alexpotato

Long time SRE/DevOps person here:

Even pre-AI, I or other team member could have written our own versions of:

- JIRA

- Prometheus

- etc

but we didn't.

Why not? A couple reasons:

- Why write custom software for common problems that lots of other people have? We are already helping build internal custom systems for the business

- We were already supporting internal apps and now we have to support more apps? Apps that have dedicated support teams that are cheaper than us supporting them due to economies of scale/

You might say that AI changes the economics of the above to which I respond:

the marginal cost of a vendor adding another cloud instance of their existing software is, while non-zero, MUCH cheaper for them than for us. They also handle all of the security, patching, stability etc.

Yes, AI changes the absolute prices of this work but it doesn't necessarily change the relative pricing dynamics which are effectively the same.

Started reading Neuromancer for the first time and a couple things have struck me about the "universe" of the book:

- RAM (specifically Hitachi RAM) is very expensive

- There are still payphones even though "jacked in" VR exists

- AIs are dumb unless they are controlled by the military

> It's not just that the world is built around human-shape, but it's also that humans are very, very adaptable. Our hands are a marvel of evolution allowing us to do extremely precise tasks while still being adaptable to all kind of movement

Not just our hands but really our whole bodies.

I recently taught one of my kids to ride a bike and once they got it I thought to myself:

"Somehow millions of years of evolution have somehow allowed us to ride a machine that was invented <200 years ago"

> My brother-in-law (Óscar Lestón) was the brave soul that desoldered the flash memory (I was too scared to even try it):

I always find quotes like these fascinating as I am the only one of my extended family (20+ cousins) that works in technology (SRE).

It's like the couples where both partners are SWEs: do you read each other's code and have opinions on them as developers??

This is fascinating and reminds me of one of my favorite medical stories.

The doctor that invented the "blood vessel path to the heart for a catheter" was German. He had the idea to try it out, grabbed a regular catheter, inserted it into a blood vessel in his own arm and pushed it in till he felt it in his heart.

He wanted evidence that he had actually done this so he walked to the X-Ray department (he worked at a hospital) and asked them to get him a chest x-ray.

Wild how medicine has progressed.

(This story is from The Body by Bill Bryson)

It helps if you think about it as:

"Before they had functions and lookup tables, what would a human have done in the 1940s?"

e.g. the statistical significance is just "if I were to randomly try this, what percentage of time would it be above 5%"

Fun fact:

When I was an intern at Merck in the late 1990s, the networking team was switching over from Token Ring to Ethernet.

It was so much work that they were openly recruiting anyone who was an employee or intern to come in on a weekend and help out. They eventually offered to pay people extra and a couple of my intern buddies took up the offer.

> Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model. I wonder if the combustion version will even break 3 figures sales.

This is just going to make it even more desirable to a certain market segment.