JustExAWS

Absolutely no enterprise - I work in enterprise cloud consulting - absolutely no company would trust Grok with their IP compared to Anthropic or OpenAI with Musk’s reputation on how he runs his businesses.

Anthropic just tolerates the money losing developers who pay $20/$200 for subscriptions.

This is completely illogical. There are a lot more dark pattern tracking that websites can do across websites than native apps without a user’s permission

People have been saying that Apple was going to require apps to be sold through the Mac App Store since 2010. You can install anything you want on your Mac.

And if only mean old Apple is suppressing PWAs, then why are the same companies who make apps for iOS also making apps for Android instead of telling Android users to use the web?

Second point, Apple could care less about random indie developers using a PWA. It came out in the Epic trial that 90% of App Store revenue came from loot boxes and other in app purchases for pay to win games.

Third point, users no more wish they could have shitty PWAs than Electron apps. It’s just what we are stuck with on the desktop

The Pixel only sales 5 million a year…

From a usability standpoint. Do you expect everyone to wear glasses? Are people going to all be out in public talking and doing hand gestures as input to their glasses? You don’t need to cater to different people who need different prescriptions for their fingers and for me, I have prescription glasses with two separate prescriptions and transition lenses.

It’s not hard to look at sales volumes of any of those to know that they don’t have mass market appeal - except maybe the Amazon devices and even Amazon cut jobs in that department and the managers there had to fuzz the numbers to get downstream revenue attributed to them.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hey-alexa-why-costing-amazon-...

I can’t find a publicly attributable source now.

Most of my work these days are around the AWS SDKs and Terraform. I always just say “verify the APis on the internet”.

Now, AWS has a documentation MCP server that can integrate with ChatGPT.

https://github.com/awslabs/mcp/tree/main/src/aws-api-mcp-ser...

I haven’t used it.

Or fail miserably…

I agree with his sentiments and his examples. But my fear is that on a place like Hacker News, people might not understand the difference between his advice and trying to have a successful startup.

You don’t need every job to choose you. You just need the one that’s the right fit.

When I’m applying for a job, I can apply for multiple jobs at once and interview for multiple jobs over a a few weeks. It’s especially easy when I am both interviewing and working remotely. I don’t have to make excuses to leave work during the middle of the day or worse case fly out for an interview.

The same is true for buying a home, I can put bids in for multiple homes - or in my case just have my homes built in 2003 and 2016. I know the world is different now.

You don’t need every person to want to build a life with you. You just need the one.

This is one place where of course you can shoot your shot at multiple potential partners and date often. What you don’t want to do is try marriage multiple times if it can be avoided. A bad marriage will wreck every part of your life and a divorce will set you back financially. (Happily remarried for 15 years after a horrible first marriage.)

None of his examples are applicable to starting a business. 9/10 startups fail and even out of those that “succeed” only a small number of those have an outsized return for the founder where they wouldn’t be better off financially working a regular old enterprise dev job for those years let alone getting a job at BigTech.

VCs can make multiple bets at one time and be more assured that they capture the 1/10 startups that succeed than a founder.

There is a huge difference between being able to take multiple chances at once in all of those scenarios and being stuck with the 1/10 choices you make for multiple years.

You didn’t real need a transition, just USB C to USB 2.0 cords and USB C to HDMI cords.

Unless you had the MacBook with 1 port.

I have been buying cheap knockoff lightning devices since my iPhone 5 at least. I can guarantee that random Chinese manufacturer wasn’t selling lightning cables in bundles of 5 for $10 using officially licensed anything from Apple.

There were hundreds of devices on Amazon that never paid Apple a fee to use Lightning.

And as far as USB C on Macs, are you complaining that Apple used an industry standard port?

I am working fewer hours. I at most work 4 hours a day unless it’s a meeting heavy day. I haven’t typed a line of code in the last 8 months yet I’ve produced just as much work as I did before LLMs.

If you are “consulting” on an hourly rate, you’re doing it wrong. The company and I get paid for delivering projects not the number of hours we work. A smaller project may just say they have me for 6 weeks with known deliverable. I’m rarely working 40 hours a week.

