Of course it is, and you could say the same with regard to mammalian brains in general. However the divergence starts very early in development (seven weeks) so is very big and very significant. By the time a human is born the brain is very different from a monkey's.

How is that evidence that the site was AI written?

The evidence is that the article’s writing is terrible. It repeats the same rhetorical devices over and over, dressing up a series of facts in false profundity, because there’s no actual authorial insight here. It’s just “write a well-researched article that demonstrates how ahead of its time the Ada language was” + matmul.

Neither of those standards are what I’m talking about.

Obviously this article was highly pleasing to the hn audience as it’s currently sitting at #1. It’s still garbage, because it doesn’t have any interesting ideas behind it. Certainly not commensurate with its length.

I think the quoted word salad is plenty of evidence.

I sometimes explain open source to people as auditable software.

That's a good way to explain it.

If you look at those "When do you actually need a database?" constraints I think its missing consistency which prevents bugs and makes debugging easier.

When you combine all those a database is a better alternative for all but the simplest cases.

At some point you end up writing a lot of code to say something that is a single word on the db query.

Perhaps (besides simple things) if you have many millions of users and no money. Or if you need something a DB is truly bad at.

Dehousing was also inspired by the effects of German bombing of the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehousing#Production_and_conte...

Do you have any evidence that open source code is lower quality?

The leaks of proprietary code, and the many examples of known security issues, the quality issues evident is most software, and the opinions of people who work on proprietary software all suggest the opposite.

I remember reading a study on source code quality quite some years ago, maybe it was featured on Slashdot. The result was that the lowest quality and the highest quality source code was proprietary, open source code was "pretty good but not the best". And that high quality proprietary code was stuff like operating system kernels and network equipment firmware, not business applications.

That makes sense.

Open source OSes, for example, seem to be pretty high quality, at least with regard to general purpose OSes. In general open source application code seems pretty good too.

On the other hand there are highly regulated or safety critical fields or where uptime is mission critical where people are very motivated to produce high quality code and a lot of that is proprietary.

I hope people are not vibe coding that type of code!

That is interesting, and I think you are right that emissions reductions will not happen any time soon (eventually, but it will take a while).

I am not convinced we need robots. A lot of it is not all that hard to do. For example, better forestry management to prevent forest fires. A lot of cities rebuild big chunks of their infrastructure over a century or so anyway. The problem is more social and political - you get worse forest management because you can blame climate change when it happens.

On the other hand a competitor site that is up (or bricks and mortar competitors) might get a lot of business when AWS goes down. If you depend on AWS for operations it might be a lot more expensive than that.

Mostly I think its that management does not blame the person who picks AWS. Its another iteration of "no one got fired for buying IBM/Microsoft".

It is also an issue at other levels: if all a county's businesses rely on AWS (let alone its government) then that gives the US huge leverage over you (sanctions would shut down your economy).

This is exactly my point, though. I was simply stating that you can't be sure it is a bad business decision just because it goes down sometimes. It isn't immediately obvious from that single fact whether the business decision is good or bad, it is simply one factor to consider. Occasional downtime isn't an immediate business killer for every business.

That would require AWS to actually be down a lot, and it’s not. Betting your business on AWS being flakier than whatever alternative provider you use is probably not a good idea.

No it would not require that. Suppose you are one of 10 competitors. The others all use AWS.

Your system is down as often as AWS. When you are down your lost sales are shared between 10 of them. When AWS is down you get all their lost sales.

Obviously very simplified, but you get the point. There might be a huge gain in being up when others are down.

> Betting your business on AWS being flakier than whatever alternative provider you use is probably not a good idea.

You are not betting your business on it. You are betting the consequences of downtime only.

AWS does not seem to be all that high reliability out of the box. You can use multiple availability zones etc. but you can do the equivalent elsewhere.

On FB ads are not very clearly marked - the "sponsored" in grey lettering is not very noticeable.

They also promote anything that gets engagement which leads to showing people a lot of very nasty stuff.

This is a feature, not a bug. By making your software different you make it harder for people to switch.

You're confusing it with something else. You don't have to have the same things. But there are basic understanding for UI like how certain elements should work. People might tolerate cos its not on their hands. But the moment they can, they'll make sure to not use it.

This also means more support tickets and internal escalations. Just like how you should drive predictably on road to avoid maximum accidents, predictable UI's are important for maximum productivity. People will use it more. And when they move to another software and don't get the same, they will talk sh*t about it. They will tell people how a certain software is soooo good.

ClickUp for example is the most disastrous UI I've used in recent history. If you get angry while using software, you've done your job poorly. When someone discussed about ClickUp, I immediately shut it down. It's the same reason why people disliked Jira. AWS console Etc. They might tolerate for a while. But they will jump ship at the first opportunity. So can't figure out how it is a feature.

I am basing it on what I have heard normal users say. The easiest thing is what they are used to. People mostly use UIs that are not idiomatic. Websites vary wildly, lots of mobile apps do not stick to conventions, and even some desktops apps do not. For example, what else uses a ribbon menu like MS Office? Most people switch between desktop and mobile. Some people like an app to be consistent across platforms - which means breaking with platform conventions.

People do tolerate AWS Console though. Jira seems to be widely used.