> Great design is original thought. AI is wholly incapable of that
This is entirely accurate, however I fear there's a lack of perspective:
If you're in the middle of the desert and need to sit down, that random rock looks and feels great because there's nothing even close, around!
One issue that a lot of experts fail to recognize is that "great" is relative: It's not apparent to the experts because they are only pulled in when their expertise is needed. Most of the time when experts are pulled in, requirements are clear, you have traction, scale and now you need to optimize.
Once you're spoiled for choices, you have lots of options and then that random rock doesn't look appealing at all: now you're considering other factors like budget - IKEA vs Adirondack.
What AI is making a huge difference are places where "great" isnt that valuable:
- people in the desert: Someone wants to track what words their toddler is saying or their groceries or how much kitty litter they should buy soon and Claude will spit something out reasonable even if it makes the skin of experts crawl.
- commodity and bean counters: in cut throat industries like power or insurance, it's all commodity services competing on price. Most people arent going to pay a premium for a better looking, more intuitive insurance app. It just needs to not suck and fall over. Or you're making a knockoff of an existing, well understood product
I suggest every developer learn how to replicate, backup and restore the very database they are excited about, from scratch at least once. I propose this will teach them what takes to build a production ready system and gain some appreciation for other ways of managing state.
The if is doing a lot of heavy lifing there but with that out of the way you do make a strong case about "local first" apps. Nothing beats the simplicity of a simple `cp` but there are other tradeoffs to be made there.
That's why I was encouraging people to make backups and restores of their DB because personally, it has made me appreciate why different designs exist and when to use them vs just slapping a DB connection to an RDS instance and calling it a day.
I just want you to ensure you're not confusing B2 with the product being mentioned here. This is a custom Backblaze product which only works via their apps and I don't believe is available as a storage backend for backups through something like rclone.
I never tried this particular Backblaze product because I don't trust a opaque blob touching my most valuable data nor do I trust unlimited plans that dont mention what the limits are, atleast in fine print.
Depending on the usecase, rclone can expose an S3 endpoint via `rclone serve s3` to route to another protocol, eg sftp.
I mention it not to shill rsync.net, but to shill rclone, because when I discovered it I was even more impressed with it.
Obviously having to run a command and apply some amount of plumbing is different to a service just providing that API at the outset so the applicability for users will differ but still, rclone is very cool!
Happy to email you, if that's better, but is this because of unsustainable competition in the space or the tremendous volatility in consumption that object storage customers bring to the table?
I ask because in this current market, I would imagine investing in storage infrastructure is painful, but then I wonder, you are still in the storage infrastructure space anyways, so it likely has to do with the user behavior or user expectations or both.
If you don't, a good heuristic would be to see how much you pay per GB - if it's less than a cent, you probably did. The ones that come with support are typically a shade above per a cent per GB
In my circles at least, people aren't using Microsoft products on their own. At home they either use Macs or Linux.
We grew up compiling Linux kernels when Microsoft was busy spreading FUD about how dangerous it would be to unleash open source and use open source. That using Linux on something critical like servers would lead to absolute chaos because the kernel wasn't written by someone who knew how to move Mt. Fuji.
I imagine Backblaze will soon realize why good PR firms are so expensive.
To some it might feel nice the be vindicated. To know that people who didnt follow industry standard 3, 2, 1 backup rule have lost all the data they thought Backblaze would protect for them.
The thing to empathize here is those who purchased these retail Backblaze plans fell into two buckets:
1. The technically savvy who were following the industry standard 3, 2, 1 backup rule, arbitraging the "unlimited" plan, waiting for the game to be over.
2. The technically unsavvy who believed in the "unlimited" plan
My bet is that 2 is screwed and that's majority of the users of this specific Backblaze plan.
This is likely to have rippling effects on Backblaze including their unrelated, object store plans. When there are choices available, people don't appreciate being ripped off and right now, there are a lot of choices in object stores.
> Anyone that knows even a little bit about guns knows that this is utter nonsense
Most people in California who vote on these matters have not held a BB gun, let alone a semi automatic.
They have 0 idea that you just cannot buy actual guns from a grocery store in California anymore!
