If I choose AWS/cloudflare and we're down with half of the internet, then I don't even need to explain it to my boss' bosses, because there will be an article in the mainstream media.
If I choose something else, we're down, and our competitors aren't, then my overlords will start asking a lot of questions.
Yup. AWS went down at a previous job and everyone basically took the day off and the company collectively chuckled. Cloudflare is interesting because most execs don’t know about it so I’d imagine they’d be less forgiving. “So what does cloudflare do for us exactly? Don’t we already have aws?”
Or _you_ aren't down, but a third-party you depend on is (auth0, payment gateway, what have you), and you invested a lot of time and effort into being reliable, but it was all for less than nothing, because your website loads but customers can't purchase, and they associate the problem with you, not with the AWS outage.
In reality it is not half of the internet. That is just marketing. I've personally noticed one news site while others were working. And I guess sites like that will get the blame.
I live in a city of about 160k inhabitants. I live about 2 kilometers away from the hypercenter. A half-hour walk, which I wouldn't consider "walking distance".
Most of the city center is inaccessible by car. Parking your car is expensive, driving is discouraged.
Removing cars means there's more space for people. It means it's safer, quieter. I'm not in mortal panic if my 4 years old drops my hand. It means the bus isn't stuck in traffic, and is therefore really fast. It's the most vibrant place I've ever lived in. It's full of life and energy.
There's a ton of small shops, whose names I can't remember, that I only discovered because I happened to walk past them. This creates a positive feedback loop. It's rewarding to just wander about, because you may discover something.
> Now what happens if you have a bunch of these components on a page? You get lots of uncoordinated data fetches. Each component is independent so it doesn’t know about the others so they can’t coordinate.
This is solved by tools like tanstack-query. Ten components using the same request will only trigger one API call, and the response will be shared.
You still can build websites this way. I was the first hire at my current company, I got to pick the stack of our frontend repo from the first commit. If you stay away from NextJS, things only improved since those heydays.
We're running tanstack-router, tanstack-query, and using vite underneath. That's about it. Each of these libraries are better and simpler than the standard redux/react-router/webpack from back in the day.
I've got lifelong backend developers reasonably (And somewhat happily) productive with the codebase.
This, with TypeScript strictness cranked all the way up.
MUI for the component library, plus Playwright for integration-testing and hoverfly to stub/fake/mock the backend, and Open-API to define the APIs between app -> bff -> backend.
This stack, plus claude-code, with the whole project fully automated (i.e. claude-code run all the parts easily) - is a literal productivity super-power. You can crank out entire complicated LoB apps, 10 - 30 pages of distinct, medium-complicated functionality in about a week, if not less - instead of weeks or months. Fully tested, production-ready codebase, not prototype-tier/vibe-code.
I tried that, but you end up sounding so bland and generic. It feels like the textual equivalent of the Corporate Memphis art style. I'm comfortable doing this at work because I exist outside of slack/emails, but in here I am what I write. If I delegate this to a LLM, then I do not exist anymore.
What I found useful is to use LLMs as a fuzzy near-synonym search engine. "Sad, but with a note of nostalgia", for example. It's a slower process, which in itself isn't bad.
I once worked for company with C-level guys working alongside the rank and file. Smartest guys I knew, EE degrees with honours from Cambridge. So smart that they knew their strength, and decided to let better people manage the company they created.
That's a dishonest argument. For a short to work, you need to be right about the direction _and_ the timing. Being right too soon amounts to being wrong, and the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Well yeah because in the end we're all dead. There will be a day when AI companies are like GE, IBM, or maybe even Intel. All innovative companies in the fullness of time stop being innovative. The question is when. It's not a bubble if it deflates in 20 years.
> market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
This is more mantra - professional shorts exist and they make money. So either you know something (in which case you'd be mum about it and just placing your bets) or you know nothing.
You can't both talk about "professional shorts" and use it as an argument against somebody who is not a financial professional. This argument is invalid because not every person who is skeptical about current AI companies' perspectives is willing or able to become a professional short just to make a point on it. One can have a perfectly valid argument and still not be a professional short based on it.
Actually, anyone with a brain can see that it's a huge and massively inflated bubble, but can also see that it's a fools game to try to time it without professional insight into the market. What we can do is make sure we're not overextended on the bubble participants, but that's about it.
No amount of hype from your side can make it a non-bubble market when OpenAI and other companies make wild and impossible to fulfill promises for infrastructure buildup that rely on vague promises of circular money lending between AI SaaS and infra companies.
> Actually, anyone with a brain can see that it's a huge and massively inflated bubble, but can also see that it's a fools game to try to time it without professional insight into the market.
"The bubble is both obvious and also completely unpredictable".
Yes, it does. You may know what there would be realignment, but you don't know where or how, and may not possess the professional knowledge and resources required to profit from it directly. The known part is general, the unknown part is specific and time-dependent.
Someone else already said: yes all companies go to zero on a timeline that includes the heat death of the universe. Your claim is about as clever as that.
No, that would only work after getting really high. You know, when somebody asks "why this thing is such and such?" and you answer "why things are at all? Maybe it's all just our imagination, dude! Maybe nothing makes sense and we are living in a simulation! Dude, just feel you mind expanding!"
But if we lay off the bong for a bit and think soberly, then no, knowing that certain economic process is not sustainable and will eventually collapse, but not being able to profit from it is not the same as saying every bubble would pop at the heat death of the universe, billions years for now. It's so not the same that the very comparison should be immediately perceived as absurd.
If I choose something else, we're down, and our competitors aren't, then my overlords will start asking a lot of questions.