Suggesting that a push-based, Ansible-based architecture will scale to hundreds of thousands of targets, with such pushes happening hundreds if not thousands of times a day, is a junior-level idea at best, dark comedy if I'm being charitable, and professional malpractice at worst.

Thanks for the laugh...

Drugs cost pennies to manufacture after they are researched and make their way through the approval pipeline. There are many generic drug manufacturers who can work off the existing formulas.

The more apt comparison is that LLMs won't be un-trained. Opus 4.8 now exists. Even if Anthropic somehow went bankrupt, that particular asset could, at the very least, be sold for proverbial pennies on the dollar to a "generic" inference provider.

I 100% agree. It's terrible that large private companies like Cargill and any others large enough to make this list: https://www.forbes.com/lists/top-private-companies/ are allowed to continue operating without being forced to list on stock markets and being subject to public reporting requirements. There's a very big difference between concentrated ownership by the wealthy and public ownership.

> You are very literally arguing for plutocracy over democracy

You can only assume that public markets results in plutocracy if individual investors hold outsize amounts of outstanding shares. The elections for Boards of Directors are not competitive when an individual shareholder holds majority voting power. There is a separate argument for a wealth tax that I agree with, and there are arguments to be made for maximum share prices (reaching the maximum triggers an automatic stock split) to guarantee financial accessibility (cough, BRK.A, cough).

When did public ownership mean that the government needed to be the owner? And when did we start to allow companies to float so few shares that public shareholder voting rights became largely meaningless?

For such doomsdayer opinions to be correct, we'd see it in massive unemployment figures. US unemployment sitting at 4.3% does not bear that out. Finland and Spain are currently at >10+% unemployment. US youth unemployment may be at 9.5%, but British and Chinese youth unemployment are higher than 16%.

Is there some Finnish, Spanish, British, Chinese civil unrest that I'm not seeing in my media outlets?

This is bizarre. When you agree to take a $100k base salary, you don't get all $100k on the first day; your salary is split into pay periods, and if you leave earlier (voluntary or not) then you don't get the rest of the year's salary by default (severance aside).

I'll agree with you that RSUs for public companies should not have cliffs. But the idea that you agree to a large amount of compensation up-front (so that re-negotiation is infrequent) which is then paid out in portions on a regular basis is very standard, for both cash and equity.

Calling this "psychosis" is maybe a neologism but it's apt in perspective.

All that's actually new with "AI psychosis" is an acceleration of that phenomenon. The agents will summarize status faster than any middle manager. Claude will happily draw you any "up-and-to-the-right" graph you please, with the most common contemporary examples being "tokens burned" and "lines of code written". And vibe coding doesn't even require paying the cost of a mass layoff to get the "familiarity debt".

There have always been both good and bad engineering leaders. No tool will magically make a bad leader into a good leader overnight. There is nothing new under the sun.

You're over-simplifying. Code in and of itself is neither an asset nor a liability. The minimal amount of code needed to solve business needs with no additional complexity is an asset with some maintenance liabilities attached (same as how a farmer's tractor is an asset that needs to be maintained), with depreciation if unmaintained (bitrot). Any code used to build unnecessary complexity is pure liability.

If you run more than one service/codebase, you might be better suited to using a proper container orchestration platform. Doesn't have to be Kubernetes. AWS ECS, GCP Cloud Run, Kamal are all modern options here.

If you run a single codebase in production, why are you even containerizing? Language ecosystems have done a phenomenal job of improving their dependency management since Docker was released. Python has uv. Go has modules. NodeJS has pnpm. Do you actually get benefit from containerizing if you're deploying to a single production host somewhere?

Not at all obvious. A lot of "fresh" produce in the US was refrigerated for more than a week before it arrived in the supermarket, from varieties that were designed to hold up to transport rather than flavor. Fruit that was canned at the height of the season is often much more flavorful than "fresh" off-season fruit.

The US has a problem with packing fruit in added sugar, which is sad but not inherent to canned fruit.

