That seems to be the pitch too. I now get google ads where they advertise you can ask your phone things about what it sees. All the examples are so trivial, I can’t believe it. How to make a double espresso. What are these clouds called?

That’s being not a complete idiot as a service.

If it was at least how do I start the decalcification process on this machine so it actually realizes it and turns the service light off.

Rewriting something in another language is super simple. The original code has all the context. Even simple for a human but takes time. I literally did the same thing recently and had Claude rewrite a simple Python lib to elixir so I don’t need to run Python somewhere. Wasn’t perfect actually but very easy to fix the issues.

USD and rubles are definitely not the same from my euro using perspective.

This seems weird. I have a lot of experience with rails which is considered super slow. But the scenario you describe is trivial. Just get a bigger VPS and change a single env var. even if you fucked up everything else like file storage etc you can still to that. If you build your whole application in way where you can’t scale anything you should be fired. That is not even that easy

People screw up the bcrypt thing all the time. Pick a single threaded server stack (and run on one core, because Kubernetes), then configure bcrypt so brute forcing 8 character passwords is slow on an A100. Configure kubernetes to run on a medium range CPU because you have no load. Finally, leave your cloud provider's HTTP proxy's timeout set to default.

The result is 100% of auth requests timeout once the login queue depth gets above a hundred or so. At that point, the users retry their login attempts, so you need to scale out fast. If you haven't tested scale out, then it's time to implement a bcrypt thread pool, or reimplement your application.

But at least the architecture I described "scales".

Fond memories of a job circa 2013 on a very large Rails app where CI times were sped up by a factor of 10 when someone realized bcrypt was misconfigured when running tests and slowing things down every time a user was created through a factory.

"because Kubernetes"? Is this assuming that you're running your server inside of a Kubernetes instance (and if so, is Kubernetes going to have problems with more than one thread?), or is there some other reason why it comes into this?

Of course you should be fired for doing that! I meant the example as an illustration of how "you don't need to scale" thinking turns into A-grade bullshit.

You do, in fact, need to scale to trivial numbers of users. You may even need to scale to a small number of users in the near future.

I'm not seeing how your example proves that a beefy server/cloud free architecture cannot handle the workload that most companies will encounter. The example you give of an under specified VPS is not what is being discussed in the article.

I was responding to CaptainOfColt, who was writing about premature optimisation killing companies. The article's proposed architecture seems fine and is similar to things I've done, but it's not an excuse to completely avoid thinking about future traffic patterns.

One of the most interesting books I have read is Franz Innerhofers Schöne Tage which describes his experience on a farm in Austria in the second half of the 20th century. The experiences of farm hands and maids was absolutely horrifying and each one would take a soul less office job at Dunder Mifflin or an Uber Eats route without question. People were basically property even in society without slavery. The US 19th century is really a special case because the land was all recently stolen from the native Americans who mostly died of diseases. So those people that colonized the land had an unknown amount of freedom because that only existed for a short time in history and even they were lacking any access to medical services or real education. What’s not seeing half your children dying worth to you?

Custom sized shirts are cheaper than many designer brands. People don’t care about the fit aspect as much as you’d think

Designer is yet another aspect alongside materials that matter so you end up with market fragmentation. Default sizing is a reasonable fit for much of the population and many people do pay the premium for custom sizing of high quality clothing.

While Shein is enabled by machine weaving it took centuries to find this business model. The first person I heard about buying single use clothing was Michael Jackson allegedly in the 90s and it was seen as the height of eccentricity. Obviously many wealthy people since the 1960 have been rich enough to easily afford throw away clothing (after all they spend as much on meals or flights all the time). It just never occurred to anyone outside of ball gowns or wedding dresses.

In conclusions SHEIN is more of a social phenomenon piggybacking on a hack on the global postal system fee structure.

Sci-fi talked about this forever, in the future we would wear single use paper clothes. It was not treated as a healthy trait should society reach it.

As an ultra marathoner I can second this.

To be fair, I got into distance because I wanted to run without pushing myself to the highest heart rate zones, which you naturally do in shorter distances. But with an ultra, I can make a zone 2 run sound impressive. So even an ultra can be a form of moderation. At least I'm telling myself that.

I know a lot of people who refer to it as ChatGTP which I assume stands for German treebrained performers