The pricing isn’t due to AWS. Even if you used standard S3 and paid for data retrieval for your entire backup every single month, tarsnap is over 3x the price of just using S3 yourself. The markup on tarsnap is wild.
Using something like restic or borgbackup+rclone is pretty much the same experience as tarsnap but a fraction of the price.
One of Rick Perry’s signature accomplishments as governor of Texas was that he implemented a few policies mandating the expansion of renewable energy, and also a massive initiative called the Competitive Renewable Energy Zone that funded building high voltage transmission lines that connected population centers in North and Central Texas to the open land in West Texas, which is what enabled massive boosts in wind farms being built in west Texas.
Every single state surrounding Texas was also suffering from power outages due to the winter storm in 2021, despite all of those states being part of the non-Texas interconnections. The outages in those states weren’t as bad, but even if Texas was better connected to them, there’s no guarantee that they would have had any power to share.
I was personally without power for 72 hours in sub zero temps. Every night I went to bed and wondered if my kids would be alive when/if I woke up. You know what that feels like?
I can’t do anything to *guarantee* you’ll never experience it, but I can take steps to decrease the chances or decrease the severity/dueation. I think my kids are worth it. Even if it’s not a *guarantee*.
Now that’s out of the way. I recommend you listen to the podcast. Really. Even if you lived through it. Even if you think you know everything about it. You will learn something I guarantee. It’s well produced and an easy listen. It’s an eye opener too. “The Disconnect”
Your condescending appeal to emotion does nothing to change the facts. My family and I too lived through the winter storm, going multiple days without power. It doesn’t change anything about what I said. The national-vs-local-grid topic is a red herring, as even the non-Texas grids were without power. If you want to actually change things, you need to acknowledge these facts rather than letting yourself be controlled by emotion.
> The national-vs-local-grid topic is a red herring
I used that in passing as a measure to show how violently against regulation texas is. It was a throwaway sentence that apparently missed its mark.
> It doesn’t change anything about what I said
What did you say? I heard "we shouldn't try to make it better if it's not GUARANTEED to make it better." I countered with "it's worth trying." I think that's not your recollection of events. Maybe you're saying that the grid not being connected to the national grid didn't cause it to go down?
I'm saying that the craptastic market-focused enron designed grid system is awful and the lackluster political response afterward is not confidence inspiring. We can and should do better.
> My family and I too lived through the winter storm, going multiple days without power
That sucks. I genuinely hope you don't have to go through another one like it.
> facts
I gave you my source of facts (podcast), besides living through it. I'm not hearing different facts or sources from you. Is there something misleading or wrong about the podcast you want to highlight? Other than you're against connecting to the national grid, what are you advocating for?
Nearly 15% of Irelands population was without power for multiple days earlier this year due to a storm. And the Iberian peninsula blackout that happened just in April was one of the biggest power blackouts in the history of the world. And those are just the ones off the top of my head.
This feels like you’re applying absolutes to a massive industry with wildly varying standards for peer review and work product.
I was a consultant for years at a Big4 and I can personally attest to a lot of the stuff I was producing as a 22 year old going straight to the client leadership with zero oversight or review from my higher ups. Whether something got extensive quality checks was dependent on the type of work, notoriety of the client, and of course personal management styles of the partners involved.
In several of my projects, nobody on the team had experience with a particular topic, including the senior management, but the client was all told we did. The juniors on the project were then expected to put together product and deliver it, and none of it was reviewed by the higher ups (not like they had any expertise in it to provide feedback anyway).
This is true for the act of launching VMs, but it’s pretty reductive towards the entire suite of important features that Proxmox provides like clustering, high availability, integration with various storage backends, backups, and more that qemu doesn’t.
If you’re on iOS, the app “Strong” is a really simple but great tracking app. On Android there is “FitNotes” which is a little bit more barebones, but still really functional. I have tried Jefit a few times and think it’s great but ended up using these other ones because of their simplicity.
AWS really shot themselves in the foot with naming everything “Amazon Q <insert suffix here>”. The Q that’s in the console is completely and entirely different from the “Q Developer” and other AI products that AWS is launching.
