Comment by esperent
9 days 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.
It does sound like a wonderful life... but if you want to have a family, you'll need to put down roots somewhere. I know a nomad who ended up doing this in Mexico - he'd never have guessed it years prior - and is super happy. So maybe, as a way of finding the country you're "meant" to live in, it's a nice approach. I think it's a younger person's game, though.
Well we did put down roots after a few years, or at least we have for for a while (me and my partner). We'll probably get the travel bug again.
We don't have or want children but I do know people who do this with families. There's an amazing community called world schooling where people travel and arrange a month in some beautiful place around the world with other families. They'll organize teachers and activities for children and make friends with the other parents.
I've met quite a few of them - the immediate assumption people will jump to is that they must be rich. But that's not the case, they're just normal people who love to travel and have jobs that can facilitate that. And the children I've met seem happy and well adjusted.
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.
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People that stay put are no friends of mine. I have a remote job and travelled 20 weeks last year, all to do my sport with friends. Most of us have remote jobs or are FIRE’d already.
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.
How much of that was in the last ten years? And do you make any attempt to have a backup system (phone hotspot, for example)?
Last 10 years has been about average. I’ve used a phone hotspot some but it’s often not an option. My prior company wanted a really locked down setup on their systems. WFH required a fixed IP address for some god forsaken reason.
> 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.
Which models do you use the most?
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I finally bit the bullet and got a $200 Claude subscription last month. It's been a busy month and I've used it a lot. More than is healthy, more than I sustainably could for more than a few weeks. I've managed to hit a 5 hour limit exactly once (20 minutes before it refreshed) and I've never hit more than 80% of a weekly limit.
But if I did - and I could imagine having some specific highly parallelizable work like writing a bazillion unit tests where I send out 40 subagents at a time - then the solution would be to buy two subscriptions. Not switch to API billing.
While that sounds impressive, a $200 subscription is still not pocket change. Do you have any approximation of the amount of tokens you use on average, and how much would it cost on a per-million-of-token billing?
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And here am I thinking that my life depends too much on the internet and the knowledge you can find on it. So if something big/extreme happens like nuclear war, major internet outage etc, I know nothing. No recipes, so basic medical stuff, like how to use antibiotics, electronics knowledge, whatever. I don't have any books with stuff like that like my parents used to. I have seen some examples of backed up Wikipedia for offline usage and local llms etc and am thinking of implementing something as a precaution for these extreme events.
That's a very different problem than OP
You should keep physical books, food, and medication for a SHTF scenario
"Back to Basics", "Where There Is No Doctor" and the Bible are my SHTF books
You won't be coding in a SHTF scenario.
> 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.
cries on a Bavarian train
If it's any consolation, Bavaria is a beautiful part of the world that's up there with any tropical island or rainforest. I hope to visit again sometime.
Ha, true :-)
Now I wonder, how has this become infeasible exactly?
I consider it more or less immoral to be expected to use the Internet for anything other than retrieving information from others or voluntarily sharing information with others. The idea that a dev environment should even require finicky configuration to allow for productive work sans Internet appalls me. I should only have to connect in order to push to / pull from origin, deploy something or acquire build tools / dependencies, which should be cached locally and rarely require any kind of update.
Do you know how many times since 1999 I have had my work Internet go down? Definitely not enough to spend time worrying about it. The world didn’t stop.
In 2022, funny enough I was at an AWS office (I worked remotely when I worked there) working in ProServe, us-east-1 was having issues that was affecting everything, guess what we all did? Stopped working, the world didn’t come to an end.
Even now that I work from home, on the rare occasions that Internet goes down, I just use my phone if I need to take a Zoom call.
I don't care how reliable it is. That has nothing to do with my objection.
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