Everyone should have understood that driving requires improvisation in the face of uncommon but inevitable bespoke challenges that this generation of AI is not suited for. Either because it's common sense or because so many people have been shouting it for so long.

What improvisation is required? A traffic light being out is a standard problem with a standard solution. It's just a four-way stop.

In many versions of road rules (I don't know about California), having four vehicles stopped at an intersection without one of the four lanes having priority creates a dining philosophers deadlock, where all four vehicles are giving way to others.

Human drivers can use hand signals to resolve it, but self-driven vehicles may struggle, especially if all four lanes happens to have a self-driven vehicle arrive. Potentially if all vehicles are coordinated by the same company, they can centrally coordinate out-of-band to avoid the deadlock. It becomes even more complex if there are a mix of cars coordinated by different companies.

That only works if everyone else also treats it as a four way stop. Which they don't, unfortunately.

Yes, especially in a city like San Francisco where so many cultures come together: the Prius culture, the BMW culture, the Subaru culture, etc.

If you are driving a car on a public street and your solution to getting confused is stopping your car in the middle of the road wherever this confusion happens to arise, and sitting there for however long you are confused, you should not be driving a car in the first place. That includes AI cars.

Drove through SF this evening. Most people treated it as a four-way stop! I was generally impressed.

But a citywide blackout isn’t that uncommon.

> But a citywide blackout isn’t that uncommon.

I think too many people talk past each other when they use the word common, especially when talking about car trips.

A blackout (doesn't have to be citywide) may not be periodic but it's certainly frequent with a frequency above 1 per year.

Many people say "common" meaning "frequent", and many people say "common" meaning "periodic".

Even among people who mean "common" as in "frequent", they aren't necessarily talking about the same frequency. That's why online communication is tricky!

It isn't? To me that's the main problem here, as this should be an exceptionally rare occurrence.

I think that statement is regional. I’ve never seen one.

To be fair 'common sense' and 'many people have been shouting it' about technical matters have a long history of being hilariously wrong. Like claims that trains would cause organ damage to their riders from going at the blistering speed of either 35 or 50 mph, IIRC. Or about manned flight being impossible. Common sense would tell you that launching a bunch of broadcasting precise clocks into orbit wouldn't be usable to determine the distance, and yet here we are with GPS.

You're paying people to do the role either way, if it's not dedicated staff then it's taking time away from your application developers so they can play the role of underqualified architects, sysadmins, security engineers.

From experience (because I used to do this), it’s a lot less time than a self-hosted solution, once you’re factoring in the multiple services that need to be maintained.

As someone who has done both.. i disagree, i find self hosting to a degree much easier and much less complex

Local reproducibility is easier, and performance is often much better

It depends entirely on your use case. If all you need is a DB and Python/PHP/Node server behind Nginx then you can get away with that for a long time. Once you throw in a task runner, emails, queue systems, blob storage, user-uploaded content, etc. you can start running beyond your own ability or time to fix the inevitable problems.

As I pointed out above, you may be better served mixing and matching so you spend your time on the critical aspects but offload those other tasks to someone else.

Of course, I’m not sitting at your computer so I can’t tell you what’s right for you.

I mean, fair, we are ofc offloading some of that.. email being one of those, LLM`s being another thing.

Task runner/que at least for us postgres works for both cases.

We also self host an s3 storage and allow useruploaded content in within strict borders.

Yeah, and nobody is looking at the other side of this. There just are not a lot of good DBA/sysop type who even want to work for some non-tech SMB. So this either gets outsourced to the cloud, or some junior dev or desktop support guy hacks it together. And then who knows if the backups are even working.

Fact is a lot of these companies are on the cloud because their internal IT was a total fail.

If they just paid half of the markup they currently pay for the cloud I'm sure they'll be swimming in qualified candidates.

Our AWS spend is something like $160/month. Want to come build bare metal database infrastructure for us for $3/day?

At 160/mo you are using so little you might as well host off of a raspberry pi on your desk with a USB3 SSD attached. Maintenance and keeping a hot backup would take a few hours to set up, and you're more flexible too. And if you need to scale, rent a VPS or even dedicated machine from Hetzner.

An LLM could set this up for you, it's dead simple.

Nice troll. But TFA is about corporate IT so hopefully you get whatever.

I'm not going to put customer data on a USB-3 SSD sitting on my desk. Having a small database doesn't mean you can ignore physical security and regulatory compliance, particularly if you've still got reasonable cash flow. Just as one example, some of our regulatory requirements involve immutable storage - how am I supposed to make an SSD that's literally on my desk immutable in any meaningful way? S3 handles this in seconds. Same thing with geographically distributed replicas and backups.

I also disagree that the ongoing maintenance, observability, and testing of a replicated database would take a few hours to set up and then require zero maintenance and never ping me with alerts.

