u/executivegtm-47

I was the reliable one, the one who answered Slack on holiday and never called in sick. For about 4 years I kept telling myself it was just a busy stretch that would end. Then my body started closing doors on me. Wired but exhausted, i was awake at 3am with my heart going, catching every cold that came through the office and keeping none of the energy. I kept pushing because that is what you do and because taking a day felt like admitting I could not hack it. I know what you're thinking, and looking back I see it too, it was very dumb...

When I finally dragged myself in to get checked, the numbers were grim. Cortisol all over the place, vitamin D on the floor, iron tanked, thyroid drifting the wrong way, blood sugar creeping up despite barely having time to eat. It was the readout of a body that had been running on adrenaline and no rest for years. My doctor's word for it was "lifestyle." I wanted to SCREAM. It wasn't my lifestyle doc, it was my freaking job...

Now to the sad part. That company replaced me in about 6 weeks. The thing I traded my health for did not care, was never going to care, and would have let me run all the way into the ground if my body had not forced the issue first. I am not even fully recovered. Resting now, and the numbers are slowly crawling back, but it took wrecking myself to learn that no job is owed your body.

so to everyone still being the dependable one, holding it all together while it takes it out of you. please rest before your bloodwork has to tell you to. it is not worth it and they will not thank you.

The 23andMe collapse is the thing that made all of this click for me so apologies if this is old news to people here.

When they filed for bankruptcy, roughly 15 million people's genetic data was sitting there as a company asset, something that could be sold off to whoever ended up buying the corpse. A whole coalition of state attorneys general had to go to court to try to block it, and they were literally telling people to delete their data and destroy their samples before it changed hands.

Once I saw this happens with DNA I could not unsee it everywhere else. My period tracker was a US app that already got caught selling cycle data. My old blood results sit in a portal owned by a lab that answers to US law. Even my wearable phones home somewhere I cannot point to on a map, quietly living under a jurisdiction I have no say in, governed by things like the CLOUD Act that I never agreed to.

So I have been trying to pull my health data back somewhere I actually control and it is harder than degoogling a phone. Where I have got to: deleted the 23andMe account and requested sample destruction, for what that is worth, moved cycle tracking to an open source app that keeps everything on-device (Drip), and for bloodwork I went with a European service (Lucis) instead of a US one like Function Health, so the labs and the data stay in the EU under European health-data rules rather than on a US company's servers.

So for the people here who have actually done it, how deep does it go, and where did you draw the line between privacy and just being able to live your life.

So we spent the better part of 4 months with our arm's motion and control stack running clean in sim. like flawless. every trajectory, every edge case we could script, green.

a fair chunk of that code was AI-assisted. we'd describe the behavior we wanted, it gave us something that looked right, simulated right, and passed review. nobody on the team would say they fully wrote it, but it worked, so who cared.

then we put it on the physical arm with a real payload and it drifted. not a crash, nothing dramatic. the end effector just slowly ended up a few mm off where the sim swore it would be, and it got worse under heavier load. once you add the real latency and the sensor noise the sim was too clean to ever reproduce, the behavior wasn't the behavior we tested. it was close. close is the problem.

what actually rattled me is that reading the code would never have caught this. it's all locally plausible. each block makes sense on its own. the gap only exists where the generated logic meets real timing and a real load, and a simulator that passes everything is exactly where that gap hides.

then the worse thought. we've shipped smaller motion changes the same way for a while, sim-pass and call it done, never put a real-hardware check in front of them because sim was green and we trusted it. i don't actually know those were fine. i just know they didn't fail loud.

so for the people running real arms here, what's actually in your loop between sim-pass and trusting it on the hardware? is any of that automated for you, or is it still someone standing there watching the real thing move

I see people here bragging about how much money they’re making with their ai influencers but I have no idea how to even start or how they’re actually making money out of it.

I saw someone here boast about using a combo of Argil, eleven labs and buffer and some other stuff to make his first 1k last month passively, like HOW, don’t you have to pay for these???? I just don’t get it…

Like is this stuff real or just hype?

Hello, our CI runs in an isolated environment with no external API calls allowed. It works fine for most of the stack but it's become a genuine blocker for anything in the AI testing space.

The traditional on-premise options are fine with Playwright locally, Ranorex and Tosca for the regulated environment requirements. The problem is none of them give us anything beyond selector-based automation. The moment we look at tools with self-healing tests or vision-based UI interaction like Mabl, Functionize, Virtuoso among others in the newer agentic stuff and they all assume cloud connectivity for inference. Private cloud still means someone else's infrastructure so that's also out.

We've been going through the longer tail of options trying to find something that runs the AI layer on our own infrastructure and so far the list is really short. Keysight Eggplant has an on-premise path but the AI features are limited. Askui came up as another option with on-premise deployment. Tricentis has something but it's buried in enterprise pricing with no public detail yet.

Has anyone here actually made agentic testing work in an air-gapped or restricted pipeline and what the architecture ended up looking like? This would be highly helpful. Thanks in advance!