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The point is you can't throw a product on the market and claim it's a replacement for everything else, with all the associated press around it. Because that's not what it is. The person prescribing what to do has absolutely no idea what all the end users actually want and need out of a product.

What it really shows is ego, arrogance and disdain for the users while running an AI cargo cult.

Everyone loves to hate Adobe because someone else does, but their products are actually pretty damn good.

And that is because they've had 30 years of effort thrown into them. It's not the big picture that's the issue, it's the thousands of small things. Stuff hidden in the menus that millions of people use. The corpus of educational material out there to help you get stuff done. And the flexibility which is really difficult to match. A good example is the ability for Lightroom to pull reasonable detail out of shadows from RAW images. No other product can touch that, not DxO/affinity/Photomator/Darktable/RAWtherapy.

LightCraft's exposure slider doesn't even work well. Blows everything out. No interpolation curve. It's just BAM!

Have you tried one? They are like gargling dog shit.

Adobe is cheap compared to that miserable experience.

All the LLM turds we've curled out at work are the same.

Totally.

The problem is hardly anyone gives a shit if they can pump out stuff that makes them look like they are good at stuff.

Vanity before engineering.

Why the fuck does a fume hood need that?!?!?!?!

I suspect the same.

For us it's not just about reliability, but risk exposure. The last couple of years really changed what our security model looks like. And it's not in public clouds, on SaaS products. LLMs are killing SaaS for sure, not by replacing them but making them a concentrated risk.

I've led and completed SOC2 and 27001 cert on own hardware.

It's absolutely fine. Everyone has just gone stupid recently.

That is a completely different argument.

Yep. We're a huge customer. It hurts. We are making exit plans.

This is incidentally exactly why I never buy any products unless they've been around 10 years. It's a risk.

Now they can do it faster than ever and to the detriment of everyone. Which is the problem.

When you optimise for fast and not correct, things are fucked.

No ECC support on current models, dubious ECC support on previous models, thermal performance issues, crap chipsets, not enough PCIe lanes.

I rather like this. Apart from the interior. Hopefully a production design will have some of the idealisms from the designer removed and replaced with more practical choices. It is however a near ideal cheaper end car for most European countries.

That exact line of thinking is how our costs increased 8x over 2 years.

And you're not immune from those issues in AWS. What happens when you run out of EBS IOPS or have to change instance type and it won't boot? What happens when your instance fails? What happens if you hit a quota limit in the middle of a failover?

AWS support is fucking awful unless you pay $5k a month or 10% of your total spend (whatever is greater) and then it's only mediocre.

We've had the best people using the best and most expensive models. They confidently produce shit they thought they understood but didn't.

LLMs remove personal exploration from tasks and that's where you really get to know things.

I've had that actually happen to me. I was without internet and phone service for 3 months. Was bliss.

I was between contracts so just sat and read books and did some gardening.

Good catch. That was pre-coffee :)

It's easy doing a lot of stuff you don't understand quickly these days. But when the shit hits the fan and you have customers you need to know what you're doing.

Hiding behind the LLM, or even a cloud service like RDS makes you think you can get out of a corner, but you are nowhere near that. Practice, drills, experience are the only solution here. The illusion of that is dangerous.

I spent a couple of days recently digging one of our associated businesses out of the shit because they killed a postgres on RDS instance (AWS bug!) and couldn't google or LLM their way out of it. It hit the trade press and did a lot of damage to them.

If you're not going to do the work, don't take on customers.

Just buy one off Hetzner or something.

I wouldn't use Ryzen on a production server myself.

Back in the old days we chucked it all on one box. Then scaled up when we needed to.

If you can’t afford to throw down enough money on a single box to bring a business up then you’re fucked anyway.

I know whole businesses that make a lot of money and never needed more than that box. (And a hot spare)

Yep. My company, based in the US, did that to most of our US team. Being somewhere with decent employment regulation meant that they kept us and not the US guys.

When I write C I tend to always return any error code on the stack and pass the pointer to where I want the result to go. Makes managing memory easier. The owner gets to allocate.

Example:

  #define E_DIVZERO -100
  int divide(float a, float b, float *result) { 
      if (b == 0.0) return E_DIVZERO;
      *result = a / b;
  }

This is actually a really good point and perspective. Couldn’t agree more.

I did note that anomaly.

You’re not wrong on phone calls. But you gain so more. A friend calls in tears - can you really feel that on WhatsApp?

I will note that we use WhatsApp for group calls.

I do actually miss having a desk phone and having the policy that calls are always urgent and emails are not. A bit of respect between people forms then.

I barely interact with people online. It’s here and email. And that’s it. I don’t have a web site, don’t have a blog and don’t have any interest in social media. 99% of the time I don't even have a brower open if I'm using the computer.

Turns out when you live that life there’s a lot of people out there who do the same. It’s easy to forget there is a completely offline world if you’re online all the time. I spend most of my time with them. In fact I’m about to go out to lunch with four people (age range 29-55) who are similarly offline. We arranged lunch over the phone.

I’d go as far as saying that the online world, past essentials, is actually the minority.

Going offline is returning to normality.

Fire. Fire always works.

Could have fooled me.

Don't you have an amendment that allows you to fix it all?

You know what I mean. ARM vs x86-64 -and- macOS API vs Linux API.

And yes, they are different even at the user end on the shell.