AWS is built for production. It’s complex because it’s designed to create robust environments that can scale almost infinitely, that’s why half of the internet runs on AWS. But to make the most of it, you need to understand how it works and why it’s built that way. That’s why being an “AWS expert” is practically a job description on its own, thats why cloud engineering teams exists, platforms, SRE, etc.
For quick and dirty app deployments, though, other vendors like Heroku probably do a better job.
We’re 100% on Azure but so far there’s no impact for us.
Luckily, we moved off Azure Front Door about a year ago. We’d had three major incidents tied to Front Door and stopped treating it as a reliable CDN.
They weren’t global outages, more like issues triggered by new deployments. In one case, our homepage suddenly showed a huge Microsoft banner about a “post-quantum encryption algorithm” or something along those lines.
Kinda wild that a company that big can be so shaky on a CDN, which should be rock solid.
Quitting coffee was a really bad experience for me.
I had what felt like withdrawal symptoms: a strong headache, muscle aches, and I was really cold. It lasted for two days, until I took a minuscule sip and everything went away within five minutes.
That made me realize the extent to which I was actually addicted, and how dependent my body was on it.
I managed to quit and stayed caffeine-free for about a year.
But one day I said, “Just one cup won’t hurt,” and oh boy... it was like having superpowers. I was so focused, so wide awake. Of course, I’m an addict again. :(
Some people reading this (systems engineers with a career) could probably retire, or at least downshift. Work just enough to pay for groceries, and spend your days doing what you actually want.
Today we can access, easily and cheaply (often free), almost every song ever recorded, every book ever written, every movie ever filmed, every video game ever made. You can write and reach thousands. You can film and reach millions. Twenty years ago, that was a millionaire’s life.
It’s the need for more and more and more that alienates us. Do you really need that shiny new car? Do you really need to take a vacation? Do you really need that promotion?
For some, work (and the status that comes with it) became their identity. Take it away and there’s nothing left. Others keep constant noise and stress around just to avoid hearing themselves think.
Great find! and I don’t want to underestimate the discovery by any means, but...
We humans are predisposed to see anthropomorphic shapes in things. I understand why that could be interpreted as a face, but at the same time, it could just be a random shape. It’s just a “T” shape. Sure, it could look like a nose and a pair of eyes, but it could also just be... something.
My first introduction to Linux was through Knoppix, the first “live CD” if I recall correctly. Maybe there was something before it, but I remember it as something new and magical at the time: being able to test a full Linux desktop directly from a CD.
From there, as I was learning Linux (I was 16 years old), I used KDE a lot. It was such a cool experience. I especially loved how easy it was to create custom themes, the desktop widgets, and Amarok! the big “killer app” back then. A music player that could show you song lyrics, album art, and even the band’s history by pulling data from Wikipedia and other APIs. It felt futuristic.
Later on, I switched to GNOME as it became more popular in the mid 2000s, but I’ve always had a soft spot for KDE. It’s been part of my Linux journey for nearly three decades.
I’ve been thinking about the impact of LLMs on software engineering through a Marxist lens. Marx described one of capitalism’s recurring problems as the crisis of overproduction: the economy becomes capable of producing far more goods than the market can absorb profitably. This contradiction (between productive capacity and limited demand) leads to bankruptcies, layoffs, and recessions until value and capital are destroyed, paving the way for the next cycle.
Something similar might be happening in software. LLMs allow us to produce more software, faster and cheaper, than companies can realistically absorb. In the short term this looks amazing: there’s always some backlog of features and technical debt to address, so everyone’s happy.
But a year or two from now, we may reach saturation. Businesses won’t be able to use or even need all the software we’re capable of producing. At that point, wages may fall, unemployment among engineers may grow, and some companies could collapse.
In other words, the bottleneck in software production is shifting from labor capacity to market absorption. And that could trigger something very much like an overproduction crisis. Only this time, not for physical goods, but for code.
