Sandwich + Tenders + 2 Cole slaws + 2 bottled 500ml drink + one fries, as combos here in western Canada total up to $50 CAD for me on DoorDash...

Yes, there's too much hype, and forcing the use of it does no one any good. And for sure a lot of that demand detached from results, and this means the demand will ebb. But I don't think this is like the dot-com bubble, it's more like the OPEC oil embargoing the 70s where soaring prices detached from results led to a collapse in demand that lasted a long while.

The main issue IMO is the Apple hardware itself isn't focused on raw performance, it's on energy efficiency and mobility. You'd need a MacBook Pro or Mac Studio at least to have the GPU cores & RAM to play the most recent PC games. And so they just tend to lead with casual games, live service games, and second run AAA games. Technically Apple maintains the world's largest gaming platform (by users & revenue) in iOS.

And plenty of AAA games have been ported to macOS like Cyberpunk 2077, the last few Assassin Creeds (Shadows, Mirage), or even iOS/iPadOS/visionOS like Control & Death Stranding, the recent Assassin's Creeds, Resident Evil 2 & 4 Remakes, RE 7 & 8, Civ 6 & Civ 7, etc.

A vSphere cluster (in comparison to say KVM) has been easier to run in my perspective, but I do think it helps a lot to be a part of the VMware tech community to learn the best practices since there are historical quirks that are not always intuitive.

Thank you for your response on the external DNS, that makes sense in retrospect.

Mostly the other problems are the typical problems of managing bare metal multi-tenant Kubernetes cluster. The customers that don't have as many of these problems are ironically running openshift on vSphere ;).

while the OCP operators and GUIs cover much of the usual day to day , you really need deep Kubernetes expertise at scale, and need to drop down to the upstream project code and docs. For example it is very hard to force configuration discipline on tenants (leading to many flowers blooming here like Kyverno); security in Kubernetes is complex and requires careful tradeoffs on policies; it is laborious and counterintuitive (requests vs limits - ie. you should always set requests and be very careful setting limits) to manage compute capacity and noisy neighbours, Submariner and OVN-Kubernetes network services are limited compared to HCX+NSX (eg. NAT topologies, distributed firewall management, tunnels, fabric connectivity ie. VRFs or EVPN support though this is coming soon... also Openshift's metalLB for ingress load balancing is its own thing with its own connectivity config), out of the box observabiity is not very good and requires 3rd party solutions or extensive customized configurations , and the Kubernetes scheduler itself is focused on efficient bin packing rather than workload stability.

Also replacing vSphere VMs with OSV, you lose DRS which is a big blow... you do keep vmotion live migration equivalence but you must use a NetApp Filer (or any NFS store) for your VMs, or Nutanix Files, or ODF/Ceph in RWX volume mode. ODF/Ceph is more laborious to manage than VSAN (it requires its own knowledge well), but importantly has native S3 object storage, which VSAN still is missing (though I hear it is imminent in VCF 9.1.2). VLAN assignment to VMs with NMstate and multi-NIC failover has gotten better here over the years with OCP though feels shakier (more complexity is exposed, LACP is required, etc) than the VMware distributed switch native load based NIC teaming or NSX.

Overall if you squint, OpenShift can replace much of vSphere on paper , and at least somewhat in practice - but you really, really need a sharp ops team that knows what they're doing and at least some 3rd party solutions for capacity and observability. I'm also not sure redhat education and consulting is scaled at the level required to build these skills in industry quickly enough, though IBM certainly has the qualifications to do so. That said Broadcom is also doing plenty to squeeze or shed its education and consulting to partners which is ... a mixed bag usually at first that doesn't end well, and leads to repatriation.

VMware in 2024 had 96% of the virtualization market and 500k customers. The above is somewhat true but also kind of like saying "the USA is in decline"... okay, but it's so big that it's going to take a very long time, and not every arrow is pointing down.

Broadcom focusing on higher margin larger customers hurts the 10+ year horizon but at the same time they're closing massive (9 figure) deals 5 years out including some very large expansions. Everyone is going to look for an exit - as they should! - but that doesn't mean they actually WILL exit.

(I don't work for VMware, though I did years ago, I am an independent).

> I spec'ed, installed, and ran a VMware cluster for a few years and it was never very stable. After a while I stopped installing the software updates because they would usually break something.

I would gently suggest this isn't really much of an anecdote. This is like saying "I ran Linux once and it never seemed stable, so I stopped updating it".

There's VMware customers that range from a dozen VMs on a cluster to literally hundreds of clusters each with 10-20 hosts each with 100+ cores and 2 TB+ RAM and thousands of VMs... adding up to 500k+ VMs at the largest customers.

> More than once, after applying an update, I had to re-install the licenses for each server and its associated CPUs, which is a painful process.

This is not something I have encountered in 20+ years or could find an KB about online to indicate it was a widespread issue (though maybe it was if you have a link). Broadcom moved all licenses to subscription recently, which caused issues here but otherwise this feels odd.

> We initially installed using an external DNS, but the cluster was so flaky that we had to switch to their recommended configuration of local DNS.

