Multi-cloud is far from trivial, which is why most companies… don’t.

Even if you are multi-cloud, you will be egressing data from one platform to another and racking up large bills (imagine putting CloudFront in front of a GCS endpoint lmao), you are incentivized to stick on a single platform. I don’t blame anyone for being single-cloud with the barriers they put up, and how difficult maintaining your own infrastructure is.

Once you get large enough to afford tape libraries then yeah having your own offsite for large backups makes a lot of sense, but otherwise the convenience and reliability (when AWS isn’t nuking your account) of managed storage is hard to beat — cold HDDs are not great, and m-disc is pricey.

In this guy’s specific case, it may be financially feasible to back up onto other cloud solutions, for the reasons you stated.

However public cloud is used for a ton of different things. If you have 4TiB of data in Glacier, you will be paying through the absolute nose pulling that data down into another cloud; highway robbery prices.

Further as soon as you talk about something more than just code (say: UGC, assets, databases) the amount of data needing to be “egressed” from the cloud balloons, as does the price.

It really depends, pulling hundreds of GiB out of AWS for backing up on say GCS is going to add up extremely quickly. The cloud companies make it intentionally painful to leave or interop.

The recent boom in neural net research will have real applicable results that are genuine progress: signal processing (e.g. noise removal), optical character recognition, transcription, and more.

However the biggest hype areas with what I see as the smallest real return is in the huge model LLM space, which basically try to portray AGI as just around the corner. LLMs will have real applications in summarization, but largely otherwise they just generate asymptotically plausible babble, very good for filling the Internet with slop, not actually useful to replace all the positions OAI, et al, need it to (for their funding to be justified).

https://transform.tools/json-to-java

Writing tests is a good example. It’s not great at writing tests, but it is definitely better than the average developer when you take the probability of them writing tests in the first place into account.

Outside of everything else discussed here, this is something I disagree with on a fundamental level, flawed tests are worse than no tests, IMO.
Not to get too deep in to the very contentious space of testing in development, but when it comes to automated testing, I think we’re better off with more rigorous^[1] testing instead of just chasing test coverage metrics.

I keep getting told that AI is good at boilerplate code, and like, so is eclipse – if you know the kb shortcuts to autogenerate method stubs, classes, etc.

It solves a pretty hard problem that is a self-hosted video platform; a lot of places use YouTube to host videos, even if they aren’t doing so to make money through adsense, this is for their own site material, posting to groupchats, and similar purposes.

Issue is that otherwise you rely on platform owners like Google, who can decide to unperson you, your business, or an employee. It effectively happened to me, YT terminated my channel for unsubstantiated reasons, and hosting my own peertube is likely in the future to replace where I host my decades of video content.

Further, ideologically, we should be collectively moving away from “platforms” for what should be obvious reasons to those of us on the fediverse.

I think it’s “the algorithm”, people basically just want to be force-fed “content” – look how successful TikTok is, largely because it has an algorithm that very quickly narrows down user habits and provides endless distraction.

Mastodon and fediverse alternatives by comparison have very simple feeds and ways to surface content, it simply doesn’t “hook” people the same way, and that’s competition.

On one hand we should probably be doing away with “the algorithm” for reasons not enumerated here for brevity, but on the other hand maybe the fediverse should build something to accommodate this demand, otherwise the non-fedi sites will.

Most of the VCS ops in Hg are actually written in C.

GitHub is mostly written in Ruby, so that’s not really a performance win.

Like I said, we’re stuck with Git’s UX, but we were never stuck with Hg’s performance.

I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say a significant percentage of Git activity happens on GitHub (and other “foundries”) – which are themselves a far cry from efficient.

My ultimate takeaway on the topic is that we’re stuck with Git’s very counterintuitive porcelain, and only satisfactory plumbing, regardless of performance/efficiency; but if Mercurial had won out, we’d still have its better interface (and IMO workflow), and any performance problems could’ve been addressed by a rewrite in C (or the Rust one that is so very slowly happening).

Further hampered by the Steam “discussions” that are an incredibly unmoderated cesspit.

If they were a small or free service I wouldn’t have much issue, but they do charge, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that they at least attempt to scrape the wider web.

Building their own database seems the prudent thing long-term, I don’t doubt they could shore up coverage over Bing. They don’t have to replace the other indexes wholesale, just supplement it.

They have smallweb and news indexing, but other than that AFAICT they rely completely on other providers. Which is a shame, Google allows submitting sites for indexing and notifies if they can’t.

Running a scraper doesn’t need to cover everything since they have access to other indexes, but they really should be developing that ability instead of relying on Bing and other providers to provide good results, or results at all.

Small web always returns 0 results for anything that isn’t extremely broad, unfortunately.

I’ve been using Kagi for the last year+.

Personally, I wish they’d tone down the AI stuff that ruined Google, but at least you can turn most of it off.

Their results are okay, a little better than Bing, but obviously they’re limited by their existing index providers, I wish they’d run their own spiders and crawl for their own data, since I think Bing fails on a lot of coverage of obscure websites.

In general I find the weighting of modern indexes to be subpar, though the SEO industry has made it a hard problem to tackle, I wish more small websites and forums were higher ranked, and AI slop significantly de rated.

At what level? I get a student email from my college (outlook based) as do the professors, though communication is primarily through Canvas. So that’s what I see most often in that context.

I think a lot of people have Gmail incidentally for things like YouTube and other Google account stuff, very few people know you can even bring your own mail.

I still see lots of different emails out there, outlook/hotmail is still huge, yahoo occasionally, icloud in the US.

Among my techy friend circle all of us have either our own self hosted mail, a ‘privacy’ company email, or something in the middle.

All to say, I don’t think it’s that uphill of a battle for the very large percentage of Internet users to accept the way federation works.

Regardless if it was the plan, it’s the result.

I can’t stand what it has become, especially when some of the most problematic subs have massive influence over the rest of the site, like wsb.

Yeah, I was starting to feel a bit crazy with how many were coming out of the woodwork with almost exactly that same wording, even in my city’s sub.