danpalmer

There's one caveat to this – I think it's good to have bias to other people's actions early on in a new role. Taking on little projects that are already understood, taking on cleanups, things other people aren't volunteering for, is all a great way to find where some of the bodies are buried, understand how the team works, and prove yourself as a team player.

Which British businesses provide this sort of infrastructure?

I ask this as a Brit who ran stuff on a few UK providers, and ultimately moved to a cloud platform because of the combination of terrible service and lack of features. The landscape may have changed, but in my experience it was bleak circa 2020.

The cost effectiveness doesn't really add up for me either though (and again, I lack a lot of context). 1% of cost to run everything essential doesn't pass the sniff test, I assume it's much more during an actual failover. But I'm also not suggesting running any more hardware than the number of failure domains you want to be resilient to losing, and on cloud you could choose to run less and scale (assuming you aren't concerned about stockouts).

My guess is a little of both. I would bet that the 1% is the unused cost, but that for periods that they are running the stand-in system it's much closer to normal. But from what I've heard of their infrastructure I'd also bet that stand-in is significantly cheaper in part because it had the benefit of hindsight and could resolve issues in the first system.

None of this really changes my original feeling though. A cell based architecture spreads the risk, failover is essentially built-in without being a special mode you have to put the system into and then recover from again, on cloud you can scale those up and down with traffic and they also take peaks from each other, and so on. There's a reason why there are very few cloud outages that cross all regions for a provider, and if you're paranoid you can run multi-cloud (as they already do).

Cancellation is different to porting a number. You'll still need to cancel your previous plan, but legislation fixed carriers holding numbers hostage a while ago.

Nice demo, but can we talk about how this is patented. Should it be? Should something like this actually get granted.

While it's neat, it's neat on the order of a UX idea someone might just come up with at standup one day. Like, cool, worth an A/B test, but worth a patent? I don't think so.

I'm afraid I'd have to defer to the public docs on this. I've only used it internally and a bunch of that is not public.

What I would say is that it's considered to be much better than CockroachDB, but that there's no getting around physics. Spanner is subject to the same speed of light... but in every other way it does what it can do to improve things at every level. Google's use of GPS hardware for better timing is public.

> Didn't even need to talk to anyone to port my old number

That seems like pretty low stakes – I wouldn't expect to talk to anyone to sign up and transfer to a consumer service in the UK. I don't think I've spoken to anyone for something like this in the last 10 years or so.

Redundancy is great, absolutely, but there are multiple ways to do it and this is not necessarily the right one.

Which is better: 3 DCs for 2 DCs worth of traffic, running the same stack but isolated failure domains... or 4 DCs for 2 DCs worth of traffic, that work in completely different ways, where 2 are left cold until needed. I can see some advantages of the latter, but not a lot.

This also isn't about fault tolerance at the code level like in, say, avionics. In those scenarios having multiple distinct implementations makes sense, but that's very different, you run all paths at the same time and check they agree etc.

I can't help but think this isn't the best idea, it raises so many questions. How does fail over work (it failed for me!), can you safely fail over, how does product think about the stack, is it funded well enough, how do you scale a system from zero to all traffic instantly, how do you effectively keep this environment warm, how do you determine which services are critical enough to be in it, how do you manage finding the bugs in two separate stacks, and so on and on and on.

It seems like it would be better to invest in a platform that is distributed across multiple failure domains. Some companies call this a cell architecture. For Monzo this might mean true multi cloud, but they already have bare metal services for bank integrations so they are already hybrid in some respects.

It's not the decision I would have made, and I'm not sure I agree with their reasoning, but I'll also admit that I have not run a bank, I don't know all their constraints, and there are some good tech folks at Monzo. That said, I am an SRE at Google so I'd like to think I'm not completely naïve here.

Edit: after reading in more detail I'm puzzled. The justification for Stand-In and not traditional scale-out is the difficulty of data consistency (agreed!), but then Stand-In is just eventually consistent anyway, and introduces sync problems in both directions. Admittedly I'm spoilt by Spanner, but I do wonder if Monzo is being bitten by past architecture choices here.

I know that's the likely timeline. My hope is that because consoles today look a lot more like PCs than they did in 2013 (or earlier during development), that it might be sooner, plus from leaks we know that development appears to mostly be happening on PC (I mean for real builds not just engine tools and cross-compiling).

But I realise that's just hope. It's probably also about business priorities and PC is just not a huge market.

> Be it the Scar Face parody of Vice City, Gang culture of San Andreas, the Immegrant story of the 4th or the trio they went for with the 5 with the LA story melting pot.

I think this is the crux of my point actually – these are all stories that were more relevant at the times they were released. GTAV seems to be more down to earth, and modernised the stereotypes that it's poking fun at.

Gangsters don't resonate right now (in my opinion), immigration is viewed very differently, wealth inequality is viewed differently.

> As a non-american it perfectly represented the characters and views of over the top depictions of the movie version of these places.

Maybe we disagree a little here – also not American, but where I feel that GTAV was more of that over the top depiction of the movie version, I'm getting a different vibe from GTAVI, something a little closer to the real America we see today.

You may be right, but I would push back on near total market capture. I guess it depends which market you're referring to, but even scoping to just software engineering I don't think they got anywhere near total capture. OpenAI has always had a good foothold there, Gemini, while it may be lagging at the moment, had some great results with earlier models that I'm sure have held some market, and that's not to mention the Chinese market.

