I suspect it may have been related to the Network File System (NFS)? Like whenever I read a file on the host machine, it goes across the data-center network and charges me? Is this correct?

Anyway, I just decided to take control of those costs. Took me 2 weeks of part-time work to migrate all my stuff to a self-hosted machine. I put everything behind Cloudflare with a load balancer. Was a bit tricky to configure as I'm hosting multiple domains from the same machine. It's a small form factor PC tower with 20 CPU cores; easily runs all my stuff though. In 2 months, I already recouped the full cost of the machine through savings in my AWS bill. Now I pay like $10 a month to Cloudflare and even that's basically an optional cost. I strongly recommend.

Anyway it's impressive how AWS costs had been creeping slowly and imperceptibly over time. With my own machine, I now have way more compute than I need. I did a calculation and figured out that to get the same CPU capacity (no throttling, no bandwidth limitations) on AWS, I would have to pay like $1400 per month... But amortized over 4 years my machine's cost is like $20 per month plus $5 per month to get a static IP address. I didn't need to change my internet plan other than that. So AWS EC2 represented a 56x cost factor. It's mind-boggling.

I think it's one of these costs that I kind of brushed under the carpet as "It's an investment." But eventually, this cost became a topic of conversation with my wife and she started making jokes about our contribution to Jeff Bezos' wife's diamond ring. Then it came to our attention that his megayacht is so large that it comes with a second yacht beside it. Then I understood where he got it all from. Though to be fair to him, he is a truly great businessman; he didn't get it from institutional money or complex hidden political scheme; he got it fair and square through a very clever business plan.

Over 5 years or so that I've been using AWS, the costs had been flat. Meanwhile the costs of the underlying hardware had dropped to like 1/56th... and I didn't even notice. Is anything more profitable than apathy and neglect?

Yes. The government has more than enough leverage to demand this. Skill was never the problem. The problem is bureaucracy; too many regulations and massive hidden corruption. The problem with the regulations is that they were designed with the explicit intent to stifle competition.

"Nobody got fired for choosing IBM" - This fact is pure corruption. I remember, when I was at university, one of the courses I took had a project management component and we did an assessment researching failed software projects and it turns out that there were a huge number of failed projects running in the hundreds of millions and even billions (and that was a lot of money at the time); always the same companies kept coming up. IMO, this is fraud, of a criminal nature. People should go to jail.

Then I got cheated out of my position in the crypto project. Literally scammed by the project founder with the full support of government regulators who are supposed to be preventing this stuff and lost all my income overnight. The regulators literally facilitated fraud instead of preventing it... And I had the pleasure of being gaslit about it while also being gaslit about COVID by a different set of regulators. I became a conspiracy theorist during this time! Now I'm forced to work again...

It's especially infuriating in this age of perma-bailouts where the system is basically bailing out everyone with assets.

I figured out that the system is a scam. I can prove it to anyone in excruciating detail, with citations. If anyone should be bailed out, it should be me. I shouldn't be forced back in the hamster wheel. It's hard to compete against others who think the system works a certain way and don't realize how the hamster wheel works. I shouldn't have to compete with delusional fools who think that their effort spent on the hamster wheel is going to yield any rewards.

Anyway it drives me nuts how the only people who can afford to retire, choose not to... And those who are desperate to retire, can't! This is so pervasive, it feels like a psyop.

It has value from the perspective of the oppressor I guess... I think this is where it derives its value.

It's kind of bittersweet for me because I was dreaming of becoming a software architect when I graduated university and the role started disappearing so I never actually became one!

But the upside of this is that now LLMs suck at software architecture... Maybe companies will bring back the software architect role?

The training set has been totally poisoned from the architecture PoV. I don't think LLMs (as they are) will be able to learn software architecture now because the more time passes, the more poorly architected slop gets added online and finds its way into the training set.

Good software architecture tends to be additive, as opposed to subtractive. You start with a clean slate then build up from there.

It's almost impossible to start with a complete mess of spaghetti code and end up with a clean architecture... Spaghetti code abstractions tend to mislead you and lead you astray... It's like; understanding spaghetti code tends to soil your understanding of the problem domain. You start to think of everything in terms of terrible leaky abstraction and can't think of the problem clearly.

