2025

If there are blanks, I could bring you stickers. If you want to 3D print some, I am out of my depth :)

Tim Hockin @thock.in · 09/08/2025

The answer is "kyoob-kuttel". "cuddle" is an acceptable pronunciation for folks with lazy accents like Americans.

Tim Hockin @thock.in · 31/07/2025

I saw Weird Al at Illinois State University in 1994 (I think) and it remains a core memory of college! 30 years later, just as awesome.

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FWIW, Ingy was helpful in reviewing KYAML, even if they are not a fan of it in the end.

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Good call out, Leigh. KYAML is aimed at Kubernetes usage patterns, though adding non-string keys would not be THAT hard (famous last words).

I'm a pragmatist - the one thing I can exert influence over is Kubernetes. K8s has been part of the problem, namely the proliferation of YAML, so I figure we should be part of a solution. If other projects like it, well I have good news - the formatting library and a reflow tool are open-source :)

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We can't change the default `-o yaml` to this because there are bazillion helm charts out there which template-insert block-style YAML, which will not work when inserted into the middle of this flow-style. It has to have a different name and be opt-in.

HJSON and JSON5 were both considered, but "strict subset of YAML" was the dominant consideration. You get take a KYAML document and apply it in any cluster of pretty much any previous version.

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Given how shallow ConfigMap is as an API, it seems like it will benefit less from KYAML than (e.g.) Deployments. But yes, the #1 thing KYAML can't do is a clean multi-line string.

caveat: I'm not pretending to be an expert in either approach, I just happened to see that article recently. Prometheus is modelled on Google's internal systems, for better or worse, and it has a huge ecosystem.