I also have a Beelink, but it skeeves me out a bit. It's probably going to drive me more towards Apple M{X} for my next home server. Even though I know those parts are also made in China, I trust Apple's sourcing more. Bee-link's stuff is so affordable that it makes me wonder why that is.
The globe continuously inching towards war makes me quite paranoid, unfortunately.
Kind of surprising to me, because I think I've tried every large competitor in the space, and have found there to be a gulf between the Dropbox UX and everyone else. I'm more than willing to pay their premium price. I was hoping Proton Drive would compete, but I felt like I was beta testing an inferior product.
Anecdotal: I know a lot of people who use Dropbox, I don't know even one person who pays it. They pay for iCloud, probably cause it makes the iPhone experience even more convenient, but not Dropbox. I also don't pay for it.
Anecdotally, having been in client services, I saw Dropbox use plummet on both the client and agency side once the pandemic hit. People switched from syncing files to working directly on the same document in the cloud (e.g. Microsoft Word -> Google Docs, Keynote -> Google Slides, Sketch -> Figma)
In 2024, I wouldn't invest in any company that's based on "Files"
The premium experience does have a heavy price tag attached to it since they repeatedly increased the pricing. In the UK, the first plan is now £7.99 / month.
This eventually led me away from Dropbox and I am now an iCloud user - the convenience and cheap prices eventually convinced me, even though I wish a Linux client existed.
Proton Drive through Proton Unlimited. I have my e-mail setup through Proton already, so the plan was going to be to consolidate, and use Proton for cloud storage as well. I have since downgraded back to Mail Plus. The reason being a pretty bad experience with Drive.
I honestly don't remember the fine-grained details, sorry, but it had something to do with waking up one morning to my remaining storage being consumed by every file in Drive being duplicated, with a title "(overwritten 21h4m)" or something like that appended to each one.
I can't remember what caused it, but what I do remember is that there was no way to remediate it through the Drive app itself. Meaning, if I wanted to return my drive back to its original state, I would be burning my own time to write the script to do it, or I would be burning my own time to research some other solution. I couldn't believe the feature was shipped in that state.
In my opinion, if there exists a feature that leads to all of my files being duplicated, then it shouldn't be released unless there has been thorough testing against that feature's ability to remediate the fubarred status that it has enacted to "protect" my files. In this case, I think the feature was version history.
So the three conclusions I could come to were that there was little to no testing, inexperienced engineers, or a project manager that isn't managing the project particularly well. In any case, I don't want to feel like I'm beta testing features with my most important files, so I went back to Dropbox and its more mature app. Haven't looked back since.
I recommend that naysayers for technologies like Cursor watch the documentary Jurassic Punk. When comparing the current AI landscape to the era of computer graphics emerging in film, the parallels are pretty staggering to me.
There is a very vocal old guard who are stubborn about ditching their 10,000+ hours master-level expertise to start from zero and adapt to the new paradigm. There is a lot of skepticism. There are a lot of people who take pride in how hard coding should be, and the blood and sweat they've invested.
If you look at AI from 10,000 feet, I think what you'll see is not AGI ruining the world, but rather LLMs limited by regression, eventually training on their own hallucinations, but good enough in their current state to be amazing tools. I think that Cursor, and products like it, are to coding what Photoshop was to artists. There are still people creating oil paintings, but the industry — and the profits — are driven by artists using Photoshop.
Cursor makes coders more efficient, and therefore more profitable, and anyone NOT using Cursor in a hiring pool of people who ARE using it will be left holding the short straw.
If you are an expert level software engineer, you will recognize where Cursor's output is bad, and you will be able to rapidly remediate. That still makes you more valuable and more efficient. If you're an expert level software engineer, and you don't use Cursor, you will be much slower, and it is just going to reduce your value more and more over time.
I think llms are useful and also that cursor is not.
It's a specific thing and it doesn't suit me.
I've seen the glittery eyed hype on hn before and it basically means it will become a common tool. Whether it's good or not, that's a different question.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Cursor is a LLM wrapper, so if you like LLMs, I don't know how you can like LLMs but not like Cursor. It's just a chatbot inside of VS Code. Cursor just provides the LLM more context, and an easier path to implementing the LLM's suggestions.
Good take. It really makes you realize that as much as engineers like to pretend they're purely rational and analytical, we're just as emotional as everyone else.
This website would make you believe that all your peers exhibit Spock levels of rationality, when really it's a combination of hubris and a desire to be right on the internet
I'm excited for these kids, to be honest. My experience in the education system in the 90's was a goddamn nightmare. I didn't make it to the 9th grade. It just wasn't designed for someone with my ADHD and chaotic situation at home. I didn't care about most of the subjects they were teaching me, and I would get beaten regularly for doing poorly. I get hyper focused on things I care about, and that system provided very few things that I cared about. Today, I'm a senior DevOps engineer. Guess what I do care about?
And it's not just that I only care about computers. I became an autodidact after I left school, and learned about the things that interested me, and only those things. I still got a great education and know a lot of things that provide value to society, and enrich others. It was just that the education system packaged my value as a human being into one big bundle that was graded in aggregate.
I have high hopes that our world's societies can have such an amazing tool as their disposal that kids don't feel like they have to cram the entirety of human existence into their brains for 12/16/18/20 years or suffer the consequences of a failed life; that they can be productive through a creative use of the tools at their disposal, and feel accomplished even if their brains don't work the same way as others'.
Not to mention the social benefits of having nearly instantaneous fact checking available, and building their opinions around it. Then, they can also be good people instead of allowing lazy idiot talking heads convince them that their situation is an immalleable doom spiral, locking them into a ecosystem of fear and idolatry that's only return is manifest destiny.
