This ban will be used to force hardware and OS-level Digital ID down our throats as a "safety measure" to ensure people are "Citizens" before accessing AI technology.
Whatever last vestiges of privacy we still enjoy will be taken from us with this as the excuse.
If it were to remain export controlled, it would probably not be accessible direct to consumers. Other export controlled technologies (aerospace, nuclear propulsion) are only worked with by companies that spend a lot of time and money to prove that there are only US citizens working there.
Go ahead. Click into any of your Google Photo albums. Just as we all surely hoped and desperately needed, the title is finally using a comic-sans-inspired font face.
It was long series of incredible and impressive feats of truly singular engineering talent continuously wasted solving problems of our own making that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.
I agree, this is a common story and your point stands for some significant percentage of the complaints.
It should be made clear though, that some of us helped spend many millions in obviously wasteful on-prem infra in the nineties, bought into AWS wholeheartedly when it came out, fought through the ignorance, developed the ability to deliver highly scaled applications on the platform over many years and at least some of us still carry those same beliefs:
- It's more complicated than it needs to be
- It's more expensive than it should be
- Pricing is more opaque than it should be
Meanwhile, the cost of other options (including self-managed, on-prem infra) has fallen massively since those early days of AWS.
Prior to the RAM crunch you could buy 4 or 5 servers ~50k that would be more than capable to handle many enterprises needs. The thing is the industry has sorta lost the skill set to host and maintain them. The people who can do this still exist of course but they are outnumbered by the YAML jockeys 10 to 1.
There are also other things that the cloud hides in its price as well. Redundant networking, provisioning, rack space, internet connections, firewalls, UPS backup, power usage.
Still I think a lot of startups would benefit from hosting their own stuff if they intend to be a long term business instead of just shooting their shot and hoping to be acquired.
No, you misunderstand, it's not that we lack the knowledge or skills (we don't!) it's that the backbones and pipelines all converge on these hyperscalers and that's where you get the best throughput and least latency.
I clearly remember having a discussion with a very VERY large company I worked for at the time about getting some NVidia hardware for our own enterprise data centers and they flat out refused. Now, they have lost any advantage they could have had.
The issue with AWS is that they started off cheap, easy, simple and grew into an enterprise mess complete with opaque pricing. That's an issue. The complexity itself has created a whole new lane of work for the SRE where they can specialize in AWS and not do anything else. It's grown beyond just a cloud provider. People who are still expecting a cloud provider are going to be sour about it.
This is borne out by the fact that there are alternatives that are:
- dramatically simpler
- cheaper
- easier to budget
while retaining the scale-on-demand and hide-the-actual-hardware properties that the industry jumped for joy at. What they don't have is the nobody-got-fired-for-rearchitecting-to-aws bit.
Like OP, I was an AWS booster for many years (also a Heroku lover), but fell out of love about 10 years ago for the same reasons.
- It felt like far too much complexity just to do simple things.
- The obvious attempts to trap customers with slightly incompatible, higher level services felt gross
- The inability to run AWS trash on a dev machine had a MASSIVE hit on productivity
- Pricing didn't fall as fast as I felt it should (an obviously debatable position that reasonable, smart folks disagree with)
In my current company, we've been running basic SMB/tech startup functions on-prem (ACK! THE HORROR!) from ~6 basic computers (4 game machines and 2 nucs) for a few years now.
We just reconstituted the entire infra working part-time over about 2 weeks using Claude code and ansible.
It really doesn't make sense in this world to pay tens of thousands of dollars to rent a level of computation that can be purchased and managed for a tiny fraction of that money.
We're also seeing massive dividends paying out with this architecture because we have self-hosted gitea, along with a local workstation for our agents to run in, and now our agents have all of the context without us relying on Github or ingress/egress fees at all.
The value in paying someone is if you have enterprise requirements for physical data security. Then after that if you go the Hetzner route, you have to micromanage your underlying OS, Redis, DB, etc... and it's just more work.. and if you're in enterprise business it reduces friction a lot to just pay someone a trivial amount like $10,000 a month.
I honestly can't believe most of the people posting aren't engineers or they work at small companies or something. They show their lack of experience when talking about how cheap Hetzner and DO are.
I worked at Google. I know there are tons and tons of great and well meaning people working there. This is the kind of thing that would make me crazy.
People there be like, “but I’m not evil! I’ll never do anything bad with all of this incredible power!”
But if you create a nuclear bomb, someone unsavory is going to wrest control of that power from your stupid little painted fingernails and destroy the rest of us with it.
How about, don’t make an effing privacy nuclear bomb if you don’t want to contribute to making the world more evil?
For the newer players who have gotten into continuous integration and containerized builds, consider checking on your systems to be sure you're not pulling 'latest' across a bunch of packages with every build.
We set up our base containers with all the external dependencies already in them and then only update those explicitly when we decide it's time.
This means we might be a bit behind the bleeding edge, but we're also taking on a lot less risk with random supply chain vulns getting instant global distribution.
Both their AI policy and their rejection of Bun's performance PR were level-headed and well-reasoned. And the link seems more like a proof-of-concept than anything else.
It's true corporate sponsors are a big help with language development, but not at the expense of conceptual integrity.
Bun is the largest project written in zig. And it isn't close. Bun is bigger than zig itself. Seems like zig isn't mature enough to handle Bun's needs, so I don't blame them at all for looking for off ramps. Only time will tell if rigidity from the zig team is worth the cost of losing Bun. It might be.
Zig won't be affected by Bun potentially moving to Rust, the language has been growing rapidly and one of the main proposals of Zig is "maintain it with Zig". It's ability to integrate with existing C code bases, as well as be a drop-in build replacement, has widespread use.
In addition, the link in the comment you replied to explains why the PRs Bun opened to Zig would have lowered the quality of the compiler and how Zig has achieved even greater speedups, with more widely applicable features like incremental compilation and the self-hosted backend.
This ban will be used to force hardware and OS-level Digital ID down our throats as a "safety measure" to ensure people are "Citizens" before accessing AI technology.
Whatever last vestiges of privacy we still enjoy will be taken from us with this as the excuse.
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