This ban will be used to force hardware and OS-level Digital ID down our throats as a "safety measure" to ensure people are "Citizens" before accessing AI technology.
Whatever last vestiges of privacy we still enjoy will be taken from us with this as the excuse.
Go ahead. Click into any of your Google Photo albums. Just as we all surely hoped and desperately needed, the title is finally using a comic-sans-inspired font face.
It was long series of incredible and impressive feats of truly singular engineering talent continuously wasted solving problems of our own making that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.
I agree, this is a common story and your point stands for some significant percentage of the complaints.
It should be made clear though, that some of us helped spend many millions in obviously wasteful on-prem infra in the nineties, bought into AWS wholeheartedly when it came out, fought through the ignorance, developed the ability to deliver highly scaled applications on the platform over many years and at least some of us still carry those same beliefs:
- It's more complicated than it needs to be
- It's more expensive than it should be
- Pricing is more opaque than it should be
Meanwhile, the cost of other options (including self-managed, on-prem infra) has fallen massively since those early days of AWS.
Like OP, I was an AWS booster for many years (also a Heroku lover), but fell out of love about 10 years ago for the same reasons.
- It felt like far too much complexity just to do simple things.
- The obvious attempts to trap customers with slightly incompatible, higher level services felt gross
- The inability to run AWS trash on a dev machine had a MASSIVE hit on productivity
- Pricing didn't fall as fast as I felt it should (an obviously debatable position that reasonable, smart folks disagree with)
In my current company, we've been running basic SMB/tech startup functions on-prem (ACK! THE HORROR!) from ~6 basic computers (4 game machines and 2 nucs) for a few years now.
We just reconstituted the entire infra working part-time over about 2 weeks using Claude code and ansible.
It really doesn't make sense in this world to pay tens of thousands of dollars to rent a level of computation that can be purchased and managed for a tiny fraction of that money.
We're also seeing massive dividends paying out with this architecture because we have self-hosted gitea, along with a local workstation for our agents to run in, and now our agents have all of the context without us relying on Github or ingress/egress fees at all.
I worked at Google. I know there are tons and tons of great and well meaning people working there. This is the kind of thing that would make me crazy.
People there be like, “but I’m not evil! I’ll never do anything bad with all of this incredible power!”
But if you create a nuclear bomb, someone unsavory is going to wrest control of that power from your stupid little painted fingernails and destroy the rest of us with it.
How about, don’t make an effing privacy nuclear bomb if you don’t want to contribute to making the world more evil?
For the newer players who have gotten into continuous integration and containerized builds, consider checking on your systems to be sure you're not pulling 'latest' across a bunch of packages with every build.
We set up our base containers with all the external dependencies already in them and then only update those explicitly when we decide it's time.
This means we might be a bit behind the bleeding edge, but we're also taking on a lot less risk with random supply chain vulns getting instant global distribution.
An ashtray is such a temporally rooted object, the phrase, "throwing around ashtrays," immediately conjures a bunch of peripheral concrete imagery.
I imagine there will soon be generations of young people who wonder what a tray of ashes was used for and why people used to collect them all over their homes and offices.
Always loved this parody of her art-school video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsgWUq0fdKk