[0] https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/bu...

In the same way you need to be 10x better for someone to consider switching to your product, if you get 10x worse your competitors get a free 10x by just standing still.

Wow. I thought the github clout market would be a bit more subtle about it.

[0] https://github.com/Lum1104/Understand-Anything/commit/9866fc...

[1] https://www.star-history.com/lum1104/understand-anything#his...

The point I'm making is that the billing becomes very clear once you treat them like a PaaS, not a cloud platform. It's like buying individual seats for corporate software that just happens to also host your application as a side effect. I feel like they make this fact pretty clear on the pricing page.

"$20/month" = a single license for vercel's own tooling

"+ additional usage" = whatever AWS + markup costs... they SHOULD link to the /limits docs [0] from here

"$20 of included usage credit" = "free" coupon to use the overpriced AWS services with the pitiful soft-limits listed in detail below

"Drag the sliders. Watch the $20 plan disappear." is a misreading of vercel's pricing chart. "Vercel Pro" was never 20$, especially not for 5 users, since that's 5 licenses for vercel's tooling, which is the ONLY thing they make here. You essentially get a coupon letting you use that tooling on AWS via their control panel, but beyond that they have 0 involvement in the cloud market. They list the soft limits under the column in the price chart, and they have that /limits page detailing their insanely marked up overage charges. [0] IMO, that's not hidden, it's just a bad deal.

They selfishly assume their tooling IS the product you're here for and whatever hurdles exist to use it will just be tanked. "theupsellgame.com" also complains that the hobby plan has no way to pay for it. Why would I sell the supermarket apples at my fruit stand placed directly in-front of the supermarket if you aren't going to also buy my superior Apple Eater's Experience package.

Again, I think they're leeches. I just think this site uses weak arguments for why Vercel is awful.

[0] https://vercel.com/docs/limits#on-demand-resources-for-pro

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27819384

The hobby plan is a loss leader to get developers into the vercel tooling. If you go over the free tier's bandwidth limit, you've exceeded what vercel believes that developer goodwill is worth for a single account. If they allowed you to pay for extra bandwidth on your free plan, it would make vercel look like a crap cloud platform, because all you're doing at that point is paying a premium for AWS, and a kneecapped version of their developer tooling. They really want you to pay the 20$/month/dev and experience everything in vercel's platform because that's their only product. Honestly... no fault to them on that.

Maybe they'd gain some developer positivity about letting you dig your account out of the "exceeding the hobby limits" hole that's easy to fall into, but the AWS cost for them is already spent, and that was all the budget for appeasing you. You'll have to pay them to pay AWS anyway, so they draw a hard line at that point and demand you also pay to use the vercel tooling, which is the only thing they make. (or, in theory, telling you to go pay AWS yourself if the tooling is unimportant to you.)

They will sell you pay-as-you-go services... but only once you pay their 20$: https://vercel.com/docs/limits#on-demand-resources-for-pro

Over all, I hate it. But I don't think there's anything too hidden about it, or at least no more than any other PaaS provider.

Trying to handle a text-based programming language with an implicitly english subject/verb/object order also feels like it makes it a bit harder to grok for Average Person (worldwide). For english speakers this is natural, but for people used to different grammar, this is nearly the same difficultly of learning a general purpose programming language already.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladder_logic

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk#Browser

That feels a bit weird to me. If you were sending emails about a kickstarter for a static website builder to a list that signed up for icon related news, you'll get marked as spam.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Station_Radisson_Met...

I'll accept that I'm biased by living here though haha

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Station_Radisson_Met...

I end up hoarding things for the same reason, and the mental gymnastics I try to play with myself (using that ice cream machine as an example) is to think of cases where I would be willing to make ice cream, but wouldn't be willing to go buy store bought ice cream as an alternative. Usually means I need to quickly go research what I think might be interesting about the thing... and then I fall short because... there's some cool ice cream recipe ideas online... and then I enjoy make the proverbial matcha gelato that weekend... and the machine goes in the packed cupboard for another 3 months.

I'm not 100% sure if that's a good or bad outcome haha. The pattern has repeated itself with any clutter that happens to enable a weekend project once a year.

I guess that's why I see it as a separate profession, as in we have to actually profess a standard for how a professional in our field acts and believes. I think it's OK for it to bifurcate into two different fields, but Software Engineering would need to specifically reject prompt-and-pray on a principled and rational basis.

