kjellsbells

A very stupid thing to do, but I can't help but think that if the shoe were on the other foot, say, if an OpenAI agent had escaped its harness and hacked a speakerphone in the office of HuggingFace, they would shrug and no consequences would follow.

What I was getting at was stuff like this:

- cheap memory: code is bloated and inefficient. Why do I need 2GB to fire up a text editor? Is that cross platform runtime really the best basis to run my app on? People need to feel the sting of a malloc saying no sometimes.

- cheap storage. It's so cheap that there is zero technical brake on storing everything. With the concomitant abuses of privacy. A widget website needs name, address, CC, not 134 pieces of information about my GPU and screen resolution along with my contacts list.

- cheap compute. we've all seen the Rube Goldberg Kubernetes/ factory contraption and it's only possible when the marginal cost of spinning up a new pod, sidecar, etc is minimal. When compute is cheap people outsource their architecture thinking to someone else's decisions.

- cheap network. Nothing new here: are apps sending a ton of gunk for no real purpose eg JS. Also related to compute complexity as systems span multiple nodes

I don't think that an abundance of any computing resource is a good thing. Cloud, storage, memory: this idea that you can always get lots of it leads to all sorts of undesirable outcomes.

be aware that Mercury is a fintech, not a bank, and doesn't participate in the FDIC insurance scheme. So there is no backstop if they fail.

To be fair to Mercury, they are quite open about this fact.

For this reader, the author undermines their own arguments by their hectoring tone. They are extremely determined to believe that collapse is imminent, but they've made earlier posts saying the same thing, yet here we are. Maybe they are right, but markets are not rational. So I'd want to see balance sheets, SEC filings, etc not Larry Is Big Bad (which may very well be 100% true).

As best as I can understand it, DC construction is handled by REITs and SPVs, who require certain guarantees from their anchor tenants and take GPUs and possibly stock in the tenant as collateral in case things go bad. Oracle is the tenant for Stargate and maybe other DCs, and OpenAI is their customer, and OpenAI would ultimately pay Oracle rent, just like any other Oracle Cloud customer. Since OpenAI doesn't have any real cash right now, Softbank and some others are fronting them some money so that Oracle can seem more "credible" to the DC builders and in doing so command a better deal from the latter.

The assertions seem to be that all this falls apart if the DC doesn't get built on time. Oracle stock takes a beating, they no longer look so attractive to the DC builder, the builder walks away, the end. Is that about it?

I'm not sure I believe that IANA's goal of reducing serving costs is met by a site where each letter is wrapped in a <span>...

separate shower thought: Microsoft have used contoso.com as the example domain in their docs for 25+ years. I bet the logs for that domain are absolutely wild.

Aha! maybe this is the time to finally resolve a question that has bugged me for years.

In Europe up to about 1983-ish I don't recall anything other than European manufacturers. For example, your commuter bike would have had a 3-speed Sturmey Archer gearbox inside the rear hub and your fancy road bike would have had Campagnolo (if you could afford it: they were infamously expensive).

And then out of (what seemed like) nowhere Shimano shows up with all these innovations. Index shifting, non-circular chainrings, cassette freewheels, 7-speed or more blocks.

Was there a reason that Shimano suddenly showed up in Europe with all these innovations?

Software quality has been miserable for decades. And more and more of daily life depends on software working well, so we all feel it much more.

This predates AI, eg recall Windows was gnarly before the third Service Pack, etc.

Personally I blame outsourcing and its cousin offshoring. Not because Indians can't code or any such racist nonsense, but because relentless pressure to be the lowest bidder, no universal measurable standard of what quality actually means, and, above all, no practical way to exercise meaningful managerial control over a team you don't control or are ten timezones away makes quality impossible.

I suspect that in the Wide World of Software, away from the 10x people here on HN who write SQLite clones for fun and send Fabrice PRs to fix his bugs, vibe coded software might actually be approaching the quality of what they get from their vendors today. That doesn't make it good, but it's at least equally meh. It's the Visual Basic era of 1994 all over again. We'd better get used to it, fast.

"Uh, I guess I'm kind of an independent", says the voter, knowing full well who they are going to pull the lever for but not wanting to share it with the pollster.

I find polls to have had very little predictive value since at least 2016. The disdain that people have for politicians is such that they can, imho, no longer be relied upon to state their preferences before or after the election to any pollster.

> Not sure if [...] works nicely.

This is the billion dollar question for corps though. Windows and MacOS are first class citizens of the corporate IT universe and all the weirdness of corporate IT works. MDM, identity/auth, Office, LOB apps, video, document signing, data labeling, everything.

Linux has taken huge, heroic strides, and has caught up to about 2005. Corporate IT simply will not sanction Linux desktops unless they are provably as well versed in the entire ecosystem as Win/Mac, barring a "political" decision made at the top to make it happen.

To change this would require a profoundly deep, expensive, and continuing investment in all aspects of the 'Modern Work' experience, plus genuine commitment from Microsoft to make it happen (which would likely require lawsuits and enforcement).

The situation today is that a few orgs are playing catchup on some features, but that will never be enough to match a platform that has been dedicated to corporate life for 40+ years, and from a company infamous for extending their advantages to extinguish the competition.

This really stood out to me:

> products like Notes, Lotus 1-2-3, they enabled the domain practitioner to potentially solve problems themselves. They’re democratized problem solving. A real estate officer or a plumber can solve their needs without having to involve third parties and explain to them the need

That may be true for people who have the freedom of action to craft and use their own solutions. It reminds me of the explosion in domain apps unleashed by Visual Basic.

It is not true for your average office jockey or line employee stuck using some line of business apps, and where access to powerful tools is not allowed or is even banned. Billy in Accounts can't fire up Claude even if he wanted to, and running Ollama on his work machine is a fireable offense. IT control precisely what can run on their hardware, after all. So he won't ever be able to finally fix those TPS reports even if he is the one guy with the knowledge to do so.

I'm not arguing that this isn't sound IT policy, but I do expect a fair bit of shadow IT to spring up when people internalize that keeping their job requires them to show massive AI powered productivity gains.

One could ask similar questions about the Americans, or the Russians. America hasnt won a war since 1991. Russia hasnt won since WWII.

Winning wars, as opposed to just battles, requires such an intense emotional commitment to the state being fought for that people are willing to die for the mission. That extends not just to combatants but the citizenry and polity behind them. Few wars of the modern era meet the bar. Wars of national survival may do, so long as the (defending) political class dont screw it up, eg by internal corruption.

tl;dr is that a state should not start a war unless they are prepared --truly prepared-- to finish it. I guess that's why so many politicians shy away from the word "war" to something else.

A few years into my career I realized that I was not cut out to code. Luckily I worked for a good employer and they told me that code was 5% of the business regardless of what the sign over the door said. Over the next 20 years I spent time doing QA, tech support, product management, professional services, and sales engineering.

Rightly or wrongly there is a hierarchy of job roles and QA and tech support are low down on that list. But if you want to stay in the industry that your org serves (eg healthcare, energy, telecom etc) they are good ways to gather real industry experience.

Product is hard but devs do appreciate someone who can clearly tell them what is needed without micromanaging them (and tell the customer what is possible and what is not).

Pro services is great if you have good human skills but it can be a tough sell (some orgs treat it like a body shop, some customers think they dont need it, some sales orgs throw it in for free meaning you are underwater immediately).

Sales Engineering can be lucrative and fun, but only if you are paired up with a good sales team that doesnt treat you like a demo and slideware robot.