Well, the idea is that you can't buy the training model of a competitor.
2,587 karma · joined October 27, 2021
A lot of value in some SaaS apps is in the initial investment it took to build it, not in the cost to host a customer's assets.
If the runtime costs of a new customer are negligible, would you rather have 0K or 20K?
It's OK if it looks bad, it looks bad for most of us. I'm just saying to acknowledge uncomfortable facts.
Whether you have the energy to use that time differently is another matter. I can share that it will become ever harder as you age. It's a typical tech/knowledge work problem. Pay is good but the price is high.
I have friends having many different professions and their skill set is largely stable over time. The idea that one must make daily effort in their free time to learn new things and do side projects is ludicrous to them.
That's the nature of tech. Complain all you want but it's not going away. So stop complaining and be pragmatic. Don't learn random things, make a short list of things that count. That are marketable and in demand. Next, cut each topic up into tiny tasks. Make it achievable.
Do your React "hello world" on day 1. Spend a few minutes on it in the evening and then reward yourself by going back to your Netflix. Read one deep article. Solve one bug. Do tiny stuff and do it all the time. Keep the train moving. The only thing that matters is that it's moving, don't worry about how much it moves on any given day.
The physical analogy is that you're listening to somebody, then turn around to speak to a group of "friends" about it whilst the other person can hear you do it. And you'd likely misrepresent what was said and receive an applause for it.
It's a deeply anti-social behavior that in the real world would make you wake up in a hospital pretty soon.
Or how about a retweet of a hot take? Imagine going all over town and plastering walls with a low effort opinion.
Or how about digging into somebody's past to find something offensive from a decade ago? What would the physical analogy look like? Following somebody for 10 years, taking notes, making pictures, interviewing your friends and family? Which would amount to what normally would be a deep criminal investigation, yet here we do it just for kicks?
Social media has normalized deeply anti-social behavior and the consequences are severe.
I strongly object to the word "normal" here. Normies, as in the common masses you know from the real world, are nowhere to be seen on social networks. Yes, many have accounts, but they're not a force. Many post nothing or infrequently and then get a handful of likes from their 20 followers.
If anything, social media promotes the abnormal. It does so by rewarding engagement, any engagement. What is reliably engaging? Triggering our brain that is hotwired to pay attention to the negative, strange, unhinged and weird.
Normally, the local madman of a town (village idiot) is kept in check. Ousted, not taken seriously. Social media is basically saying, you know what...you're unhinged, but we believe you should be major. Along with some tens of thousands of others like you, you should run this entire place.
The people will click, surely they do.
Vocal internet is overly tech, overly American, overly progressive, overly academic, overly LGBTQ+, overly neuro-atypical, overly "misfit/alternative", overly chronically online. This interesting umbrella of demographics shapes internet culture with of course the sizable counter force of the right. This sub culture has somehow bled into media and institutions, becoming THE culture, but not really.
Quite a lot of it makes zero sense to "normies".
I once read a fascinating account of a campaign activist for the Democrats. She would do home visits to get a reading of people's political leaning and try to persuade them to vote for them.
She was in for a shock. She found that people had no answer when probed for their position on seemingly important topics. They had simply never thought about it. Sometimes they do answer yet when probed for a "why", it soon turned out that they made it all up on the spot. And more often than not, the few answers given were contradicting and all over the place.
Turns out it's all bread and games. People know and care about their immediate circles and don't do politics for the sake of politics unless their local lives are drastically impacted.
Even "superior" online characters don't care about politics. They know what is the outrage of the day but wouldn't able to correctly answer the most basic of questions about politics. Yet the strength of their opinion seems inverse to that.
I get into your home by bypassing (poor) security. I take pictures and make copies of anything inside. Then I publicly announce the breach and demand that you fix your security based on a deadline I made up. Then I say "trust me, bro" when I promise to never reveal the data I stole.
Nobody would find any of that moral. The analogy breaks down because your home is not a place where sensitive data of lots of people is stored. But even then if you'd do the same thing in a physical place where this would be the case, you'd simply be arrested, if not (accidentally) shot.
I do agree that these security researchers are ultimately doing a good thing, but they should not be this naive and aggressive about it.
Both entertainment and reading in-depth paid news are one and the same: luxuries one does in their (typically) scarce spare time using an (often) modest budget.
We frame this story by defining some villains, like lawyers and Google, whilst no fault is upon us. We're victims even.
And yet the typical internet user doesn't pay a dime for most things. Blocks ads. Works around Paywalls. Piggybacks on the neighbors' Netflix and then Tweets how they fully support the writer's strike.
What I'm saying is that we're not that great either, us internet citizens. We very much have the internet we deserve.
If somebody with zero skill in the arts can produce output of similar quality as a craftsman and about a thousand times faster, what is the point of art anymore? Sure, one can enjoy the very act of creating art, but we can't deny that art has value in relation to an audience, and is also a display of skill and a source of pride.
