Yeah I think there are a number of "hidden" dependencies on different regions, especially us-east-1. It's an artifact of it being AWS' largest region, etc.
us-east-2 does exist; it’s in Ohio. One major issue is a number of services have (had? Not sure if it’s still this way) a control plane in us-east-1, so if it goes down, so does a number of other services, regardless of their location.
Seems the underlying issue is with DynamoDB, according to the status page, which will have a big blast radius in other services. AWS' services form a really complicated graph and there's likely some dependency, potentially hidden, on us-east-1 in there.
us-east-1 was, probably still is, AWS' most massive deployment. Huge percentage of traffic goes through that region. Also, lots of services backhaul to that region, especially S3 and CloudFront. So even if your compute is in a different region (at Tower.dev we use eu-central-1 mostly), outages in us-east-1 can have some halo effect.
This outage seems really to be DynamoDB related, so the blast radius in services affected is going to be big. Seems they're still triaging.
> This looks to me like they are acknowledging that their claims were premature, possibly due to claims of false advertising, but are otherwise carrying forward as they were.
Author here. No the article is not generated, it's dictated. This was more of a shower-thought (car thought I guess, since i was driving) that I dictated and fed to deepseek to punctuate and structure for myself. When it's a quick, short, unrefined article, I post it on the byte size section of my blog. So no, these are my words, and you can find it on some of my old comments where I mention how I've been testing AI editing and it's a hit or miss.
Not really: as much as I despise AI slop, LLMs do a much better job than this author of making sure I have the information needed to understand a point. For example:
> I have this little web app I built for my kids to help them manage their day. It has those tiles that animate when you hover on them.
I have absolutely no idea what “those tiles” are. They are familiar to the author, but he has not bothered to explain them well enough to deserve that familiar “those.” AI would have explained them better.
No. Could you try to put your finger on what exactly in this text gives you the vibes?
Also, a sibling comment suggests that "those tiles" is some sort of slop; but I find it no more sloppy than "this little web app" in the preceding sentence. Both are handwavy markers of imprecision common in oral speech. A comment on English Stack Exchange points out that this feature is referred to as the "indefinite this" [0].
Yea. I was not going to say that because apparently it's bad etiquette - and we're supposed to look at the substance. It happened to my writing once where someone said it was AI written and it did hurt me. :'(
But at this point I'm seeing it everywhere... the "Trash question? Trash answer" format posed as poetry EVERYWHERE and it is correlated with slop and I'm finding it very annoying to read. I might (to my own detriment perhaps) start factoring that in into what I'm gonna continue reading.
Examples of that question format in this article:
- Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
- That glassy transparency and window animations? A notorious resource hog that brought mid-2000s hardware to its knees
- The moment a single tile wiggles? The entire UI crawls
- Checking mail? Browsing? Streaming? Your M4 is bored out of its silicon mind
- That whole section on: Battery life? ... Thermals? ... Future-proofing? ... Real workloads? ... ugh.
- Is it worth it? For Apple’s vibe? Probably. But next time your fan whispers or your battery dips faster than expected… maybe blame the glass.
And apart from that question format, there's another thing but I can't quite figure out the pattern behind it but is slop: (I would really love to figure out what my brain thinks as "off" in these - maybe sentence length variability, maybe colons, or maybe trying to be poetic or dramatic or too self-assured with basically no data/substance underneath it, idk):
- Let’s be real: eye candy always comes at a price.
- When the system’s stressed, the pretty things break first.
- They chew through GPU/CPU time. Always have.
- Here’s my hot take: Apple knows exactly what they’re doing
- It's stealth bloat.
- You might not feel the drag today. That’s the point! The M4’s raw power is the perfect smokescreen. But those cycles aren’t free
- TL;DR: Liquid Glass is gorgeous tech debt. Your M4 can afford it… for now. But never forget: fancy pixels demand fancy math.
Basically the entire article at this point. There was one place which was a bit personalized about the web app he built for his kids where I was like OK at least something seems OK, but as another user pointed out "It has those tiles that animate when you hover on them" doesn't make any sense. What tiles. How are we supposed to know.
This is true if you take a very loose definition of "political violence" lol and probably just disingenuous at best.