well, at my current job they use NoSQL, in this case it's DynamoDB and it's been frustrating at times. So I asked the question: why are we dealing with these problems day in, day out, if the problems we're trying to solve have been solved half a century ago with SQL?

The answer is cost. The way we access data may be convenient to do with SQL, but it's also expensive. We have big (not webscale but large) volumes of data coming in every day. Having this on SQL would cost us tens of thousands a month. Keeping it in DynamoDB costs us a few hundred. And it's stupidly fast - if we wanted to get that kind of performance from SQL we'd have to pay for a supercharged overprovisioned server.

And honestly it's been fun. It's turned "boring business software development" back into more of an engineering problem.

I see the problem as a more "get off my lawn" types here. They have fully adopted "vibe coding" as "anything made with AI assistance" as much as older people call anyone younger than them "millennials".

There's a big difference between an experienced programmer providing the AI with clear, concise prompts and guidance; than having someone with zero knowledge trying to build an entire app from scratch.

One is "augmented capabilities", the other is vibe coding. But the haters here just refuse ANY sort of AI involvement.

Are consumers really clamoring for this?

I've worked with both the state of CA and AT&T.

You're goddamn right I'm full of hate.

Hmm, I hate CA, and I hate AT&T ( may both rot in hell ). I literally can't lose no matter who "wins".

I hope they both destroy each other somehow.

I refuse to believe the claim that "this would require billions of dollars and at least five years to get a factory operational."

There is clearly enormous amounts of money circulating in the industry right now. If a company like Nvidia genuinely wanted to manufacture its own memory, it absolutely could. Even with initially poor yields, the economics could still work. A 50% yield rate is far less concerning when RAM prices have increased by 200%, especially for a company purchasing memory in massive volumes alongside its hardware partners.

From my perspective, this looks less like an unavoidable technical limitation and more like market consolidation and price coordination. Companies have become comfortable charging substantial premiums for RAM, and the current situation provides a convenient justification for it.

I was never offered a free upgrade path and I only have 2 accounts: mine, and the admin one they force you to pay for. I was on the legacy plan and they forced me to pay.

they also remove drag-hover-drop . it's so infuriating to have to organize your windows in a specific way to drag a file over to another window, OR use ctrl-c/ctrl-v

it was as easy as drag the icon to the next window "through the taskbar" which made the other window come front, and drop the icon.

i guess they removed that option since they started forcing taskbar grouping by default. a feature i remove from every windows and KDE machine I set up. I don't see any benefit in "grouping" or "compacting into an icon". if i wanted that behavior i'd just get a mac.

we have two options: live with a bug, or hope the fix doesn't introduce another bug.

The blame for this falls squarely on the politics surrounding education fads. We abandon the boring things that work in favor for the new exciting crap that doesn't. And it's not because anyone really thinks it works, but because there are billions behind the new crap.

Parental apathy factors into this as well, no doubts.

We know what works, so ask yourself why we aren't using it.

i mean that's not a bad thing either. I sometimes DO NOT want to learn "new to me" things. I've been contributing to an ancient, but still used software called Xastir. It's VERY OLD spaghetti code, low level X11 with Motif. I DO NOT want to learn Motif. It's not a marketable skill or something I'll ever need. But I let the AI code a few contributions (one of them was replace some parts with Cairo fonts for antialias in high dpi scerens, and the other was fixing a very old screen drawing routine that took 2-3 minutes on a Raspberry Pi 2 and cut it down to 5 seconds). Could I have fixed this bug? Not even in my wildest dreams. Do I care how it was fixed? Oh no. No I don't. I just checked that the output of the LLM was reasonable.

Based on my analysis of their needs and what AI can deliver. I agree that it's management's job to increase efficiency and output, but change for change's sake is never good. For instance, in the examples above I *knew* what AI would deliver. I told them, in no uncertain terms, what product they'd receive. They still made the decision to push ahead ( and I'm more than willing to cash that check ). I can see, objectively and by any metric, that what was delivered is a worse customer experience than what they had before.

However, because it's "AI", that makes it acceptable. The buzzword has effectively disabled the rational and critical thinking parts of this management's teams brains. Of course I have seen this before ( First rule of IT: Vendors lie, Second rule of IT: Managers believe them ), but to this extent? Especially in smaller businesses, where margins are tighter. For what they're paying for this AI solution ( ha, "solution" ), they could afford to hire another staff member; another person on the phones, and far more capable than AI in delivering the ultimate product ( caring for the patient ).

Mind you; I pointed all this out to them. They know the math, but they are so...enamored with AI that it doesn't mean anything to them. Meanwhile, patients and staff hate it.

I'm sure there's AI use cases out there which deliver a decent ROI. What I'm seeing in the field, however, is management hysteria for the latest thing at a scale I've never before experienced.

I shouldn't complain, it's paying extremely well, but I know this will all come crashing down at some point.

I've been through more than a few technology cycles, so while I don't necessary disagree with you, the scale of the disconnect between the worker bees and management is more significant than I ever remember.

It's becoming exceedingly difficult to dissuade management from AI courses of action, even when they make no sense or will end up delivering a substandard product for significantly higher cost.

For instance, I just had a client implement an AI auto-attendant for a medical office. Were they having difficulties answer the phone in a timely manner? No. Do they anticipate a staffing shortage that would cause such an issue? No. Will the auto-attendant be able to accomplish what a regular worker can? No. In fact, it can pretty much only answer the phone and find someone for the caller to talk to.

But by god, management had to have it. So, for an extra 2000 a month they get a middle man that delays delivering service to patients. Management loves it. Folks answering the calls hate it because the patients hate it.

Different office asked about AI curated music. Another client asked about replacing our network monitoring software with AI so their IT staff can stop working after hours. They both will end up getting their wish, and at least in the case of the network monitoring solution it's going to cause so many issues I'm having them sign a waiver before I implement; I won't be held responsible when the AI agent is rebooting servers randomly because it thinks they're offline.

More than any other IT fad over the past 2 decades, I've noticed AI has really divided "decision makers" and "makers/workers". Those of us in the trenches making things work are highly skeptical of AI and treat it much as we have any other "flash in the pan" technology; weary, willing to test/play with it, but disbelieving of the hype.

The decision makers though...whoooboy, they've bought into the tech hook, line and sinker. They want AI everything, even in places it makes no sense. They can't define what they want AI to do, or how it's supposed to do it, but by god they will sign away millions of dollars in pursuit of their golden cow.

The only time I really saw anything like this was with "Teh Cloudz!", but even then it was tempered by practicality. AI? It's magic beans, all the way down.

"Shot themselves in the foot" is relative; it was never about sustainability. It's about extracting the most they can as fast as they can, then selling the dregs at a discount.

That includes pursuing legal action against other vendors once their cash cow starts drying up.