"Fun" isn't the same thing as "functional."

I remember having great fun in QuickBASIC. And my son enjoys Scratch.

Django code is much more fun to work with than Node, but I can't imagine developing something competitive in it in 2025 to what I'm developing in Node. Node is a pain in the butt, but at the end of the day, competitiveness is about what you deliver to the user, not how much fun you have along the way.

* I think the most fundamental problems are developer-base/libraries and being able to use the same code client-side and server-side.

* Django was also written around the concept of views and templates and similar, rather than client-side web apps, and the structure reflects that.

* While it supports async and web sockets, those aren't as deep in the DNA as for most Node (or even aiohttp) apps.

* Everything I do now is reactive. That's just a better way to work than compiling a page with templates.

I won't even mention mobile. But how you add that is a big difference too.

It's very battery-included, but many of the batteries (e.g. server-side templating language) are 2005-era nickel cadmium rather than 2025-era lithium ion.

I would love to see a modern Node framework as pleasant to work with, thought-out, engineered, documented, supported, designed, etc. as well as Django, but we're nowhere close to there yet.

You spell out a lot of examples, but all of them are purely technical. What is it that you can deliver to the user using Node that you cannot deliver using Django? This is a genuine question.

There is nothing you can't do, given a Turing-complete language.

That doesn't make it reasonable or convenient to do so, though.

You must not be very imaginative.

Plenty of Django businesses making tens of millions. Some in the billions.

I know a solopreneur making around $2m a year and all he uses is Django

Man, the only true part is the async/web socket part (and it's most because of python and not django itself) ... you can do a lot, and by a lot I mean almost 99% of websites/apps out there, with django and it's 2005-era nickel cadmium features

The lithium-ion battery analogy seems fitting: When we're not careful about sourcing those modern batteries from a trustworthy supply-chain, they tend to explode and injure the user.

It is, and intentionally so.

NiCd batteries could also sit on a shelf forever, holding their charge. They had virtually no self-discharge, which was super-convenient.

They came in standard form factors (AA, AAA, 9V, etc.).

I really liked NiCd batteries.

But realistically, you couldn't sell a phone or laptop in 2025 which ran on them.

It's double-return-fraud.

Amazon shouldn't sell returned products as "new," but as "open box."

The other way it happens is co-mingling. Some vendor sends an "open box" product to Amazon as new, or a fake product, and Amazon ships it out when sold by Amazon since it considers goods to be fungible.

I stopped buying anything which goes in my body from eBay, Amazon, and similar after receiving a premium food product with very clearly fake packaging.

Man, I don't think this co-mingling thing was big or existed when I moved to a country that Amazon doesn't ship to directly almost 6 years ago.

Reading about it on HN makes me feel fortunate. I can't recall ever running into something like this back then.

Amazon broke in 2020, when most shopping went online. It never recovered.

I doubt it ever will. Trust takes a long time to earn, and a little bit of time to break. I had four or five incidents on Amazon, cancelled Prime, and I doubt it will ever make business sense for Amazon to get me back.

I do think there's a place for a competitor to Amazon right now which looks more like the old Amazon.

Starting one would be super-capital-intensive. It's not a lean startup. There's only a handful of organizations with the capital to do that, and I doubt any of them will, in fact, do it.

> Amazon broke in 2020

nah. jassy taking the reigns in 2021 is when the nosedive began.

He was representative, not causative. The rot had been settling for years.

>I do think there's a place for a competitor to Amazon right now which looks more like the old Amazon.

If walmart plays their cards right, they can do it (I mean they did acquire Jet). Unfortunately they also seem to be OK with becoming a dropship frontend for aliexpress

I think modern Walmart understands the problem better than modern Amazon.

Walmart just needs the volume to be able to compete with Amazon's logistics, so is getting volume where it can.

There is some good news. After years of customer and company complaints, Amazon finally ended commingling recently.

The cycle has been:

Piracy -> Friendly ways to buy -> Unfriendly ways to buy -> Piracy -> ...

Unfortunately, giving money back to writers involves hopping through piracy. At that point, a new, consumer-friendly service will sprout up. Everyone will use it.

