Typical? I know a bunch of tech folks, and none of them are pushing huge hours.
Work for a ramen noodle startup? Sure. Work for a typical profitable company (Atlassian/Xero, whatever) - and I just don't see it.
Especially with the leverage of good LLMs operated well - if anything I find I have less time pressures than more, and I over deliver as compared to almost every one of my peers.
I don't understand his phenomenon either. Listened to a few long podcasts with Zitron. He had about 10-15 minutes worth of ideas and not much beyond that, mostly anecdotal stories about excesses. Nothing of it was particularly novel. Are AI companies in a huge bubble? Most likely. Is there a shitload of grifting? Yes, there is. Is AI itself useful? Not to the degree it's hyped, but yes, it has its uses. And that's about it. Nobody knows how the events will unfold, and listening to speculation feels like a complete waste of time.
Because he actually analyzes the rather ugly financials of the companies in the bubble.
For some reason the people who hate him the most are the ones most inclined to completely ignore the topics he actually talks about.
They all get hooked on anthropic screeching about ending humanity or some other nonsense and forget that this is a business. A business which is losing gargantuan stacks of cash and is running on the fumes of hype and cope.
this is kind of what I mean. when I listen to what he says 95% of it is not technology predictions it's describing the financial structure of these companies.
ctrl-f "vendor financing" zero hits. yep... why bring up the main theme of most of his rants at all?
most of the time he says "this will end badly. on the few occasions when he gave a time frame he's been very wrong but so what?
the world is divided into people who deny the existence of a bubble at all and people who are wrong about when it will go pop. the latter group are always the ones who get the most shit for being wrong.
I mean, if they're using it internally then there's probably a TON of context you can feed these things to converge on approximately-correct solutions. Certainly it sounds like it can be a much better alternative to Localstack/Floci and friends.
It comes from a history of this sort of thing where an Amazon staff person will say that X will always or never happen and then their promises falls flat because of big company dynamics.
Same commenter a few months later: "I (work at Amazon and) already have to go in once a week, and I literally do NOTHING that day. [...] This is a disaster in the making."
I've tripped several times in my life while walking. I've even hurt myself a few times. I don't go outside wincing to myself about whether I'm about to fall and hurt myself.
You choose the attitude you want to have in your life to disappointment and the attitude you bring to this site. You chose cynicism. You're going to crowd out people who don't make the same choice.
I crashed my motorcycle years ago and have mild but still lifetime injuries. As a result, I've changed my behaviors and have put away my motorcycle. It's given me a place to reflect on what my own life is about, where I want to go, and the pain my family felt when they heard about the crash.
I choose the attitude of learning from the past and adjusting my behaviors.
I had a similar experience on my bike and chose to get back on, though it certainly took me a while, and I've stopped riding in weather and in other conditions. My family supported me in my decision. I guess you and I are just wired differently.
I try not to share my cynicism with the world too broadly because I think our modern era has too much of it. I think humanity is advanced by the wild dreamers.
You're making a lot of assumptions about me, what my risks are/aren't and... dude, can you not, please? I sold my motorcycle and once I recovered, I rented a motorcycle out in New Zealand as a sendoff and I reflect on that time with deep joy and appreciate the deep joy that others feel when they ride motorcycles. But I would not blame anyone for stopping, or infantilize them like you're doing to me now.
Yes, we're obviously different, but... dude.... dude. this is a damned conversation about a damned cloud server emulator that's not even close to 100% in-parity. It's perfectly healthy to inductively recognize that using such a system, like its sibling tools, might not continue receiving support.
> Sometimes things suck and it's okay to express our frustrations about them.
I guess I care because I've been on this forum for a very long time and everyone individually says that, but then the comment section as a whole turns into a hazard zone. Anyway I think I've engaged too much on this site for today.
Strongly agree. I've been wanting an official emulator from AWS for years. It looks like they've finally produced it, and it looks like somebody that works there is saying they're planning on maintaining it. And they've blogged that it was released. And somehow the comments are focusing on the fact that they haven't promised to maintain it for a long time. It's extremely rare to ever see statements about longevity when something is first announced.
We can appreciate it while also recognizing that history repeats itself into disappointment while also recognizing that Amazon has done large social media campaigns (remember the FC Ambassadors?). I would have been more excited about this ten years ago.
Amazon saying that they'll continue supporting an open source project and quickly forgetting about it isn't on-topic? It's why I asked the question to the AWS person...
You're certainly not wrong. But in the wake of Localstack's changes, the landscape has been full of slopware and low trust anyway. I don't think this is worse, for now at least.
