But no, it is not generally that easy anywhere in America. My wife and I tried for six years and it never happened. Texas completely privatized foster care licensing years back, so standards can be pretty arbitrary. Some agencies are thinly-veiled scams requiring you to purchase books or parenting classes from the founder.

This is what human reasoning is and we're supposed to be good at it. At its best, this is what any reasonable education should do for you if you take it at all seriously, arming you with some capacity for doing prima facie sanity checks of poorly sourced claims.

Also, there is the question of why? This is a quarterly publication with only a few articles, not a blog spamming 20,000 a day. The author himself is a rabbi and professor at St. John's, who is heavily published but not exactly spamming the world with shit. He's written two full-length books, one novel and one non-fiction, both of them published before LLMs were anywhere near good enough to produce convincing long-form prose. All of his material I could find is published through real publications with editorial boards, not self-published. He doesn't exactly fit the profile of the ambitious hustler trying to make a name for himself to game SEO rankings or boost his karma on web outlets with up-voting mechanisms.

Projects like these always feel like people whose experience of combat is video games imagining how cool it would be to have better tech, and I can't help but wonder what the guys at the top buying this shit are thinking. They too were once at the platoon and company level, even if it was decades ago. Cynically, they might just hope to end up like this Quay Barnett guy. Buy shit you don't need and will never field from a vendor today, then get a 7-figure job from the same vendor when you retire.

This gives us a $1,995 a month payment when we purchased and a $2,142 a month payment today, due to higher assessed value for the tax.

We can see upsides and downsides in both cases. Rent would have been quite a bit cheaper in 2007, but it has very nearly caught up by now. Meanwhile, you're probably talking about renting maybe a 2 bed/1 bath apartment, whereas the median single-family house is more like 4 beds/2 baths, with a yard. Whether or not that extra space and privacy matters to you likely depends a lot on whether you're single or have or ever plan to have a family. You could have invested into something like the S&P 500, which has historically returned about 10.5% since 1957 annually in nominal returns. Let's just kind of naively split the difference here and assume you can invest $1,000 saved on rent versus mortage a month for the first 10 years and $200 a month for the next 9. That would have gotten you somewhere around $240,000 by now. Meanwhile, you're looking at about $248,000 in home equity by now for the purchase case.

Choose different parameters if you please, but I'm not really seeing the case for renting here over the long term, and that's in spite of choosing the single worst time in the last century you could have made the purchase.

My question is, if it's this trivial to rewrite Zig to Rust, and trivial in general to write Rust at all, why not just use Rust for your server side code in the first place? What's the value of continuing to use JavaScript and putting so much effort into the runtime?

We also seem to fall into these ruts of not understanding what is meant by labor productivity. When an economist is presenting the common outputs / inputs measure, they don't mean raw quantity of output. They're talking about the value added by outputs divided by the value of inputs. Churning out software faster that doesn't earn anybody additional revenue is not making us more productive. It's disheartening that even c-suites with business education don't seem to understand this. That's not to say there is no productivity gain. Plenty of AI-adjacent hyperscalers are seeing ridiculous growth right now, but no non-startup is seeing revenue 10x what it was the year before, not even NVIDIA.

A lot of this is just basic diminishing marginal utility. There is only so much value to be added. Software is usually either a semi-automated controller or human decision making augmenter to some kind of physical manufacturing process, or entertainment, when we talk about ultimately delivering value. Everything else is an intermediate input. We can only be so entertained. For physical goods, we have food, space, clothing seemingly at a sufficient level to satisfy just about everyone, with the reasons for value not being maximized having to do with distribution. Unless your software manages to solve borders, bigotry, cultural incompatibility, poverty, mental illess, physical illness, violence, I'm not sure what the other big rocks are. Software can absolutely be a key part of infrastructure to facilitate distribution. That's exactly what the Internet is, along with all the backend business and logistics systems out there in existence. But without hitting the true big rocks, where is the 10x value supposed to come from? We're talking incremental gains simply because we're not in the dark ages any more and incremental gains are all that's there. Short of Star Trek style replicators and transporters, I'm not sure what could realistically multiply global value by 10.

