Comment by discordianfish
8 days ago
I’ve been around long enough to remember people saying that VMs are useless waste of resources with dubious claims about isolation, cloud is just someone else’s computer, containers are pointless and now it’s AI. There is a astonishing amount of conservatism in the hacker scene..
Well, the cloud is someone else's computer.
It is, but that's not a useful or insightful thing to say
It's not an insightful statement right now, but it was at the peak of cloud hype ca. 2010, when "the cloud" often used in a metaphorical sense. You'd hear things like "it's scalable because it's in the cloud" or "our clients want a cloud based solution." Replacing "the cloud" in those sorts of claims with "another person's computer" showed just how inane those claims were.
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Are you sure about that?
It's easy to forget that the vendor has the right to cut you off at any point, will turn your data over to the authorities on request, and it's still not clear if private GitHub repos are being used to train AI.
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People pass around stickers (or at least used to) in hacker events saying that so there has to be something to it, right?
Protesting the term is, I'd wager, motivated by something like: it sounds innocuous to nontechnical people and obscures what's really going on.
Only if owning the means of your production isn't important to you
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Is it conservatism or just the Blub paradox?
As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.
https://paulgraham.com/avg.html