When I did do one short term project independently, I gave them the amount I was going to charge for the project based on the requirements.

All consulting companies - including the division at AWS - always eventually expand to the staff augmentation model where you assign warm bodies and the client assigns the work. I have always refused to touch that kind of work with a ten foot pole.

All of my consulting work has been working full time and salaries for either the consulting division of AWS where I got the same structured 4 year base + RSUs as every other employee or now making the same amount (with a lot less stress and better benefits) in cash.

I’m working much less now than I ever have in my life partially because I’m getting paid for my expertise and not for how much code I can pump out.

You really think that people at BigTech are doing it for the “enjoyment” and not for the $250K+ they are making 3 years out of college? From my n=1 experience, they are doing it for the pay + RSUs.

If you see what it takes to get ahead in large corporations, it’s not about those who are “passionate”, it’s about people who know how to play the game.

If you look at the dumb AI companies that YC is funding, those “entrepreneurs” aren’t doing 996 because they enjoy it. They are looking for the big exit.

Well I have personally tested it on the green field projects I mostly work on and it does the grunt work of IAC (Terraform) and even did a decently complicated API with some detailed instructions like I would give another developer.

I’ve done literally dozens of short term quick turn around POCs from doing the full stack from an empty AWS account to “DevOps” to the software development -> training customers how to fish and showing them the concepts -> move on to next projects between working at AWS ProServe and now a third party consulting company. I’m familiar with the level of effort for these types of projects. I know how many fewer man hours it takes me now.

I have avoided front end work for well over a decade. I had to modify the front end part of the project we released to the customer that another developer did to remove all of the company specific stuff to make it generic so I could put it in our internal repo. I didn’t touch one line of front end code to make the decently extensive modifications, honestly I didn’t even look at the front end changes. I just made sure it worked as expected.

I’ve been a “software engineer” or closely adjacent for 30 years. During that time, I’ve worked for small and medium “lifestyle companies”, startups, boring Big Enterprise, $BigTech and over the past 5 years (including my time at $BigTech) worked as a customer facing cloud consultant where I’ve seen every type of organization imaginable and how they work. No one ever gave a rip about “craftsmanship”. They hire you for one reason - to make them more money than they are paying you for or to save them more money than you are costing them. As far as me, I haven’t written a single line of code for “enjoyment” since the day I stepped into college. For the next four years it was about getting a degree and for the next 30, it was about exchanging my labor for money to support my addictions to food and shelter - that’s the transaction. I don’t dislike coding or dread my job. But at the end of the day (and at the beginning of the day) I’ve found plenty of things I enjoy that don’t involve computers - working out, teaching fitness classes part time, running, spending time with family and friends, traveling, etc. If an LLM helps me exchange my labor for money more efficiently, I’m going to use it just like I graduated from writing everything in assembly in 1987 on my Apple //e to using a C compiler or even for awhile using Visual Basic 6.

In all fairness, this is the AWS “house style” of writing and you will find older pre LLM posts that sound just like this.

I’m 51 and have had 10 jobs over 30 years. Those jobs have been everything from startups, to boring stable small and medium “lifestyle companies”, to boring big enterprise, to $BigTech and now I work in customer facing cloud consulting as a staff consultant.

And I’ve never seen a market this shitty. Even after the dot com bust if you were a regular old enterprise dev - and at the time I had 4 years of experience as a Windows developer in Atlanta - it was easy to find a job. 2009-2011 was a shit show but it wasn’t that bad.

While I did find a job quickly after being Amazon’ed in 2023 and again last year, things have gutted worse since then.

My only strategy is to keep our fixed living expenses way down (less than half my income and I’m the only one working by choice), stay out of debt, keep a years saving in the bank, keep my resume updated and a longer form career document [1], keep my skillset in line with the market (I lead a lot of “AI” related non chatbot projects) and keep a strong network.

