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Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

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Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#91

Post by fooster »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #45
boundless88 wrote: post #23

Our company also requires everyone to use more AI-related tools, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But the quality of work produced using these tools really depends on the individual's ability. Some people don't put in much effort, and the results they produce are really sloppy, which bothers me a lot.

I think there is actually something wrong with that. What should matter is the work produced, not the tools used to produce it. If AI tools really are all they are cracked up to be, then people using them will get ahead, and the company can justifiably point out "your peer gets twice the work done as you" to the other employees. But mandating tool use in and of itself is senseless and counterproductive.

The unfortunate reality is that unless you use these tools it is impossible to keep up. People using these tools well are substantially more productive, and often they were already the most productive.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#92

Post by mattmanser »

vkazanov wrote: post #44
fooker wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS was launched around 2006 (2002 internally at Amazon I think). Where could you rent VMs in 2006? IIRC there were two ways to run stuff, get your own server or get an account on a big shared computer.

Ehm. Shared hosting was a thing since forever. VPS also existed. Linode definitely had something along those lines. Amazon won on APIs and overall integration but VMs were around already. I remember the story really well as this is when i joined the workforce as a young GNU/Linux fan.

It was pretty regional back then, when I got VMs for clients we used UK providers (ElasticHosts maybe?).

Also people are throwing AWS start date of 2006, but AWS only really started catching on around 2008/2009 if I remember correctly. EC2 came out of beta late 2008, and EBS was only launched around the same time.

I don't think it even officially launched S3 until 2008, which is what all people really used it for initially for cheap remote backups.

It definitely took a while to get good. There was also a period where having 'noisy neighbours' impact VM performance was often discussed here. You didn't tend to have that same problem on the other VM hosts as people were using the VMs for hosting with generally low CPU usage, not for compute.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#94

Post by baq »

fooster wrote: post #91
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is actually something wrong with that. What should matter is the work produced, not the tools used to produce it. If AI tools really are all they are cracked up to be, then people using them will get ahead, and the company can justifiably point out "your peer gets twice the work done as you" to the other employees. But mandating tool use in and of itself is senseless and counterproductive.

The unfortunate reality is that unless you use these tools it is impossible to keep up. People using these tools well are substantially more productive, and often they were already the most productive.

Force multipliers need force to multiply, but also remember force is a vector, so watch out for multiplying in the wrong direction

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#95

Post by baq »

smitty1e wrote: post #20

The "fungible" point sounds as though the "cattle, not pets" ethos of the infrastructure management has leaked into the management of the staff.

Always has been, IT has been resisting due to (as pointed out in the article) institutional knowledge required, but this is now going away as LLMs can efficiently and accurately write it down and search it. Meta turning ICs into data labelers is trying to make knowledge workers fungible; expect others to follow.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#96

Post by Spooky23 »

nickjj wrote: post #80
Max-Ganz-II wrote: post #40

Over the last month I contacted Support for the first time in many years. This was for a question about how billing works. It went like this; 1. Case created. 2. Unassigned for seven days. 3. Open real-time chat, talk for 25 or so minutes where I guide a first-line Indian chap who plainly doesn't know about the subject in hand and who is as we talk reading the AWS docs I've already read. At the end, just as I couldn'…

Don't feel too bad. I've been at places where the AWS annual spend was a real lot of money, let's say way over 100k but not 1 million USD. Support tickets went unanswered for months, assigned account reps left us hanging for months with multiple follow ups, etc.. All tickets opened within the last 6 months got AI generated responses with massive delays that indicate the ticket wasn't read by a human due to how inaccu…

This where I don’t get the HN flame at Google.

I had an obscure KMS issue a few months ago, I reproduced it and opened a ticket. It was a low severity. A guy emailed me back in about 4 hours, acknowledged it and thought I was doing it right. Came back 2-3 days later noting that it was a bug, and would be fixed in a few weeks. As a workaround he updated my script with a less obvious/efficient solution to get me through.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#97

Post by oddly »

nacozarina wrote: post #78
throw5 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if there is another industry that behaves this childishly. There might be. But good grief, how much more juvenile can ours possibly get? AI-generated images with obviously nonsensical text is something I never thought I'd see in professional meetings. But it is becoming more and more common.

we’re witnessing how advanced civilizations actually die there’s no heroic clash with other civilizations, they simply rot away

Check the podcast “Fall of Civilizations”, this is very true. This advanced civilization is actually dying.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#98

Post by Spooky23 »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #57
Hard_Space wrote: post #3

I used to see AI generated images with lots of unintelligible writing or misspelled words in slides, but the speaker left them in anyway. “Good enough” is not customer obsession. This enforced adoption of immature GenAI reminds me of Milo Minderbinder trying to make people eat cotton in Catch 22 , because he had inadvertently obtained a huge amount of it.

It remains to be seen whether GenAI only acts as an accelerant of organizational decline, by amplifying the laziness inherent in people.

It’s worse.

Remember the “Prussian general 2x2”? https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/28/clever-lazy/

AI enables the stupid and diligent. When I get long form emails from people I don’t know well, I assume that 80% of the time it’s AI bullshit. People are having AI respond with bullshit to other people’s bullshit.

I’m actually deliberately adding bad grammar to communications as a hook that you should read it. It hurts my soul.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#100

Post by figassis »

> the goal seems to be to create as many things as fast as possible, throw them into the world and see which ones gain traction, whether or not they serve a real need

The goal was never to solve a real problem, like we evangelized for decades. That was how it was explained when resources (mainly time, but also money) were scarce and we could not just throw things at walls. Now we can, and you won't see anyone talk about "make something people need".

Things will be low quality until something sticks, and then money will be poured into it. It's not a bad strategy, but my takeaway from this is: there are multiple plausible explanations for the same thing. People have an incentive to not give you the correct one if it helps you compete with them. But they will give you a sensible one. AI won't protect you from this, experience and real knowledge will.

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