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As someone who both uses AWS professionally, and as a consumer of goods on Amazon.com, I'm really surprised by the dichotomy in quality. Perhaps I shouldn't be,
by JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
As someone who both uses AWS professionally, and as a consumer of goods on Amazon.com, I'm really surprised by the dichotomy in quality. Perhaps I shouldn't be, and that's just how corporations are.
If AWS was as shaky as Amazon.com goods, nobody would use it.
- Cephalopterus 7y agoAWS is quite literally a printing press for Amazon that prints it $$ and let's it devour other competitors in the retail eCommerce segment by selling at close to no margins. They need to keep the AWS quality decent because unlike their retail customers, corporations using them can vote with their wallet and/or possibly sue if there's any actual misselling
- lawnchair_larry 7y agoI think you mean figuratively
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y agoIn informal usage, "literally" is used to provide emphasis. Literally, in this context, doesn't mean literally true. It's a figure of speech. Example: You might've heard a phrase like "I was literally blown away by the response I got" (probably from a vlogger). Nobody in English would say, "I was figuratively blown away by the response I got", because it's obvious the person is speaking figuratively. Here, literally is meant to emphasize just how effective AWS is acting analogously to the Treasury's money printing presses.
- Buge 7y agoWhen there's a word with 2 meanings that are almost opposites of each other, that's confusing. I think it's good to avoid using words in confusing ways like that. https://youtu.be/8Gv0H-vPoDc?t=163 https://youtu.be/8Gv0H-vPoDc?t=163
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y agoAdd this to the list of quirks of the English language.
- dhimes 7y agoAnd especially that world. “Literally” has also meant “figuratively” for over 150 years [https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of-literally https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of-lite...] I used to argue the other way too, then one day on a whim I looked it up. I was surprised.
- malnourish 7y agoI love Weird Al; but there's rarely confusion with the word "literally", else it would have fallen out of usage long ago. When someone says "it's literally a printing press" about something that is obviously not a printing press, you know that they are using literally as it has been used for hundreds of years[0]: for strong emphasis. [0]: https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/109061 https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/109061 definition 1c.
- Stratoscope 7y agoEnglish is full of words and phrases that mean something different from their literal meaning. Another classic example is "I could care less." Steven Pinker wrote about this in detail in The Language Instinct. https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2007/01/i-could-care-less.html https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2007/01/i-could-care-less... When someone says "I literally could care less", everyone listening knows what they mean. There is no confusion and no need to worry about whether they are literally correct. This is just part of the fun and wonder of the English language.
- Retric 7y agoThe literal definition works fine. Consider the related “it’s possible for me to care less” suggesting a preference exists, but it’s negligible. That’s generally how people mean “I could care less”. Which oddly enough means the literal difference between “I (could/couldn’t) care less.” is practically meaningless.
- thiagomgd 7y agoThis is literally the dumbest thing to do with a word. I mean literally, not literally.
- jjoonathan 7y agoI understand that English is defined by those who speak it, not by committee, and that the colloquial use of the word "literally" as an intensifier is widespread. I still think the word "literally" is worth fighting for. It would be a pity to turn a word with such precise, significant, and unique meaning into yet another mediocre intensifier, of which we have dozens. In doing so, we would not merely add a definition, we would destroy the old one. So, I'm with GP: the word "literally" doesn't fit the context and ought to be replaced.
- malnourish 7y ago"Literally" has been used in the contemporary colloquial sense since at least 1769[0]. [0]: https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/109061 https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/109061 definition 1c
- jjoonathan 7y agoThen it has been worth fighting for since at least 1769.
- malnourish 7y agoI think the battle has long been lost
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoThis. I'm all for treating language as the living thing it is. However, "literally" is a very useful word and there's noting else quite like it. If "literally" can mean both literally and the exact opposite of literally, it becomes devoid of meaning.
- BLKNSLVR 7y agoIn informal usage, "literally" is used to mean it's literal opposite "figuratively". Which I find literally demonstrative of human nature. "Informal" tends to mean "wrong", "bastardised", or "misappropriated". So I think we're all actually on the same page.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y agoWhat place does informal usage have in our speech, if only to be immediately corrected when it is used? When a commenter said, "No, you meant X", that statement in itself is wrong because the other poster intentionally used the colloquial definition.
- agumonkey 7y agopeople cite aws/amazon, there's also uber/vc that leverage massive funds to grow shaky business models without constraints.. how many others (if any, I'm genuinely curious)
- vineyardmike 7y agoGoogle Ads/EverythingElseAlphabet For what its worth, Amazon Retail has been (or could be, depending on quarter) profitable on its own. It's certainly not a shaky business model, shaky margins maybe. Similarly, Uber is a sound business model (taxis exist for a while), just an unsound price point.
- agumonkey 7y agoI don't know, Uber 'lets race to the bottom to kill everybody else' seems everything but sound. Amazon is operating weirdly (random pricing now) even though it's true the financial side is probably normal.
- jjoonathan 7y agoDo we use the same AWS? The one where new features are half-baked, old features are still half-baked, and the only redeeming factor is convenience?
- jeffparsons 7y agoThere are two "AWS". One consists of: - EC2, including scaling groups (but crucially do not attempt to use them for auto-scaling) - S3 - Route53 - RDS - Redshift - Maybe a few others I've forgotten or haven't used They all have their flaws, but if you stay on the beaten path, they basically work most of the time. Then there is the other AWS. It consists of all the other high level services you can pick from that enormous drop-down. I haven't tried many, but from my little experience and loaaaads of anecdotes from other people, _that_ AWS is largely unreliable rubbish. That is to say, stick to the extremely common low-level or otherwise foundational stuff unless you love pain and disappointment.
- eropple 7y agoI'd add a few to those. Fargate is remarkably trouble-free. ElastiCache is reasonably well-done Redis. SQS, EventBridge, and SNS are solid and unsurprising. Even DynamoDB is quite good so long as the implementor understands how to actually use it (most people don't, and instead just crank up the read units until AWS literally owns your company). But the thrust of your point remains: when you get into the nonsense factory, when you're trying to bolt together the higher level integrated services, it becomes an exercise in self-inflicted stochastic violence.
- jjoonathan 7y agoYes, if you stay on the beaten path, invest time in figuring out the subset of functionality that actually works, and tease out through experimentation its major quirks, the basic AWS services can be made to work fairly reliably. I stand by my description of this state of affairs as "half baked." The true AWS advantage is that the boss can't get fired for choosing it so the individual contributors already have spending authority inside its walls. Unfortunately, that's a trump card.
- robbyt 7y agoReliability of AWS and GCP is one of their best features. Everyone just assumes Azure works as well as the others (spoiler alert: it doesn't). The main reason you hear about so much Azure growth is because they give free credits to their software assurance customers. For everyone else, not work paying for it.
- lowdose 7y agoDidn't Microsoft migrate active directory into Azure so every enterprise client is on Azure?