This article misses the most important reason to not use Serverless: Cost. It's way more expensive to run serverless than it is to run any other format, even something like AWS Fargate is better than Lambda if you keep your Lambda running for 5% of the time.

The second one is even more important though: Time. How many of my systems are guaranteed to stop after 15 minutes or less? Web Servers wouldn't like that, anything stateful doesn't like that. Even compute-heavy tasks where you might like elastic scaling fall down if they take longer than 15 minutes sometimes, and then you've paid for those 15 minutes at a steep premium and have to restart the task.

Serverless only makes sense if I can do it for minor markup compared to owning a server and if I can set time limits that make sense. Neither of these are true in the current landscape.

This is why I use serverless (API Gateway + Lambda) for super low traffic stuff. If I have a cron that runs 24 times a day for 12 seconds, or a service that occasionally gets a request every few days, it makes sense not to deal with the overheard and waste of a server or container running constantly.

Tool-chain dependencies are still dependencies. If you need autoconf, cmake, python, perl, and gcc to build, you’ve made yourself a giant pile of garbage to deal with compared to just having a bash script that you spent two days getting into shape to send incantations to gcc.

One group sees the other as a person backpacking with a bespoke gadget for every little thing, wearing a 60lb rucksack while they are wearing a 20lb ultralight pack and have a multi-tool that serves 90% of their needs.

One group sees the other as a person with a reel-mower proclaiming they don’t need a tractor mower, while they can mow much less grass a day.

Both groups are right, and both are wrong. Depending on what you’re doing, it can make sense to use heavyweight tools, lightweight tools, little tooling, or lots of tooling. If you’re hired into a big codebase written over the course of ten years, skipping tools that will help you make sense off it is probably not the right choice. If you’re building a system from scratch, then those same tools might inoculate you to the dangers of having a poorly organized codebase. If you need to debug a server remotely, bring productive in vim and basic command line tools could be invaluable. But if your debugging stuff, you could have saved yourself hours by turning on a debug port and stepping through the code in a debugger.

The arguments everyone is having look to be about whether it’s worth it to learn how to use tools. The answer is yes, but everyone has their identity caught up in their pet workflows.

What’s another dignified option when it reaches terminal?

Accepting suffering as part of the human condition. In the Christian faith, Christians are taught that suffering is part of life and good things can result from it. Like what? Empathy, love, and compassion from caregivers, friends, and family to the suffering person. Also, the suffering person may express love to those around them. Jesus allowed himself to be crucified and suffered one of the most horrible deaths imaginable. He did it as an act of love for humanity. A Christian might argue that it was also to serve as an example of enduring suffering.

And you and anyone else can still opt to live and suffer if you see value in it. The beauty of freedom is that you can do you, and nobody can force their beliefs on you.

I would also caution with the old adage, don't knock it till you try it. Life in extreme pain is no life at all. Calling on Jesus isn't going to suddenly make excruciating pain more bearable, especially for someone who doesn't believe in Jesus. Maybe toughing it out for a few more weeks or months is worth extra presents in heaven, but unless we have some evidence of that, I think it would be grossly irresponsible, indeed evil, to legislate it. It is, in my opinion the equivalence of torture.

I accept your suffering if you choose so. If I knew you personally, I would even do all I could to help and comfort you. However, I cannot condone you imposing suffering on others in the name of YOUR religion.

I never said anything about me wanting to impose my religious belief on others.

Christians can suffer as much as they like. To everyone their weirdness.

Just don't push it to others under the name of morality out other bullshit.

I would like to be able to die when I want to, in a simple and painless way. Because I will do it anyway jumping under a train or lorry it is just messy for everyone.

Your life doesn't belong to you. You need to reread the Phaedo.

I never said anything about imposing my beliefs on others. I merely responded to the question about whether there was any other course when things are terminal.

Yeah they will. Surgeons aren’t in it for the money, they’re in it for the glory.

Most doctors, nurses, EMTs, etc. would work for free if they could magically have them and their families taken care of, as evidenced by how much they go well above and beyond the requirements of their job, working heroic hours, buying stuff out of pocket when the system fails them, etc.

Not all health care professionals, but 90% of the ones I’ve met.

What about the surgical nurses and med techs? What about paying for the surgical room? The after surgery care? And a lot of surgeons are in it for the money.

EMTs are usually in it because they're adrenaline junkie masochists. I am married to one, there are few exceptions.

Nurses are often there "for the money" but absolutely love their jobs.

Surgeons are absolutely in it for the glory, they have the same basic makeup as EMTs.

Different specialties have different personalities, for sure. Just look at Orthopedic bro...

But the planning change to add a new wing to the building? That can’t be made smaller. What about if a new regulation is put in effect requiring every fire door to have a corresponding fire window next to it? That’s either 3000 little changes that need reviewing or one big change. One big change is often the correct choice. Knowing when it’s appropriate and when it’s not is the job of the engineer, the team, and the lead.

We could make it not opinion with ease. Make the test:

“Can the fetus survive without the host body?”

That’s a medical question that will slowly move toward not aborting ever. And it solves the medical issues as well. “This fetus is killing the host” always allows for removal, because we can either keep them alive, or it can’t survive.

Then the folks who want more babies to reach term can focus on improving medical technology instead of getting involved with the mess that is people’s love lives.

Do you want your children to have a better life than you? They won’t unless we start putting in the work to fix climate change.

As a species we took on some climate debt to improve our standard of living, and we’ve been talking bigger loans every year. Those loans are coming due in the form of larger and more frequent weather-based disasters as well as health problems for millions. If we start paying off the loan more aggressively now, we can help prevent harsher payment plans for the next 50 years.

You don’t pay off a house all at once, but you’ll thank your future self for paying it off earlier rather than later.

I can’t find any statistical reporting to back there being millions more undocumented immigrants coming into the country in the last 4 years. Data-backed reporting indicates that we’ve had ~11 million undocumented workers since the 2005 with little change until 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-k...

Any chance you know where to find some more?

Look at monthly border patrol contacts with people crossing the border illegally. About 55k/mo recently with much higher numbers in 2023.

This was a “double-pump” migration to a faster database and building a caching service. There’s nothing particularly fancy or creative about their solutions. The migration efforts and working out issues with the reverse table scan were probably way more creative, but they didn’t get into that unfortunately.