The really fun part was after getting billing finally set up in the cloud console trying to find what model name you actually have to use to call it via the API.
Conflicting information? Sure! Gemini cloud help being useless? Naturally.
Oh and don’t forget that error message being returned when you try to call the API is because you didn’t give your project the proper permissions in google cloud console. What permissions do you need? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Google Cloud Console feels like being stuck in the seventh circle of hell.
To get the reduced rate many municipalities will require you to visit an office, somewhere you likely have to take transportation to, during office hours (aka working hours), and provide documentation to prove this.
This isn't really unknown either. There's a very good story anyone can look up about Dr. V in India and what it took for him to actually get the eye care he wanted to provide to the people who needed it.
In the digital world many of us know you want to deeply understand your user and design with them in mind. Same thing here in the meat space.
Yep, Peter Drucker wrote about this all the way back in 1964.
> The competition is therefore all the other activities that compete for the rapidly growing “discretionary time” of a population
His examples were bowling ball manufacturers competing with lawn care companies, but the idea is the same, go up an abstraction layer, and the competition is for time.
My perspective from someone who wants to understand this new AI landscape in good faith. The water issue isn't the show stopper it's presented as. It's an externality like you discuss.
And in comparison to other water usage, data centers don't match the doomsday narrative presented. I know when I see it now, I mentally discount or stop reading.
Electricity though seems to be real, at least for the area I'm in. I spent some time with ChatGPT last weekend working to model an apples:apples comparison and my area has seen a +48% increase in electric prices from 2023-2025. I modeled a typical 1,000kWh/month usage to see what that looked like in dollar terms and it's an extra $30-40/month.
Is it data centers? Partly yes, straight from the utility co's mouth: "sharply higher demand projections—driven largely by anticipated data center growth"
With FAANG money, that's immaterial. But for those who aren't, that's just one more thing that costs more today than it did yesterday.
Coming full circle, for me being concerned with AI's actual impact on the world, engaging with the facts and understanding them within competing narratives is helpful.
It's not even an externality? They just pay market price for water. You can argue the market price is priced badly (e.g., maybe prices are set by the state), but that doesn't make it an externality. The benefits/costs are still accrued by (and internal to) buyer and seller.
If datacenters are getting electricity and water at a rate lower than retail (costs passed on to residents or tax payers), and factors like noise and water pollution aren't factored in, then yes there are unpriced externalities.
So you are saying that test driven development is:
a) not useful for you and your use cases
b) never useful in any use cases
c) sometimes useful but not for you
There's an old Drucker quote "there's nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."
If you're in the wrong market or building for the wrong customers you can execute brilliantly on everything you mentioned and it won't matter. The only thing that matters is product market fit or finding it if you don't have it. That's what I see as unsaid in your parent's comment about "execute what though?"
... yes. One of us is missing the point. It's probably me, but even if you're running a lawn care company there will be annoying details you have to get right. That's execution.
Perhaps it's more that we are looking at it from different levels. A contrived example to illuminate:
If I'm running a lawn care company in the desert I can get all those annoying details right and still be unsuccessful. So strategy is not opening a lawn care company in the desert.
If you think I'm missing something you are saying, please let me know!
Haha sure, that works. Or tailor your services for xeriscaping. The thing is, that's sufficiently obvious that it's not the kind of thing we're usually looking for when we talk about "strategy". Important, yes, but probably not what I was asking about.
So maybe there's "strategy" on the level of "sell something that non-zero people want", then there's execution on the details, and then a higher level of strategy that's maybe related to fine tuning product market fit, etc. But that feels like a weird discontinuity in "strategy" along the priority axis, and definitely doesn't fit with the conventional tone of "strategic thinking", which is definitely more on the "higher" level end of that spectrum.
What exactly did your work flow look like for the gpt-5-medium refactor you did?
I don't have a test like that on hand so I'm really curious what all you prompted the model, what it suggested, and how much your knowledge as a SWE enabled that workflow.
I'd like a more concrete understanding if the mind blowing nature is attainable for any average SWE, an average Joe that tinkers, or only a top decile engineer.
4. buying out or building feature parity with competitors that took FB from its IPO market share of $104 billion to today's market cap of $1.89 trillion.
Has he innovated successfully since the o.g. thefacebook? Not really. Metaverse fell flat on its face. Hardware efforts over two decades have gained no meaningful traction. AI is a mess.
Oh and don’t forget that error message being returned when you try to call the API is because you didn’t give your project the proper permissions in google cloud console. What permissions do you need? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Google Cloud Console feels like being stuck in the seventh circle of hell.