As someone in music, yeah, that was one of the best movie soundtrack’s of all time (not much like it in movies beforehand).
But kind of disagree about the film, think it was under appreciated. It isn’t a masterpiece, but the acting, the overall story, and the visuals were really good. And yeah, those dark Tron-visuals combined with the pulsing, digital daft-punk music really worked (at least for me), and when I want to get pulled into a different world, will rewatch that film.
The Overture sounds like Chariots of Fire and The Lord of the Rings had a baby in the beginning, followed by a Kraftwerk wannabe who couldn't afford a vocoder.
Hmm, tend to disagree, but this is just an educated guess of mine. Seems like business have more specific needs that individuals, and would guess that Dropbox has many small features targeted for just companies (richer api's, more stability, more customization). Yeah, at least in my opinion, the larger the business, the more features they need.
Well they do. The problem is that if a competitor arises on the individual market they can pretty efficiently copy anything that makes them competitive.
And just a side question, it's incredible that her advisor would not use their computer (especially since they were in an analytical field, would think computers were essential for statisticians). What were their reasons? One obvious thought was were they just much older and didn't learn how to use them?
Think for a large tech company, they did a really good job with success in software. For exammple, they were probably the first large tech company to realize AI was actually working, and made it their focus:
And yeah, they did/do a lot through acquistions, but seems like most major companies screw up acquistions. Google has it's fair share of failed acquistions, but especially in the earlier half of the company's lifespan, they really did some great one: Youtube, Google docs, Nest...
maybe am biased, but have always thought Google in general does do it better than most tech companies. think it's their focus on the love of interesting ideas vs the love of money (although, that changes more and more as the company ages)
My point on the acquisitions was that a surprising amount of their successful software was not made in house. Again, I don't mean it as a knock against them, necessarily.
AI is an odd example. For one, a lot of the research there is from acquisitions. Somewhat feeding back to my first point. They also were seen as tripping up on a lot of the current AI race, no?
Referring to DeepMind in the UK? Ah yes, that’s definitely through acquisition.
But even though their AI models aren’t the absolute leaders in every field, all their models are near the top, across the board. Yeah, their recognition of this current dominant trend before any other major company has given them a big advantage in the number of fields they’ve applied AI to. For example, by putting their full weight behind DeepMind early on, they had a bunch of models before anyone else dealing with topics from protein folding to playing games. Think for them, this might be the right strategy. Explore as much in AI as you can, and figure out the ways it is truly revolutionary. Don’t focus so much on creating products that will make money today or even in near future. Take the long view… hmm, actually, a good example of this is Waymo, it seemed stalled out a few years ago, but is the clearly the best self-driving cars currently out there and finally growing market share.
Also, it was their researchers who kicked off the LLM race with their seminal paper on transformers in 2017 (yeah, they should have released an LLM first, but think they have made up for it since then).
Yeah, am trying not to be overly enthusiastic, but still, despite a couple of big mistakes in AI, they seem to have made mostly correct calls for the past ~10 years. It’s an impressive track record at least to me.
Similarly, I'm not trying to be overly damning. And again, I don't think what they are doing is necessarily a bad strategy. I just don't think of them when I think of good software practices, sadly. If anything, I think the opposite. In that there are few things more unstable than trying to take on a dependency of something they have done.
Do they largely make this work for them internally? Seems so, yes. But taking on any sort of dependency to Google is something you can only do if you can keep up with their very large developer base.
> My point on the acquisitions was that a surprising amount of their successful software was not made in house.
First, that's just not true. Their biggest products by revenue (search/adwords) and biggest stock value driver (AI/Gemini/Datacenters) are clearly in-house creations.
But even then, the two biggest "acquisitions" you're probably thinking of are YouTube and Android, acquired in 2006 and 2005 respectively. What fraction of the software base of those products do you think has survived the intervening two decades? To be blunt: most of the software being shipped out of those groups is being authored by engineers who couldn't even read when the ancestral code existed outside of Google.
Honestly the "acquisition" thing is just a cope meme promulgated by Apple stans, as it were. It's not a serious point.
I mean... First, I don't think acquisitions are automatically a bad thing. And I was largely riffing on the list the post I responded to started. Youtube, Google Docs, and Nest were all acquisitions. As noted, we can add Android.
Do these also take a lot of effort to keep going? Absolutely! But that doesn't change that they acquire a ton. They just acquired Wiz this year.
I do question a lot of the focus on a unified IDE when it comes to this strategy. It is not surprising that there is a specific "discontinued google acquisitions" page in wikipedia with that in mind.
I don’t know, software systems complicated, it’s pretty much impossible for one person to know every line of code and every system (especially the CEO or CTO). Yeah, it was probably one or two employees set this all up realizing the possibility of bad Cursor and Railway interactions.
if you’re a software dev/engineer, if you haven’t made a mistake like this (maybe not at this scale though), you’ve probably haven’t been given enough responsibility, or are just incredibly lucky.
… although, agreed, they were on the cutting edge, which is more risky and not the best decision.
There is a difference between making a mistake like this one and being humble (e.g., lessons learned, having a daily external backup of the database somewhere else, or maybe asking the agent to not run commands directly in production but write a script to be reviewed later, or anything similar) and just blaming the AI and the service provider and never admitting your mistake like this article is all about.
The fact that this seems to be written by AI makes it even more ironic.
Indeed. I swear reality gets stranger and more implausible by the day.
"That isn't backups. That's a snapshot stored in the same place as the original — which provides resilience against zero failure modes that actually matter (volume corruption, accidental deletion, malicious action, infrastructure failure, the exact scenario we just lived through)."
Agree in that this person seems to trying to shift blame, but still think he's right in that Cursor and Railway also have glaring weaknesses. Yeah, it's was somewhat of a perfect storm of mistakes with blame to go all around.
> Yeah, it was probably one or two employees set this all up realizing the possibility of bad Cursor and Railway interactions.
I’ve got a hunch the only person is the CEO.
The domain was registered in October 2025. The site has kind of a weird mix of stuff and a bunch of broken functionality. I think it’s one guy vibe coding a ton of stuff who managed to blow away his database.
> if you’re a software dev/engineer, if you haven’t made a mistake like this (maybe not at this scale though), you’ve probably haven’t been given enough responsibility, or are just incredibly lucky.
Mistakes are understandable. Having no introspection or self criticism, not so much.
> if you’re a software dev/engineer, if you haven’t made a mistake like this (maybe not at this scale though), you’ve probably haven’t been given enough responsibility, or are just incredibly lucky.
I’ve definitely made bigger mistakes, but we also had an Oracle DB that could INSERT INTO…SELECT FROM -point in time- that pretty much put us back to the point before we started our migration. And of course we had backups rolling all the time, as well as our pre-migration backup. We had a good, competent team, and we overlooked a small but catastrophic detail - it can happen to anyone, the goal should be to have backups and failovers in place because things _will_ fail, at some point, and a contingency plan is just good practice.
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