563 karma · joined June 6, 2023
This has always been my interpretation. The "everybody is replaceable" mindset comes from Amazon retail warehouses, and bled into the rest of the company.
- Pay the tax we think you owe, or go directly to jail
- if you can prove later that you overpaid, we will give you a rebate on taxes over the next N years
- if the government is consistently getting your tax estimate wrong (in your view), then perhaps your tax-avoidance games aren't such a good idea after all
I felt exactly the same way about Brexit; it was clear that if we voted Remain that Nigel Farage would still be there - alongside Maxwell's Demon - to shove us towards the door at the next opportune moment.
Seems like this is one of the hardest problems in modern politics - populists only have to win once, due to us having a complex system of preferential arrangements and one-way door decisions.
Whenever content related to Wolfram comes up there are mixed opinions about his genius - I wonder how much more impactful he could have been if he had a smooth-talking PR person filtering and shaping his output into a more digestible form.
Bingo.
Also, the tooling you need to drive CDK is all TS-based, which means I now need to think about NPM and Node versions occasionally, which are not relevant in any other part of my workflow.
Admittedly as someone in scientific computing I am unusually far from the JS/TS ecosystem - but all I can tell you is that it feels second tier as a user.
AWS shot themselves in the foot by making the Python version of CDK second-tier after Typescript; IaC is still done by DevOps people far more often than application people, and DevOps people use Python.
Another gripe is the number of services and new features which launch without CFn support, which also blocks CDK support; when Terraform supports a new platform feature before the vendors own tools do, that's a sign the product teams are being driven by the wrong metrics.