The mac mini they bought with their own money to run their own stuff? Company policy doesn't apply to their personal computing.

I'm sure company policy would technically prohibit them from accessing company resources from their personal computer; or if it does allow access to company resources from their personal computer then their corporate tech policy very likely does apply to their personal computing.

If the executive bought it for a personal mac mini for personal use only, with no interaction with company resources, then the person probably wouldn't have told the story.

You might be right. But this (and a few other) weird comments in this thread suggest some folks aren't thinking very clearly on this topic.

> Company policy doesn't apply to their personal computing.

Sure, it'll come over as "oh I'm just running an experiment" after your infra/security teams notice. Seen @ public company before current ai hype.

"If you mix raisins and turds, all you have is turds"

It's a common phenomenon - mixing strong arguments with weak ones because then you have "more arguments". So dumb.

And yet you mixed strong advice with childish dismissal.

But I agree, you should present your best argument, otherwise they'll attack your weakest argument and claim victory. Such tactics are weak in logic but often successful.

And you mixed childish pedantry with a general agreement.

I am often pedantic. But here I think it's instructive. One can easily use name-calling without realising it.

Who’s name-calling here?

Lol... maybe I needed an explanation point to make it obvious it wasn't by accident...

*exclamation

AKSHUALLY

Of course you are right, but in addition they wouldn't have even made them if GPUs hadn't made ML on CPU so relatively incapable. Competition drives a lot of these decisions, not just raw performance.

You are missing his point. They very likely don't start building TPUs if there were no GPUs.

I'm not missing the point. If you recall your computer architecture class there are many vector processing architectures out there. Long before there was nvidia the world's largest and most expensive computers were vector processors. It's inaccurate to say "gaming built SIMD".

You are missing the point - it's an economic point. Very little R&D was put into said processors. The scale wasn't there. The software stack wasn't there (because the scale wasn't there).

No one is suggesting gaming chips were the first time someone thought of such an architecture or built a chip with such an architecture. They are suggesting the gaming industry produced the required scale to actually do all the work which lead to that hardware and software being really good, and useful for other purposes. In chip world, scale matters a lot.

The Cray-1, which produced half a billion USD in revenue in today's dollars, at a time when computing was still science fiction, did not demonstrate scale? I just can't take you in good faith because there has never been a time when large scale SIMD computing was not advanced by commercial interests.

In this context scale = enough units/revenue to spread fixed costs.

I'll take your word on lifetime revenue numbers for Cray 1.

So yes, in todays dollars, $500 million of lifetime revenue - maybe 60-70 million per year, todays dollars - is not even close to the scale we are seeing today. Even 10 years ago Nvidia was doing ~$5 billion per year (almost 100x your number) and AMD a few bill(another 60-70x ish)

Even if you meant $500m in annual (instead of lifetime), Nvidia was 10x that in 2015. And AMDs GPU revenue which was a few billion that year, so it's more like 17x.

That's a large difference in scale. At the low end 17x and at the high end 170x. Gaming drove that scale. Gaming drove Nvidia to have enough to spend on CUDA. Gaming drove NVidia to have enough to produce chip designs optimized for other types of workloads. CUDA enabled ML work that wasn't possible before. That drove Google to realize they needed to move away from ML on CPU if they wanted to be competitive.

You don't need any faith, just understand the history and how competition drives behavior.

If you think they are doing bad work because they are in country X for any X, it's xenophobia.

There is also the benefit of being able to use a single database (and hence schema) across multiple "apps". In many cases the complexity arises from the fact that all these apps have their own databases.

It doesn't. The person is saying they built just the functionality they needed. Probably 25% of a CMS. That's the point.

Exactly.

And the big advantage for us is two things: Our content marketers now have a "Cursor-light" experience when creating landingpages, as this is a "text-to-landingpage" LLM-powered tool with a chat interface from their point of view; no fumbling around in the Webflow WYSIWYG interface anymore.

And from the software engineering department's point of view, the results of the work done by the content marketers are simply changes/PR in a git repository, which we can work on in the IDE of our choice — again, no fumbling around in the Webflow WYSIWYG interface anymore.

This is the benefit few understand properly. The storage layer is where you get a lot of benefits.

In most cases they can't. The cost they face is sales and marketing. Acquiring a customer costs money. Churn happens.

this is true in many cases and not in many cases. Another true one is payments - it's complex AF and and no one will sit down and vibe code it. A CRM? Easy in many cases. Some workflow tool? Easy, they know the exact workflow.

So, sure, some products will go the way of the dodo and some will not.

Only the still meek vibe code payments, the truly brave simply install the Stripe MCP directly in their on site chat window

this is hilarious

You are ridiculous. The all in cost is easily that. Cars don't run on air. Insurance costs money.

And you don't use "ingenious" there.