Readit NewsSadly the fallout from the Dotcom era wasn't a rejection of the asinine Business 2.0 mindset but instead an infection that spread across the entirety of finance.
There's an upside to this sort of effort too, though. You actually need to make it crystal clear what your idea is and what it is not, because of the continuous pushback from the agentic programming tool. The moment you stop pushing back, is the moment the LLM rolls over your project and more than likely destroys what was unique about your thing in the first place.
“ They drank tumblers of Irish whiskey filled to the brim, illicit pours they secured with ten-dollar tips to a curvy Dominican bartender.”
“ For the price of three beers, he told me his story.”
“ In the two decades since the show aired, a hundred thousand American Spirits had yellowed Bob’s fingers and turned his voice to gravel.”
When I read things like this I find it very hard to take the wider message seriously, because it feels like writing-as-cosplay, the writer inhabiting a caricature of “hard bitten” and inserting that at the forefront of the piece.
Very odd.
I think you quite didn't got the point. The whole point is that putting together a system architecture that considers Cloudflare is a single point of failure is like designing a system architecture that considers a power supplier a single point of failure. Technically they can be considered that if you really really want to, but not only are things irredeemably broken when those failure modes are triggered but also they themselves are by far expected to be the most reliable components of your systems due to their design and SLAs that is pointless to waste time and resources mitigating such a scenario.
"I want to use a power tool and simply plug it into a wall" is not the same class of problem as "we're using a heart-lung machine during this bypass operation and power loss results in dead patients."
The widespread dependence upon Cloudflare has resulted in the "heart-lung machine" problem of DNS, among other things, being "solved" by a "power tool" class of solution.
This is a simplistic opinion. Claiming services like Cloudflare are modeled as single points of failure is like complaining that your use of electricity to power servers is a single point of failure. Cloudflare sells a global network of highly reliable edge servers running services like caching, firewall, image processing, etc. And more importas a global firewall that protects services against global distributed attacks. Until a couple of months ago, it was unthinkable to casual observers that Cloudflare was such an utter unreliable mess.
It may have been unthinkable to some casual observers that creating a giant single point of failure for the internet was a bad idea but it was entirely thinkable to others.
First, let’s set aside the separate question of whether monopolies are bad. They are not good but that’s not the issue here.
As to architecture:
Cloudflare has had some outages recently. However, what’s their uptime over the longer term? If an individual site took on the infra challenges themselves, would they achieve better? I don’t think so.
But there’s a more interesting argument in favour of the status quo.
Assuming cloudflare’s uptime is above average, outages affecting everything at once is actually better for the average internet user.
It might not be intuitive but think about it.
How many Internet services does someone depend on to accomplish something such as their work over a given hour? Maybe 10 directly, and another 100 indirectly? (Make up your own answer, but it’s probably quite a few).
If everything goes offline for one hour per year at the same time, then a person is blocked and unproductive for an hour per year.
On the other hand, if each service experiences the same hour per year of downtime but at different times, then the person is likely to be blocked for closer to 100 hours per year.
It’s not really bad end user experience that every service uses cloudflare. It’s more-so a question of why is cloudflare’s stability seeming to go downhill?
And that’s a fair question. Because if their reliability is below average, then the value prop evaporates.
The problem with pursuing efficiency as the primary value prop is that you will necessarily end up with a brittle result.
AI assistance in programming is a service, not a tool. You are commissioning Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. to write the program for you.