Comment by esperent
4 hours ago
I've had a fairly long career as a web dev. When I started, I used to be finicky about configuring my dev environment so that if the internet went down I could still do some kind of work. But over time, partly as I worked on bigger projects and partly as the industry changed, that became infeasible.
So you know what do, what I've been doing for about a decade, if the internet goes down? I stop working. And over that time I've worked in many places around the world, developing countries, tropical islands, small huts on remote mountains. And I've lost maybe a day of work because of connectivity issues. I've been deep in a rainforest during a monsoon and still had 4g connection.
If Anthropic goes down I can switch to Gemini. If I run out of credits (people use credits? I only use a monthly subscription) then I can find enough free credits around to get some basic work done. Increasingly, I could run a local model that would be good enough for some things and that'll become even better in the future. So no, I don't think these are any kind of valid arguments. Everyone relies on online services for their work these days, for banking, messaging, office work, etc. If there's some kind of catastrophe that breaks this, we're all screwed, not just the coders who rely on LLMs.
> I've worked in many places around the world, developing countries, tropical islands, small huts on remote mountains
I am genuinely curious about your work lifestyle.
The freedom to travel anywhere while working sounds awesome.
The ability to work anywhere while traveling sounds less so.
There's a whole movement that does this.
https://digitalnomads.world/
It means having no friends.
hey I can have no friends just sitting at home for months on end. I'd rather be miserable on a mountain top rather than sitting at home.
> people use credits? I only use a monthly subscription
Those still have limits, no? Or if there's a subscription that provides limitless access, please tell me which one it is.
I've been on ChatGPT Pro plan since introduced, and also used codex-rs since it was made public, never hit a limit. Came close last week, not sure if the limits were recently introduced or there always was but they got lowered, but I think that's as close to "unlimited" as you can get without running your own inference.
I've tried Anthropic's Max plan before, but hit limits after just a couple of hours, same with Google's stuff, but wasn't doing anything radically different when I tried those, compared with Codex, so seems other's limits are way lower.
Meanwhile I’ve lost roughly a month from internet issues. My guess is you’re experience was unusual enough you felt the need to component where most developers who where less lucky or just remember more issues didn’t.
> Meanwhile I’ve lost roughly a month from internet issues.
If you tell me "I lost internet at home and couldn't work there", it's one thing. But that you simply went about a month without internet connection, I find it hard to believe.
It’s not a single continuous stretch of one month, I’m probably significantly older than you, and I’ve lost access to critical services because data centers have had issues not just myself.
Hell, on Tuesday I lost ~2 hours because Starlink was having some issue. When it came up I was on a different ground station and getting very low speeds. Not such a big deal except you never get that time back.