It's hard even for humans to look at a problem through fresh eyes; it's likely even harder for LLMs to do it. For example, if you use a word in a prompt, the LLM tends to try to incorporate that word into the solution... So if the AI sees a bunch of leaky abstractions in the code; it will tend to try to work with them as opposed to removing them and finding better abstractions. I see this all the time with hacks; if the code is full of hacks, then an LLM tends to produce hacks all the time and it's almost impossible to make it address root causes... Also hacks tend to beget more hacks.

- It's backed by nothing.

- It's not a fair medium of exchange because it physically cannot circulate very far from 'money printers' (not many hops) before it's taxed down to nothing. This means that it's unevenly scarce based on social proximity; unfair by design. Cantillon effects on steroids.

- It doesn't even exist as a single cohesive concept; the US dollar in your bank account is not the same as the US dollar in your friend's bank account and it's not the same as the US dollar which European traders use to buy derivatives (e.g. Eurodollars)... There are literally thousands of different ledgers (banks, institutions, in different countries), each presenting its own interface supposedly showing their holdings of this mythical unit called 'The US dollar' which is actually thousands of different currencies, which happen to share the same name, scattered around the world and held together only by regulators whose only shared interest is to print more units for themselves than the next guy does. Slow and fallible human regulators represent the only layer of 'consensus' which exists for the entire fiat monetary system; they move at snails' pace in a world of high frequency trading.

The problem is systemic. The legal concepts of 'Corporate personhood' and 'Limited liability' don't make sense. Just think about what those terms mean.

Of course you cannot expect accountability in the long run.

Is a corporation really a legal person? Can it go to jail as a person might? Does it need a visa to operate in a country as a person might? Will a corporation die as a person will? Sounds like it's getting all the benefits of personhood and none of the drawbacks... Our legal system literally gives more rights to non-sentient entities than it does to us humans! No wonder things are getting out of hand!

What does 'Limited liability' mean? Who has to deal with the repercussions for the excess liability which may exceed beyond the limit?

It's deep corruption, codified into law. Of course these corporations will get worse. They will get satanically worse. Just watch what happens internally; a decade from now, the current CEOs will look morally responsible by comparison. It's a systemic issue. Total violation of the social contract at a deep human level.

Why don't we say weapons are legal persons and provide limited liability protection to the person wielding it? Then criminals could kill people and the court could pass judgement that the gun must serve 20 years in its holster while the criminal walks free... That's about as fair as what we have now. If you conceive of a corporation as a weapon. There is nothing in the law to explicitly prevent this exact scenario. The corporation could theoretically use up CEOs as a gun might use up bullets... The investors would bear no liability.

There are many people in this depraved world of ours who would be willing to be a corporate bullet. People will go to jail to provide for their family. With corporations sucking the wealth out of society, it will create new levels of desperation, this will surely happen.

It's disturbing how everyone is gravitating towards the same tools. This started happening since React and kept getting worse. Software development sucks nowadays.

All technical decisions about which tools to use are made by people who don't have to use the tools. There is no nuance anymore. There's a blanket solution for every problem and there isn't much to choose from. Meanwhile, software is less reliable than it's ever been.

It's like a bad dream. Everything is bad and getting worse.

No doubt this short-sightedness was the result of our debt-based monetary system. The disconnection of money from long term value-creation created a cycle of speculative booms and busts which made short term bets the most viable strategy to ensure that execs would get their bonuses.

Also, the perverse legal concepts of 'corporate personhood' and 'limited liability' sealed our fate, ensuring that companies could pollute our land and water with chemicals... China was all too happy to send children's toys full of phthalates and other endocrine disruptors our way, ensuring that the next generation would be pacified and struggling with hormone-related issues (I leave you to infer cultural implications...)

Seems like China got their revenge for the Opium wars!

Something else I struggle to understand is why some people/companies will build their entire business on top of software they don't own on top of third-party platform code that they can't even see. Somehow they prefer this than paying for an unlimited license to self-host and control the code. The companies who have access to the customers/end users definitely should have that kind of leverage over platform providers.

The software industry is weird to me. Saying this as someone who has been in it for almost 2 decades. I wish someone could explain it to me.