When you need to scale up and don't want that $160 to increase 10x to handle the additional load the numbers start making more sense: 3 month's worth of the projected increase upfront is around 4.3k, which is good money for a few days' work for the setup/migration and remains a good deal for you since you break even after 3 months and keep on pocketing the savings indefinitely from that point on.

Of course, my comment wasn't aimed at those who successfully keep their cloud bill in the low 3-figures, but the majority of companies with a 5-figure bill and multiple "infrastructure" people on payroll futzing around with YAML files. Even half the achieved savings should be enough incentive for those guys to learn something new.

> few days' work

But initial setup is maybe 10% of the story. The day 2 operations of monitoring, backups, scaling, and failover still needs to happen, and it still requires expertise.

If you bring that expertise in house, it costs much more than 10x ($3/day -> $30/day = $10,950/year).

If you get the expertise from experts who are juggling you along with a lot of other clients, you get something like PlanetScale or CrunchyData, which are also significantly more expensive.

> monitoring

Most monitoring solutions support Postgres and don't actually care where your DB is hosted. Of course this only applies if someone was actually looking at the metrics to begin with.

> backups

Plenty of options to choose from depending on your recovery time objective. From scheduled pg_dumps to WAL shipping to disk snapshots and a combination of them at any schedule you desire. Just ship them to your favorite blob storage provider and call it a day.

> scaling

That's the main reason I favor bare-metal infrastructure. There is no way anything on the cloud (at a price you can afford) can rival the performance of even a mid-range server that scaling is effectively never an issue; if you're outgrowing that, the conversation we're having is not about getting a big DB but using multiple DBs and sharding at the application layer.

> failover still needs to happen

Yes, get another server and use Patroni/etc. Or just accept the occasional downtime and up to 15 mins of data loss if the machine never comes back up. You'd be surprised how many businesses are perfectly fine with this. Case in point: two major clouds had hour-long downtimes recently and everyone basically forgot about it a week later.

> If you bring that expertise in house

Infrastructure should not require continuous upkeep/repair. You wouldn't buy a car that requires you to have a full-time mechanic in the passenger seat at all times. If your infrastructure requires this, you should ask for a refund and buy from someone who sells more reliable infra.

A server will run forever once set up unless hardware fails (and some hardware can be redundant with spares provisioned ahead of time to automatically take over and delay maintenance operations). You should spend a couple hours a month max on routine maintenance which can be outsourced and still beats the cloud price.

I think you're underestimating the amount of tech that is essentially nix machines all around you that somehow just... work* despite having zero upkeep or maintenance. Modern hardware is surprisingly reliable and most outages are caused by operator error when people are (potentially unnecessarily) messing with stuff rather than the hardware failing.

For companies not heavily into tech, lots of this stuff is not that expensive. Again, how many DBAs are even looking for a 3 hr/month sidegig?

Yeah. It's bad enough if kids prompting this stuff online is the new form that creativity is going to take. But this way, it's generating electronic crap that will end up in landfills as well.

I'll stare at a blank editor for an hour with three different solutions in my head that I could implement, and type nothing until a good enough one comes to mind that will save/avoid time and trouble down the road. That last solution is not best for any simple reason like algorithmic complexity or anything that can be scraped from web sites.

A vast majority of the problems I’m asked to solve at work do not have open-source code I can simply copy or discussion forums that already decided the best answer. Enterprise customers rarely put that stuff out there. Even if they did, it doesn’t account for the environment the solution sit in, possible future integrations, off-the-wall requests from the boss, or knowing that internal customer X is going to want some other wacky thing, so we need to make life easy on our future selves.

At best, what I find online are basic day 1 tutorials and proof on concept stuff. None of it could be used in production where we actually need to handle errors and possible failure situations.

Obviously novel problems require novel solutions, but the vast majority of software solutions are remixes of existing methods. I don’t know your work so I may be wrong in this specific case, but there are a vanishingly small number of people pushing forward the envelope of human knowledge on a day-to-day basis.

My company (and others in the same sector) depends on certain proprietary enterprise software that has literally no publicly available API documentation online, anywhere.

There is barely anything that qualifies as documentation that they are willing to provide under NDA for lock-in reasons/laziness (ERPish sort of thing narrowly designed for the specific sector, and more or less in a duopoly).

The difficulty in developing solutions is 95% understanding business processes/requirements. I suspect this kind of thing becomes more common the further you get from a "software company” into specific industry niches.

The point is that the best solution is based on specific context of my situation and the right judgment couldn't be known by anyone outside of my team/org.

I used to feel fortunate that I don't have to live in a red state, now I have to feel bad for people who have family to visit there. I shouldn't feel like basic rights and privacy are something I still have only because of luck.

As the article states, at this rate it's only a matter of time before a federal law will be passed that applies to you, too.

