donavanm

Nope, different service. We were introducing new methods using POST and (iirc) some differential pricing based on the actual request params. Which made it a different code path, metering value, price, etc than the existing GET requests.

It was the same old kona files for metering until at least a ‘23-24 when I last did metering/pricing work. “Luckily” the size of the EC2 pricing plan was so stupidly large that it was forcing improvements to how those were serialized, and how private pricing plans were created/assigned to different payer ids.

Thats not really how estimates work. The actual metering data is ingested in near real time. The metering * pricing plan is processed within a few hours; thats what youre seeing for “estimated spend” IIRC. The actual billing accumulation is done later, at the end of the cycle, because pricing has cross service discounts, price tranches, credits tied to total spend, etc.

“Rolling back” estimated bills is reprocessing the historic metering data by an older or newer pricing plan version. As i mentioned in another comment someone will have messed up a metering type vale (eg GB/B). Thats why theyll need a few hours to redrive the metering data.

After 14 months I got a $7,000 refund. I was told it had to be approved by the head of AWS.

$7,000 of credits is no problem. At that time a friendly neighborhood PM or director could issue the credit without much oversight.

Your problem is the time period. Amending a bill in the same cycle is EZ. Fixing the previous cycle is a PITA but pretty common. Issuing amendments for the previous financial _years_ would be a huuuuge PITA going through finance etc.

Ive dealt with this error at AWS. It’s a unit error. In my case we _meant_ to charge like 5¢/GB, but missed the unit (GB), and then the billing system defaults to bytes. 5¢ per Byte of data transferred meant some customers were seeing MM bills within hours. Got paged by support around 2am, had it fixed and amendments issues by 3-4am, apology emails shortly after.

Services emit metering values that arent directly tied to prices. Every SKU/line item is defined in a “pricing plan”, with a unit type, regions, and price per unit. The metering records are joined to a pricing plan based on account id, region, sku, etc. mess up the unit type in the pricing plan and the metering data conversion doesnt work, and you get crazy bills.

That’s not quite fair. As I recall there were about 1,500 people in that part of the hardware org circa mid 2000s. Before PA Semi there were pretty established teams already doing VLSI/PD/verification/validation, PCB, and of course analog/mixed hardware, in their own work and in conjunction with samsung, old broadcom, qualcomm, etc. Lots of inhouse work went in to all those bespoke monitors, phones, apple tv, airports, etc etc.

My recollection is that PA Semi was very much for the architectural and design talent, even though it was an “asset purchase” and all the existing Power & military chips were hived off.

For Intrinsity I recall a lot of interest was actually in their existing graphics work and EDA. ISTR that those early mobile GPUs were what they focused on.

I was in the mansfield org circa ‘07-11. I spent a lot of time flying between cupertino and austin/bee caves that first year.

Youre out of date. The revenue numbers from cloud infrastructure (iaas) are HUGE the past few years. DB licensing etc are mixed in to “ Cloud services & license support” so it is hard to pull out. But youll notice that:

- “iaas” (OCI) is growing 50% yoy and the bulk of the revenue. - “cloud license and on prem license” (new software licensing) is $5B or ~10% of the segment - ERP, peoplesoft etc arent broken out but are also very large in their market categories.

I dont think those points are in conflict? I certainly read it as yet another example of centralization of power and advisors/advisees who are only interested in “yes.” I read the NSC/JSC/cabinet advise as the passive failure of directly answering what is asked, and not what is meant or needed. To wit, yes the US DoD can absolutely suppress an opfor and infrastructure. No one asked if there was a strategic outcome, and no opinion on that matter is proffered.

Edit: I know recall JCS is reported to have said something like “its bullshit” about the Israeli operational plan/end state. But subsequent discussion focused instead on “can we”, not “how” or “should.”

And the current civilian administration is doing a pretty thorough job of eliminating anyone who _would_ point out previous lessons learned around strategic outcomes, going in to conflict necessitating clear & achievable exit criteria, creeping escalation, conflating use of force with success, etc.

Theres a reason everyone talked about “adults in the room” last time and anyone inclined to those kind of thoughts, or voicing the associated opinions, is absent now. And personally Id say that amplifies culpability, nit diminishes it.

maybe the Israelis managed to sell a story

This was already reported a month or so back. It also matched some of the early, unprepared, statements along the lines of “acting before they (israel) do.” And matches previous reporting along the lines of JCS/NSC giving “nuanced” advice which is easily interpreted as agreement or compliance.

