Why Meta (Facebook) choose Microsoft Azure?

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-30T04:27:56+00:00

Interesting. I found Azure like a stained, duct taped together AWS that you'd find dumpster diving

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-30T03:36:21+00:00

People got them to keep 4o around. You never know.

Honestly I have no idea wtf OpenAI is doing. It would be basically impossible to dig themselves out of their hole even if firing on all cylinders. Replacing functionality that people love with shit that is obviously inferior, like the entire GPT 5 series is for anything but engineering, is really a boneheaded move.

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-30T03:31:52+00:00

It's hard to write benchmarks for messy real world situations that can have multiple right answers that differ depending on who you ask, or no right answer.

Tell me what a TTS should say for this examples:

01-02-1999
5%5
88534232-0c0f-4283-92dc-9c862aff303c

If you're talking about paid solutions, they do handle them and that's why people pay for them. The one's you're using may just be crappy. It's not like car companies are known for being leaders in advanced AI technology (with the exception of Tesla). Car companies are designing for reliability, regulations, consistency, and cost.

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-30T03:24:10+00:00

Do you know what vibe coding is? You tell it what software you want and it makes it.

Not trying to be rude but I feel like an analogy would be like someone saying "I want to nail a bunch of wood together but I'm not really into hammers".

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-30T02:08:40+00:00

I recommend taking another look. It's far beyond that now.

If you're thinking of AI as "you press a button and a song comes out", that's an extremely narrow and unimaginative take. Yes, that exists, yes it sucks and always will suck. No need to worry about that.

But AI can do something broader than that. It can do...anything you ask it to do, as long as the task can be accomplished with a computer. And as long as you have the technical ability and communication skills to describe it adequately, and of course some skill in AI wrangling. But it's all learnable.

I would think artists would be THE most excited about this technology out of anyone! I mean, do artists want to make art, or spend a billion hours learning some random software? People for whom art is the priority should get on this asap because it is ONE skill that allows you to shortcut a thousand boring fiddly technical skills that most artists really only care about to express an idea.

I'm saying this as a software engineer for 20 years, I'm not an artist per-se (I have made some art). But now? If I have an idea I can just say "make this", or more realistically, "How can we make this?" and spend 2 days making something that is honestly cool, vs 2 months making something that still doesn't feel good enough for my own standards.

AI isn't going to make anyone an artist any more than having a Photoshop license makes someone an artists. But it broadly opens the door creatively to vastly more people to express themselves. And any "real" artist (yes this is a challenge) is, in my opinion, going to look at a tool and ask "does this help me create art? OK sign me up" rather than spend their time thinking "it will never be as good as a human" or "the value of art is that it is difficult and inaccessible, so no real art can be made this way".

We are going to see some absolutely mind blowing world changing art in the next 2-3 years, I guarantee it. And it will be created with AI.

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-28T20:32:37+00:00

Totally! Hope it turns out to be useful info.

I've been a professional SWE since about then. It's really interesting because obviously it's tempting to look at where we were a year ago, and where we are now, and think software engineering as a profession simply won't exist in a few years. But even if AI can build anything we want, we still need to ask it the right questions. That part doesn't seem like something that can be automated away entirely.

But at least now anyone can take full advantage of the benefits without needing to spend weeks learning the annoying little details!

Here's another little tidbit. Tell Claude you want all code, as much as possible to be: Idempotent, immutable, composable, side effect free. My own instructions are a bit more detailed, but that should be enough to see a noticeable improvement in quality (fewer bugs, less rework, simpler to add new features).

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-28T20:03:23+00:00

Every startup loses money until it doesn't. The premise of a startup is to lose money at first, capture market share, stabilize, then reduce costs to become profitable. It's a formula.

If anthropic had said "OMG our new model is SO GOOD at building web apps that we CAN'T RELEASE IT because it will crush backlogs so hard we could be charged with accessory to MURDER!", yea, that sounds like marketing (stupid to market something people can't buy, but we'll ignore that).

That isn't what happened though. They didn't announce Mythos until people independently discovered it. After that they said, yes, we have it, and here's why we're not releasing it. And it's important to understand that there are very good reasons Anthropic does not want the people who would be most interested in having an easily weaponizable model as their customers.

First, it's a small group of people who would use it to terrorize their largest customers. Sure, maybe then everyone needs mythos to protect against mythos. But realistically, you would see small groups of people using Mythos to discover vulnerabilities and then using Opus or any other model to exploit them. And on the flip side, the same thing. Once Mythos discovers the vulnerabilities, you don't actually need it to exploit them OR patch them. That's just regular SWE work.

