12 years ago I had to choose whether to specialize myself in AWS, GCP or Azure, and from my very brief foray with Azure I could see it was an absolute mess of broken, slow and click-ops methodology. This article confirms my suspicions at that time, and my colleague experience.

Learning a new tool is a mental effort that makes sense for the seller to propose, but doesn't for me. My mental energy is better spent on my loved ones. It has to be truly revolutionary for me to invest time into it, like the LLM stuff. But otherwise I've been happy with Bash, Vim, JetBrains products and Terraform for a very long while. I don't see any need to change that.

I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for the excellent games that you all built in that era. Thief 1 and 2 are part of my formative games. I played it when I was a teen. The lore, the ambient, the thrill of playing a non combat game (well, at least until you get the sword to beat the bad guys in the last stages, in Thief 1). I could never like mainstream games to the same extent all my friends did after playing Thief 1 and 2. They may have had better graphics, but they did not have the same soul, passion and love that those games had.

It was with a lot of sadness that I read about the demise of Looking Glass studio.

To add a funny anecdote to this, I enjoyed the game even though I barely understood the dialogue and text, being a Spaniard. But it was one of those games that sparked my interest to learn English (alongside Zelda, A link to the past xDD)

I've been 3d printing with resin for a long time before I had my dog. Now I don't do it, unless I can be sure that I can have the dog out my printing room for several days straight, for the water-washable resin to solidify on the sun after usage, and all the different after-print steps that have to be taken care of.

It's also annoying to clean the plate, and deal with the resin bottles when you stop using them. There's no easily accessible infrastructure to dispose of the waste from the printing process so if you become lazy, you end up creating toxic hazards for anyone in the community. Not a good outcome at all.

Still, safe 3d printing brings me a lot of joy, specially to prepare board games sessions with friends and neighbours. Printing, painting, etc. You just have to be responsible and civic and do the right thing.

There's a safe way to handle this stuff, but you have to be very disciplined about it. Animals and kids complicate that big time.

I love that you've made it open source and that it's in Rust, thanks a lot for the work!

Of course, not for the content itself, but because it's really a time capsule of the feelings and hopes of our time, back then, when we were teens, discovering this new exciting thing called Internet, the excitement of meeting like minded people and have discussions that you could never have with your friends.

I feel like nothing is ever gonna replicate that excitement anymore, but that may be more related to us being 40+ than the technology not being available xD

Geocities/Lycos/others, then switching to phpbb forums that you modded and where you had your first programming experiences to try to build games...great innocent times all around, before everything was enshittified for commercial purposes.

It is so much better to run scripts with Just than it is doing it with Make. And although I frankly tend to prefer using a bash script directly (much as described by the parent commenter), Just is much less terrible than Make.

Now the only problem is convincing teams to stop following the Make dogma, because it is so massively ingrained and it has so many probems and weirdnesses that just don't add anything if you just want a command executor.

The PHONY stuff, the variable scaping, the every-line-is-a-separate-shell, and just a lot of stuff that don't help at all.

You surely care about what your partner thinks about you. Your parents perhaps? Your friends? It's part of the emotional connection.

You can be laid back and easy going, but you're still going to care if your loved ones strongly go against your core beliefs and ways of living, right?

But they made it very difficult to try it out at scale (we generate quite a lot of logs) and at one point they only wanted to talk to the CTO instead of the persons in charge of the PoCs.

That move made them untrustable to me, and they were disqualified from the process. If they wanted to compete on selling the solution to non-technical people that told us all we needed to know about them and how support would be. We ended up choosing managed Opensearch by AWS, which was a shitshow in several fronts. I wish we had given Loki a bigger chance at that time. We've ended up migrating to it anyway.

I've only used them for personal projects, though, so I can't say anything to the suitability in a corporate environment. In particular their support. That's quite an important factor when working in a corporate setting.

I wish they already had that S3-like service they've announced for some time. It would be really handy.

I really wish AWS conceded the IaC war and stopped putting resources into Cloudformation. I never suffer as much as when I have to work with CF. The only worse thing I can think of is having to interact with Azure, which around 5 years ago was a terrible experience all around with regard to automation.

Going back to my CF rant: As soon as you get into any amount of complexity (and this also includes CDK, as it inherits all of CF problems), like for example using nested stacks and custom resources, it becomes almost impossible to troubleshoot incidents and problems. Error messages are obtuse. Fail states are too frequent. Update and deploy times are incredibly slow. Working with CF makes me reconsider my whole job every time. I curse the day that I chose to ignore my general precaution with CF and go for a database (Opensearch) managed with CDK.

There's a night and day difference between managing infrastructure state with Terraform and CF. Terraform also has its quirks and warts, of course, but at the very least there's very little that cannot be recovered by yourself. And it is also fast enough. CF is mostly a black box of misery.

I feel LLMs are great at suggestions that you follow up yourself (if only for sanity checking, but nothing you wouldn't do with a human too).

I've already used some LLMs to ask questions about licenses and legal consequences for software related matters, and it gave me a base, without having to involve a very expensive professional into it for what are mostly questions for hobby things I'm doing.

If there was a significant amount of money involved in the decision, though, I will of course use the services of a professional. These are the kinds of topics you can't be "mostly right".