269 karma · joined January 26, 2021
I do think we'd have avoided a lot of trouble by investing in our own servers rather than paying more in the long run for a cloud provider which will always come with more risk (more moving parts), and _by definition_ has to cost more than DIY in the long run because otherwise cloud providers wouldn't make money.
The one problem I have is the over-reliance on the big dogs - so an AWS DNS oopsie (which aren't as rare as I'd like - unrare enough that there are memes about it) causes so many things to break on the internet. Not just my work stuff - I couldn't play Helldivers either because GameGuard apparently relies on AWS too. Slack has issues. Even Tailscale, which is supposed to not rely on AWS, apparently does in some respect - when AWS was being dodgy, so was Tailscale.
There's a huge warning buried in this key-man reliance.
Instead, that would provide me the freedom to learn more, study more, create more, without having to care about the mundane stuff like having a home, food, water, etc.
If that business really is a new passion, go for it. If it's just because you're bored, consider just doing the thing you like without the business side. Perhaps if you really want to make software that fills a gap somewhere, release it open-source. Be different from the average grifter, if you dare.
This flies in the face of typical corporate strategy, which hires drones to do the bidding of the "head thinker". It requires those at the top to be able to set aside their egos when a lower-ranking employee hits the STOP button or provides good reasoning why the current plan is flawed. It cannot work in a company where those "at the top" consider themselves superior to their "underlings" and blatantly ignore their input. Ask me, I know.
Whilst I haven't read the entire article, the first paragraph is actually on-point: apartheid was shit in a lot of respects, but the schools, especially in rural areas, have dramatically declined since 1994, as have most government-run companies (with the exceptions like Eskom being bailed out every year).
You don't have to like the facts, but that's what they are.
can't wait.
1. currency predictions are all more affected by randomness than anything else - this is why only people who want to lose their money invest it in, say, pesos or roubles (many have done it, many have "blown up" as per the author) 2. LLMs "predict" by following past trends, which are going to be fallible to randomness.
So, it may come to pass, or likely will not, as the odds against currency valuation predictions are enormous and random.
I agree the ai slop is... slop. I don't think it will ever replace real human writers all the way. Sure, greedy corporates will try, and gullible masses will accept most of the crap. But sometime, somewhere, someone will want to read an original thought, and that will (so far) have to come from an human.
BUT
Apple already has a battery problem - most iphone users are running from charger to charger, or using the fancy new magnetic batteries to be able to use their phones all day long. People have been asking for more battery for years. The solution isn't a phone that still costs a bucket and has even less battery. If they'd positioned it at a better price-point, they would have picked up the correct market - mid-range phone users. Instead, they priced it up at the level where you can easily get a better phone and would need to have some desire for the iphone air _specifically_ instead of any of the other great options.
IOW, yes, it's a fail - but what was anyone expecting?
No, your vibe-coding is not more productive, unless your only metrics for productivity are commit counts, PR counts, deployment counts. I can commit, PR and deploy crap all day long and "score well" - and this is what people are clinging to with their ai-gen defenses. I'm really sorry to inform you that your experienced "speed-up" is just a trick of the brain (remembering from an article written, iirc, by Gurwinder, but I'm having trouble finding it now) - you're actually going slower, and your brain is tricking you into thinking it's faster because whilst the ai was "coding", you didn't have to, so it feels like more of a win than it actually is, considering the results.
- too weak and it's the same problem as wireless chargers for phones - they do the job, but no hurry included, so sucks if you need charge now - too strong and the charging "mat" becomes a hazard - that charge is going to be induced via magnetic fields - the stronger, the faster, but also the more likely to absolutely ruin your day if you step on it or have a paint can in the garage
Yes, your ai codegen agent may occasionally produce "good enough" code, but it will always require validation by a designer who understands the domain, the tooling, and the requirements. At least, it will always display this behavior as long as we're using the current mechanisms to train and execute. This is why LLMs will never reach sentience, why smarter people are quietly working on AGI differently from the ai grifters who are, in most likelihood, simply going to precipitate the next bubble-burst, as soon as the reacharounds between all these companies reaches critical mass and can no longer be supported by the previously-gullible masses.
We should also all be wary of companies aiming to shift the blame for their design failures onto the user.
I think this is the foundation of the muppet-think I see there. If you honestly believe this, you've never met a senior engineer. Good luck for the future, as the cracks start to show.
generational wealth is the most common springboard I've seen for "successful" people - but how successful would they have been without daddy's millions?
Yes, DHH is a weapons-grade plum, confidently wrong on a range of topics. I'm not here to defend him in the slightest.
We use stuff made by people with questionable pasts all the time. You know anyone who drinks Fanta? Do you call them nazi? Probably not. They're just drinking some soda/pop/whatever you want to call it.
Whilst I haven't actually tried omarchy, I understand that (a) a lot of people are liking the results and (b) I'm probably never going to try it because people who are confidently wrong on a range of topics often choose the most bizarre stuff as "normal". And I'd rather just load up the linux machine that I want, since I have a pretty good idea of what that is after decades of usage. I'm also a little disappointed in arch with recent events (esp around AUR), and I probably have an even lower opinion because I'm using Manjaro which apparently side-steps the arch way in a few cases (eg kernel). At any rate, I'd rather spend the time and get a gentoo machine up next time. But I digress.
I just think it's petulently childish to throw a fit that a company making hardware is surfacing a software setup that some of its users are finding productive. Just because it's (yet another) DHH thing. Use it or don't use it. This (like most things to do with DHH) is more "much ado about nothing". People like getting mad. DHH likes making people mad - I think people like that feel special when they do so, from all the attention. This whole topic is likely giving DHH little pleasure-thrills all the while people cry about it.
DON'T FEED THE TROLLS.
You're hired as an expert. But when you use your expertise, people with the power to make decisions ignore you. You're told you're important to the company, blah blah yakkety schmakkety, but at the end of the day, you, like me, are just a cog in a machine. And there's a critical mass at which that machine becomes a grumbling corporate mech-tank, blundering across the terrain with nary a thought for the people inside or outside the tank - all eyes are on PROFIT.
I don't know how to fix this. I have just resigned myself to the understanding that this is how it is, and I'm paid for my time, so if they want to waste it, that's their prerogative. The sheer number of times I've heard someone raise in a point in a meeting, and devs that I work with all shout out "that's what he's been saying for 2 years", and then the surprise from the bean-counter muppets.
The only real solution is to found your own company (which runs the same risks of going down the technical toilet, and which I personally detested - I'm not a financial guy, and I didn't have the money to hire someone for books and chasing down people who aren't paying. I just wanted to build ): )
Or, do what I'm doing - resign yourself to the fact that the people at the top, whether or not they have technical expertise, over-estimate their technical abilities and use their social capital to push their confident wrongness. Sometimes you can step in the way. Other times, it's just a reason to keep you hired as you fix the mess.