phil21

While I certainly don't work at Cisco, I've come to the conclusion that I need to re-examine my priors when it comes to code rewrites and general maintainability.

AI makes these projects significantly more feasible, at least in my domain. We have some critical-path software I wouldn't touch with such an approach, but the vast majority of our code is internal and/or supporting tooling.

For those cases, burning it down and rewriting via AI tooling has proven far more productive than anything we have attempted in the past. This is for old technical debt laden stuff everyone has been afraid to touch for well over a decade.

It's not perfect, but it moves the needle where before a lot of such projects were stuck on the backburner for years.

It certainly introduces new bugs and such, but at least this way forward momentum is happening vs. just being stuck in decision/analysis paralysis forever.

This also assumes some very senior SME folks are driving the process. I would not expect similar results with junior or even mid-level folks in these specific domains.

> Weirdly, underutilization of hardware was never a problem before.

Fixing exactly this has been the constant drumbeat of IT since the early 00's at least. It started with virtualization, to get capacity factor of hardware up in the enterprise. The average server back before VMWare (and HyperV/etc.) became a major thing was probably sitting at 10% utilization or less 95% of the time. Hypervisors were invented to fix this as their primary use case. You'd take a 5-10% performance hit on the raw server performance to gain 90% efficiency back.

Next came the cloud. Which was virtualization at scale. The larger the scale, the better the efficiency.

It's basically almost all anyone has actually accomplished in IT over the past decade or two. Everything else has been largely stagnant compared to the 80's and 90's.

AI inference is in it's infancy, but I imagine we will see more or less the exact same thing play out yet again. Lots of initial on-prem stuff due to cost and freedom, and eventually it becomes virtualized, commoditized, customer segregated, etc. Just like average cloud workloads are today and all the various "small" megawatt-scale builds moved back into the hyperscaler type providers within the next 5-10 years.

> How many companies are building datacenter commons and sharing with other companies to optimize resource usage?

Quite a few that I've seen. Rented inference/token factories are the current new hotness. Plenty of speculative builds being done by hundreds of smalltime providers. These will consolidate per usual and everyone but the last few top percent will remain as the winners. Just like the first hosting providers. Virtualization and fancy schedulers to maximize hardware utilization across a number of end-user customers are a huge topic in this space at the moment. Heck, a lot of these small time players are providing raw compute for the giant AI labs and even hyperscalers.

I don't like that Altman is right on this btw. I much preferred the highly inefficient days of every midsize corporate office having a 200-500kw datacenter in the basement. AWS and their ilk are quite obviously orders of magnitude more hardware efficient though.

No, it's recognizing mistakes will be made and no one is perfect. You will also make mistakes regarding blast radius - sometimes the blast doors don't close or function like you thought they would during an actual explosion.

Defense in depth is the idea. Swiss cheese model of failure.

Very much agree with most of this.

The number of people who never seem to have understood what software and IT is in most companies is eye opening to me. Your job was never really to "write code" - you were always automating things.

That the field got somewhat stuck for a couple decades seems to have made many people forget this.

The vast majority of programmers who started in the 80's and 90's are basically directly responsible for massive waves of job losses in certain categories. Lots of cases of entire departments of secretarial level paper-pushing work being replaced with a small team of programmers. Same will happen with AI tooling. The difference is programmers are no longer the "winning" party here.

Computers and software in the end are the most configurable and complex automation system society has ever created. They are simply a continuation of industrial automation, and AI is a continuation upon that.

Been a long long while but basically empty flights were semi-regular things back in the day if you booked what you knew to be repositioning flights at odd hours.

I’ve been one of a handful of passengers more than a few times. Where the flight attendants just move everyone to first class after boarding and the rest of the flight is super relaxed and barely professional.

This was not common, but not a rare thing after the 2008 crash for a few years.

During IRROPs you can still luck into one of these. Definitely a fun experience!

> Few people in a neighborhood of single family homes would want a 20-story apartment tower getting built next door.

Only this is just a thing that really doesn't happen much at all. Very few developers are putting up 20 story apartment buildings in the middle of an existing SFH community in the suburbs somewhere. Most of those such fights are people fighting the 5 over 1 development built greenfield just outside the current SFH neighborhood in question. And for those such people? They should have zero say.

