CapeTheory

Take that, Jassy.

"Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?”

Doesn't even take that much. Today I did some basic Terraform with the help of GenAI - it can certainly print out the fundamentals (VPC, subnets) faster than I can type them myself, but the wheels came off quickly. It hallucinated 2 or 3 things (some non-existent provider features, invalid TF syntax, etc).

When you take into account prompt writing time and the effort of fixing its mistakes, I would have been better off doing the whole thing by hand. To make matters worse, I find that my mental model of what was created is nowhere near as strong as it would have been if I did things myself - meaning that when I go back to the code tomorrow, I might be better off just starting from scratch.

I was just about to try it, but the idea of allowing Firefox access to my audio/video to talk to a machine-generated person gave me such a bad feeling, I couldn't go through with it even fuelled by my morbid curiosity.

One day someone will create an AR/VR product which doesn't look ridiculous - but it is not this day.

> Price is supposed to cut in half every 3-4 years

Citation needed

> if it isn't it is largely because cloud vendors can't bear to take less

Even if we choose to accept your original premise, I think anti-competitive behaviour is much more likely than "can't bear to take less".

I would love to attend a UK cryptography conference just to see how they deal with the dual meaning of "nonce" and the number of jokes which inevitably follow.

It is simply a lack of skilled staff. The industry has plenty of mediocre people who struggle to follow a playbook, but hardly any people who can write the playbook. It is a common trope that the government is like this, but over the last 5 years I have observed it to be true at every organisation I've encountered.

I've been using a reMarkable since the first release and have never experienced what you describe. Yes, the updated focus on typing more recently - but what else can they really do for the writing experience without new hardware? Lots of updates I don't care about, but none that make it "worse".

The only bit of animal behaviour research I have ever found to be really interesting or meaningful is that on cephalopods. Their nervous system is very different to ours, and it seems like that difference shows clearly in their learning abilities.

Holy double-dipping Batman, that's an expensive way to run some EC2 instances.

Same here. If I found Zed now I would probably avoid it, but having tried it already I'm glad to have it, and will just turn off the intrusive bits.

The SPICE must flow

(Small Particles Inside the Crust of the Earth)

I'd equate it to running RHEL Vs Ubuntu, but with the difficulty stepped up a notch or two. If you understand what is happening at a conceptual level you can change between providers and be productive - but there are going to be pitfalls which might lead you to doing things sub-optimally. For day-to-day usage I think the differences are trivial enough, but at a higher level (account Vs project setup) the differences are more pronounced.

As a predominantly AWS person looking at the others, GCP seems relatively lacking in polish but with some nice features I wish AWS would steal. Azure on the other hand looks like a shiny turd; all of the bits I expect from AWS seem to exist and are presented in a familiar way, but closer inspection reveals that I definitely don't want to get involved in using them.

You won't believe what the Mysterons did next

Evidently you dodge bullets well, you should consider running for office.

That would be the vending machine on the skis.

This is consistent with my own experience that Claude is just downright better than ChatGPT.

The only way cloud providers are making money on "AI" is via obscene mark-ups on access to GPUs used by companies who are deluded into thinking that (re-)training their own LLM is what their own shareholders want to see.

Never thought of it in those terms, but I'm afraid you've nailed it.

We're really fucked, aren't we?

I have fallen in love with Zed on Mac, so glad to see it will still be an option when I switch back to Linux. My main concern is the collaboration features; just seems like a nonsensical addition. I have zero influence over what editors my teams use, and I work with dozens of different people on collaborative development every year - I'm not going to be persuading anyone to switch, and so that feature is just dead code and security risk. Even if I worked on a small and consistent team, I don't think the value-add justifies the complexity and risk.

IMO the absolute most important thing with a tool like this is performance. I have to sign in to a handful of cloud desktops each week and interact with customer Jira/Confluence/AzureDevOps/etc pages, and the big thing which kills my engagement is the app not being snappy enough. Doesn't matter how many of the features our Agile SAFe scrum wizard wants me to use, I'm not going to bother if there is too much friction. These apps inevitably require a lot of clicks, so latency becomes very noticeable.

I agree, but with "funding model" rather than "ecosystem". With VC funding the cost of failure is low, and arguably failing to scale will make you look worse than simply running out of money. In a bootstrapped business, the same pressure doesn't apply. Also, I imagine it is easier for a small team spending their own money to avoid slipping into resume-driven development.

Anecdotally, I am hearing scientific computing customers who are unhappy after moving to Rocky - the window where each minor OS version is "supported" is too small and their hardware vendors have trouble staying current. Have seen quite a few move to Ubuntu, and the rest switch to regular RHEL.

User manuals are for tools.

AWS is a (collection of) service(s) which can scale and have low marginal cost of reproduction. Fire Tablets are a real thing you can buy, but they are shit so nobody does.

Sorry should have said "big tech", as commonly used to refer to FAANG companies who focus more on software and/or services.

They can't make them fast enough to satisfy hype-driven demand; they are not scaling like a tech company, but their market cap is being inflated like one.

> Google is not just ads.

Bad example given how aggressively they terminate products which don't generate the same revenue as ads.

> Apple is not.

Best example, they have done a fantastic job of being both a tech company and pseudo-fashion company.

> Amazon is not.

They don't make anything (at least nothing people want to buy) and have ad revenue as an increase slice of their pie.

> Tesla is not.

Even bigger hype/speculation vehicle than Nvidia.

> NVidia is not.

Nvidia of 5 years ago would not have appeared on this list, being too much of a niche tech company. Good at what they do, but hugely hype-fuelled.

> Netflix is not.

Running out of growth potential with their current business model, starting to introduce ads!

The DAX is only 40 companies, most of which make real products rather than advertising mechanisms. Making real physical things just doesn't scale, and never will.

While I would enjoy a US tech salary, I'm not sure we want a world where all manufacturing is set aside to focus on the attention economy.

Nvidia value deserves to be much higher than any company on the DAX (maybe all of them together, as it currently is) - but how much of that current value is real rather than an AI speculation bubble?