In my experience, LLM-generated code is only as good (or as bad) as the software engineering skills of the “vibe coder.” A seasoned engineer will not only craft clear, detailed prompts that specify how something should be implemented, but will also review the AI’s output on the fly, correcting major derailments—things like: “Don’t create a new function for that; just modify X to add support for this case.” They’ll even do an initial review of the code before opening a PR.
The real problem arises when non-technical people use an LLM to generate a full project from scratch. The code may work, but it’s often unmaintainable. These people sometimes believe they’re geniuses and view software engineers as blockers, dismissing their concerns as mere technical “mumbo jumbo.”
It’s strange that you can patent gameplay mechanics. After all, gameplay mechanics are what define a genre.
It’s like in literature if someone could patent the idea of a detective investigating a murder.
How could the "pokemon-like" genre even exist if you couldn’t create a game that uses “summoning and battling characters”?
Even worse, that description alone applies to multiple genres... JRPGs, or even fighting games with multiple characters (something like Marvel vs. Capcom) could fit that description.
I can understand intellectual property rights for very specific technical implementations (for example, the raycasting technique used in Wolfenstein 3D) but you shouldn’t be able to patent the concept of the first person shooter itself. That feels more like restricting freedom of expression.
Oh the memories, i worked like... 20 years ago! on EDS for the Sun Microsystems account as a Solaris System Administrator.
It's hard to explain how advanced was Solaris at the time, specially Solaris 10 which had something named "Zones" which were actually some initial form of containers. With Zones you could run another instance of the OS completely isolated from the main Solaris (the kernel was shared, but for your apps would look like a native OS). You could even run another Solaris version! that was a cool approach to migrate a really old solaris 8 app to solaris 10 without having to change the app code.
Zones, combined with Sun Cluster or Veritas cluster would give you the ability to migrate those zones from one node of the cluster to the other (with it's own lun -external scsi disk/volume attached-) giving you some reaaaaaly interesting and new approaches to system design.
You can think about it as your dad's kubernetes.
Nothing like that could be done in linux at the time, and no one would use linux for any critical task, only for lamp servers.
Agree completely, the title is misleading. I was amazed by it by just watching the video, but this is actually a fan project. Which is cool, but not a prototype of the original game as the title implies, or something that should be "recovered".
yeah, i suppose we bought "a license to use the car", like a really expensive entry fee. If the car was free and i was just renting it then maybe it makes sense, but capping something you bought is crazy and asking recurring money to unlock it is crazy.
The idea of a service is that you pay a monthly fee and can use it during that period. It implies that the vendor has some kind of ongoing or recurring cost, or that they need to continuously provide or produce the service in some way. For example, in software they need to keep the servers running, push updates, and so on. If the service is related to goods, they deliver you a set of products that you’ve subscribed to on a recurring basis.
This new approach, however, often means you need to pay to use something that has already been produced, with its functionality fully available, but locked unless you subscribe. In that case, they are not really providing a service, they’re just holding a feature hostage until you pay. That isn’t a service; it’s basically extortion. If the car were free, I could understand having to pay to unlock it. But needing a subscription just to use my own car at full capacity? That’s dystopian.
I can totally see a TV that refuses to turn on until you’ve paid Samsung, a fridge that stays locked until you cough up more money, or a toilet that only lets you flush twice a day.Unless, of course, you upgrade to premium.
Don't worry, just press and hold the power button on the satellites until they turn off, then release and press it again to power them back on. Should be fine.
This will happen in production at a large company in the near future.
I keep seeing more and more vibe coded AI implementations that do whatever... by anyone. And managers celebrate that the new junior engineer created something that "saves a lot of time!" (two full time positions in their heads)
I agree it can be useful for some tasks, but the non deterministic nature of AI will inevitably impact production once someone plugs an AI tool into a critical part of the system, thinking they’re a genius.
For quick and dirty app deployments, though, other vendors like Heroku probably do a better job.