I wrote about a workflow I’ve been using to manage AI agents across multiple projects using structured PRDs and task lists. It’s a manual, markdown-based approach that ended up being more reliable than multi-agent automation tools for real-world coding tasks. Covers how I set it up, what worked, and what didn’t.
> I think it can be summarized as "recklessness" (i.e. jumping the gun without proper understanding of/regard to foundational concepts)
Well… I tried to approach it properly. You google or look up in wikipedia a bunch of info on Buddhism, then you find most popular authors writing on the topic. You end up with “Zen mind, beginner’s mind” and a few others. None of them tell you it may hurt you, none of them mention doing it on group settings or with teachers, they recommend you starting alone and doing it daily. One of those foundational books (don’t remember which one), recommended doing an hour a day… How is one supposed to know that it is dangerous?
> How is one supposed to know that it is dangerous?
It isn't supposed to be dangerous, but if you dive head first into hardcore "retreats" with unrealistic expectations, that might end up badly, yes.
For starters, if you have to seek recommendations on the Internet, you're probably already several steps detached from the original tradition. Buddhism has an insane amount of breadth: there are west asian flavors and east asian flavors, and there's literally thousands of years of history to go with them. Some forms of practice don't even focus on meditation (for example, as a child, I was largely exposed to ritualistic aspects of the japanese flavor). If you're interested in it as a westerner, it's likely because you've heard of mindfulness in the context of mental health benefits, but that's in large part a western concept bolted on top of the original tradition.
It would be helpful to try to understand where stuff is getting lost in translation. Learning more about the original Buddhist philosophy and its roots can help give more context on things like what enlightenment is supposed to be about (coming to understand what it is is actually kind of the point) and how meditation and mindfulness are supposed to fit in.
In general, one key tenet you will find even in those books is a focus on 'being' and 'experiencing' reality over taking as truth an abstract knowledge of how something 'should be'.
An approach that might work better could be a gradual and expanding exposure, talking physically in person to others, and exposing oneself physically to the practices and reality of a number of different sects and groups over time - while evolving your own understanding with book reading. It is very unlikely that meditating, or following basic practices, is going to cause anyone harm - but definitely not impossible based on their state of mind or circumstances. Given a large enough group trying something, it is inevitable someone will have a terrible outcome. It doesn't mean others won't have amazing outcomes, however.
It is our own individual responsibility to take ownership for making the decisions we make, taking the path we take, and owning the results, or we lose all handle on the little we can actually control and become even more lost.
Going to a meditation retreat (12+ hrs) without a solid grounding and understanding of the context would be a bit like hopping on a race motorcycle on a track day right after getting a learners permit - ill advised, and unlikely to result in anything healthy. Not impossible it wouldn't go well however, and not something likely to need screening for from the retreat (or track) side. Usually most people would realize pretty quickly even if they were dumb enough to get started and quit before anything really terrible happened.
If someone doesn't know or recognize that, they are unlikely to find the right ways to get in trouble - usually.
Book knowledge can help expand or refine knowledge, but should always be validated and integrated with personal experience. There are too many conflicting ways to take a specific passage, too many personal traumas or gotchas, too many environmental variables for anything else frankly.
It should not be your only or especially your only foundational knowledge about something so fundamental as how to understand or approach reality and yourself.
Maybe getting your only information from a cursory grazing of wikipedia isn't approaching the topic properly?
The article in question isn't about meditating once a day. It's about meditating aggressively for TWELVE hours a day two weeks straight, and how it negatively affected the author.
Those weren't outages for a specific instance. But from the whole pool of instances we were running 2-3 would have networking issues, random unexplained hangs requiring an instance restart, huge CPU performance drops, IO hangs, etc, etc.
We get free inter-DC connectivity for free with Softlayer. There really is no difference for us between connecting to a server within a DC or between datacenters (aside from added latency, of cource) – the same private address space, the same access rules (we see all of our machines in a private backend network from any datacenter).
No, I really do not think going to EC2 could be beneficial in any way in terms of improving resiliency compared to Softlayer. SL allows you to control which VLANs your box will end up on. VLANs could be treated as racks (since they do not allocate more than one VLAN per rack). Then you have multiple DCs in one region (e.g. DAL01, DAL05, DAL07, etc) and you have many different regions (DAL, SEA, WAS, AMS, etc).
I'd be very interested what problems you were having with them and at what scale. If this is a private topic, we could do it over email or some other medium if you like. You can contact me by any of the means listed here: http://kovyrin.net/contact/
We were about 75% virtual with SL and 25% bare metal. One of our issues with the virtual stuff is when we started dedicating them to a set VLAN, multiple times we ran into an issue where some type of resource for that pod the VLAN was in would be maxed out (usually storage) so we couldn't create a new instance. The solution we were given was to let the system pick a VLAN but by doing that we had lost control of the placement and added some complexity to our architecture.
Aside from that it was mainly nit-picky type stuff, but still things that were annoying (networking issues between DCs, networking issues between pods, internal mirrored apt-get repos going out of sync, API is kind of blah, etc).
We use docker so having a few bare metal machines with tons of containers on them wasn't a great HA setup (for us at least), even running in two data centers. The fairly quick setup time though was a nice selling point.
When we went to AWS things just kind of worked. The API was easier to use and the GUI portal was way nicer/stable. So far we have not had any odd issues with our instances, but we also typically run them at about 50% capacity so that might be why. It is also still early so maybe things will come up in 6+ months that send us back to SL :)
Softlayer manages the network for us. They offer a fully isolated backend network (frontend connection to the world is optional). For frontend connections we simply use iptables.
My personal experience within the last 7 years:
* Softlayer – the best option in terms of quality of service, quality of hardware, quality and size of the infrastructure (geo distribution, etc).
* Rackspace – nice, until you grow enough to get relatively locked in and then your prices start to go up, provisioning time suffers and their service turns into shit.
* Steadfast – provisioning times up to a week, basically a joke in today's world.
* Some German/EU providers like Hetzner – dirt cheap option with desktop-like hardware, failing quickly. Service is nowhere near SL level.
I could go on and on about those, but other options were even more painful.
I've been running three 32GB servers (each with 3TB storage) with them for 2+ years now and the only outage I've experienced is the switch (5 port GBit) dying once. Hetzner tech replaced it in under an hour.
These three servers cost me €263/month (that's total, not each). Included in that monthly price is an additional IPv4 for each server, a private 5port Gbit switch, remote console access and 300GB of DC backup space.
There are probably better deals available now (i.e. more RAM at the same price) than the one I'm on since it's old and not offered on their site any more (/makes note to self to call Hetzner sales)
Hetzner and OVH both use cheap hardware, but IME it's not hard to use the same primitives you'd otherwise use in something like AWS to build in redundancy at a price point well below AWS.
I wouldn't want to do it, which is why I'd rather work for somebody who'd pay for AWS, but I think there's a thing in there somewhere for those who want to dig.
With Softlayer I get multiple locations (transparently routed 100% transparent backend connectivity), get 1-2 hrs provisioning speed, I do not need to worry about networking and hardware. Failed drives (when they fail, which happens rarely since the hardware they use is REALLY good) are replaced within an hour.
Colocation is a very different beast and I certainly would not encourage anybody to do that until a very large scale when rented hardware economics stop working for them.
