I actually vibe-coded (kinda vibe, mostly hand holding) a "2D Sketchup" for myself for a large yard renovation/construction project we've been doing for about 12 months. It was mostly successful - as others noted, you spend a lot of time investing in the tool rather than drawing your project.

HP was making shit laptops that barely worked a decade before SaaS was a known acronym.

Sure but businesses bought them and people bought them. Their quality is beside the point.

PE firms are efficient... at maximising equity. A good example of what they do is find the maximum viable price consumers will pay.

A small business might be less accurate - figure out a "reasonable rate", and therefore charge less.

Shrek would argue the layers are a feature not a bug

The OS's do provide webviews pretty uniformly, and the browser engines they ship with behave more similarly than in the days of IE.

I get some of this... but the argument around versions like 3.10 being footguns in YAML apply here too - in both YAML and SOML both you want to quote that as a string. (I suppose in SOML the user might be used to quoting strings, but in both cases you'd still want your application-level parser to reject floats for that field for safety's sake).

I think many here would say the hyperscalers enjoy that the masses can't afford, e.g., ample local RAM (especially GPU RAM) because then they are encouraged to "rent" it from them. And that could lead to a feedback cycle where no-one could independely run models, due to (artificially created) economic conditions. And going further, if your personal economic prosperity is dependent on running capable LLMs, then while you may not be "enslaved" per se but you are certainly forced to pay these large companies for the racket they created and benefit from.

(No one is saying the RAM is "enslaved")

EDIT: upon re-reading, maybe we agree

I am a bit confused on your position - are you saying HOA's are uniquely awful, or saying that we should all have equal access to local RAM (and Sam Altman is like the chairman of the biggest & least efficient HOA ever)?

I know it's popular to take a black or white position and fight viciously about it, but I didn't say either of the choices you're offering. Some things are shades of grey.

Really though, I just wanted to point out that there's a difference between efficient use of limited resources and lower prices and convenience for consumers.

I'm from Australia and always assumed the word "shithouse" was mostly used here, and at first glance assumed this post was an amusing joke by an Aussie (though - being somewhat cutesy with a Trump-ism?) rather than a Norwegian government website.

Though I might be wrong - I doubt this word comes up in tech blogs and academic conferences very often?

We claim too many things as our own when, in fact, they're not.

It can go to extremes. Like 100x by going from a dynamic to static language then 100x more adjusting the data structures/algorithm…

Once I got very confused when exactly this kind of 10k x speed up I demonstrated for a problem introduced to me as a business bottleneck then got ignored (I wasn’t on this team, though, but it’s still hard to understand the mentality and incentives there).

I've known about a student, long ago in the '90s, who got to speed up a batch codebase in some bigcorp, as a summer job. The original did basically everything wrong, up to bubblesort. So student diligently cleaned up the mess and got a speedup from multiple hours to a few minutes.

Then he could not get an interview anywhere. After some backchannel communication it turned out he had to remove that experience from his CV, as all employers assumed he was just lying.

To be fair, I would have assumed that too. Occam's razor: in a sea of lying candidates, the next one is probably lying too.