Dijkstra understood it 50 years ago, and again 26 years ago [1]. Nothing changes. Malpractice just propagate and there are zero incentives to build simple, small, and maintainable software.
If the company you work for just push for unnecessary complexity, get out of there! Don't fold!
> If the company you work for just push for unnecessary complexity, get out of there!
Why? We learn all these cool patterns and techniques to address existing complexity. We get to fight TRexes… and so we get paid good money (compared to other jobs). No one is gonna pay me 120K in europe to build simple stuff that can work in a single sqlite db with a php fronted.
Except now we get websites that need to download 20-25MB of "latest cool framework" to show you a blurb of text because programmers before you created unnecessary complexity that needs to be maintained forever.
The honest opinion no one wants to hear is that programmers do not deserve the money they are paid for because MOST of the time what it's really needed is a "single sqlite db with a php frontend".
Fair. I work on backend, and there we usually need db replication, sharding, event brokers, monitoring and alerting, autoscaling. I wish we wouldn’t need all of that, and could use a single server with sqlite… but that won’t cut it.
Sam Altman (and everyone else in the field) complain that estimates of water and power consumption of AI are wrong, but instead of just publishing that data they come up with this crap.
What data do you want to see published about water consumption? Here's Google's tiny tiny estimates[1], for example. AFAIK AI water usage has always been a made-up issue, spread by people who never realized before how much water is routinely spent by humanity.
From the post you linked "These findings do not represent the specific environmental impact for all Gemini App text-generation prompts nor are they indicative of future performance."
I would like to see independent agencies having access to the various companies to provide reliable estimates. Just because humanity as a whole consumes a lot of water does not justify the extra consumption of water AND energy AND land AND monetary resources that is wasted on AI crap.
Humans also don't have wheels, but we build objects with wheels. It is as if we can build objects that don't resemble humans for specific purposes. Crazy...
Maybe because of the multiple investigations Tesla has currently due to crashes, deaths, injuries, etc. all caused by "whoops our cameras were fooled by some glare/fog and accelerated into a truck/pole"
Those are mainly autopilot which people conflate with FSD, and high percentage are human caused accidents (auto pilot requires full attention and driver is liable).
Autopilot is Tesla’s brand name for adaptive cruise control with lane centering. This is a common feature available on a wide range of vehicles from nearly every major manufacturer, though marketed under different names (e.g., ProPilot, BlueCruise).
Drivers can and do misuse adaptive cruise control systems, sometimes with fatal consequences. Memes aside, there is no strong evidence that fatal misuse occurs more frequently by owners of Tesla cars than with comparable systems from other brands.
This perception reflects the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, more commonly known as the frequency illusion. Nobody is collecting statistics for other brands, so it’s assumed the phenomenon doesn’t occur.
A similar pattern occurred with media coverage of EV fires. Except in this case, good statistics exist which prove the opposite: ICE vehicles catch fire more often than EVs.
not OP, but sometimes I add the ebook version to my library even if I never use them. To find it again and fix it, sometimes I need to scroll through the years of read books to spot the tiny icon that distinguishes the version of the book.
It would be nice to have a simple filter by book type (physical/ebook/audio) in the library page.
Before everyone jumps on CodeBerg, please remember it runs on donations! It doesn't have Micro$lop money behind. Please donate to projects like this :)
This can have pros and cons. They will get much more vcpu / dollar on bare metal. And they can develop great operational discipline if they do it right.
On the downside, I don’t see them yet taking ops seriously. They are getting a lot of attention, but not yet establishing SLAs (at least not publicly). And their donations don’t seem to be scaling to the continued and expected demand.
Everyone: things suck, better move my stuff on a small home server.
The hyper-scaler mafia: NOT ON MY WATCH!
The only silver lining is that newer devices will have to scale down memory, so developers will have to ditch memory-sucking frameworks and start to optimize things again.
How many useless living humans do you know? They go somewhere. Something happens to them. Whatever it is it’s about to happen to 30% of the population.
Capitalism relies on consumers. It's pretty much central to the idea. That's why the world on average (median) has gotten wealthier and better off over the decades.
Do they? When I was at AWS in 2019-2021 there were some servers in the fleet— not many, but they definitely existed— which dated to before 2010. Maybe it depends on the type:class, but I think hyperscalers run hardware until it dies, then junk it. Where have you seen hyperscaler hardware for sale?
I've seen plenty of stuff from google and meta datacenters on the market.
Had some weirdo AMD GPUs that were GCP-only that were offered to folks if you bought in bulk quantity. A whole ton of whitebox Ethernet switches from Facebook were on the market a number of years ago.
Lots of weird stuff like OCP 25G NICs that only were bought in quantity by hyperscalers as well come out in waves. You don't see a lot of these things hit eBay and traditional "used marketplaces" but they are out there if you know where to look and have connections with liquidators. You're unlikely to get deals on a few here and there though unless the market becomes absolutely saturated - usually hundreds are MoQ for a lot of these things.
Storage will be unlikely to see as the risk:reward for a giant company usually is too great. If data was ever written to them, typically they will be shredded vs. secure wiped. Very few large corporations want to take the risk of some liquidator either not running a proper wipe process or something slipping through the cracks. Even with encrypted drives I haven't seen much in quantity hit unless they were quite literally never utilized and straight pulls from large JBOD orders or the like. However, ServerDirect and other places seem to have cracked this nut a little bit considering the number of refurb drives they run through - not sure what their sources are though. Certainly not hyperscaler levels in any case.
