They had a working PDP-10 at the Living Computers Museum (since shut down by Paul Allen's estate). Definitely a mainframe. That thing takes up an entire room.
Most of us never had the option for work to pay for Claude Code -- some internal orgs did this. That being said I had a personal Claude Code subscription for a bit.
Honestly I find GitHub Copilot CLI (and now also the new GitHub Copilot app) quite decent. I mostly use it with Opus 4.7, or rarely with GPT-5.5. The VSCode extension is ok, but CLI or app are the better experience IMO.
Microsoft. It more than compensated for Azure not being the best product . They are incredibly more responsive, you have multiple points of contacts and escalation chain of actual humans you can meet
they will even come to your customer call or connect with their rep already working with the mutual customer and so on.
AWS has the best tech and but not as good as Microsoft service wise, they certainly improved a lot last few years and it shows but because they don’t have any enterprise apps like MS their footprint is more limited.
Google keeps talking about GCP being important but doesn’t feel anything has changed on ground
My company also used all 3 (at a very large scale / spends). MS was nice, but useless / incompetent technically. Anything non-trivial took forever to get a straight answer or resolve. We rarely got to speak directly to anyone with real expertise.
AWS, we could speak directly to Sr engineers on the relevant team. Full transparency, highly responsive. They were clearly trying to understand our issues and suggest change for both us and themselves.
Google was mostly useless. There was one team I got to talk directly to, who were great. But that was the exception.
My experience with AWS hasn't been good when we had major problems in redshift becoming unresponsive. Since it was an intermitent issue and not a full blown blackout they just shrugged and we kept having problems for months.
I can confirm. Redshift support is mediocre even for a F100 firm with TAM support if the workload is large and complex and you have some needle in the haystack causing problems like you allude to.
Practically speaking keeping an eye on locks and transactions is a good idea, as is watching out for your statistics on key core columns going bad when they shouldn't. (analyze and vacuum sometimes don't actually do anything when you need them to...)
> You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle. -Bryan Cantrill
A few years back someone at work stuck their hand in the lawnmower. I've seen this happen a few times, but that time it ended with Oracle fining us for every VirtualBox install and the company sent The IT Spanish Inquisition around to make sure we all deleted it off our computers. Fun times.
You honestly just have to treat any Oracle product as malware, and proactively scan for it / block it from being installed on employee laptops in the first place.
In theory as a government employee you already fear getting in trouble with OGE (Office of Government Ethics) and in normal times this is truly enough. Nobody wants to have a conflict of interest or fail to disclose investments etc. However nothing is normal under the current administration...
I was a GS-15 before (same level most CTOs in government have). Maybe senior executive service roles (SES) might not concern themselves with ethics violations.
In any case the vast majority of government employees are on the general schedule.
Agreed - I have been checking to verify whether this truly is a Google service or just something that links out to generic Google ToS and Support pages. It looks suspicious.
Due to lots of long distance running my rest heart rate is below 40. I am highly skeptical I would experience a 3bpm lower heart rate after sauna. Maybe this benefit applies after infrequent activity or less intense activity only.
Squash merge is an artifact of PRs encouraging you to add commits instead of amending them, due to GitHub not being able to show you proper interdiffs, and making comments disappear when you change a diff at that line. In that context, when you add fixup commits, sure, squashing makes sense, but the stacked diffs approach encourages you to create commits that look like you want them to look like directly, instead of requiring you to roll them up at the end.
Like Jensen Huang said the job of an engineer is to solve problems not writing code. The code is a means to an end. This is certainly true for me as an engineer and why I'm not worried about AI.
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