I think you’re talking about a different thing? The bad practice from AWS et al is that you post-pay for your usage, so usage can be any amount. With all the AI things I’ve seen, either:
- you prepay a fixed amount (“$200/mo for ChatGPT Max”)
- you deposit money upfront into a wallet, if the wallet runs out of cash then you can’t generate any more tokens
- it’s free!
I haven’t seen any of the major model providers have a system where you use as many tokens as you want and then they bill you, like AWS has.
If I talk to the people I know who don’t spend all their time online, they’re just not using AI. Quite a few of my close friends haven’t used AI even once in any way, and most of the rest tried it out once and didn’t really care for it. They’re busy doing things in the real world, like spending time with their kids, or riding horses, or reading books.
I talk to an acquaintance selling some homemade products on Etsy, he uses & likes the automatically generated product summary Etsy made for him. My neighbor asks me if I have any further suggestions for refinishing her table top beyond the ones ChatGPT suggested. Watching all of my coworkers using Google search, they just read the LLM summary at the top of the page and look no further. I see a friend take a picture, she uses the photo AI tool to remove a traffic sign from the background. Over lunch, a coworker tells me about the thing she learned about from the generated summary of a YouTube video.
We can take principled stands against these things, and I do because I am an obnoxiously principled dork, but the reality is it's everywhere and everyone other than us is using it.
Being busy riding horses and reading books are both niche activities (yes, reading too, sadly, at lest above a very small number of books which does not translate to people being busy doing it more than a tiny fraction of their time), which suggests perhaps your close friends are a rather biased set. Nothing wrong with that, but we're all in bubbles.
The music is definitely considered classic, you can find tons of people online talking about how it means a lot to them - and personally, I really loved the music.
I remember the early Minecraft musics from C418 to be relatively unconventional, especially some of the jukebox discs.
I started playing Minecraft again recently and while it sounds like it’s the same artist, and it’s still somewhat contemplative, it’s not dissonant anymore.
It's not the same artist. C418 had a very good deal with Notch's Mojang, letting him keep rights. Microsoft demanded that he sign over the rights to further music as work for hire. He refused, as a result the newer music in Minecraft is made by other composers who signed on to that deal and try to make music fitting with C418's style.
It's not hard to get into the library of congress? It's purposely extremely easy. I forgot who it was, but there was one big right-wing talk show host that would end all of his segments by saying it's being added to the Library of Congress as if it's an exclusive accolade, and people rightfully called him out on his shit for how easy it is to do that
The classic Minecraft music was great. Some of the new music Mojang has added in recent years is unlistenable noise. Like "glitchcore" crap. I tried playing with music on recently and after a few hours had to give up.
I’d much rather go to work in the dark and have sunlight after work. The only people that it’s better for are children who would have to wait for the school bus outside in the dark, though in my experience growing up school started early enough that we were still waiting in the dark anyway.
Electric is extremely practical - I know a lot of New Englanders who have replaced oil burners with heat pumps and made back the investment quite quickly and warmly (it’s easy when a fill up of oil can cost close to a thousand dollars, and you will probably need two in a winter). Insulation helps a lot of course, but the main difficulty is just the upfront cost, time, and structural issues with houses that don’t have central air.
My father replaced oil burning with an air-water heat pump. That is, the heat pump heats water that circulates in the same pipes and radiators that were used previously. Apart from installing the heat pump in the boiler room, no other changes in the house were necessary.
The only problem with them is that they don’t work well with lambdas (and related features like Stream). If you need to call a method that throws a checked exception inside of a Stream, there’s no good way to pass it up other than re-throwing it as unchecked or some other hack (like collecting all the thrown exceptions in a separate loop).
A different implementation of lambdas that allow for generic exceptions would probably solve it, but then that introduces other issues with the type system.
My other complaint is that the standard library didn’t have enough pre-made exceptions to cover common usecases.
When you use lambdas you lose control over when and how often your code gets executed. Since checked exceptions are very often thrown by code that has side effects, I'd consider the friction to be a feature.
> collecting all the thrown exceptions in a separate loop
It's really not comfortable to do so in Java since there is no standard `Either` type, but this is also doable with a custom collector.
> Since checked exceptions are very often thrown by code that has side effects, I'd consider the friction to be a feature.
This is true, but I think that it’s partly true because checked exceptions are cumbersome here. In my ideal world, the majority of functions would throw exceptions, testing cases that today are either missed or thrown as unchecked exceptions.
For what it’s worth, I’ve been using IntelliJ for about a decade now, and I thought the UI change was great. Obviously not for everyone, but I’m more productive now thanks to it.
I don’t like their recent AI features, in large part because my company only allows OpenAI, but everything else that they’re doing is great.
For at least a decade now every UI redesign has been useless chasing own's tail. Only rearranging items and adding white spaces. Android, JetBrains, MacOS, iOS, Windows. Sometimes I use a relict software or device with UI from 10-15 years ago and it was perfectly fine. Modern UIs introduce no advantage, even icons are not getting prettier anymore.
The jetbrains UI redesign actually allowed me to reclaim screen space. I immediately jumped on the beta and stayed with it in every editor.
Though there are other issues with their ides like slow fixing of reported bugs, and improper support for new feature which is most likely because of the bespoke implementation of everything
I have to agree. UI updates generally go wrong because users are conservative and loathe any changes to their workflow, even if it improves it. I won't judge anybody who disliked the update, but to die on this hill is a bit silly (imo).
It took me some time (like a few days) to get used to the UI but it is a general improvement
I don’t know the story, but I’m not surprised. I led an effort to switch my company to Auth0 recently and they’re… bad. They have very poor support for anything even barely outside of normal, and when things are working correctly they not very good.
But when you have a requirement to move to a third party SaaS service, I suppose Auth0 is maybe the best of a bad bunch.
Same, I felt like I was writing my own auth. They don’t seem to understand that we’re trying to get away from the complexity of auth. I’ve talked with their sales people but may as well be talking to a wall.
I interviewed for an SRE position at Auth0 years ago. My interviewer told me it was all held together by duct tape and prayers. I'm glad I didn't end up taking that position.
Sure, everyone ends up having a dim perspective on what they manage usually. But this was especially noticeable as he explained to me how many incidents they'd have daily, what their on-call was like, etc. In an world full of castles built with toothpicks and elmers glue this came off like it was built with wet cardboard and chewing gum.
I’d noticed recently that my Macbook was consistently being warm even when I hadn’t used it in hours and it was closed and unplugged. I wound up doing a clean up of a bunch of processes that might be running in the backend, and it was resolved. I believe in the end it was some daemon for a built-in app, the contacts app maybe.
I haven’t seen any of the major model providers have a system where you use as many tokens as you want and then they bill you, like AWS has.
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