If they are doing so, it's typically in very dense city cores that support the density and thus investment. If someone wants to put up a 20 story building next to me in my Chicago neighborhood, sounds good to me! I am upset there are not more of them and that zoning has effectively made them illegal to build here, as I'm roughly 500 feet away from a rapid transit station and two arterial roads with high frequency bus routes. It's a crime that they are illegal to build.

I'd be an asshole if I bought a house in such an area and wanted my little conclave to be protected at the expense of everyone else in the city. I should rightly be overruled and told to pound sand and move the hell out if I don't like it.

Instead, laws have enabled such people to effectively veto such buildings. Or even simply stuff like 12 unit 4 floor apartment buildings that already exist due to predating zoning on my block.

Many areas of the US are effectively retirement communities by zoning. People who moved in 20-30 years ago who demand zero change and have captured nearly all political power.

Not my experience at all in my neighborhood. Development gets torpedo'ed by current residents. Parking and traffic almost always being the primary one. As in, more parking minimums. Developers showing up are the only people trying to actually build anything at all, most community members are NIMBY.

Not sure what a private developer would have to do with public transit though. That's the city's job to provide and figure out the routes for. Developers bring projects accordingly, and the local residents veto 12 story apartment buildings built on current strip-malls 2 blocks away from train stations. Residents using transparently bullshit environmental and walking/biking infrastructure "concerns" as just another way to block things.

I'll take building stuff - even if flawed - over the current state of never building anything ever any day of the week.

> and be spared of the implementation effort

I enjoy the effort - most of the time. I don't enjoy the time burned on what amounts to a very small portion of the entire chain of creation.

Shrug, assume bad faith if you want to. It’s exactly how I read it when it was first marketed. I didn’t think it met that definition then at the time, but these days it’s pretty close. Plug in a destination and it works until it hits an exception it can’t handle.

Autonomous driving is something entirely different in my mind. That would be a car good enough to work without driver controls or a remote operator. Nothing on the market meets this definition today.

In that case, autopilot is the correct term.

Pilots still are required to be able to take over immediately for an autopilot system and are responsible and accountable for all those items you list and more.

Calling it autopilot is precisely what it is, calling it self driving would be false marketing.

I would usually have been part of the downvoting brigade for this comment.

But to be honest the reaction from the ivory tower here is seemingly quite telling to a layman watching from afar.

It looks far more like this was some extremely gatekept community where you were only allowed to work on sanctioned things if so deemed worthy. Better not step one someone’s toes lest you get exiled! How much progress was lost due to newcomers never working on a problem due to told not to?

It’s starting to make those old timey Usenet kooks look a whole lot less crazy to me. They seemingly were right about this part.

Mathematics was funded and supported by a whole bunch of janitors and blue collar workers busting their asses to let entire departments of thinking men and women work on hard problems for the betterment of society. If it was just a super special friends club the whole time that was gatekeeping what amounts to a hobby, it’s going to me much harder to justify such a social contract.

Honestly not even sure what to think at this point. Extremely disappointing to me the more I read from these people.

Sure, but their energy budget includes everything. They don’t have the luxury of importing energy others invested into decades ago when convenient and having it be off balance sheet like Denmark does.

China would actually have to build stuff to do that. Denmark can just pretend it doesn’t exist.

Not how it worked in my home state growing up. The state intermittently ran budget surpluses and were net givers to the federal budget. Still are today.

I’m also not entirely sure how relevant that is due to states (and provinces) not printing their own currency though. Very different situations.

You don’t make meaningful progress when you focus on a rounding error part of the budget. It’s like targeting private jet use for climate change. It’s for the feels so you can pretend you’re on the right side of things while doing absolutely nothing that matters in final effect even if 100% successful.

If you want to solve the budget deficit you need to go after the things that matter which is mandatory social spending these days. That and the revenue side combined are all that matter. Even the military is starting to become more and more irrelevant as social spending and debt service eats up all the air in the room. You could end it entirely tomorrow and you’d still have a deficit. It’s not the 1990s anymore.

Anything else can be immediately written off as unserious action brought by unserious people. The bike shedding of budgetary politics.

Depends where you fly out of mostly. When I lived in MSP Delta was both the only real choice, and also pretty damn good for an airline. Especially with top tier status.

I moved to Chicago and am stuck with United now. I miss Delta most times I fly, they simply had a better product.