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Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

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Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#51

Post by orf »

minraws wrote: post #36
orf wrote: post #3

> First of all tons of more outages than ever, remember that React useEffect fkup [0]? Complete insane that this would happen at an infra company that runs a third or so of the web. Bugs happen all the time. They roughly increase with scale, not decrease. There’s an argument to be made about better testing, but this specific bug seems like a perfect one to slip through: multiple services, hard to spot at code review,…

Bugs happen all the time yes, outages don't. If outages are increasing with scale you get 1 or maybe 2 free passes. After that you either have in-ept Engineering or just in-ept leadership. I used to be all in on CF a while ago, now I am moving off them almost entirely. Same issue with GitHub, I can understand if you can't build for the scale when you couldn't predict it but if after over 12-18 months things don't see…

To put it bluntly: that is complete nonsense.

AWS has had more than 1 outage a year - is it not worth investing in? Are they not serious?

Outages are just a specific kind of bug, often surfaced by the interactions of several discrete bugs.

Saying “you’re not serious if you have more than 1 bug a year” is silly.

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#52

Post by orliesaurus »

aleda145 wrote: post #33

Hard disagree. Sure their docs are bad, and it's sometimes buggy. But to me cloudflare is actually innovating and trying to offer "new" infrastructure. Durable objects and workers are super cool. R2 has free egress, isn't it insane that they could pull that off? If what you want is a VM to run postgres then there are other offerings that would be much better. Not saying they aren't evil though, they probably are, but…

I disagree with your disagreement. I wrote the post and I am not blaming the innovation. I am blaming the chaos of innovation. Everything feels DISJOINTED.

The innovation is useful, the delivery of the innovation is the pitfall here.

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#53

Post by dgellow »

piterrro wrote: post #46
dgellow wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Side question: does anyone have a moat in the AI industry? AI vendors for sure do not. Hyperscalers don’t seem to have one. Datacenter companies are in an industry that is more difficult to enter but don’t have a moat per se. Same for manufacturers of HBM and other hardware. NVIDIA is maybe the only player with an actual moat thanks to CUDA & co

Companies specialized in building DCs and AI labs specialized in niche models?

Actually, not DC builders themselves, but companies that manufacture fairly specific parts used by DCs, like the massive gas turbines they’ve been using. I’m not familiar with that part of the industry but would assume that has to be a business with a pretty big moat

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#54

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

I don't know where this person got the idea that a company "run by engineers" would result in good products. Engineers don't always care about the end result. I've seen engineers completely compromise the utility and experience of the product to make their own job easier or more fun. If it "sounds logical", they assume it's good and don't ask more questions about how it will impact users.

Would you hire a mechanical engineer to run a car company? The mechanical engineer cares if the transmission is highly efficient; they don't care if the seats are comfortable, or if the car can fit standard wheels/tires. Those are the things the car's user cares about. They expect the transmission to be efficient, but they equally expect it to be comfortable and compatible.

"Infrastructure" isn't a raw mechanical component. It's a product with an entire "life" outside the technical. How it's controlled by a user, its responsiveness and intuitiveness, how they (and 3rd parties) interface with it, its operational and failure modes, its outputs and inputs... all of that's separate from the internal workings.

It's the difference between a car having a door, and having a door that fits perfectly, opens with ease, and closes with no effort, gaps or seams. A ton of extra work is required to make that happen. Making the door is easy; making it fit well is much harder.

Putting a nerd in charge will not fix the focus on the end result. You need to put people in charge who are obsessed with the customer's experience. Say what you will about Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs, they at least got that right.

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#55

Post by orliesaurus »

sssilver wrote: post #43

> There was a time Cloudflare just made the internet better This is the kind of naive thinking that enabled what's going on today. Sadly, the decentralized Internet is now destroyed and will never exist again.

Yeah but you can't blame 1 company for destroying the whole thing

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#56

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

sssilver wrote: post #43

> There was a time Cloudflare just made the internet better This is the kind of naive thinking that enabled what's going on today. Sadly, the decentralized Internet is now destroyed and will never exist again.

What decentralized solution ever existed for preventing DDoS attacks while allowing a spike of traffic when, say, your blog post gets a highly upvoted HN submission? I am not really convinced this is a problem that can be solved without centralization. It'd be like trying to decentralize airports or communications cables.

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#58

Post by orliesaurus »

daishi55 wrote: post #32
gegtik wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i read the article as caring about the values, principles, and goals of the human beings driving it. if you are looking exclusively at compiled bits and bytes and/or quarterly statements then I agree, human/societal judgment seems irrelevant.

What values and principles are supposed to be preventing cloudflare, the internet and technology company, from exploring hot new internet markets and technologies?

the constant "fights" with Vercel instead of delivering shareholder value by refining the product

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#60

Post by orliesaurus »

xpct wrote: post #14
spicyusername wrote: post #4

The fact is that every major company is AI accelerating their development, and soon, it will just be every company. We're already past the point of getting our hackles raised when we suspect something is AI written. Everything is or soon will be AI written. So I don't think it's that useful to blame bad product design on AI. Bad product design is just bad product design. Bad writing is just bad writing. Bad graphic d…

Well, let's not normalize bad product design. Worse, let's not normalize pushing out broken projects that never get maintained. It's noise and breaks trust. I'd say the maintenance part is especially bad now, I hold very little trust that people will maintain the projects they share.

I think that's 33% of my rant too! Pushing out features and forgetting about them 1 week later.
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