At a fundamental level, I cannot make sense of the relationship between people and software.

The duality of people making software free and open source only to be ignored completely and at the same time companies paying massive license fees for essentially the same or even inferior software... I suspect it's largely driven by cronyism.

Yes, I actually did this as an experiment.

From my perspective they are both different ways to communicate the same idea (with different effectiveness, different level of detail, to different audiences). I don't regard my Gemini-generated one as being any less 'my own work' as the one I painstakingly wrote by hand.

It gets to the core of what writing should be about. It should be about substance, not form. LLMs are equalizers when it comes to form. Time to focus on substance now!

For example, I'm bilingual and I tend to think in visual and abstract concepts and then translate to the target language as a separate step. It doesn't necessarily come out exactly right the first time. I often re-read what I wrote and see ambiguities which could cause someone to misinterpret what I'm trying to say.

Also, I tend to over-elaborate and struggle to understand other people's mental models. You need to understand your audience really well in order to convey points effectively or else you might bore them or your ideas might seem to go off on a tangent while you're actually trying to lay the foundation for the idea you're trying to convey...

For example, as an experiment, I posted my previous comment 2 times; once handwritten, the other transformed by Gemini (the one you responded to). The transformed one did better and got more engagement... It said the same thing but punchier and shorter. It doesn't waste words laying the groundwork because it has a better sense of what you already know (as the audience) given the conversation context.

This comment here is handwritten. I suspect it's probably not as punchy or to-the-point from your perspective.

So to summarize; I think LLMs can help some people more than others and it fits with the point I was trying to make that it will empower more people to write who would previously not write.

It has a lot of nice-to-haves which I wouldn't have bothered setting up individually but having them altogether out of the box does improve the overall developer experience significantly.

I think this may be a form of denial. The reality is likely the opposite: AI will commoditize the act of writing entirely, shifting the value solely to insight.

For too long, we’ve confused "good writing" with "good thinking." We assumed that if someone wrote beautifully, they had something smart to say. Conversely, we ignored brilliant people simply because they couldn't articulate their complex ideas effectively.

AI fixes this market inefficiency. It allows experts who are too busy actually doing things to finally compete with professional writers. They provide the raw brilliance (the substance), and the AI provides the polish (the form).

I totally disagree with this point. It's a combination of wishful thinking and denial. LLMs do a very fine job at writing if you give them the right base of information/insights. I think it will totally obliterate 'writing' as a differentiable skill.

What will happen IMO is that people who have interesting ideas and experiences but suck at writing will have the upper hand. The market for content will be flooded by articles from people who would normally not write. They will feed the LLMs bullet points of interesting facts and observations and let the LLM fill in the gaps and actually make the article engaging. What matters is that the core points have to be interesting. The AI cannot come up with brilliant insights but it can convey brilliant insights really well.

I think even if, hypothetically, some people could tell apart AI-generated content from manually written content, some AI-generated content may actually be more interesting and valuable to read than the manually written one...

At the end of the day, writing by itself doesn't matter; it's just a communication medium. What matters are insights, ideas, concepts, perspectives... It was always about substance, not form. It's a flaw of the human mind that some people used form as a proxy for substance.

There are a lot of people who know a lot and have a lot to say but they were so busy experiencing and learning that they never had time to write before... And even if they did, they could not convey their ideas effectively before.

Now given that LLMs have mastered the superficial aspects of communication, those aspects are no longer valuable and substance is more valuable. But IMO nobody will care whether articles or books were written by AI in the future. It won't have much effect on quality or value of the book/article.

I think what will matter in the future are:

- Insights, ideas, perspectives.

- Media (the most important still); who intermediates content distribution gets to decide what people consume and can shape their perception of quality to a significant extent.

I'm hoping that as more people get involved in writing using LLMs, that it will force more people to confront the second point... People will be forced to pay more attention to substance as it will be the only real differentiator. I'm hoping people will begin to feel disgusted by the low level of substance that current media platforms purvey... It's already kind of happening; people invented the term "AI slop" but really it's not just AI which produces slop. The media has been guilty of spreading slop for quite some time and it kept getting worse. Now AI is just a convenient strawman to bash.