I am not sure I understand, What do you mean by local vs external DNS? I am familiar with Kubernetes clusters having local CoreDNS and a plugin for plumbing external records called External DNS, however these aren't vSphere concerns. Vsphere uses standard NTP and DNS and doesn't ship with a DNS server, it doesn't have any recommendations on where or how it runs other than it being highly available.

OpenShift is okay but has quirks unless you have a major Kubernetes staff; Proxmox is good for most but I wouldn't use at massive scale. Azure Stack/ Hyper-V can work but has its own quirks.

These sorts of lawsuits never really make it to court, there's a negotiation tactic.

Meanwhile Broadcom's software revenue led by VMware keeps growing 30% YoY and they close new contracts because in spite of being expensive.... because there's very few true alternatives in the market to VMware Cloud Foundation at high scale - Nutanix, Proxmox, Azure Stack, and OpenShift all exist but have their own problems. I've worked with them all, and they're all... big, expensive and difficult, though VMware probably is the most stable and hassle free of the bunch. Just costs a lot.

Simple text ads to start. It was built on MySQL, Java and C++ and became how they made most of their money.

The point is that times change, and institutions change, and holding grudges for long ago sins and policies is ineffective.

ok

"and any kind of believe system hurts our society and divides us."

People shouldn't believe anything?

Disagreement and conflict are natural. How we handle these disagreements while striving for widespread peace and prosperity is the question.

For all the lies, bad behavior, and broken promises, SpaceX's achievements and reliability record is still incredible, X/Twitter hasn't crashed and burned after all the layoffs and drama, and Tesla (until recently due to his meddling) had a lock on the leading the car industry's direction & doing a lot to drive practical electrification globally.

I think this is definitionally wrong, but okay. We're talking about the price of supply chain components, not assets or speculative commodities. Tulip valuations were entirely driven by speculation. Housing bubbles are largely driven by speculation with cheap credit. Railway mania was about a stock market bubble, not the price of rail itself.

> Forecasts do not make it so.

In publicly traded companies, they tend to be accurate. Are you suggesting that NVIDIA has given improper forward guidance and is about to be subject to major shareholder lawsuits? That's a major short sell opportunity, and I suggest you get on that!

> Inference is massively subsidized. The demand is fictitious just because of that. Once prices go up, especially once free or cheap inference dries up, demand will collapse.

This is, kindly, incredibly wishful thinking. It may be true for individual companies that are stretching themselves too thin. On the other hand, Anthropic claims they are not subsidizing inference (they have raised prices - it hasn't slowed demand) and will become profitable around 2028 as training costs for LLMs have likely peaked. We'll see.

> It hasn't. For all the claims that AI has made any given job so much easier, developers who claim "It'd have cost me a billion years to do so" (next time bring a counterfactual), the actual economic benefit appears to be a big fat zero. We're right back to the Solow paradox.

... I think you may misunderstand the Solow paradox. Paul Strassmann's work on information productivity and "The Squandered Computer" covers a lot of this: there is no correlation between IT investment and productivity or profitability on the firm level, and a serious lag in overall productivity statistics until the 90s, because such gains are only achievable through alignment to meaningful business goals and structural change on processes. It's only when impactful practices become ubiquitous that they reflect in the statistics. The same will be for AI. Which is why I don't think that AI will be as fast an economic transformation as its proponents believe. But it will take place, unevenly to start.

> So much of the demand for inference is driven by hype.

We agree there.

> Companies using AI in the expectation of an ROI that has not materialized, and in many places, is very unlikely to.

We agree there too.

> Where will these tens of trillions come from if the aggregate economic benefit doesn't exist? Joe Slopman making a dozen CRUD apps a week for half a million in revenue, but there ain't a million of him.

Compressed project capital requirements and schedules, and compressed operational expenditure & time for many business processes. I've seen this myself before AI, 25+ years ago, with business process management and enterprise resource planning - think Peoplesoft, SAP, etc., replacing armies of paperwork processors. Same for accounting systems in the 60s and 70s.

Another area I have deep familiarity with - "precision railroading" pioneered by Hunter Harrison (a mix of locomotive distributed power technology, classification yard technology, IT systems, lean thinking, and management insight) has led to the most effective freight delivery times we've seen and productivity gains that many thought would be impossible (operating ratios in the sub-60s at times). This took decades to tweak and "get right" and is still subject to to many problems (safety issues, crew stress, and reliability delays to smaller customers due to a lack of slack in the system).

Of course, it takes insight, discipline, and design to extract technological gains on an individual firm or agency basis, which is why this stuff doesn't show up in the aggregate statistics until many years afterwards. Business intelligence systems also improved production and market decision making in the 90s and 00's, but that's hard to trace back to IT improvements.

I think with AI it is another round of major IT improvements in industries that were previously less susceptible to such change, and as such it will definitely be a multi-trillion dollar impact. But... It will be a mixed bag for a while - much longer than the AI CEOs would have you believe. I don't think this will lead to a crash, but I do think component shortages will eventually end (towards 2028-2029). Some will find significant benefits with it through expressive prompting, appropriate agent structure & guardrails, and deep contexts... and it will take a while for that know-how to spread.

> In no small part because any "efficiency" or "productivity" gains realized by AI immediately drives down the cost of the good or service produced.

I think there's significant lag on that point.