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domain:alexepstein.substack.com

Friday Fun Thread for July 4, 2025

Paralleling @JarJarJedi's story, I tried to outsource some annoying research to Gemini and it just gave me the run around. [TW: Boring ops work] I was trying to find a way to copy a large-ish Cloud SQL MySQL DB from one GCP project to another. Solutions I was given:

  1. Just make a clone in another project (not allowed)
  2. Dump the data to a GCS bucket (I said I didn't want to do that in the original prompt)
  3. Use DMS to transfer the data to an empty Cloud SQL instance in another project (sounded promising, was my original thought... but you can't select a DMS instance in another project from the drop-down)
  4. Just use the public IP address of the other Cloud SQL instance as the target (and send my prod DB data over the internet? pretty sure the security team would kill me)
  5. Just use the private IP address of the other Cloud SQL instance (...what? it's in another VPC in another project)
  6. Just peer the VPCs (hmmm.... but no, Cloud SQL instance interfaces actually exist in a "private services subnet" which is part of a hidden Google-controlled VPC which gets automatically peered to the customer's VPC in the same project (A <-> B), and GCP does not support transitive VPC peering (A <-> B <-> C))
  7. Just peer the hidden VPCs in each project directly (they're Google-controlled so we can't create peerings)
  8. Peer the customer's VPC in the source project with the Cloud SQL VPC in the target project (that doesn't make sense)
  9. Just dump the database into a bucket (sigh)

In the end I probably could have just spent 30-45 minutes reading the docs and figured out what my real options were rather than spending severally hours trying half-baked solutions. I just use Gemini for short scripts, text editing operations, and boilerplate now.

[PS. I think we can use PSC to solve the problem above]

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

Yeah but the point of 'sovereignty wasn't ceded' arguments is essentially that the lack of any sort of a coherent political union or body of Aborigines with which to negotiate a surrender means that they didn't surrender meaning that they still own the territory of Australia under illegitimate occupation. Galaxybrain shit.

It also contributes to an active resistance towards archeological or other historical investigation of Australian history in order to reduce the chances of anything that might contradict the official narrative. There was a semi-recent case in which Mungo Man, the oldest Homo Sapiens discovered in Australia, was reburied in accordance with Indigenous wishes to prevent further scientific inquiry.