The VM layer gives you an aspect of fungibility that commodity hardware doesn’t. It’s being able to over provision, dynamically reallocate hardware resources, or do things like live migration and entire system snapshots. That hardware/system management aspect is what VM’s give you and containers don’t.

Note: if you want to conflate “containers“ with an entire job management and scheduling system (“k8s”) then you’re not actually talking about the current target customer for VMware.

Ive been out of the authoritative dns game for a while, but asi recall…

Larger providers can also get bulk zone access for TLD’s and whois/registrar data. For this use case it’s relatively easy to create a time based filter on that. Anything that’s “new” will be de facto absent from your “allow” check and create an implicit deny.

Then your large IT provider or recursive DNS system will probably layer in RPZ where they can insert explicit denies at resolution time. Either based on QNAME, RDATA, zone, etc.

As mentioned defaults do shockingly little to change future funding. Its been years since i looked but its something like a few years of “cool down” on issuance and a few points of coupon premium. The economist has done some great, very accessible, articles on this over the years.

Second, its critical that treasury bonds are denominated in USD. The us gov controls the monetary policy and can choose to inflate away the debt over time. This is in contrast to EM debt where they get trapped with foreign denominated bonds. See also the tensions around EU debt, greece, etc.

I would think for compliance reasons hospitals would not want to alter the records and only go by transcripts, but what do I know...

Transcription is both too good, and not good enough. The magic generative content only makes it worse.

Too good: a lot of commercial settings forbid persistent transcription because it makes an easily discoverable record of specific details. Thats a business risk that can be mitigated simply by having participant notes or summaries where the secretary can omit sensitive discussion or present consensus without specifics. And notes/summaries also introduce a interpretive defense with some “strategic ambiguity.”

Not good enough: if you look at STT its still probabilistic. The actual evaluation output will have just much data about alternate words/phrases as the selected choice. That leaves lots of room for creating alternate impressions or representing words that werent actually spoken. The fact that people _think_ a STT transcript is authoritative only makes this worse.

When you add generative inference in top (eg summarization) you exacerbate both problems. I suspect that counsel is more accepting of summaries as its less likely to contain specific discoverable terms, likely to diffuse responsibility and specificity, and your judge/jury will be more amenable to “the ai summary is wrong” than “the transcription selected the wrong vowels.”

Nice! Awesome coincidence, happy to hear from you. I feel like that team was somehow both the tail end of the system admin hacker era and on the forefront of what would become “devops” and system management infra. And now, cloud… cloud, as far as the eye can see.

AWS took limited data retention very seriously starting around 2015. Before that it was reasonable controls and a strong culture preserving customer privacy. After 2015ish they started implementing strong controls, to where service team members cant feasibly access customer data in the service they run, and account termination starts a legit data removal process (“GDPR compliance”). They also take the terms of service and user agreement (“your data” etc) very seriously in general.

Hah. I actually had opendirectory, OSX clients, and CentOS/RedHat clients running krb5 NFS off of netapp filers circa … 2008? Lots and lots of NFS in the (mansfield) hardware org at that time. I think krb on osx started getting hard around 2010 when they moved tickets and other credentials to a process aware in memory store. Became difficult to use TGT or machine identity for automation.

And yes, Im sure theres a very lonely radar bug for this. But even MM of revenue wont fix “edge cases” like this.

You're conflating operational efficacy and strategic incompetence.

Operationally, and tactically AFAIK, the US has been dominant. Strategically it appears to be a massive failure, mainly because there was no actual achievable strategic goals going in to this war. Read some of the reporting on JCS advice and cabinet level decision making leading up to the war. It's illuminating (again and again) of the risks on overly loyal advisors and getting the advice you want, not the advice you need.

Your causality is backwards. The relatively loose monetary policy is because inflation (and economic activity) is too slow.

FYI "convertible" instruments aren't new, I suspect its just unusual phrasing that's tripping up your search. "Convertible bonds" or "convertible securities" are more common terms IME. Either way it's typically a bond/security that can be held _or_ converted at a preset strike price. Eg a convertible bond has a slightly discounted coupon (interest) for the holder. The bond can be converted to a fixed number of shares (equity), effectively at at a pre defined price/share. If the per-share price appreciates the bond holder can convert at capture the vallue above their strike price. If the associated equity falls (or doesnt appreciate) the bond holder 1) holds to maturity 2) is senior to equity holders for recovery.

In short, the allbirds financiers are taking a slightly reduced interest payment in exchange for the option to capture stock price appreciation if the gamble finds a greater fool.