I feel a tinge of FOMO knowing that an intern I mentored while they were an intern an a year after coming back makes a little more than I make. They are 25 and a mid level SA at AWS - similar to what I do. I have to think about the story of the “Mexican Fisherman”.

https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherma...

[1] A career document is a detailed list of all of your accomplishments in STAR format that you keep updated quarterly.

You only die once - you live everyday…

Yes and developers these days don’t know assembly like I learned at 12. Does it matter?

I’m sure the list of things that you don’t know that some other developers do know is long.

No one is an “expert” at everything. I know AWS well (trust me on this) and I’ve used more services than you can imagine in a production capacity. I choose not to know the intricacies of Linux and front end development for instance. That’s either “someone else’s problem” or in the former case, I just give a zip file with my code in it and run it in Lambda or a Docker container and run it using a managed Kubernetes/ECS cluster, use Lambda (yes you can deploy a Docker container to Lambda) or Fargate (AWS manages instances in Docker cluster).

No the Supreme Court said a long time ago that a company has “no duty to deal”. Meaning it doesn’t have to do business with anyone it doesn’t want to.

Rclone with aws s3 Glacier Deep Archive storage class is about $1 a month per TB.

I didn’t use rclone. I just used native AWS cli commands. But I’m an AWS guy and already had my own seldom used AWS account.

Restore takes from 12 (more expensive) to 48 hours (cheaper)

There is a huge difference between a president using the “bully pulpit” and threatening to take away a network’s broadcast license because they said something he didn’t like. That was a road too far for even Ted Cruz who criticized both Trump and the FCC.

A democratic president also didn’t accept personal bribes from companies to allow a merger to go through (Paramount) or accept bribes from other companies that were afraid of retaliation - Meta, Google, Twitter and Disney.

The current administration has carved out outs for companies that bend a knee when it comes to tarriffs. This is the worse case of false whataboutism yet.

And then what happens when CloudFare de platforms you? It doesn’t take much to DDOS most websites that aren’t protected by something like CloudFare.

At least in the US, every single app maker can link out of an app and accept payments. But most still don’t.

You know why? It came out in the Epic Store that 90%+ of App Store revenue comes from pay to win games, coins, and loot boxes. Game developers love to have direct access to whale’s wallets.

Parler was also kicked off of AWS…

As far as X being banned, if you haven’t heard Tim and every other tech CEO bends a knee anytime Trump and conservatives asks him to.

No one has sold digital music with DRM since around 2009 - not even Apple.

The story behind that is the music industry wanted Apple to license its DRM and it refused. Instead Steve Jobs said in his public “Thoughts on Music” letter that was posted on Apple’s website at the time that the music industry should license its music to Apple and everyone else DRM free and Apple would gladly sell music DRM free. Only one organization (EMI) and indie artists took him up on that in 2007. By 2009, everyone did after contract wrangling.

https://shellypalmer.com/2007/02/thoughts-on-music-by-steve-...

Maybe it is a bias by music genre. I went to things played in a concert hall: old classical music, new classical music, Jazz, film music, etc., to newly composed music on modern medieval-like instruments and to a-capella concerts of music from various centuries from various choirs, some of which I used to or still participate. All of them sell CDs and Spotify would be considered unprofessional and cheap

And you are far from the mainstream. I went to a Jazz concert this year. He also didn’t sell music and had a QR code where you could find his music online. He sold merch and the chance to take pictures with him. Funny enough, we were in London earlier this year and saw Lionel Ritchie at the O2. He was also selling merch and the chance to take pictures with him and definitely not CDs.

I’ve worked in cloud consulting for a little over five years. I can say 95% of the time when I discuss the cost and complexity tradeoffs of their websites being down vs going multi region or god forbid “multi cloud”, they shrug and say, it will be fine if they are down for a couple of hours.

This was the same when I was doing consulting inside (ie large companies willing to pay the premium cost of AWS ProServe consultants) and outside working at 3rd party companies.

Ben Thompson of Stratechery talks about this all the time. It didn’t take courage to canibalize a $200 ASP iPod for an $800 iPhone.