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Comment Couldn't find their app the other day (Score 4, Insightful) 51

We wanted to sign up to stream some hbo stuff and couldn't find their app in the tv store. After much digging we found out they had rebranded simply as "Max", which, I can't imagine why they would drop the name brand that brought us sex in the city, have of thrones, the sopranos, for some unrelated generic word

Comment Re:The AI gamble (Score 2) 71

No, they hired a guy to run their AI department and it's been going very poorly. If you're looking at "abject failures of AI trying to win in the market" this isn't it, the guy they hired to run their AI division is just bad at running AI divisions at microsoft. Even their CFO was critical of the guy last week in a public meeting. People at least critisize apple's lack of interest in AI, microsoft is doing so poorly they're not even part of the conversation.

Comment Re:They're weirdly vocal about this (Score 1) 65

They almost certainly increased staffing, you need capacity planning, ordering testing installing and then headcount to monitor and repair, plus engineering resources to manage all the day to day infra operations. Part of the aws pricing is paying for the headcount on their side to manage uptime and reliability.

Comment Re:both a lack of accounting and accountability (Score 4, Informative) 65

The cost increase is generally justified as an early business expense as 1) aws services are generally reliable, secure by default, and excellent uptime 2) cheaper than hiring a dedicated operations person, your developers can just cobble together something and go 3) you don't need to do capacity planning. database going underwater? convert it to one twice as powerful in about 15 minutes with zero downtime! magic
 
Capacity planning has to be done quarterly, you need good metrics to do that, then you have to order, assemble, test the hardware which for a one-off thing can be quick but as sustained business operations is a 2-4 week project from the initial request to having it serving production traffic. once growth levels off DIY datacenter stuff can make sense, but early stage with less than 50 employees the AWS premium makes a lot of sense. transitioning to dedicated hardware is also an indicator that growth has leveled off or become extremely predictable.

Comment Re:OceanX (Score 1) 22

We've found a handful of complex life living deep in the sea near volcanic vents, including a snail that builds its shell primarily out of iron. So finding exotic life with different primary processes is valuable but... yeah deep sea exploration budgets are probably about correct until we find something of unique value down there, like a giant gold field or something. Oil fields have all mostly been mapped so far.

Comment They're weirdly vocal about this (Score 0) 65

They're saving $2 million a year which is.... 10 engineers' salary? Maybe 15 with juniors. How many engineers do they have? 200? I guess this looks good on paper but It's not outrageously big savings. Probably the biggest outcome of this transition is that they've fully quantified what their system really is and that allows them to consolidate various features since literally everything in their business stack is accounted for now, and you get a bunch of efficiencies by dropping dead code/zombie services. Good for them, but this doesn't strike me as headline news.

Comment Re:I never understood.. (Score 2) 81

To get good use out of LLMs you need to provide adequate context and not mischaracterize the task. LLMs are getting better about recognizing when humans mischaracterize a task, or a step is skipped due to context of human language. Coding business apps is annoying/difficult because telling your assistant "forward these kinds of emails to the rental team" is easy and they'll navigate edge cases, but coding that is harder as you have to know the edge cases in advance. For example I just asked chatgpt for an example of highly context specific languages and it returned a couple paragraphs about "recursively enumerable languages in the Chomsky hierarchy" which relates to programming languages intepeting natural languages; when I wanted human languages, which I corrected and then it spit out japanese, korean, chinese. Understanding the question sufficiently enough to ask specific questions is pretty important. I agree though people are getting better at asking questions with enough context it's becoming a task rather than a job.

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