Weird, why wouldnt this fantastic startup want to report on their performance in a standardized and accountable manner for six months after collecting public money to pay out insiders and “sponsors”?

Surely they wouldnt mind bragging about their fantastic GAAP P&L in their filing docs. Maybe its the pesky quiet period theyre trying to avoid, so they can be even more transparent about finances and equity holders.

Dude. SPACs are structurally a _terrible_ idea for any non-privileged investor. The sponsors 20-25% comp, the early warrants, etc. All of those costs are taken out of the bag-holder, sorry “investors”, expected value. The entire thing is setup to maximise info asymmetry and perverse incentives for the sponsors at the cost of bag holders. The “shitty tactics” _are why SPACs exist_.

I worked at a previous listed company where a single $6MM order of hardware being pushed out a week made quarterly p&l positive. Im absolutely sure the same situation occurred every other quarter as well in some part of the business I didnt see.

For the gp: the other side of the risk/reward coin is that private credit has limited upside. They're going to get the margin between the private 6/7/8/9/10% loan and their funding source + admin. Whereas PE can go “to the moon” if things work out.

morningstar had a nice writeup of the changing winds https://dbrs.morningstar.com/research/469893/2026-private-cr...

Yes. Nat gas -> ammonia -> urea. Theres some efficiencies that vary by site but its a hundred year old process of a true commodity. The price per therm _is_ the input.

Was listening to a fertilizer analyst the other day. She thought corn:urea was the better comparison. Nitrogen is the cost of marginal yields. And corn:urea shows the farmer being squeezed between their commodity output price and the required input cost. At some point its just not cost effective to grow corn, so you go soy, and reduced supply should pish up future prices. Oh look! More commodity price inflation pressure!

if you're in the UK, Middle East, Australia (food is about to become more expensive & tricky)

Australias not in a terrible position. We produce ~50% of our NPK fertilizers used, and this is down primarily because were importing more from places with cheaper/distant environmental impact. Conversely, IIRC, UK and Ineos just shut down their significant last fertilizer plant and the north sea fields is its own thing.

Similarly we have suitable local gas supply for the needed feedstock. And you can see the govt already starting to restrict (“reserve”) exports. Which, of course, will contribute to the global problem.

AU as a whole is a commodity and food exporter. Of course global commodity squeezes make Everyone poorer, I believe ricardo. I dont see our local position being anywhere as fragile as europe and me, unless Im missing something.

But I dont see AU being anywhere near as fragile as Sri Lanka circa 2022-23.

IME you end up with both; something like discrete client, LB, and controller. You can’t rely on any one component to “turn itself off.“ ex a client or LB can easily get into a “wedged” state where it’s unable to take itself out of consideration for traffic. For example, I’ve had silly incidents based on bgp routes staying up, memory errors/pressure preventing new health check results from being parsed, the file systems is going read only, SKB pressure interfering with pipes, and of course, the classic difference between a dedicated health check in point versus actual traffic. All those examples it prevents the client or LB from removing itself from the traffic path.

An external controller is able to safely remove traffic from one of the other failed components. In addition the client can still do local traffic analysis, or use in band signaling, to identify anomalous end points and remove itself or them from the traffic path.

Good active probes are actually a pretty meaningful traffic load. It was a HUGE problem for flat virtual network models like a heroku a decade ago. This is exacerbated when you have more clients and more in points.

As a reference, this distributed model it is what AWS moved to 15 years ago. And if you look at any of the high throughput clouds services or CDNs they’ll have a similar model.

Thank you for actually testing and measuring an implementation & hypothesis. I appreciate the leads for evaluating my own similarity problems and efficacy.

no one could explain how they got those numbers.

Not quite. The big board percentages were effectively us (imports - exports) / imports * 0.5 ~ fuzzy adjustment based on feels. Your point remains theyre amateurish and bely a lack of any grounding to actual foreign import duties. But that is a direct way of representing a mercantilist world view where net imports bad, exports strong.

https://www.investopedia.com/trade-experts-question-trump-te...

… and keep the interest from those and their “high value commercial paper.” Now, why this is better than a money market fund, and regulated similarly… no idea.

I suspect the issue is they still need cash for 1. dividends 2. Further dilution, er acquisition. They have some put away for the near term dividends. But you can see the negative feedback loop if they cant make those payments/acquisitions. Having a huge hole in the books wont help for raising cash through lending, or asset sales realizing the loss.

Re: 10% specifically, i havent checked but Im guessing thats a floor on their cost basis for a bunch of holdings going negative.