Reminds me of my recent vibe coding project of porting Winamp AVS to web using Emscripten. It worked so well that it was simply.. done after a few sessions, and I was amazed and also feeling fuzzy in the head.
One turn involved ChatGPT explicitly fixing C++ source code to fix beat detection for the available audio sources after I complained that it was broken.
Hands down, sure, the most respectable work, apart from the original AVS code, was done by the Emscripten contributors. Anyway, it readjusted my expectations, even after my day job switched to agentic coding as the primary development tool.
and AI-doomers still post in this site saying AI has no benefit, where is a productivity boost, and where are all these new software AI is supposedly making...
I have a few of my own stuff and it has been amazing.
In the context of free will (disregarding the full context here for a moment), this is where it actually gets interesting.
Theologists and philosophers alike have been thinking about the problem what "free will" even means exactly because of this, when there are no preconditions informing my decision, what does "free will" even mean?
In German, I have heard this being framed as "bedingt freier" versus "unbedingt freier Wille".
As a thought experiment, it makes a very good argument for a deterministic world view, quantum woo aside.
When there are no reasons for what I decide, what are my decisions based on? A whim? Chance? My personal taste? Well, my personal taste is a reason. And all reasons come from somewhere, right?
On the other hand, thinking of my decisions as without preconditions: what does that give me?
Decisions without rationale?
Sure, one can make everything more fuzzy by introducing probablities, even real chance if you like.
But also then, total determinism with hidden information is an immune theory that cannot be refuted, so it explains nothing.
But was does true randomness help with? I'd say, from a philosophical perspective, it doesn't bring any interesting argument to the table.
So this leaves us with free will as the only useful way of understanding ourselves and our role in the world, but on the other hand, it seems like a sneaky device for ourselves to ignore the infinitely confusing thought of considering ourselves determined by our circumstances (which, as a thought, already has real side-effects, too).
Hm, edited out snark. I think that's an easy trap to fall into, and it's good to warn against.
What I agree on (top comment): there should be laws against providing cloud services without a fee cap. Another edit: businesses and hobbyists are different beasts of course. You can't demand scaling and reliability and a hard fee cap. For traditional shared hosting, this is mostly a solved problem AFAIK.
That's what prevented me from using Firebase for a hobby project in 2023.
The only available killswitch was some weird workaround with a Google Sheets monitoring the bill and triggering an action (give or take latency) when it exceeded some amount...
"The market" is not a benevolent fairy godmother with your best interest at heart.
It is a machine that optimizes profit and absolutely nothing else. It does not and cannot consider what is "good" or "right" or even "legal" unless and until one of those things directly and indisputably hurts profits too much.
This is magical thinking. "The market" is fundamentally incapable of making things better for you, the consumer.
I agree, up until the question is how transparent the risks are.
For example, I think that OpenAI's system of incentivizing automated credit purchases borders on being predatory. Not because it would be hidden info. Just because the product is clearly aimed at consumers who do things that they might not fully understand.
For me, I don't habe any issues with their current design.
But for John Doe vibe-coding their nutrition analysis app, I feel it's wrong to advertise automatic payments and long-running tasks without providing a clear fee cap option.
I think the OP just points out that if you never read the code you are playing with your wallet. It's a gamble and in this case it resulted in considerable losses for an individual.
> You can't demand scaling and reliability and a hard fee cap.
Why not? Just because you can scale to million or billions doesn't mean that you should do it automatically without any supervision. Just like because your BMW M5 can reach a top speed of 305 km/h, you shouldn't drive at that speed all the time. Heck, some should never drive at that speed.
OK, I meant "auto-scaling", which is what most of these dev-aimed services we are talking about offer, right?
Anyway, reliability is already enough of a criterion when you set up a site that does some expensive thing in an infinite loop, gets (D-)DoSed, etc.
When you're trying to develop a product to sell, these are all things to look out yourself and that's fine I guess.
Just find it sad that the providers of these services apparently often don't make clear to their customers the billing responsibilities that they enter, although technically, sure, it's all written in the terms / pricing.
Auto-scale to one hundred bucks cause I'm a poor student and that's all I have.
Auto-scale to a million cause I'm a big corporation and I can deal with a bad fiscal year.
By the way, I wonder how well is the debt collection auto-scaling going so to speak.
What I mean is parent companies and contracts that might obfuscate who's owed the debt.
However, I don't know anything about debt markets let alone homeownership.
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