Without the value, then sure, you may be churning out 10 times as many discrete projects used by at least one person, or 10 times as many lines of code, but that was never the point. Your personalized notes and grocery ordering apps you share with your wife might excite you for a few weeks, but I can assure you they aren't going to revolutionize your life.

The way military radios handle this is hardware key loaders that have seeds pre-synced in factory, in person. Every day in the field, a unit comms person takes the key loader and loads new keys onto everyone's radios. The key loaders themselves are reseeded and resynced during maintenance periods between campaigns or exercises. They're physically accounted for on every movement and twice a day when not moving, and if they ever can't be found, all messages from any device they loaded keys onto is considered compromised.

Anyone trying to overthrow a government or run a criminal empire or whatever is going to have to take measures at least this drastic. Or quit LARPing and accept that nation state attackers can probably slide into your Instagram DMs, which are probably being sent to people you don't know, and if they're hot and actually answering you, 90% chance they're a honeypot anyway.

It'll be another 40 years hopefully to get a full lifetime of experience and see how I ultimately feel about this, but right now, my sense is software saw a huge boom in the 2010s, a la aerospace in the 60s and finance in the 90s, and it isn't going to die, but that boom was never going to last forever, either. Being a specialist surgeon was always the only true close to guarantee you'll make half a mil annually with supreme job security. Everything else sees booms, busts, regional disparities, and power laws that make it hard to even talk to each other about it because nobody's experience is universal. Even now, in my particular niche of the industry, I don't know anybody who's been laid off. My own company and our competitors are not exactly drowning in cash (I work largely on commission and it's been a terrible quarter), but we're expanding headcount, not reducing.

Conversely, in the 2010s as software boomed and I did terrifically, basically my entire family is in trades and it was totally different for them. Drastic cyclical instability, projects started but then canceled all over the place, injuries, bankruptcies, drug addiction, prison terms. But that's also in California. I live in Texas and construction here seemingly mostly stayed in the boom state. All the tradesmen I know from here rather than family did much better. We also had roughneck as a lucrative fallback option for anyone that didn't mind living in the middle of nowhere thanks to the fracking and shale booms. Computer geeks from 2006 to 2021 or so also had that kind of easy skill transfer fallback thing thanks to the boom in computational data analytics due to advances in data storage and machine learning technologies.

We might even do well to remember that hyperscalers drowning in ad money for the past 20 years had a practice of intentionally overhiring to hoard talent but not give them anything productive to do, putting them into restrictive NDAs and non-competes largely to prevent them from starting their own companies or working for competitors. If that practice is ending, it floods the labor market, driving down wages, and reduces industry-wide employment metrics, but it's not death of the profession so much as ending a market distortion. Maybe it even supercharges entrepreneurialism, but right now we just seem to see a boom in the "solo indie dev" putting out reams of slop. At some point, people have to actually work together and have a real product vision that solves a problem other than using AI to make dev tools to harness AI for making more dev tools.

> It is interesting to note that if this were an absolute rule for IT investments (which we believe it is not, as covered in our other sections), then investing in IT would be a waste of resources for the economy as a whole despite benefitting individual firms.

This site is surveying arguments that have been made over the years, one of which is the one you quoted. They're not agreeing with all of those arguments. In fact, they explicitly disagree with the one you're questioning.

Internally, though, they wanted to self-host a chat server, Apache airflow, Overleaf for collaborative editing of research proposals, three separate Git servers, a container registry, many other things, all with extremely strict multi-tenancy isolation requirements for storage and networking because they're handling customer data and their own customers audit them for it. That was a hell of a lot easier to do with Kubernetes than trying to figure out some giant universe of barely related technologies with vastly different APIs, having to buy specialized appliances for network and storage that probably also need their own control plane software hosted somewhere else.

But if you just look at "scale" as number of http requests a particular URL gets per some unit of time, the customer-facing sites have far greater scale. If you're trying to attribute revenue, beats me. They wouldn't sell anything without the customer-facing sites, but they wouldn't have anything to sell without the internal tooling. Solo web devs get into this tunnel vision view of ops because, to them, often the web site is the product. That's not the case for most businesses.

And, of course, they'd probably just use someone else's SaaS for tooling. But if you're in a heavily regulated space where that isn't possible and you have to self-host most of your business systems, then what?