Given this has been going on for years at this point, the high prices of graphics cards through crypto and now AI, it feels like this is the new normal, forever propped up by the next grift.
I don't think this ideology and investment strategy will survive this grift. There's too much geopolitical instability and investment restructuring for it to work again. Everyone is looking at isolationist policies. I mean mastercard/visa is even seen as a risk outside US now.
Well a risk has an abstract level and is either increasing or decreasing. You can look at your risk profile over time and work out how to define policy going forwards. It takes a long time to make changes at country level.
US is medium risk and increasing rapidly. Run away quickly.
> I’m just afraid that prices of $everything will go up soon and will not come down anymore, like they did after Covid.
That's how inflation works. In this case it seems more narrow though, there's hope the prices will go down. Especially if the AI hype finds a reason to flounder.
> I’m just afraid that prices of $everything will go up soon and will not come down anymore, like they did after Covid.
Just like the price of labour. Your salary went up and doesn't come down
In the UK weekly earnings increased 34% from December 2019 to December 2025.
CPI went up 30% in the same period.
Obviously that CPI covers things which went up more, and things which went up less, and your personal inflation will be different to everyone elses. Petrol prices end of Jan 2020 were 128p a litre, end of Jan 2025 they are 132p a litre [0]. Indeed petrol prices were 132p in January 2013. If you drive 40,000 miles a year you will thus see far lower inflation than someone who doesn't drive.
> so developers will have to ditch memory-sucking frameworks
Since when have developers ever lowered hardware requirements? Prosumers will just cough up the extra money while casual users will continue to be left in the dust, like they have been for practically the last decade (or longer).
Unless people notice that they just built lots of useless datacenters and push back towards a mainframe + terminal setup, because ah sorry, modern software just runs much better that way, and you can save money on our inexpensive laptop with subscription model
Saw this one coming and got my personal stuff out. It's running on an old Lenovo crate chucked in my hallway.
Work is fucked. 23TB of RAM online. Microservices FTW. Not. Each node has OS overhead. Each pod has language VM overhead. And the architecture can only cost more over time. On top of that "storage is cheap so we won't bother to delete anything". Stupid mentality across the board.
It is one tiny sliver of silver lining that “storage/memory/compute is cheap” nonsense that has produced all kinds of outsourced human slop code. That mentality is clearly going to have to die.
It could even become a kind of renaissance of efficient code… if there is any need for code at all.
The five guys left online might even get efficient and fast loading websites.
Honorable mention of the NO-TECH and LOW-TECH magazine site because I liked the effort at exploring efficient use of technology, e.g., their ~500KB solar powered site.
We went from using technology to solve problems to the diametric opposite of creating new problems to solve with technology. The latter will have to contract considerably. As you say, many problems can be solved without code. If they even need to be solved in the first place.
On the efficiency front, most of what we built is for developer efficiency rather than runtime efficiency. Also needs to stop.
I'm a big fan of low tech. I still write notes on paper and use a film camera. Thanks for the link - right up my street!
> The only silver lining is that newer devices will have to scale down memory, so developers will have to ditch memory-sucking frameworks and start to optimize things again.
No. Prices will just go up, less innovation in general.
The main thing that the powers that be have always underestimated is the insane creativity the common people have when it comes to wanting things, but being forced to use alternative ways. Not going to say it won't suck, but interesting ways will indeed be found.
You’re going to find what, ways to make hand crafted survival RAM and drives in your backyard chip foundry?
Call me cynical if you like, but I don’t see this optimism that assumes the banal idea that somehow good always wins, when that’s simply not possible and in fact bad-guys have won many times before, it’s just that “dead men tell no tales” and the winners control what you think is reality.
The Chinese have end-to-end production capacity for lower capacity, lower performance/reliability consumer HDDs, so these are quite safe. Maybe we'll even see enterprise architectures where that cheap bottom-of-the-barrel stuff is used as opportunistic nearline storage, and then you have a far lower volume of traditional enterprise drives providing a "single source of truth" where needed.
In the same way that China is stepping into RAM production, I suspect they will step into the gap for high capacity drives as well. The market abhors a vacuum and China is eager to fill it, even at minimal levels of profit. Chinese manufacturers have become very good at providing an acceptable level of quality at a good price, maybe not the highest quality, but acceptable for consumer use.
I can understand that incumbents may not want to overinvest in capacity, which could be financially precarious, but they are also putting themselves in danger by opening up avenues for competition. One more thing ruined by AI mania, I suppose.
I come from a time when people had to use 1 to a maximum of 48 kilobytes for their entire computer. Later on i once went to Helsinki to watch with my own eyes what people can program in a restriction of 4 to 64 kilobytes. Computers have amazed me, but people who used them, have amazed me a lot of more times.
I wasn't saying it'll be good and that the good guys win, but a lot of insane creativity to circumvent restrictions will pop up.
Not like having a portable number, but I was able to do it kinda okay with DuckDuckGo @duck mail forwarding, at least for newsletters and other semi-spammy emails.
It is used to remove trackers from emails, but then I was able to just change the forwarding from gmail to another provider and that was it.
As a limitation, it doesn't allow to respond to emails from the same @duck email.
[1]: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1305.PDF
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