they are usually couple of dollars more (for $20 range rides) but I think their demand supply is so skewed that it surges almost all the time it feels like
Pretty much any queue and a compute will do. SQS paired with lambda an event bridge (I forget if that's the service to trigger the lambda or not) would be solid. I lean towards compute that's a bit easier to run in different settings so just any old code checking the queue and executing as expected also works. SQS is cheap and it's pretty damn solid. I believe it was the first AWS service.
But in reality, any managed queue or even a well structured DB table can be fine, depending on your scale.
Is using Lambda with an external data store (like MongoDB) a solved problem?
I remember this being an issue a long time ago, where Lambda pretty much was a non starter for use cases where you're running 1000 independent tasks that each, on their own, is a small unit of work (just 1 or 2 database queries).
Long way of asking: is there a way to share a database connection between lambda functions or does each run need to re-establish / re-authenticate a new connection with the database?
Cars are only useful because America foolishly built and rebuilt around cars, instead of humans. There were even places that functioned perfectly fine with transit and walking, destroyed and replaced with infrastructure for cars.
If it can be demonstrated to most voters to be a mistake, presenting the full plan to undo and replace it with something better would be a good next step.
When was the plan for what we have now ever presented to voters?
Clearly it's not something that can be "undone" all in one go - but every day governments make decisions about what infrastructure to build/repair/extend, how much parking should be available and how much to charge for it, and how much to continue ensuring the current car-based economy is well supported/subsidized. If those decisions gradually moved towards "let's not assume cars are the be all and end all", we could still slowly unboil the frog as it were.
It never was. But as a voter, it's what outside my window right now and what I understand.
If you want to make wholesale changes quickly, you probably need the support of voters.
Nobody put 240V center-tapped, 60 Hz AC residential electricity to the voters either, but if you wanted to change it, you're probably going to need a strategy and a communications campaign to explain why and how.
US public transit is ruled by homeless and criminals. Constant stabbing, sexual assault, robbery, and stalking.
I will not take my kids on any transit where they might be assaulted by a naked homeless man. America will never have safe public transit because it lacks the will to handle the mentally ill and addicts.
If the city you live in has been entirely designed around private motor vehicles and lacks any decent transit network (LA being the obvious example), no amount of investment into helping the mentally ill and drug addicts is going to make transit an attractive option for more than a tiny percentage of the population.
Thankfully in Australia's biggest cities our public transport systems are generally clean and safe to use - but a) they're not always super reliable, despite some improvements in recent years b) they're often poorly interconnected, meaning I could potentially do 80% of the journey sitting in comfort on a train, but spend 3 times longer than it would take to drive trying to deal with getting to/from train stations and c) there are still huge areas of said cities that are fairly poorly served by trains, and buses will always be a second rate way of getting around. Oh and d) you can't carry v. large items or animals on most public transport (*). All solvable problems, some easier than others, but there's a distinct lack of real political will to do so.
(*) e.g. it'd be a 15 min train ride to take my dog to the beach from where I live, but she's not a service animal so wouldn't even be allowed on, despite taking up less space than a human.
(Ooh, I actually just looked it up - you are actually allowed to take dogs on trains here, though they're supposed to be muzzled. Never seen anyone do so though, and I'm quite sure they wouldn't be allowed on buses).
[IT Perspective] In my personal experience, these tools also overreach. Most people I've met in IT (15 years) want to go into Engineering, or at the very least, something MORE technical and code-related.
They are hungry and willing, but often overlooked. I have seen many climb out and teach themselves code, build tools for IT and revolutionize the way teams and orgs work. It's a marvel to see someone with drive do what they desire.
Fast forward to today. I see IT forcing all members to use a low-code tool. The passion drains from their eyes. I can see the fear of the mounting weight of becoming unemployable. They've shared with me their experiences. The directions they want to go have nothing to do with Low-Code, and the roles and orgs their interviewing with aren't interested in people who build with them. The question "what have you been working on?" is like a death knell. I'm pretty sure a lot of them don't see a future beyond helpdesk because of these tools.
My point is, think carefully about who is using this product. You can kill careers with this stuff. I think it's great for business teams who want to "do x in x app when y happens in y app."
Sure but if it's just ChatGPT spitting out code that the users don't really understand I can't see it being a workable solution either.
What I'm thinking is that low-code implies something like natural language pseudo code that LLM tech is able to accurately interpret and turn into executable code. Of course the "accurately" part is still something of an issue, but usually with a few rounds of "no that didn't work" or "that's not what I meant" you can likely get what you actually intended.
I feel like any code created from GPT can also be interpreted from GPT. Use a prompt like "Explain like I'm 5". Also DiagramGPT and just generating documentation in general from code.
Perhaps at some point you can screenshot the lowcode and paste the image into GPT for it to interpret, but will they build for that use-case? The former exists today.
I was so stoked to build stuff this way; I had the same sentiments about the learning curve, but overall it seemed like an amazing tool and pretty fun.
The problem is the people around me thought it was too difficult, and couldn't see long term. So we implemented a low code solution and now everything is in there and it's a mess/nightmare. I hate my work now, and everything we build is tightly coupled to this spaghetti platform that will inevitably decide to raise it's prices on us and we will have no recourse.
Job hunting has been tough too, because very few places have done this, so they ask "what have you been working on?" and I'm basically setting record times for ending interviews if I tell the truth.
Less technical companies throw money at problems to solve them. Like mine, sadly... Even if it takes a small amount of effort, companies will throw money for zero effort.
Zero execution risk, rather than zero effort. There’s always a 10% chance that implementation goes on forever and spending some money eliminates that risk.
