steveBK123

There's something reassuring in this for me.

There's a lot of magic & handwaving from hyperscalers like AWS about redundancy. I always wondered about some of the engineering to make this absolutely (and literally) bullet proof. At the end of the day most of their answers when you push hard enough involved paying 2-3x to run everything across multiple zones/regions, and lots of awareness in your application to handle this.

In any case, I think it's good that when a data center blows up the data is lost. Noteworthy for future skynet situation, etc.

A lot of this stuff again seems like labor augmentation not replacement, like in this article. She wasn't using professional paid artists previously, but a mix of her own extra labor (which she had less time for with a baby) & a barista who drew well (but had recently left). Most small businesses are like this.

I'm not an AI booster, but I think GenZ particularly have really lost their mind with the anti-AI rage.

I was handing out flyers at a fundraiser, for a charity to promote their next event. The flyers were made by a staff member using some AI art.

Some GenZ kid started ranting to me about how the flyers were AI slop and how some artist would have been willing to do the job, blah blah blah.

Kid, its a charity event that I'm volunteering for on a beautiful sunny summer weekend day for.. it's gonna raise like $10k if we are lucky.. no artist was going to paid with or without AI.

Well yes, we used to talk about "supercomputers" in the hands of state actors for cracking into enemy systems and places like science labs for working on big hard problems of DNA, the universe, and the like.

So I think part of what is going on now is not just the method (LLMs) but the means (supercomputer levels of compute) at unprecedented scale of concentration.

> “a swarm of agents could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet.”

I also find this whole "its so good, its scary" flex a little less impressive when you consider they access to millions of GPUs?

The AI buildout has been one of, if not the largest, focussed capital investment in history. The 2 big AI labs are the final customer for something like 20-33% of all datacenter compute in the pipeline.. up to 70% when you look at hyperscaler "AI revenue" from the big 3.

I don't think any single entity has had remotely this much compute available in history.

Good luck proving your data was laundered and included in a training run

I umpired baseball in my early teens and even 30 years ago it was bad.

Grown men getting into the face of 14 years old umpires over calls, at games for kids barely out of tee-ball. It just doesn’t matter that much.

I remember a coach who would flip over 20 gallon coolers and send ice and drinks flying in the dugout.. in front of his team of 10 years old umpires olds.

They already trained on pirated content, what makes you think they are going to honor ZDR?

Maybe just giving themselves an exit ramp off the capex arms race they are increasingly finding it difficult to fund?

Historically ignorant comment.

9/11 resulted in building collapse throwing something like 1-2 million tons of debris into the air, which then fell and was on fire in a huge pile for 100 days.

Concrete, drywall, glass, asbestos, you name it.

This is nothing like regular car/heating/power combustion exhaust which is well understood, regulated, and result of reasonably efficient conversion of mass to energy.. at least by comparison.

I've also found new hobbies sometimes allow cheaper gadget purchases / higher enjoyment-per-dollar than buying more junk for longtime hobbies.

The logical mechanism for me was - a hobby I've done 30 years I have probably upgraded through various classes of equipment such that anything left to buy is expensive. For a new hobby I am back to buying little $100 gizmos again.

Doesn't work for some hobbies that have a higher cost of entry.

> People under-appreciate (or have forgotten) that a lot of happiness is is related to anticipating as opposed to getting

Shoppers & hobbyists who spend too much time browsing gear are well aware of this though generally don't like to admit it to themselves...

There was (I believe) a Korean app for people to fake shop so they get all the dopamine of the hunt without the cost of actually buying anything.

As someone approaching mid 40s..

Is Apple screen enlargement over the years just matching the aging eyes of their core demographics? Close focal vision degrades, hold phone further, bigger phone useful.

Kind of like the stat how burning man is getting older every year cuz its mostly the same GenX cohort going since forever...

lol yes

I’m still searching for signs of 10x productivity in SWE showing up in actual consumer facing product improvements industry wide.

This is a problem that one of the richest 10 companies in the world should be able to solve with time & money.

Simply making your product worse is not normally a solution outside monopolies.. ah, I see.

This goes to my same complaint re: some Apple products. Some stuff is solved.

It's fine, email / photos app / texting apps are solved problems.

Keep upgrading the backends for compatibility / security / whatever, but you do not need to change the UX annually. We're done. Just stop.

I was at a big European company that was also somehow still on Lotus Notes in 2015, for similar reasons. Moving back to Outlook after my 5 years there was a breath of fresh air.. for a time.

I do have to say Microsoft has spent the last decade "upgrading" their product to be a similarly painful experience though.

I always find these sort of "we'll pick up our ball and change homes" threats by non-monopoly capital interesting.

It's almost a real thread from say GM, ignoring the billions of physical plant infrastructure that would be relocated.

But in industries where there is enough competition and a large talent pool, being the regional defector makes you the odd duck out in the war for talent. Similar to the quiet walk back of a lot of the Tech/Finance "we are moving to Miami" bros, I don't think you're going to get a lot of entertainers doing projects down in Texas.

I guess this is why Big Capital wants to replace us all with AI so they can re-dom to Puerto Rico with servers in Elons orbital datacenter.

Indeed, "I wish there was tech to stop me from lying to myself" is just not a tech problem.

Local encryption is not going to help 100 year recoverability

Yes, AI will simply vibe code drivers for devices it can't talk to in order to read formats it can't read

More likely it will just hallucinate content that plausibly could be on the disc and display that for the unwitting

Right thats the much more likely issue! Some Google-like reaction in the future where using service X (chat/mail/whatever) from Amazon results in being banned across an entire account which also happens to be the account you wrote all your data to AWS Glacier with for 30 years... oops!

I think more & more that hobbyists need to keep air gapped old-OS/hardware machines in the garage to manage this kind of stuff.

Otherwise you quickly run into connectivity / driver / application / OS compatibility hassles trying to get even 10-20 year old stuff from our own lifetime experience to run.

I'm not sure how we expect our great-grandchildren to figure out how to get data off a disc/drive in 100 years.

I can look at a film strip or print from my grandfather or play his records more easily than I can run software from my own childhood.

The risk is they get bored and retire it / retention terms start to get iffy / they 100x prices.

> 100 years is long enough, and 1000 years was always a wild-ass theoretical abstraction.

The software will be an issue before the hardware anyway inevitably

Yes I was joking

Bleak stuff

I’ve noticed sometimes my wife puts on a playlist and it’s almost like weird covers or remixes I can’t quite put my finger on. Like it has a melody of a real song but the style / tempo / vocals are changed.

I’m sure more agentic coding loops will improve these inefficiencies

I timed how long it took to open Spotify and play a song on a $2500 Mac on low latency gigabit fiber internet.

15 seconds.

Incredible stuff.

They are in my top-3~5 list of "actively & aggressively getting worse" software products.

What great productivity gains are Spotify achieving in making their product worse?