>Forecasters expect Friday’s report on gross domestic product to show the economy expanded 2.7% in 2025, a solid pace by any standard for a developed country.
I would be very curious to see if any circular deals aka funny money have been factored in there.
Also, despite literal hundreds of billions presumably invested in data centers where's all the construction, energy, communication, and other infrastructure build activity?
> The latest monthly jobs report published on Feb. 11 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed job growth was weaker in 2025 than initially reported, but it also showed hiring picked up in January.
The 2025 numbers were revised down (by the largest number in history - again), and no changes have been made to the methodology/models, which means that January data will be revised, too, so nothing shows that "hiring picked up"
>Is 75 minutes really considered that long of a time?
From my experience in setting up and running support services, not really. It's actually pretty darn quick.
First, the issue is reported to level 1 support, which is bunch of juniors/drones on call, often offshore (depending on time of the day) who'll run through their scripts and having determined that it's not in there, escalate to level 2.
Level 2 would be more experienced developer/support tech, who's seen a thing or two and dealt with serious issues. It will take time to get them online as they're on call but not online at 3am EST, as they have to get their cup of joe, turn on the laptop etc. Would take them a bit to realize that the fecal matter made contact with the rotating blades and escalate to level 3.
Which involves setting up the bridge, waking up the decisions makers (in my case it was director and VP level), and finally waking up the guy who either a) wrote all this or b) is one of 5 or 6 people on the planet capable of understanding and troubleshooting the tangled mess.
I do realize that AWS support might be structured quite a bit differently, but still... 75 minutes is pretty good.
Edit: That is not to say that AWS doesn't have a problem with turnover. I'm well aware of their policies and tendency to get rid of people in 2/3 years, partially due to compensation structures where there's a significant bump in compensation - and vesting - once you reach that timeframe.
But in this particular case I don't think support should take much of a blame. The overall architecture on the other hand...
Sorry, are you saying you worked at Amazon and this is how they handle major outages? Just snooze and wait for a ticket to make its way up from end user support? No monitoring? No global time zone coverage?
Because if so, this seems like about the most damning thing I could learn from this incident.
No, it's just mindless speculation from someone who clearly hasn't worked a critical service's on call rotation before. Not at all what it's actually like, all these services have automatic alarms that will start blaring and firing pagers, and once scope of impact is determined to be large escalations start happening extremely quickly paging anyone even possibly able to diagnose the issue. There's also crisis rotations staffed with high level ICs and incident managers who will join ASAP and start directing the situation, you don't need to wait for some director or VP.
I worked at AWS (EC2 specifically), and the comment is accurate.
Engineers own their alarms, which they set up themselves during working hours. An engineer on call carries a "pager" for a given system they own as part of a small team. If your own alert rules get tripped, you will be automatically paged regardless of time of day. There are a variety of mechanisms to prioritize and delay issues until business hours, and suppress alarms based on various conditions - e.g. the health of your own dependencies.
End user tickets can not page engineers but fellow internal teams can. Generally escalation and paging additional help in the event that one can not handle the situation is encouraged and many tenured/senior engineers are very keen to help, even at weird hours.
Wholly inaccurate. AWS Systems Engineers would have been paged by automated monitoring systems once alert thresholds were breached. No escalation through Support needed.
Hardware doesn't just pop out of the thin air. Data centers need to be built, GPUs need to be produced, and storage, and other compute, and networking, etc etc. All this needs people. Shouldn't there be boom in construction? Hardware manufacturing?
I've read that the US have almost a million skilled worker shortage in construction (especially commercial and industrial that demand more specific skills), and that since a quarter of the demand is for federal/state/county projects that cannot decide as fast as a company to accept rising prices, it also mean the already decaying public infrastructure risk to never be repaired in time (constructing new stuff is more expensive than repairing expensive stuff. More GDP growth i guess, but :/)
And you have a boom in hardware manufacturing, in Asia mostly, but even in europe you see new companies popping up (before Covid we had like 2 comapnies that could print custom pcbs, both german, now i found like 5 in France (2 of them are the german who expended but still))
OpenAI burned $6.7bln on R&D with revenue of $4.3 bln in 1st half of 2025. And is planning on raising _trillions_ to build compute/storage for the next gen/AGI. How's this not a bubble?
I said private companies are another matter. The public ones are all funding it from cash flow not leverage and excessive debt which are the real hallmarks of an unsustainable bubble.
My guess would be infrastructure. Like brick and mortar, buildings, laying down fiber, installing and setting up servers, and then maintenance. Construction is booming... Or should be. Any day now :)
Very dumbed-down take on the subject. What's "AI"? ChatGPT and Google AlphaFold are both AI.
I very much doubt speech and voice recognition and synthesis, as well as visual object recognition, are "as good as they will get" (however scary some of the practical applications might look like). Ditto specialized neural networks like aforementioned AlphaFold.
General-purpose chatbots trained on randomly selected data from stolen books and social media (and increasingly on its own slop)? Very likely.
Architectures allowing the said chatbots trigger actions online or (worse yet) IRL? Almost definitely.
I very much disagree. Terms and definitions matter, and in this case what you mean by "AI" changes the answer. Again, general-purpose LLMs might be a dead end. Specialized neural networks are not. One might argue that even specialized LLMs (ie fine tuned for code generation) have ways to go, too.
I'm not sure about target audience of the TheRegister but here on HN we should be more precise in our discussion.
Sure, it wasn't bad when IT caused automation and elimination of many job positions and entire occupations, both manual and office. Now that we're on the receiving end of it, it is a bad thing all of a sudden.
As for the upcoming crisis, there's an increase in inequality and further accumulation of wealth among fewer and fewer individuals. As long as these individuals continue to spend their newly acquired wealth to compensate for lower spend by the less fortunate (which is exactly what's been happening), the economy will be fine.
Can someone please refer me to the hard data on "overhiring in 2020"?
I was laid off as part of the initial panic in early 2020. The job market for IT for the entirety of 2020 was dead. D-E-A-D. There was a _very_ small pickup in the summer when people got more optimistic about the vaccines but it waned very quickly.
I'm in the Midwest so it might have been different in the West but I doubt it was that much different.
There was _some_ pickup in 2021, when companies realized the end of the world isn't happening soon, but it was not very significant. IT job market never really normalized, there was some pickup in 2022 but by then LLM hype started causing layoffs to go up and openings down.
The test site is severely damaged, and they don't have another one. It took what ,6 months to rebuild the launch tower after IFT-1? And it wasn't destroyed, just damaged, on the test site the tanks and pipes and all the rest are right near the vehicle so I see a lot of destruction.
So what, 6 to 9 months while they repair/build new test site(s)?
Might as well cut the losses and scrap Block 2 altogether, and move on to Block 3.
I would be very curious to see if any circular deals aka funny money have been factored in there.
Also, despite literal hundreds of billions presumably invested in data centers where's all the construction, energy, communication, and other infrastructure build activity?
> The latest monthly jobs report published on Feb. 11 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed job growth was weaker in 2025 than initially reported, but it also showed hiring picked up in January.
The 2025 numbers were revised down (by the largest number in history - again), and no changes have been made to the methodology/models, which means that January data will be revised, too, so nothing shows that "hiring picked up"