> Am I naive for thinking that nothing like that should take as long as 6-9 months in the happy case and that it's absurd for it to not succeed at all?
Bluntly, yes. And so is every other reply to you that says "no this isn't naive", or "there's no reason this project shouldn't have finished". All that means is that you've not seen a truly "enterprise" codebase that may be bringing in tons of business value, but whose internals are a true human centipede of bad practices and organic tendrils of doing things the wrong way.
> Did you actually use the command you ended up with?
Yes! Note that I had to use my domain knowledge to sift through the options and eliminate the garbage, but the experience was just _faster_ than repeated searches and digging through ad-laden garbage sites.
Here's my pet example...feel free to google around yourself on this.
Problem: I want an AWS CLI command line that requests a whole bunch of wildcard certificates from AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) for a TLD.
Ostensible solution: the AWS official docs have a small snippet to achieve this, BUT -- the snippet on the official page is inadvisable as it leads to a browser cert warning.
So I (skeptically) asked ChatGPT for a command line to achieve what I was trying to do.
Try 1: got basically the snippet from the AWS official docs (but with the inadvisable flag set to the _Correct_ value, strangely)
Prompt 2: please give me more best practice options
Try 2: get back a bunch of new CLI options and their meanings. 3 are useful. 1 is hallucinated. 1 is deprecated.
Prompt 3: keep going with more options
Try 3: 2 more useful new options, 2 more options I chose not to use
As a skeptic, the overall experience was much more efficient that googling around or even reading a manpage. I put it all on the fact that context is maintained between questions, so you don't have to repeat yourself when asking for clarifications.
A lot of the value comes from follow-up questions. Imagine being able to interrogate a StackOverflow answer with new constraints and details. Not always correct, but in some cases, faster that typing in a new search term and parsing a screen full of links.
ROI talk aside, and long risks aside, as an entrepreneur in SV, I'll be damned if I touch a dollar of Thiel funding. You can be as rational and cynical as you like, but if you even indirectly support a candidate as abhorrent morally as Trump, I'm going to assume that you have the same vacuousness in ethics that the top of the Republican ticket has, and I'd rather be an impoverished failure than take a dollar of his cynical Paypal money. Fuck you, Peter Thiel, you're on the wrong side of history.
Edit: and I don't care if this is my last HN post ever.
Your comment represents some of the best of HN (detailed, illuminating, informative), but is incredibly depressing for someone with an idle curiosity in FPGAs. This is what I've long suspected, and it seems that the barrier to entry is generally a bit too high for "software" people.
This aspect of their new chips is massively underrated. An FPGA is the future-proof solution here, not chip-level instructions for the soup-du-jour in machine learning.
Edit: which is not to say that I'm not welcoming the new instructions with open arms...