Just yesterday I was in a meeting with a customer asking if we could make our FOSS virtualization platform work such that if you yank the root disk out of a server and put it in another one, everything will work with no hiccups. Well, provided it's exactly the same model and you're going to put it on the same network with all the same IP assignments, you've got a shot. I've actually tried to do this before for the hell of it and I only needed to account for the MAC addresses of the NICs being different, as long as you have no other drives and everything else is exactly the same. I'm sure I could whip up something that scans for the predictable interface name and changes the old MAC stored in the NetworkManager configuration files (and wherever else they might happen to be) and change them to the newly discovered one before making a DHCP request, and maybe that will work, but how certain can I really be? I can test on servers I have and I don't have every possible combination of data center equipment all of our customers have. There is no feasible way to test every possibility. Having an LLM whip up the code for me instead of writing it myself doesn't change that.

Ironically enough, that customer is making software for another customer and their own requirement is that it has to run on very hardware on an airplane, which they don't have. So they're working on little NUC clusters in their cubes and at their houses instead, because their company doesn't have extra true server racks for them to use and no budget to acquire them, which probably won't change any time soon given the spike in hardware prices. They're all using AI but what good is it doing? They're spinning their wheels because they're targeting a runtime environment that doesn't exist that they can't test on.

It's a weird folly of the Internet age that the largest companies in the software world are all web companies. Mostly, they're media companies in disguise. Their only real product is human attention and they sell it to advertisers. Tech is just the vehicle that allows them to deliver it. We've valorized their "ship as fast as possible" ethic, which maybe matters, maybe doesn't, but it was never the source of their value. Nobody spends ad money on Facebook and Google because of the quality or delivery speed of their software. It's the human users and data they've captured, which to be clear, software plays a huge role in, but it's not a model all software companies can follow. We don't earn revenue from half braindead doomscrollers wasting most of their day with a background drip of vaguely dopamine-boosting noise blasting into their senses while they leak every fact about their lives to media companies. Our customers have to make intentional decisions to spend money out of finite budgets.

There's another story on the frontpage right now of Coinbase laying off a bunch of its employees and using AI to write more code. Okay, great, but the best that can do is reduce labor expense. They only earn more revenue if consumers decide they want to buy more Crypto and hold it in Coinbase. If Coinbase is using AI to write their software, so is everyone else, so that doesn't give them any kind of edge on quality or shipping speed. Their success is going to be determined overwhelmingly by whether or not people want to buy crypto, a broad market trend completely out of their control. No one in any business ever wants to admit this, but we're all at the mercy of these broader trends.

People are all over this thread citing Ford. Ford didn't decline because they couldn't ship fast enough. They declined because the market stopped wanting what they were making except their full-size pickups, and it's largely just Americans that want that. I don't blame them or think they did anything wrong exactly. People love to do these post-mortems contemplating a world in which someone like Ford accurately predicts every single shift in consumer sentiment that will ever happens and always stays ahead of the curve. It'll never happen. Everything that goes into style eventually goes out of style, and your ability to ship out of style shit faster won't help you.

You said you work for a bank and I'm honestly curious. What causes a customer to choose your bank over another? Do you think it has anything to do with software features? I'm lucky I even got a meeting with the customer I was with yesterday. He told me he loves our product and fought hard for it over a chief architect who wanted something else and made them do a long comparison study to prove our product met their needs better. Why did that chief architect prefer the other product? He plays golf with their CTO.

If you've been out of the game a while, things got significantly more difficult ten years ago around the time of the OPM breach. CMMC2 requirements got a lot stricter. The only bright side here is everyone is subject to the same bullshit, so you're not at any competitive disadvantage. I get how frustrating it is. We've all been there. But go easy on your own team. It's just as frustrating for them.

With all respect, "building it because I want to" and "working toward making (it) production grade" doesn't inspire a ton of confidence. k3s has been part of the CNCF for many years and its developer Darren Shepherd was the founding CTO for both cloud.com and Rancher Labs, which were acquired by Citrix and SUSE. It looks like you're running your own B2B company and hoping to swap out k3s as the underlying engine for multitenancy. That's very risky. Surely Claude can help you understand and use k3s just as readily as help you write a replacement, and I'm sure SUSE sells professional services. I have no clue what they charge but typically you're talking like $300 an hour and you'd probably only need 40 hours.