I think it would be fairer to say that Anthropic held the mindshare in the Silicon Valley style tech scenes around the world and the companies built on that model, plus a substantial portion of other software engineering. Now it seems that's dwindling quite rapidly.

Absolutely, I replayed some of GTAV is ~2018 it already felt a bit clunky in that respect.

I think some of this is technological, but much of it is style. There are likely limitations that forced some of those issues back in 2013, but I think it's more down to game design practices. It doesn't take a lot of tech to give you another 10 feet of leeway and trigger a sound bite with a snarky comment from another character.

Indeed, and likely playing on its similarity to "affluence".

I see your point, and maybe I'm over indexing on this or not describing it well.

I don't see myself in either of these characters, but I do see them as representative of society, whereas I don't see the GTAV characters as representative of society. However, I think I did when I first played GTAV the year it came out.

The last game I played was James Bond First Light – and that's for the escapism you describe, I got to "be" James Bond, great. But in the same way, the game and story felt relevant today, with aspects being believable in 2026, which is a stark comparison to how watching Thunderball recently made me feel – that was jarring and much harder to "escape" into because of how out of touch it was (obviously understandably so).

The second one is pretty much directly a Die Hard parody – new building, party, execs off doing drugs, dead guy in the lift. I'm looking forward to that one, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot more in there.

I think it's mostly about the characters. GTAV was, in my opinion, much lighter-hearted than this is looking. Trevor was a hoot, Michael's marital problems were made light of, even Franklin as probably the most serious character still had plenty of quite direct comedy written around him.

I'm not sure that would go down well in 2026. The redneck thing feels tired, the public narrative of wealth inequality would likely make Michael feel out of touch, and much of the audience would have identified with Franklin but he doesn't really have the struggles that today's Millennials and Gen-Z have.

These two characters seem more realistic in that sense. Less direct comedy (although I still see that there's the iconic GTA parody in places), a couple who are probably going to be much more relatable even if they're criminals, and a standing in society that is more relatable.

It's not that the comedy wouldn't land, the parody/satire is important and it looks like it's still there, it's more that I think V depended on some stereotypes that are long gone, or that society recognises differently now.

It looks like Rockstar have nailed a solid 2026 update to previous releases, everything looks great. But is that enough? It should be, but given the billions spent on development I think there's an expectation of more.

It also looks like they've kept the art and writing fresh for 2026. GTAV feels dated at this point, no criticism of course, and I was concerned that they would fail to modernise into a world that is quite different now than 13 years ago, but it seems they've likely succeeded at that.

I'm looking forward to playing, eventually, when it comes out on desktop. But is this the game of a generation that justifies buying a console? I'm not sure.

The vocabulary truly is load-bearing, without these words the model is less able to think. Where a human can understand a concept without words, an LLM plainly cannot. This is based both on the technological limitations and based on the evidence we see: as these models get better at working they get worse at communication.

Well that $120k is also likely at a huge profit margin, at least accounting for COGS. That's already most of the $115k difference gone.

Again, I don't really disagree with your general point here, but I think it's just a bit more complicated than you're making out.

Yes Occam does quite literally state that – the option with the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct. Assuming that someone is lying is an extra assumption to make over what they are claiming to do.

Malicious acts from large corporations are certainly well known, but they're also grossly over-represented in the news and mindshare. Mostly things just work as they say they work.

I don't really know what proof you're looking for, it's well known that it's hard to prove a negative. I'm not suggesting taking Google (or anyone else) at face-value, but rather saying that when you think about T&Cs, laws, PR, etc, it's unlikely.

That's up to you, but occam's razor would suggest the most likely thing is that they are in fact just doing what they say they do in their T&Cs.

According to public material, Google does not train Gemini on Gmail or Docs: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gmail/pr... https://proton.me/business/blog/google-docs-ai-scraping

This is exactly it. When I worked in a ~10 person team I just didn't get it, PRs worked quite well (with some basic discipline, they're not perfect). When I moved to a... much larger company... I don't know how PRs would work here, it would be way too unwieldy. The Gerrit style works fantastically here.

Lots of talk about engineering his game, lots of talk about how this game is exactly what he wants, no talk of play testing. Is there any world in which this is going to be a good game?

I don't disagree with you, but I would clarify that it's not $120k of tokens, it's $5k of Claude subscriptions. And also I suspect he would consider "affordable" to be "as a well paid software engineer". So I guess his benchmark is really more like: does $5k of subscriptions reduce to ~$500 next year.

I don't think it will. I also don't think this is really that affordable, but I'd imagine he'd call it accurate.

That's good, but this article explicitly covers this with multiple people citing not receiving any contact.

Hyperbolic, but I'm seeing hints of this – Models refusing to do pair work with an engineer and trust their input, instead mandating having full control over something. Friends switching back from Fable/Opus 5 to Opus 4.8 just so they can have some input.

Anthropic especially right now seem to be optimising for doing the whole task with no input. That's fine when that's the only task, and it's fine when you don't care how the sausage is made, but it's not fine for actual software engineering.

I remember when people knew the posting guidelines.

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

What do you like about them? I disagree, but so many people seem to like them that I assume I'm missing something. The main one I've heard before is that they work nicely over SSH, but I assume there must be more?