What if AI generates the perfect music just for you, based on your taste? Here we lose any and all social/cultural aspects of music. There's no point in discussing music as we have no shared experience. There's no point in emphasizing your favorite song because everybody exclusively listens to favorite songs.
What if you need to write a long essay and use AI to help write it. I receive it and use AI to summarize it. Other than this interaction being supremely depressing, what is the point of it at all? Just submit it to the big machine and perhaps some of it will show up in my use of ChatGPT-17.
So you were faster to write something whilst I was faster to consume it. This allows the both of us to do more in a single day. This "big win" won't gives us back free time nor raise our wages though. I just means that the nature of the work is for us to take the job of being guard rails for AI, a soul crushing job in itself but also temporary, until the rails are no longer needed.
This is a display of arrogance and lack of empathy matching the Chrome team's article.
There is a sizable "old web". Built by amateurs. Think people writing web pages in Microsoft Word and FTP-ing it. They're not web developers or sysadmins and have absolutely no idea what we're talking about when we insist they should just install certbot.
Many of the owners may not be reachable anymore or in the worst case, dead.
I object to breaking the old web. I object to the assumption that behind every website there is a competent tech team, perpetually upgrading whatever others decide to break from some ivory tower. And whilst I don't need convincing of the security benefits of HTTPs, I worry about the centralizing force that it is.
Take out Letsencrypt and Cloudflare and you destroy the internet. We're practically begging for it.
1. Ready to start (requirements and technical solution direction clear)
2. Working on it
3. Merge (to see if it also works live)
4. QA (typically dedicated role)
5. Regression testing (did we break anything?)
6. Release to Prod.
7. Sanity test on prod.
You could argue that you don't need both "Ready for QA" and "In QA" but for the QA team this distinction can be of value.
This doesn't even include a UX/UI sign-off, security audit, privacy review, and in my case several health-tech related audits.
For a typical developer, you're only asked to move your stories/tasks from 2-4, unless you get feedback from 5-7. That's not too much to ask, it's just basic sanity.
In my experience, that's not wasteful, it's a basic flow of work. What is wasteful instead is endless meetings that disrupt, of which only 10% of the content is relevant to you. What is wasteful is 5 million stakeholders asking about the status of things whilst that is the whole damn reason we have the system. What is wasteful is poorly written stories/tasks that require enormous detective work to understand. What is wasteful is constantly shifting priorities, moving work in and out of a sprint whilst it's already ongoing.
Modern front-end development heavily embraces small components, composability, clean abstractions, reusability, higher order state, decoupling of error logic, testability, and so on.
The natural consequence of this paradigm is that when your PM says "hey, can you make a small change to this online form?", you'll be context-switching between many files.
The idea that you currently can do "application logic" in your HTML/JSX is a gross misrepresentation of reality.
React was invented because Facebook had very interactive/stateful UI as well as large teams of developers working on the same codebase. The then conventional jQuery soup approach didn't cut it.
Should the web platform come up with a standards-based approach to solve the same problem, then this is not "competition", it is a blessing. It's not like React earns Facebook any revenue. Ideally, it wouldn't be needed or exist at all.
In the late 90s the Netherlands had extremely generous disability benefits. It was so generous that a US president that visited wondered why anybody would work at all in this country?
All of a sudden, we had a full 1 million people of working age on permanent disability. And yes, the vast majority on claims of "back pain" and "depression" which both conveniently cannot be medically disproved.
You'd receive some 70-90% of your last/highest paycheck, and get this benefit for life. So you can basically retire at any age on a full work salary.
Everybody over here would know several people in their circles fully abusing this. It was widespread.
None of this is surprising. Getting money whilst not needing to work is attractive.
As a kid in the 80s we owned close to nothing. But nobody did and we just made the best of it. I never felt poor because this simply was the living standard of the time and our objective needs were met.
It seems since then we simply invented a whole lot of extra "needs", which really are "wants".
Own your shitty lifestyle. I make poor health choices all the time. It's bad for me and it makes me feel bad about myself. But it's on me. Nobody forced me. I acknowledge and own the decisions.
Using a lack of a "walkable city" as an excuse is pathetic. You can exercise in a tiny room if needed. You can drive to a gym. Or just to a park. Or to a national park. At work you can take the stairs. I live in a country 15 times denser than the US so don't tell me you don't have space to move around.
What would be your next excuse if you would have a walkable city? Obesity is OK because Twitter said so?
There's no excuse for your crap diet and inactive lifestyle. Is it impossibly hard to change? Yes, I totally feel that. But start by owning it.
Not an artist myself, but this basic assumption in tech that you can just take somebody's shit without informing them, without permission, without compensation, without basic due diligence, and then go do whatever the hell you want with it needs to stop.