The Q Developer CLI, Q Developer IDE plugins, and now Kiro are pretty much just wrappers around Claude Sonnet 3.7/4, and work just as well as them.
Which is kind of ironic since the Amazon Q Developer CLI (which is essentially Claude Code with a slightly different wrapper) was released long before Claude Code and seems to mostly be flying under the radar.
Claude Code really was at the right place at the right time. Cursor started putting new models under their MAX plan that charges per use and I started getting worse results with Cursor over time as they optimized costs. I started looking into Cline/RooCode when Cursor did this because I knew they were in the squeezing customers stage now. I used those for a while with Sonnet thru OpenRouter, but Anthropic had the genius plan of bundling Claude Code with their Max plan. That made a lot of users jump ship from Cursor and the difference is night and day for me. Yes I pay 5 times more than I did with cursor, but still less than using API credits and the results for me have been superior.
Claude Code is what it is because of Claude, TUI or not isn't really the point. What makes IDEs lose to TUIs is that the agentic models can really do more than coding and is evolving toward a hands-off kind of workflow. A clunky IDE is too much for that, but TUI is not the way either. When has TUI ever been mainstream?
Agentic tools of the future will be rich notebook/chat interface that's available in all form factors, which is to say, most likely web/cross platform apps.
You can have an agent loop in your IDE, I don't see why anything makes "IDEs lose to TUIs" there.
If anything, TUIs are the awkward in-between of "human in the loop, but with poor tools" where one side is fully automatic, agents suggesting fixes on issue tracker, and the other is holding-AI's-hand where you review every step one at a time.
I hate trying to copy paste in/out of Claude Code's unnecessarily-cute boxed text input.
Zed's implementation of the agent feedback loop isn't yet as good as Claude Code, but there's nothing inherently IDE-related in the parts that are lacking.
I use the TUI for a lot of agentic stuff that is not necessarily coding, from performing some cloud management commands or just dumb things like "where the hell did I alias vim to nvim?". For those things, having to reach out to the IDE is annoying.
And the way I see the future of coding is that should should be able to code from anywhere, mobile, web, your computer. You already have your code on the cloud (most of the time). Neither TUI or IDE works well currently for that.
These AI reports are just an acceleration of the slop created by similar human “researchers”. The real root cause of this is that most security “professionals” have been trained to do the bare minimum of work and expect a payday from it.
There’s an entire industry of “penetration testers” that do nothing more than run Fortify against your code base and then expect you to pay them $100k for handing over the findings report. And now AI makes it even easier to do that faster.
We have an industry that pats security engineers on the back for discovering the “coolest” security issue - and nothing that incentivizes them to make sure that it actually is a useful finding, or more importantly, actually helping to fix it. Even at my big tech company, where I truly think some of the smartest security people work, they all have this attitude that their job is just to uncover an issue, drop it in someone else’s lap, and then expect a gold star and a payout, never mind the fact that their finding made no sense and was just a waste of time for the developer team. There is an attitude that security people don’t have any responsibility for making things better - only for pointing out the bad things. And that attitude is carrying over into this AI slop.
There’s no incentive for security people to not just “spray and pray” security issues at you. We need to stop paying out but bounties for discovering things, and instead better incentivize fixing them - in the process weeding out reports that don’t actually lead to a fix.
Professional Vulnerability Researcher here... You are correct. Over the years this industry has seen an influx of script kiddies who do nothing but run tools. It's sad but I really think this field needs more gate keeping...
Oh yes. AI has nothing to do with it! It is Totally Outrageous and Unexpected that AI would be abused to spew a lot of low value crap.
Haha, I kid. Make no mistake, this is the AI sales pitch. A *weapon* to use on your opposition. If the hackers were trying to win by using it to wear down the defenders it could not possibly be working better.
It is at the same time being used to tear down faith in democracy, all open content in the Internet, workers' autonomy, and generally serving to attempt to make all thought derivative while minimizing incentives to create anything new that isn't an AI
Using something like restic or borgbackup+rclone is pretty much the same experience as tarsnap but a fraction of the price.