Yeah, fair enough. That’s a great point. I will update my opinion of this advancement.

The catch is that it’s useless in most plastics applications, where you really don’t want it to dissolve easily. Probably more catches, but that’s the one I see right away.

You see the thing is, the point of plastic is that it doesn’t dissolve easily. I can see this having some niche applications, but this won’t be replacing most plastics any time soon.

That wholly depends on what and how you’re animating. 2D animations with something like a CSS based animation software only require basically anything with a CPU. Simple 3D animations, like source engine, usually require either decent integrated graphics or a dedicated GPU. Complex 3D animations, like some of the stuff you can do with Blender, require at least 8ish GB of vram and a decent GPU. Then if you want to generate animations with AI, you’ll need at the bare minimum something like a 3090 (and a lack of ethics).

The VRAM is technically the only limiting factor in most cases, because you can only render what fits into it. The power of your GPU doesn’t really matter as to what you can render, just how fast you can render it. Within reason, of course. A thirty year old GPU isn’t going to be able to render things that rely on modern graphics APIs.

Most software also lets you render with a CPU, which just takes longer. So even a GPU isn’t strictly necessary. Just necessary if you don’t want to spend days rendering.

TS devs: 😢

That’s the thing though, free social media was giving them massive returns. But the line must go up. And once they completely saturated the market, there are only two ways to make the line go up: expand the market (give Internet to communities that didn’t have it), or extract more money from your existing users (enshittify). Facebook made a half assed attempt at the first one for a couple years, then pivoted hard to the second.

It’s simpler, there is a client for everything even mobile phones, it has a move command, it has props that can be edited without a copy command, pagination is however you set it up to be rather than a one size fits all approach, it can be just as scalable as S3 if you build it to be, it has much simpler locks that make them easier to use so you might actually use them, keys can be longer than 1024 characters, actual directories exist.

That’s just the protocol level. The biggest benefit for me isn’t really at the protocol level, but part of the design of my own WebDAV server: deduplication. I can throw the same file into my server with 50 different keys, and it will only take up the space of one copy on disk. This basically moved the logic of deduplication from my application to the blob store. Mountains easier from an application design perspective.

There are use cases where S3 is better, but they are few and far between. And, WebDAV is extensible. You can build whatever functionality you need into it, rather than using some proprietary protocol.

I’ve completely switched away from using Minio (and just the S3 protocol in general) in all of my projects.

I’ve found that the WebDAV protocol is better for object storage in almost every case. It’s also way simpler to use and understand.

Now it’s time for me to shill:

I wrote my own WebDAV server called Nephele. It’s free and open source, and you can run it on Docker. Probably doesn’t help if you’re using something that requires S3, but if you’re building something, I implore you to migrate away from S3.

I don’t honestly believe that AI can save me time as a developer. I’ve tried several AI agents and every single one cost me time. I had to hold its hand while it fumbled around the code base, then fix whatever it eventually broke.

I’d imagine companies using AI will need to hire more developers to undo all the damage the AI does to their code base.

I’ve been a professional software developer for over two decades. There is zero chance my job will get taken by an AI any time soon. Anyone who thinks my job is to write code doesn’t understand my job. That’s like saying a bus driver’s job is to turn a steering wheel.

My job is to turn vague ideas and nondescript feelings into APIs and (sometimes) UIs, then turn those into specs, then split those into tasks, then sometimes I’ll write the code for them and sometimes someone else does. About 90% of my time is turning ideas into plans, and about 10% of my time is turning those plans into code.

When I was young and was a junior engineer, my job was more to receive the specs from the senior engineers and turn that into code, but even then, I was still designing my own stuff. Maybe more like 40/60 time instead of 90/10.

Now that I’m a grizzled old man forged in the fires of task management software, I’m doing almost all of the design work myself. I manage a project that has about 250,000 lines of code. An AI isn’t going to be able to build new features into that, let alone decide which features to build in the first place.