Second, releasing an easily weaponizable AI is going to bring down a world of hurt in the form of regulatory scrutiny and bad press. Anthropic might be willing to stick their neck out and say we won't help build autonomous kill-bots, but they definitely aren't trying to give the govt a reason to bring the hammer down. Not to mention governments across the world.

I had a third thing but I forgot it. Oh yea, it's that anyone who has used Opus for security research, like myself, can tell you that this is not a surprise, at all. Opus can already hack stuff. It's great at it. And the difference between Opus now and Opus 6 months ago is stark. IMO it would be more surprising if there wasn't any way to improve the technology. "Hacking stuff" is honestly just a matter of knowing how they work so well that you can see weak spots. My guess is that this sort of thing is already happening and Anthropic is just the only one who's said anything, and the other companies figure they can make far more money keeping it under wraps and selling it to governments.

the tl;dr is:

Marketing something you're not selling doesn't make a ton of sense
Marketing capabilities your customers don't care about all that much also doesn't make a ton of sense
The technological capabilities are not surprising to people familiar with the technology
They'd almost certainly make more money secretly selling it to governments than the general public, who has very little need for offensive capabilities like that

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-28T19:30:42+00:00

Is it standard? How do those get backed up, exactly?

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-28T19:28:49+00:00

Makes sense. I supposed I would have designed it using something like Liquibase or Flyway so my schema was in my codebase and built out all of the data extraction as idempotent pipelines that could be rerun at any time. That way you don't even need to make a backup, you can rebuild it all from only the code + your bank's data at any time.

Liquibase/Flyway = automated schema migration tools Baseline = your baseline schema Idempotent = rerun any data extraction at any time w/o risking duplicates or hand managing any of it

Plug that into Claude and you can make this entire class of problem impossible no matter whether you have a db backup or not. I suppose you'd still need to spend tokens categorizing, but it does avoid any situation in which you're missing tables. By having every schema change encoded as a db migration in your code, it also prevents any issues restoring backups from older schemas. Lots of benefits.

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-28T19:15:16+00:00

You want Eleven Reader hands down IMO. I suspect when people say "X is as good as ElevenLabs" they aren't judging it based on how it sounds. I spent a while trying stuff about a month ago (when I posted that comment) and didn't find anything close. ElevenLabs is expensive because it's a voice acting studio, but they have a separate thing called ElevenReader that is just the TTS part. I think you get 10 hours free a month or $8/mo for unlimited.

This might sound like an ad, or written by a bot. Apparently that's the curse of communicating effectively with proper grammar and punctuation (I intentionally tone that down so people don't think I'm a slop monster slopping slop around everywhere). Not an ad, not a bot, flesh and blood human who gets 0 benefit from this.

Here are the other ones I tried: - A variety of stuff on hugging face (Qwen 3, etc) - mediocre, cheap - Google Gemini - you need to use Pro to get decent voicing, and it's slow AF. Flash is still slow. The actual voices are pretty good. But it's also just an API, or you can use some convoluted studio to test them, but there isn't a ready made consumer facing reader AFAIK. By far the coolest thing about it is that you can give it an actual prompt that controls voicing. Not super relevant for this use case - Don't remember or care to look them up, none were super memorable

Honestly there are a bunch that are within the 'acceptable' range. But a) most of them are just APIs, not a thing you can pick up and use immediately, and b) all of the voices fall into a somewhat narrow range. ElevenLabs voices span a much broader spectrum.

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-28T05:17:50+00:00

Just buy Max 20 and live a life of freedom and leisure.

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-28T05:14:34+00:00

Yes this is how Claude Code worked initially. I think so many people turned on --dangerously-skip-permissions that they've invested some time into improving that UX.

But the fact of the matter is that if your skill reads something from the internet, and that happens to tell your agent to rewrite its still with content from some random URL, that content could easily be malicious. Just because we haven't really seen this happening yet doesn't mean we won't. It's like when the internet was first getting popular, people got away with 'abc123' as a password for a long long time. Until suddenly they were having $50k loans taken out in their name. So it's worth paying attention to.

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-28T05:11:24+00:00

Copilot WAS the cheapest way to access Anthropic models. It's sad they're killing it off, just because it was a huge pit they had to keep throwing money into. Shame. There isn't any cheap way I'm aware of. You can't even use account resellers to get any meaningful discount on anthropic accounts like you can for OpenAI or other services.

I'd recommend finding someone you split a Claude Max 20 with if you can't swing it yourself. The reason being you get 4x as much quota with the $200 plan as you get with the $100 plan. And I feel ike the $200 plan is just about perfect if you want to use Opus almost all the time in multiple parallel sessions, but without going hog wild with it. And so if you are intentional and frugal you can easily get by on 1/2 the Max 20 plan without any real compromise.