For the artists' sake but also for tech's sake. This model can't work, it's a complete dead-end that will wipe out livelihoods and culture.
But I can ensure you artists can/will be equally hypocritical themselves. Surely they've pirated themselves, removed paywalls from articles, blocked ads, borrowed the neighbor's Netflix account.
"When I ran out of books on my own shelves, I looked to the internet for more text that I could analyze, and I used web crawlers to find more books."
I'm annoyed by the phrasing. Because you're obscuring that you pirated commercial books. A commercial book is not open or public data. You're supposed to pay for it to get access to it. This assumption that just because something can be found on the internet, it's cool to just take it and do whatever the hell you want with it, is worthy of push-back. Especially in the case of data that isn't public at all (not by intent anyway). This is not the same thing as scraping Wikipedia, which allows for it and has supportive licensing for it.
I believe that in the majority of cases where we're talking about entirely new use cases such as big data, deep analysis, AI training, etc we need to move to an opt-in model. Unless explicitly specified, you have no permission. The opposite situation is ridiculous.
I do agree that the mob-like type of criticism deserves criticism in itself. Trigger words like "AI", "crypto", "white techbro" converting adults into sadistic bullies is a sad thing to watch.
All the manager types, HR, comms...people that spent all day talking, they all want more "collaboration" rooms.
All the other types, people actually doing tasks, want more "concentration rooms".
The collaboration people don't like that. There can't be too many concentration rooms and attendance is max 2 hours per day.
It's all so pathetic. It's truly baffling how in our society that ordinarily aggressively optimizes for costs and efficiency, businesses really believe that employees should collaborate MORE.
The entire fucking problem is that there's TOO MUCH of it. Endless meetings, emails and chat with very little to show for it. How can you stand by and piss away all your money on buildings nobody wants to be at to do absolutely nothing of actual value for most of the day?
Make it make sense.
My neutral stance is that this is a potentially marginally useful tool. There's nothing fundamentally new about it. Github has an online IDE, as does Amazon, as does everybody. In particular at Github it shouldn't be that difficult to connect it to deployment actions, after which you have the same thing, yet with more flexibility.
As said earlier, it doesn't reduce the complexity of the tech stack nor will it maintain itself. When you create a React/Vue app this way, your shit continues to constantly get out of date. And you'll need to continue to coordinate dev setups within a team.
I wouldn't call IDX core because it doesn't solve the problem the article opens with. It says that modern app stacks are complex. IDX doesn't solve that at all. There's the same amount of moving parts behind the curtain, it's just that stitching them together is made easier.
The motivation for the service is unclear, but in itself it can't produce serious revenue so I guess it's an on-ramp to Google Cloud hosting. And perhaps another "free" service to train AI on.
Or rather, humanity acts as a highly intelligent collective but individual humans are only moderately intelligent in comparison.
As a thought experiment: put an average urban person on an uninhabited island. No tech. The person would have absolutely no idea how to recreate any of our technology. Nor would they know how to hunt, do agriculture, do mining, do anything.
We have no idea how anything works and outsourced even basic survival skills. The magic of humanity is that actually smart people are able to store and communicate knowledge to build ever more advanced tech, which through sophisticated supply chains and management systems is widely distributed to all other people whom don't require to know how anything works.
You should not do anything serious on Google-based technology, especially not on non-core technology, as it cannot be depended on to be properly supported or even exist at all.
Similarly, it's safe to assume that any and all data that can be collected will be sent to the mother-ship for whichever purpose they see fit. I increasingly believe that the very similar act of hosting your proprietary code on Github is plain dumb. We're lazy and naive, actively creating these monopolies by giving away our value, data and secrets for free.
Convenience and (initially) free is how we keep falling for this.
Google is both harmful and childish. They don't do responsibility. They toy around like little children and cannot even grasp the concept of a customer. They can suck and screw up anything they touch for decades in a row with seemingly zero consequences. Because somehow 30 billion gets printed every quarter regardless of what they do. That would be 30 billion earned over the backs of the content WE produce, not Google.
In fairness, their office is an excellent adult daycare center.
There's over a 100K parts, several of them from exclusive suppliers. You'd have to recreate several industries from scratch or somehow bribe all suppliers. You will absolutely fail to recreate the parts at all but even then if you hypothetically would, you can't put the machine together as if it's just a few bolts. It requires a team in the know months to do it, but you're not in the know. The tolerance for error is near-zero. Installing, configuring, running the machine, both hardware and software is extraordinarily complex.
None of this is a secret. The Chinese government announced a multi-billion dollar program to try and recreate such a machine from scratch. Expected timeline is 20 years with a highly uncertain outcome.
ASML does not have a concern to export to China, they want to export to China but are pressured to not do so by the US government.