Sadly yes, that might require real cost to life in order to find out the "why" side of that rational basis. If you meet anyone that went to an engineering school in Québec, ask them about the ceremony they did and the ring they received. [0] It's not like that ceremony fixes anything, but it's a solemn declaration of responsibility which to me at least, sets a contract with society that says "we won't make things that harm you".

[0] https://ironring.ca/home-en/

    > [The] history of the 1907 failure of the Quebec City bridge, which was the inspiration for the Calling of an Engineer ceremony.

This sort of "prompt and pray" flow really works for people, as in they can make products and money, however, I do think the people that succeed today also would've reached for no-code tools 5 years ago and seen similar success. It's just faster and more comprehensive now. I think the general theme of the products remains the same though; not un-important or worthless, but it tends to be software that has effects that say INSIDE the realm of software. I feel like there's always been a market for that, as it IS important, it's just not WORTH the time and money to the right people to "engineer" those tools. A lot of SaaS products filled that niche for many years.

While it's not a way I want to work, I am also becoming comfortable with respecting that as a different profession for producing a certain brand of software that does have value, and that I wasn't making before. The intersection of that is opportunity I'm missing out on; no fault to anyone taking it!

The software engineer that writes the air traffic avoidance system for a plane better take their job seriously, understand every change they make, and be able to maintain software indefinitely. People might not care a ton about how their sales tracking software is engineered, but they really care about the engineering of the airplane software.

Transportation, especially ALL transportation, does a LOT. You're looking for ROI not the absolute values. I think it's undeniable that the positive economic effect of every car, truck, train, and plane is unfathomably huge. That's trains moving minerals, planes moving people, trucks transporting goods, and hundreds of combinations thereof, all interconnected. Literally no economic activity would happen without transportation, including the transition to green energy sources, of which would improve the emissions from transportation.

I think it might be more emissions-efficient at generating value than AI by a factor exceeding the 7.5x energy use. Moving rocks from (place with rocks) to (place that needs rocks) continues to be just an insanely good thing for humanity.

Also, I'm not sure about your math. 4% would be 4% of the whole like in a pie chart, not 4% of the remainder after removing one slice. 4% AI, 30% transportation, 66% other. I don't know where that 40% is from.

    > the Flipper Zero community seems less than enthralled by the whole thing. A post about the project on Reddit got a pretty tepid response from r/FlipperZero subscribers. The original post got next to no engagement, and a second thread received several responses from people saying they have no interest in the project.

    > “No thanks!” one wrote, while another critiqued the project as seeming “AI-generated.” A user claiming to have worked on the project offered to answer any questions about it, and was downvoted and pelted with some mean-spirited replies.

I know it's rather rude to make fun of someone for trying to make/write something... but I truly cannot think of a funnier and more worthless premise for an article. Gizmodo could pivot to the Onion of technology.

Here's the "second reddit thread" featuring "the pelting" (comment is at the end, with a score of -7 as of right now, and seemingly not changing) https://old.reddit.com/r/flipperzero/comments/1rzbjit/pliny_...

Once this passes through a few generations of people responsible for tending to the needs of rich people's frozen brains, the empathy and money will be gone. Imagine inheriting a business funded from people wanting to skip over the entirety of your lifetime because they assume your time is too boring for them. Plus, your impact on that business will be null. There is nothing you can do except keep it going and get more rich people's brains in there. The only "innovation" that's going to drive business is bringing someone back to life... which for a large span of brain custodians, will only be possible AFTER their death. Maybe you need to model it after a religion; humanity has kept stuff going for long spans of time under that framing... but are you still just a servant to these ancient people who you have not met, and will actually NEVER meet since you'll die first... having spent precious time in your life taking care of them? Seems like an uninspiring religion.

Or... you do some fraud, which is much easier. They're already functionally dead, and you presumably have access to a lot of their money. Money that is worth more in your lifetime, than in their future.

People have historically cared very little about the personal feelings of the pharoah as they dust off his bones and take his nice things. Doesn't even need that long. Guess what, T+200 years, the brains are getting dumped in a river.

Really nice job on the app though! I think written-beyond's comment says more than enough: you've made what should be a default feature, that no one had thought to make.