Over time, the service will want to profit-maximize, and will adopt anti-consumer techniques. Leading people to go to Pirate Bay. Leading to friendly services.

Rinse, repeat.

How many times has this happened, such that it can be called a cycle?

There are other possibilities, such as people simply not writing as much anymore, or higher quality writers existing the market due to lack of sufficient return.

Bad DRM led to Napster led to Netflix lead to a fragmentation of services led to a resurgence of piracy.

Similar thing happened with music, only rather than piracy, it landed on legal / free (e.g. Youtube). Youtube is just starting to do the consumer-unfriendly thing (but it's got a long ways to go before piracy comes out competitive).

Similar in books.

I'll mention: A lot of these are consumer-unfriendly in some ways (e.g. Netflix DRM), but friendly in others. $20/month for all the movies you can watch beats piracy.

It’s happened to some degree with music, movies, and TV shows.

Four of these together should, in the abstract, let you run 200GB models, which is where things get very, very interesting.

The biggest Deepseek V2 models would just fit, as would some of the giant Meta open source models. Those have rather pleasant performance.

In theory, how feasible is that?

I feel like the software stack might be like a Jenga tower. And PCIe limitations might hit pretty hard.

Well, no. It doesn't. The comparison is to the A1000.

Toss in a 5060 Ti into the compare table, and we're in an entirely different playing field.

There are reasons to buy the workstation NVidia cards over the consumer ones, but those mostly go away when looking at something like the new Intel. Unless one is in an exceptionally power-constrained environment, yet has room for a full-sized card (not SFF or laptop), I can't see a time the B50 would even be in the running against a 5060 Ti, 4060 Ti, or even 3060 Ti.

> There are reasons to buy the workstation NVidia cards over the consumer ones

I seem to recall certain esoteric OpenGL things like lines being fast was a NVIDIA marketing differentiator, as only certain CAD packages or similar cared about that. Is this still the case, or has that software segment moved on now?

I don't know the full set of differentiators.

For me (not quite at the A1000 level, but just above -- still in the prosumer price range), a major one is ECC.

Thermals and size are a bit better too, but I don't see that as $500 better. I actually don't see (m)any meaningful reasons to step up to an Ax000 series if you don't need ECC, but I'd love to hear otherwise.

It's competition. Poison increases in toxicity over time.

I could generate subtly wrong information on the internet LLMs would continue to swallow up.

> I could generate subtly wrong information on the internet

There’s already a website for that. It’s called Reddit.

Yes, but so would people, so what's the point of this unless you just dislike everybody (and if so, that's fair too I suppose)?

The whole design was based on things to make pages not discoverable except to sketchy AI companies who violate web norms.

I'd be totally down with "content belongs to everyone."

The problem is when you steal my content, repackage it, and resell it. At that point, my content doesn't belong to everyone, or even to me, but to you.

* I'd have no problem with OpenAI, the non-profit developing open source AI models and governance models, scraping everyone's web pages and using it for the public good.

* I have every problem with OpenAI, the sketchy for-profit, stealing content from my web page so their LLMs can regenerate my content for proprietary products, cutting me out-of-the-loop.

Yes but I am sure your content that you want to exploit was made in a complete vacuum.

"want to exploit"????

The curve is getting steeper, yes. That's not a contrast to the "AI will replace programmers" rhetoric.

Steeper means: higher at the top. Lower on the bottom.

Right now, AI can do the job of the bottom large percentage of programmers better than those programmers. Look up how a disruptive S-curve works. At the end, we may be left with one programmer overseeing an AI "improving" itself. Or perhaps zero. Or perhaps one per project. We don't know yet.

Good analogue is automation. Mass-scale manufacturing jobs were replaced by a handful of higher-paid, higher-skilled jobs. Certain career classes disappeared entirely.

The entire mess isn't with data in databases, but on laptops for offline analysis, in log files, backups, etc.

It's easy enough to have a SQL query to delete a users' data from the production database for real.

It's all the other places the data goes that's a mess, and a robust system of deletion via encryption could work fine in most of those places, at least in the abstract with the proper tooling.