[skeeter2020]

>> Are you completely missing the point of the submission

no, and that's what people are noting: the headline deliberately tries to blow this up into a big deal. When did you last see the HN post about Amazon's mandatory meeting to discuss a human-caused outage, or a post mortem? It's not because they don't happen...

[ummonk]

Amazon has had a really bad string of various outages recently. Assuming they're internally treating this as business as usual in post-mortems then perhaps the newsworthy thing is actually that they aren't taking their outages seriously enough.

[thepasch]

> the headline deliberately tries to blow this up into a big deal

I do not understand how “company that runs half the internet has had major recent outages and now explicitly names lax/non-existent LLM usage guidelines as a major reason” can possibly not be a big deal in the midst of an industry-wide hype wave over how the world’s biggest companies now run agent teams shipping 150 pull requests an hour.

The chain of events is “AWS has been having a pretty awful time as far as outages go”, and now “result of an operational meeting is that the company will cut down on the use of autonomous AI.” You don’t need CoT-level reasoning to come to the natural conclusion here.

If we could, as a species, collectively, stop measuring the relevance of a piece of news proportionally by how much we like hearing it, please?

[mattgreenrocks]

The defensiveness is almost as interesting as the meeting itself.

[emp17344]

Way too many people have tied their egos to the success of AI.

[cobolcomesback]

And too many people have their egos tied to its failure, too.

Im a massive AI skeptic. If anyone were to be jumping up and down on the corpse of AI and this incessant drive to use it everywhere, it’d be me. But I also work at Amazon. I got the email. I attended the meeting. I can personally attest that there are no new requirements for AI-generated code. The articles about this in the meeting at extremely misleading, if not outright wrong. But instead of believing the person that was actually there in the room, this thread is full of people dismissing my first-hand account of the situation because it doesn’t align with the “haha AI failed” viewpoint.

[autoexec]

Not just their egos, but their paychecks. This place is either going to get very quiet or really weird when the hype train derails and the AI bubble bursts.

[shermantanktop]

The subject of the media coverage is not AWS, it is a peer organization to AWS that runs using significant amounts of non-AWS infrastructure. They are both part of an umbrella called Amazon but are not at all the same thing.

Maybe your CoT-level reasoning isn’t so robust.

[saghm]

It's hard to that this objection seriously. The publication is literally called the Financial Times. It's not exactly crazy for them to think that their readers might care about the entity that shows up the stock ticker rather than how the company happens to divide up things internally.

Even if it weren't a finance publication, I have trouble imagining you making this argument if a headline said something like "Google deals with outages in the cloud" because of the idea that it's misleading to refer to it as anything other than GCP. I think you're fundamentally not understanding how people communicate about this sort of thing if you actually think that someone saying "Amazon" is misleading in any meaningful way.

[shermantanktop]

You’re describing reasonable misunderstandings, but they are still misunderstandings.

The cause and effect statements just don’t correspond to reality.

I guess I’m stuck on the idea that the actual facts are relevant. If the question instead is how the dance of optics and PR is going in the minds of people who don’t know enough to doubt what they read, I don’t know what to say about that.

[cobolcomesback]

The message and meeting being discussed here have nothing to do with AWS or any outages AWS has faced recently. I think you’re missing the point of the discussion.

I don’t blame you, because this is just bad reporting (and potentially intentionally malicious to make you think it’s about AWS). But the meeting and discussion was with the Amazon retail teams, talking about Amazon retail processes, and Amazon retail services. The teams and processes that handle this are entirely separate from any AWS outages you are thinking of.

The outages that Amazon retail has faced also have nothing to do with AI, and there was no “explicit call out” about AI causing anything.