Ask HN: What strongly held beliefs have you changed your mind about recently?

Cloud services certainly have uses, but I used to be "all in" on cloud, now I'm "use cloud, but only if there's no alternative".

I don't believe that the core premise of the cloud - that "your company cannot afford to run its own computers" and "running your own computers requires massive in house technical expertise, whereas cloud does not".

Cost, complexity and vendor lock-in are huge factors. Anyone who has tried to build cloud infrastructure knows the pain of configuration/authorisation. Any accounting department knows the cost of running cloud has the potential to simply run out of control.

I still believe in:

* using bare metal/dedicated hosted instances

* cloud DNS services

* cloud storage

But building sophisticated applications using cloud application services like databases/serverless functions/queues/messaging I think you should really question whether it makes sense to use these.

Also the data egress fees are simply nuts. And most companies underestimate the impact of this, and fail to take into account how clouds charge for data movement within the cloud in a whole range of complex and expensive ways.

And I may well be, as the "concentration of power" effect is - I believe - unlikely to be strictly a consequence of the technology qua technology, but is rather an effect fostered by the confluence of the technology itself and our legal/social/political system(s). And the latter are potentially subject to change in ways that would allow technological advances to benefit everyone without creating ever increasingly concentrated pockets of power and leading us inexorably towards a cyberpunk dystopia.

That latter point is one on which I deeply hope I am correct.

I find these questions very questionable now, but I didn't before.

This is probably related to the fact that I finally stopped practicing the high-demand religion into which I was born, after preaching it from pulpits for decades. So I dropped a LOT of strongly-held beliefs, including some pretty wild stuff TBH, and this led me to question this idea of belief.

Other reasons:

Questions mentioning belief are often criticism couched in curiosity. Sometimes the questioner doesn't even realize it! And IMO, a lot of people will ask "why do you...believe...whatever" when they are not in a mindset to be swayed; the verb itself may even be a form of unintentional ridicule, depending. Yet the believer is ready to take some imaginary podium and defend their position. lol. The conversation sets itself up, and everybody picks up their scripts and takes their places on the stage. Yeah no thanks.

Other questions mentioning belief are often a kind of a perspective-check by the questioner--what is your perspective on X or Y, what perspectives are you taking. This then suggests to them a form of derivative-outcome in their mind: OK if that's what you believe, then you'll probably invest in Z, you'll probably vote for candidate A and not B, etc. In fact it's a form of gestalt speculation and even feeds an emotional like/dislike process in the end. I studied this particular mindset really heavily for the last ~10 years and couldn't be more disappointed that people don't really understand more about it. :D Those who practice it tend to overrate its applicability. Those who don't practice it tend to vastly underrate it.

And in general, questions about belief become a point of no return for a lot of conversations that could have been great. Better questions IMO:

- What do you find useful these days that you didn't make much use of before? (Perspectives, tools, whatver)

- Help me understand how X works for you, like what does that look like in your schedule?

- What are some things that have affected your opinion on X?

Opinions, uses, perspectives, practices: I find all of these way better to talk about than belief. I really don't see that the word is necessary...but I'm open to changing my mind!

I love coding, but my attitude has changed based on what I see big tech doing. Google, Facebook and Amazon particularly seem to be dead set on the enshittification of everything. It’s hard for me to see things as anything other than negative overall.