"Anyone who uses < public cloud computing > is hypocritical" is a pretty insane take, even for HN.
All technologies have benefits and costs — choosing and using a technology does not imply the nonexistence of tradeoffs. One can give sufficient consideration to the downsides, and then determine that the upsides outweigh them. It's not rocket science.
Sure, but those people who "considered the downsides" shouldn't then moralize about the exploitation of workers; they're contributing to it. It's explicitly hypocritical. They're explicitly deciding the exploitation is worth the upsides for their or their company's benefit.
I'm not excluding myself from this. Just chafing against this grandstanding by people actively contributing to the same problems, and especially annoyed by the people saying we should pause development because it's going to affect people's jobs. This isn't new.
Edit: I'd also like to point out that "Public cloud computing" doesn't really capture what I said; the OP of the article is specifically building on Amazon, which has a well documented history of worker exploitation. Even building on Azure or Google cloud would be more defensible in the context of the article they wrote.
I generalized the statement from one cloud to big public clouds categorically to show by hyperbole that ... what difference does it make?! [One can find analogous critiques of Azure, GCP, etc.]
Last year, AWS did ≥ $100B in revenue across millions of customers. But where do you draw the line exactly? "Everyone who uses < thing > is < problematic >" feels extreme.
I could even agree with “is problematic” although I don’t see it as black and white, but “is problematic and therefore doesn’t get to comment / needs to own this / did this” is definitely not a legitimate critique of the critical discourse.
> I know the technology, I understand what it's doing and I know the impact, so I am vehemently anti-AI.
Author: Goes on to demonstrate superficial (mis)understanding of the technology by proliferating misconceptions peppered with anecdata and heavy virtue signaling and calling it a blog post.
Hmm, okay, then...
Is anyone else annoyed by this kind of ironically [^1] weak thinking / writing that conflates: (1) one's own personal opinions and biases however long-standing or irrelevant; (2) limited working knowledge of the actual technology; and (3) virtue signaling / moral posturing / etc? ... and then ultimately just stirs that all up in a pot to not actually say anything more substantial than "AI bad". It's such an overstated, bland, lifeless, useless, uninteresting, intellectually lazy take.
Clutching onto a weak opinion, strongly held [^2] does not make one an "outcast" ... it just comes off as closed-minded and melodramatic. Is that even contrarian? Being on the majority side of an unnuanced opinion is about as far away from being an outcast as possible...
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Very few of the moral panic type issues those vehemently opposed to LLMs are raising repeatedly are really unique to that field... because why? [Because LLMs are not the problem.]
- Where was said moral posturing when we were building the cloud computing infrastructure?
- Where is the concern of "wasting" compute resources when using 10–15 GB of bandwidth to stream a 90-min movie in 4k?
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[^1]: Better not call the poorly written human authored post of poor quality "slop" though!
> I’m terrified that there’s going to be a doctor’s office sometime that does the same, with more serious consequences.
they can send scheduling info, appt reminders, etc via SMS but (1) they must allow opt out, and (2) they cannot send medical info this way — that's where HIPAA requires encrypted "patient portal" messaging because SMS can be intercepted or accessed by others.
That's good to know - I'll tell him to check that with his current doctors' offices, and make sure that he makes it clear for any new practices he visits that he only does phone calls and postal mail.
> From my quick research online, it seems they've gone digital-only for season tickets because they don't want people just reselling them to turn a profit. They want actual season-long fans, so now if you transfer too many games they can track it and ban you.
this is a common clause in season-ticket memberships, but it doesn't actually work all that well. for instance, resale on the ticket marketplace is tracked and counts, but in general transfers alone are not penalized. so people do transactions outside of the official platforms, sell / trade in fb groups, etc.
sure, but undo isn't the only path to a newer better version of the code
it's easy to see how the product (claude code) could be abstracted to spec form and then a future version built from that without inheriting previous iterations tech debt
All technologies have benefits and costs — choosing and using a technology does not imply the nonexistence of tradeoffs. One can give sufficient consideration to the downsides, and then determine that the upsides outweigh them. It's not rocket science.
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