They think you can just buy a gun at Walmart like you can buy a can of Coke. I was able to pull up clips made in 2023 and 2025 that were literally claiming that. Hasn't been true since atleast 2009, likely even earlier.
A few years ago a local Walmart was clearing our their air gun and rifle selection after there had been a shooting on the east coast that was all over the news. Since ammo have become really expensive, I bought out the whole shelf of air rifles so I could continue to target practice with a focus on my breathing.
People called the cops on me. Multiple people verbally abused me as a gun nut and recorded me buying them on their phones. I had air guns - *children* *toys*. They thought it was the real deal!
The local sherrif's department received nearly a 100 calls that hour when we spoke. When I asked them why they even bothered to turn up because they know no Walmart in a 300 mile radius have ever sold a rifle in the last 20 years as was described to them over the phone, they just shrugged and said "politics".
You cannot defend yourself from a hungry coyote or surprised mountain lion with a dollar bill but you can certainly protect yourself or your child from one with a gun
> if you can make a gun, you can certainly make ammunition
theoretically true but having re-sleeved ammunition, the chances of injury is tremendously different. That said, a lot of people in California are having to resort to re-sleeving ammunition, not out of choice but because for all practical purposes, California has made buying ammunition impossible.
While you can crawl and bite your way through getting a horribly castrated gun in California, the real struggle begins buying affordable ammunition.
For regular people to own a gun that you can actually use in California, (not LEOs or certain other people), you either needed to have inherited them or bought them from the cartels. Otherwise you own something of limited use that insanely expensive to operate.
Can't you make a blunderbuss pretty easily with some rocks and scrap? I wonder how straight shooting a musket you could make? Probably pretty straight if you happened on something manufactured that already happens to fit pretty precise into your cylinder I'm guessing. You could probably get pretty far with airguns too. I mean a pellet gun is already enough to kill a bird or squirrel outright and pretty damn accurate. I probably wouldn't want to take one of those to the neck or soft part of the head.
pellet guns use the "diablo" profile to the pellets.
pellet guns have low spin per inch, and use drag to add extra stability.
and keep velocity below that trans-sonic shock range.
if you went to a reloading shop, and purchased some .177, or .22 projectiles, trimmed them down, or core them to about half wieght, and it will perform like a small rifle.
>pellet guns have low spin per inch, and use drag to add extra stability. and keep velocity below that trans-sonic shock range.
They are strong enough to embed the pellets into wooden fence boards already though. I think that is plenty enough velocity to blow out your trachea, enter your brain through your eye socket, and probably also penetrate the soft part of the skull.
i have couple of pellet rifles that will penetrate [2] gallon milk jugs full of water at 50 yards and leave pellets on the bottom of the third, 6" grouping with quick reload shooting.
dont get me started on souping up the piston, ive already talked about alternative projectiles, but yes it can be made even more powerfull so it will yeet signifigant grain wt.
> For regular people to own a gun that you can actually use in California, (not LEOs or certain other people), you either needed to have inherited them or bought them from the cartels.
or, you can just break these stupid, unenforceable laws and buy out of state or just "uncastrate" it yourself.
no idea why so many people get their panties in a twist everytime California passes an unenforceable law. they're unenforceable.
This is entirely accurate, however I fear there's a lack of perspective:
If you're in the middle of the desert and need to sit down, that random rock looks and feels great because there's nothing even close, around!
One issue that a lot of experts fail to recognize is that "great" is relative: It's not apparent to the experts because they are only pulled in when their expertise is needed. Most of the time when experts are pulled in, requirements are clear, you have traction, scale and now you need to optimize.
Once you're spoiled for choices, you have lots of options and then that random rock doesn't look appealing at all: now you're considering other factors like budget - IKEA vs Adirondack.
What AI is making a huge difference are places where "great" isnt that valuable:
- people in the desert: Someone wants to track what words their toddler is saying or their groceries or how much kitty litter they should buy soon and Claude will spit something out reasonable even if it makes the skin of experts crawl.
- commodity and bean counters: in cut throat industries like power or insurance, it's all commodity services competing on price. Most people arent going to pay a premium for a better looking, more intuitive insurance app. It just needs to not suck and fall over. Or you're making a knockoff of an existing, well understood product
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