Each critical and warning alert should link to an "interactive runbook" - a dashboard that combines text instructions along with graphs showing real-time data.

Doing this at scale, correctly, requires both alerts-as-code and dashboards-as-code, which almost nobody does because nobody treats higher-level configuration languages (jsonnet, CUE...) with the attention and respect they deserve /cries-in-yaml

> So you need to consider the emergency of moving somewhere in a political and legal climate not known in advance.

Fair enough. So do the financial planning, and ask yourself, how much does it cost to fly/travel to X place that is far away? Put in a risk premium - what if the cost became 2X or 3X because of a sudden catastrophe affecting everyone? What is the actual number that you need to save? Can you keep the money in a bank account, or are you concerned that banks will be inaccessible, and thus need something more portable? If you need something more portable, how much will it cost to protect it (vault/safe, weapons)?

I sympathize that life isn't fair, and that financial goals for some people need to be concerned first and foremost with personal safety instead of luxurious "nice-to-haves". But my point is that there are still actual numbers involved, and that you can put those numbers into a spreadsheet, and that the spreadsheet can help you understand your progress towards those goals. Financial planning is valuable regardless of what your goals are.

It's one thing, without a spreadsheet, to have the emotion of "I'm not going to have enough and I need to save more to make sure I have enough." I'd argue it's even evolutionary; we want to make sure we have enough to get through the winter we know is coming.

It's quite another when your spreadsheet shows you saved X, your monthly cost of living is Y, and therefore you have enough money saved, even if your income went to zero and you made no changes to your lifestyle, to last you for Z years. Being able to take YouTube University rule-of-thumb advice like "of your take-home pay, use 65% for necessities, 15% for long-term savings, 20% for enjoyment" and seeing how much money that is per month for you in your personal circumstances, along with rules of thumb on things like what ratio you should have achieved by which age on net worth-to-income ratio (1x by 30, 2x by 35, 3x by 40, etc.) and seeing what your personal actual ratio is, to get a sense of benchmarking yourself.

I mean, the influencers could be totally full of shit, but it doesn't matter. Getting actual numbers for where you are, plus getting "generic" advice that you know wasn't directed at you personally, and seeing how those numbers make you feel, can do a lot to either tell you "you don't need to be so frugal anymore" or "yep, your emotions are totally justified, keep saving".

This happened frequently enough at large enough scale we seriously considered building an automation to attempt to analyze the Terraform logs for the connection breaking and automatically import the created resource.

Azure support was completely worthless.

It's quite rare to find companies that do this for the same reason it's quite rare to find companies willing to "do agile correctly" and really scope out work before sprints and not put additional work in the middle of a sprint. It takes too much effort and gives up too much flexibility for most managers to make the investment and see if it pays off.

So it's a bit of a tautology. Managers who manage time better are more effective. Who knew?

No, it's a concern if you care about impact. Improving commercial profits is one kind of impact that is relevant to for-profit corporations, but there is also impact like "improving user privacy" or "helping lower-income people manage their finances with a free-as-in-beer product". This impact can be measured and the feedback can be used to improve the product according to non-profit, non-commercial goals.

There are also people who build open-source software as a hobby and couldn't give two shits whether other people use it or not. More power to them. For those people, you are correct. https://book.iced.rs/philosophy.html comes to mind.

Then there are projects like Streisand (maybe a bad example, I see it has since been archived, but it came to mind) that want to change the world in some way. Those projects very much do need to care about metrics like, how many people are downloading the software, are people opening GitHub issues, are we obscure or is our target audience talking about us, hopefully positively but if not, how can we improve that? Value must always be worth the cost (even when the code is free, it must be worth the time to download, give it a try, give it CPU/RAM, maintain/upgrade the installation) - are we giving users value or are they churning?

It might blow your mind but even non-profits hire people with MBAs (and universities offer programs for MBAs that focus on non-profit management), precisely because some organizations focus on non-financial impact.