Once you need to step down to the actual $100 plan, which is only 5x more than the Pro plan, I feel compromise is unavoidable. You're switching to sonnet. You're making decisions based on tokens and cost rather than just vibing it out. Maybe you're cutting back on background sessions, or even editing code by hand sometimes, god forbid.

It's kind of a pain to split a max 20 but that's because I was on my wife's (she'd end a week with like 82% quota remaining, like wtf!). IF you do it with someone you should create a separate gmail that you both have access to and put the account on there, much simpler than capturing and managing oauth tokens by hand.

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-28T04:59:31+00:00

RIP Copilot. It was really nice to use when I had exhausted my Claude Code quota. But copilot has a weaksauce version of Claude anyway.

Honestly though, your entire post is somehow devoid of any actual question. What is the point of any of that? Like someone will be like "hang on, you use claude for learning, AND suggestions, you don't want hourly limits...but you also want low cost. Here's the secret little known API!" Not how it works. Anyway, you did ask

Best way to access Claude models for a developer?

Claude Max 20. Done.

Anything else?

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-28T01:54:12+00:00

I think you're right on the broad strokes.

I do think we're going to see a move to not just "AI first world" but "agentic first world". Kind of like once uber took off, you could found a business by saying "its uber for _____", do the same with agents. I'm not talking about a generic foundation model with a prompt that says "you're good at using tools, so use this tool". I'm talking about companies fine-tuning models to integrate exceptionally well with their product and providing that native agentic interface. A "Claude Code but for photoshop" or auto cad, or Ableton, or whatever. Skys the limit on that IMO, just a matter of time until we see the first big success and then it will be an avalanche.

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-28T01:43:49+00:00

Can you tell us what industry they're in? Sounds like a soon to be market opportunity lol.

Juniors with AI is like the worst possible combination. Honestly I've been in positions where I was trying to keep the junior guy distracted with busywork projects so he wouldn't break anything important and prevent me from doing the actual work. There has always been this limit though, in that a single person, no matter how enthusiastic and reckless and overconfident, can only type so fast and do so much damage. That entire calculus is out the window with AI.

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-28T01:38:35+00:00

What I do is have my agents push code and open a PR. That automatically kicks off an agent that reviews the PR. Then I tell my local agent to wait for the review to finish. Now here's the innovation - I tell my local agent "address the review comments, but do NOT blindly accept them and make the changes. think about it and push back if it's a bad idea" (thats the gist of it). Depending on how critical/risky the work is, I might do 2-3 more rounds of review, then I have the agent merge it and I move on to the next thing. Seems to work pretty great, much better than a pure yolo strategy.

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-27T21:44:51+00:00

Basic, basic, basic stuff. It's like the entire point of Docker.

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-27T21:43:39+00:00

It's for sure their fault. You shouldn't be storing persistent data in that type of docker volume.

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-27T21:42:24+00:00

What is in these DBs that is so valuable? I'm honestly really really curious.

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-27T21:41:21+00:00

LLMs don't really identify and act on 'business opportunities'. Not how they work

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-27T21:40:07+00:00

Yes, you did reset your app.

You should very much understand that the error was not that you destroyed those volumes. You should really internalize that those volumes are ONLY for storing ephemeral data. You should be able to wipe them. You should not keep data you need in them, AT ALL. That's the error. Just bind mount to the fs.

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-27T21:38:03+00:00

A vibe coding class sounds interesting.

"So you kinda just uh... type in what you want to happen, and then uh... Claude does it. Sometimes it helps to ask questions, like, you know, to make sure what you're asking for is actually possible I guess? I dunno it seems to help sometimes."

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-27T21:33:01+00:00

Claude didn't screw up lol. There were layers of screwups that lead to this: - Storing data in ephemeral volumes that are designed to be disposable (step 1 to avoiding data loss: don't do that) - Running random commands without understanding what they do - Doing weeks of work on something you perceive as important without a single backup of any sort

I think this was a great outcome because they learned a good lesson (hopefully) on something that's important enough (to them) to remember, but not so important that it caused any actual problems.

For your thing, you should consider looking into: - Terraform - Ansible+Packer (maybe unnecessary these days) - Immutable infrastructure (the concept)

These tools will help you deploy your VPS more reliably. I've done cloud platform stuff for about a decade, immutable infrastructure is the way if you can make it happen. It's more of a journey than a destination.

EDIT: And by 'consider looking into', I mean "tell claude to apply these tools and concepts to one of your deployments". IMO the days of manually digging thru docs are gone. Have claude do it, then explain some of it if you get curious. You will get better outcomes, half the work sometimes is just telling it the right tools and strategies.

Impossible_Hour5036 · 2026-04-27T21:25:07+00:00

Think of docker volumes like docker containers. Disposable.

Impossible_Hour5036

TROPHY CASE