Punkie

Keep in mind, whenever you think too hard about these sorts of things, this is one of those operations that could apply to Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Many people make the incorrect assumption of something like, “They must have done some clever supply-chain wizardry," or “There’s a smart cost-reduction plan behind this.” When in reality, a lot of times, the actual explanation is something like a mid-level manager wanted a slide that said “cost savings," then procurement was pressured due to some personality ego problem, engineering objections were ignored, the math was never checked, and in the end, nobody involved actually understood unit economics. Maybe exchanging a $6 part for a $4 looks good in volume, but they only did this 20 times, resulting in $40 of savings which was erased by their reputation and incompetence.

I have worked government contracts. I have worked with shitty project managers. There’s a lot more of these mistakes than you realize powering economies.

All over the map: Barracuda, SkyHawk, Ironwolf, Constellation, Cheetah, etc…

Three companies, kept track, but not after I left. It was always funny to me that they bought out Atlas and Maxtor. “Of course they did. Why not dominate the market on shitty drives? lol” I am surprised they hadn’t bought Deskstar.

Yeah, but it’s Seagate. I have worked in data centers, and Seagate drives had the most failures of all my drives and somehow is still in business. I’d say I was doing an RMA of 5-6 drives a month that were Seagate, and only 4-5 a year Western Digital.

I’d compare LLMs to a junior executive. Probably gets the basic stuff right, but check and verify for anything important or complicated. Break tasks down into easier steps.