Perhaps that will be how they will make it more broadly available.

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.

Old man shakes fist at cloud.

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.

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.

- 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.

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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?

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.

As a fan of the language, I hope it leads to some reflection on things that might need to change moving forward.

An ashtray is such a temporally rooted object, the phrase, "throwing around ashtrays," immediately conjures a bunch of peripheral concrete imagery.

I imagine there will soon be generations of young people who wonder what a tray of ashes was used for and why people used to collect them all over their homes and offices.

The Eternal September eventually comes for us all.

Believe it or not, at least some of those modern practices (unit testing, CI, etc) do make a big (positive) difference there.

They are definitely beyond a hobby device.

They're made well, designed well and the libraries are some of the best in class.

My concern is purely on risk.

What would any responsible state security agency spend to have devices behind every single firewall of an adversary?

It shocks me even more that any Western customer would do the same with network-connected Chinese chips. But we do.

The Espressif chips are truly incredible value, but what are we doing here?

Is there any doubt that these don't represent a major attack surface if a conflict were to heat up?

If you had network-connected chips of your own design inside every household of your adversary, what could you do with that?