The UK, Australia and the EU also seem hell-bent on this. China already has aggressive user controls in place.

I am not a conspiracy nut at all but it feels off that so many states are all simultaneously pushing for stuff like this and message scanning.

Together with more and more services requiring hardware attestation (think banking, medical, streaming, games) it seems like we're gliding towards a future of tight digital control by states+corporations.

Honestly all it would really take is Meta deciding their messaging apps require your account to be verified by some state system and your device to be in a verified state. WhatsApp + Instagram + FB Messenger have over 5 billion active users. They're not gonna move to Signal and Telegram en masse. Plus who says their CEOs won't get arrested (again) on some phony charge to pressure them into requiring verification.

Blech.

I feel a divide w.r.t. this topic. I'm old now and grew up when the internet was full of small groups of nerds. People knew each other (rarely by name), often times you weren't identifiable at all. You made friends strictly on the content of your character and clout chasing wasn't really a big thing. Even in hacker circles "clout chasing" was mocked.

Around the time social media emerged all of this changed. People started voluntarily using their real names and photos. They share intimate details about their life to complete strangers. They demand attention, they want to be noticed, they want a "record". It's trivial to piece together enough across anyones social media accounts to pin point where they live, possibly where they travel (sometimes daily), etc.

Subsequently we have children who are being born and raised by this system. It makes sense to me to fence these kids away from the internet. I take the more extreme stance of fencing children away from the entire internet until at least they're teens but I have also watched it turn from a place where you can learn to a very dangerous place for anyone not smart enough to remain anonymous.

Should the federal or state government regulate this? I don't know. What I do know is every bit of data on education. child rearing, health, etc have shown that the average person in the west is completely and utterly incapable of rearing children. Someone has to step in. We are getting to be past the point "it's the parents responsibility" works when the second and third order effects dramatically shift society and it's culture. Either we begin severely punishing parents for failures to thrive (e.g. prison time) or we enact laws like this. I am not against the idea of putting parents in prison for child neglect for their iPad kid, and investigating and potentially removing children from a home when their grades in school have a pattern of being excruciatingly poor despite intervention.

Legislators have a far easier time legislating ID laws than child neglect laws, however, and these ID laws are easier to swallow given existing infrastructure.

From my experience it's the opposite. On the old internet, forums, newsgroups, people willingly used their real names to communicate with strangers. They treated the internet as an extension of real life where of course you use your real name, what else?

Nowadays, using your real name is dangerous, lest you get swatted or an angry mob decides to get you fired because you made an off-color joke. Doxxing someone is viewed as a potentially violent act. It's hard to imagine anyone using their real name on Discord for instance, whereas in the days of IRC it was common.

Huh. I may be younger than you are. By the time I got online in the early to mid-nineties the very strong zeitgeist was never to use your real name, nor to post identifying details into (the resultingly anonymized) fora. This was the "on the internet no one knows you're a dog" era, which cartoon (I just looked it up) was from 1993 - way earlier than I'd have guessed!

Social media - starting with the very early ones: Six Degrees, Friendster, maybe MySpace? - weakened that expectation, but (someone tell me if this is accurate) my recollection is that Facebook was the first platform to require realname accounts. I agree with you about the current danger, and though I've never posted anything anywhere that I wouldn't stand behind - trolling just isn't my style - I have, reflecting the pov of my "internet generation", always felt super weird publicly posting anything under my real name.

Not having to provide customer service is part of the magic that allows these tech companies to get to this size in the first place. Customer service doesn't scale.

The irony is that Apple's selling point (as far as I know) is good customer support. e.g. with Google at least you know you aren't getting any support

My experience with Apple's support is abysmal. They left me without a working product for something like 6 months despite the product being faulty (bricked Studio Display). Years prior to that I had issues with a MacBook Pro. That also took way too long to repair (6 weeks), and I was treated as though I broke it rather than the hardware failed due to manufacturing defects. Very much a 'guilty until proven innocent' customer support experience.

I hope that's not the typical experience, but it's certainly mine.

Oh, nonsense.

I filed a bug report about an issue in Google Maps once; this had to have been around 2006.

A little over a decade after that, they emailed me and let me know that they'd fixed it.

That's support -- right? (Right?)

:)

You can "throw" projectiles yourself so why do we have different laws about guns???

No, those are all completely separate things.

they really are kind of the same thing: basic human rights.

Only to bigots.

Reversing it? We're on the cusp of the LLM era. You're on a site full of people trying to sell one kind of summarization or another as so thoroughly a replacement for reading full original texts that it can't be questioned without raising hackneyed accusations of objecting to the invention of the calculator. Before long people who read full novels will be seen the way we now see people who listen to music on vinyl.

And, to put it more explicitly, against the people who were manipulated into fearing the "extremist" threat in the first place.