In my experience Floci has been the epitome of vibe coded - huge amount of changes, with things breaking randomly between releases. Moved away from it as soon as I could. Still better than Localstack :)
I didn't have a good experience with test containers, but perhaps it'd work better with fast starting containers. We run our test fixture with compose, and have the tests manage their data in isolation - so we don't pay the startup penalty in our test suites.
I think I'd trust this project at least as much as Floci. Embedded Rust mode also looks very interesting for us.
Do you have any recommendations to start learning cloud infrastructure with a almost real setup? ive heard of localstack but also a lot of negative reviews, so im not sure how to get started..
I only use Testcontainers with "explicit" tests (do not run by default in CI; must be run explicitly). This lets agents exercise the integration with a realistic fake locally, but does not incur the cost in CI nor for any dev unless they run it explicitly (usually also with a category so it's explicit + category filter)
I'd much rather buy a 5 year old mini Dell (or Nuc or whatever) that I can reliably put Linux on than some kind of one-off thing like this.
Call me cynical after being burned countless times on niche-ass platforms. Even my Framework 13" has a flurry of issues I've never seen on more mainstream hardware. Life is too short to worry about bizarre firmware issues in hardware that no one is paid to support.
There's plenty of reason to be conservative and that's a solid recommendation. My own i5-8600t nuc continues to tick away!
I for one am delighted that you can buy a modern-ish high performance, advanced processing node based system, that's small, that has such incredible capabilities, that's super power efficient. And that finally it runs a mean Linux!
well, of course people are still "learning to program" it's just everyone gets to be sitting in the chair of an academic or the start up chair, or whatever.
Since they're still improving models, they still are learning how to program, it's just a meta game now, not the specific intricacies.
It's been used on UseNet since at least the early 1990s [0].
I think it comes from a Perry Barlow-esque feeling that Cyberspace is an improvement on the "merely" meat real world (perhaps even a proxy heaven on earth, cf. Platonism). Sometimes it is tongue-in-cheek, other times earnest (I assume for people who have found the real world (and their real bodies) a disappointment.)
Shoot, I didn't mean to say "meat space" (of course that's been around forever),
I specifically meant "meat proxy" - I've only heard of that recently. And I don't think that comes from terminally-online people. I think it comes from folks that are sick of people over-using AI in a blind way and it becoming very fatiguing.
I wonder if the term might have been influenced by Terry Bisson's excellent short story "They're Made Out of Meat"[1], which was published in Omni Magazine in 1991.
Bisson himself credited the idea to the poet Allan Ginsberg[2]:
> “I was thinking about an interview I had read or heard that Allen Ginsberg was doing with some journalist,” he stated, “and he was talking about poetry and the guy was saying that it was like they were two poets talking or something like that and Ginsberg says, ‘No, we’re just meat talking to meat.’ And somehow that got stuck in my head.”
The earliest known online usage of "meatspace" seems to be two years later, in 1993. Then in 1995, it was apparently used in the Seattle Times[3].
There is no reference within the provided context for how long you have been online, so I am unable to verify whether or not this statement is correct.
I thought of this again and went to check google books. The earliest reference I see there to the term 'meatspace' is from "The Law and Business of Computer Software", which I find amusing.
I've known the phrase "meatspace" for decades now as an "opposite" of "cyberspace" from some of the CyberPunk Sci-Fi of my childhood, though I cannot at this moment name any specific novels it might originate from. It's not a terribly new term, although it may have only recently gained common enough usage as to seem new to those who hadn't heard it before.
I've been using the term meatspace since at least the 90s, and would be semi-shocked if it didn't exist in either 80s sci-fi or posthumanist manifestos or whatever in some form or another.
The use of "meat" to characterize the physical, analog, arbitrary, biological (as opposed to the logical, digital, formal) pre-dates the 80s/90s deliberate apposition with "cyberspace" afaik, but I don't have time to fish up concrete examples from my library atm.
Others have already provided links as proof, but anecdotally I've heard "meatspace" since at least the 1990s (I have been online since the 1980s).
"Meat proxy" OTOH is a newer term for people who when you communicate with them online just run everything through LLMs and respond with voluminous and mostly unedited slop. Hadn't heard that one until about a year ago.
Work for a ramen noodle startup? Sure. Work for a typical profitable company (Atlassian/Xero, whatever) - and I just don't see it.
Especially with the leverage of good LLMs operated well - if anything I find I have less time pressures than more, and I over deliver as compared to almost every one of my peers.
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