outworlder

If you are on AWS, the direct attached storage option you have is ephemeral volumes. That's bad. If the hypervisor fails you lose data. Which is fine, you have replicas. If there's an event that takes out multiple machines at once, even for a moment, you are hosed(this can be AWS issues, or could be as simple as automation misbehaving and shutting machines down).

I'm all for treating DB as cattle, but your cattle needs to be able to survive long enough.

EBS is expensive but it works for PG. AWS uses EBS for RDS databases. Calling that a 'mistake' is a tall order.

A bit better in real life since the world isn't 2D.

It's orders, not queries. Who knows how many requests that actually takes.

The issue is solely that OG Mercurial was written in Python.

Are we back to "programming language X is slow" assertions? I thought those had died long ago.

Better algorithms win over 'better' programming languages every single time. Git is really simple and efficient. You could reimplement it in Python and I doubt it would see any significant slowness. Heck, git was originally implemented as a handful of low level binaries stitched together with shell scripts.

Neurons are insanely more complex, even if you disregard their electrical signaling entirely.

This is fun to read but any such galactic intelligence would probably recognize that its predecessor were meat

That does not follow at all. It's _likely_ that life elsewhere would be carbon-based since carbon is so useful and common. It is not a requirement. Silicon has been proposed as a replacement. While not as flexible as carbon, it's pretty close. Silicon-based lifeforms wouldn't be "organic" at all. Even if we just stick to carbon, there are many organic compounds (and lifeforms) that aren't anything close to what we would consider 'meat'.

We are working with N=1. Until we find more lifeforms elsewhere, we can't assume anything beyond basic physics and chemistry. RNA isn't a given. A lifeforms probably needs something that will pass along instructions to their offspring (in whatever form they take). It doesn't have to be RNA.

For a fictional description of a lifeforms that doesn't have RNA, DNA or anything remotely similar, I like to point out Blindsight, by Peter Watts. https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

Consciousness had millions of years headstart. Give it time.

No, it's literal meat that they have issues with. Machines are fine, hydrogen clusters are fine.

Is this a joke, or are you serious? Do you work for Nvidia?

Seems like a big issue is I'm guessing insistence on having this be a solo operation for cultural reasons.

I had to do some stool collection and it took every ounce of willpower and a N95 mask to prevent me from vomiting everywhere. And that was my poop. I think it's more than cultural, there's a strong visceral reaction.

On the other hand, I can pickup my dog's poop no problem.

Nurses are heroes.

Microsoft is the go to solution for every government agency, FEDRAMP / CMMC environments, etc.

I've been involved with FEDRAMP initiatives in the past. That doesn't mean as much as you'd think. Some really atrocious systems have been FEDRAMP certified. Maybe when you go all the way to FEDRAMP High there could be some better guardrails; I doubt it.

Microsoft has just been entrenched in the government, that's all. They have the necessary contacts and consultants to make it happen.

Thinking that the solution is a full reset is not necessarily wrong but it's a bit of a red flag.

The author does mention rewriting subsystem by subsystem while keeping the functionality intact, adding a proper messaging layer, until the remaining systems are just a shell of what they once were. That sounds reasonable.

Well, part 3 at least explains something I've observed; the platform is incredibly unstable. The same calls, with the same parameters, will often randomly fail with HTTP 400 errors, only to succeed later(hopefully without involving support). That made provisioning with terraform a nightmare.

I won't even dive too much into all the braindead decisions. Mixing SKUs often isn't allowed if some components are 'premium' and others are not, and not everything is compatible with all instances. In AWS, if I have any EBS volume I can attach it to any instance, even if it is not optimal. There's no faffing about "premium SKUs". You won't lose internet connectivity because you attached a private load balancer to an instance. Etc...

At my company, I've told folks that are trying to estimate projects on Azure to take whatever time they spent on AWS or GCP and multiply by 5, and that's the Azure estimate. A POC may take a similar amount of time as any other cloud, but not all of the Azure footguns will show themselves until you scale up.

$93 billion over 13 years doesn't feel like a great deal

So, around 7 billion a year?

We are at around half of the total Artemis cost just one month after the Iran invasion. One week of this war finances one year of the Artemis program. Do you think that's a better deal?

Compared to the military spending, that doesn't even register. Maybe you should be mad about that.

it's just a matter of wasting enough money for some people to have the time of their life.

That's such a cynical viewpoint. We are not doing this so that astronauts can have fun.

Yes, we have been screwing up our planet. On that note alone, we should develop capabilities to access resources beyond our planet. We could have made that same argument before we had the capability of launching satellites ("why are we wasting resources sending something to space that can only beep while people are dying of hunger?"). Nowadays, they are crucial if we want to have a chance at saving what remains of our planet.

Moon missions may not give an immediate benefit, but we have always benefitted from scientific and technological advancements from space missions. I doubt it's going to be different this time.

I'd certainly prefer countless more moon missions than a new aircraft carrier.

Sure, you may look at it from that perspective. Or, you could look into it as restoring a capability that we used to have, and potentially enable further, more interesting missions.

I am not _too excited_ about the SLS itself as it looks like a political compromise, just as the shuttle was.

But better late than never.

Indeed. I _have_ been able to (mostly) talk about things that I was dissatisfied about, but out of dozen bosses I had, that was with only two. I wouldn't trust the others to start looking into a replacement the moment I gave even a hint of dissatisfaction. For some others, I could express disagreement about outcomes or company policies, but in some cases even pushing too much on those topics can get you fast tracked out. I have seen it happen.

To be able to have (again, mostly) honest conversations with a boss or HR is a privilege. In 99% of the cases, HR is there to protect the company, there were only a handful of HR employees that went above and beyond. And even then, you had to make sure not to use some triggering words. I mean this in the literal sense, there are a few things that, if you say, that triggers an automatic HR response, regardless of who you are talking to. Hinting of leaving, even with an unspecified timeframe, is one of them.

In general, don't do this.

Also, exit interviews cannot benefit you. Decline.

You don't even need a canvas.

You could simulate pixels with divs if that's all you had. Or you could create an image in memory and save to file. You could write the text for it and save as SVG.

For a CPU based ray tracer, you don't need any output capability at all(unless you want it to be interactive, which school assignment raytracers usually don't have to).

They may not be "thinking" in the way you and I think, and instead just finding the correct output from a really incredibly large search space.

Knee jerk dismissing the evidence in front of your eyes

Anthropomorphizing isn't any better.

That also dismisses the negative evidence, where they output completely _stupid_ things and make mind boggling mistakes that no human with a functioning brain would do. It's clear that there's some "thinking" analog, but there are pieces missing.

I like to say that LLMs are like if we took the part of our brain responsible for language and told it to solve complex problems, without all the other brain parts, no neocortex, etc. Maybe it can do that, but it's just as likely that it is going to produce a bunch of nonsense. And it won't be able to tell those apart without the other brain areas to cross check.

I'm wondering why your and other companies haven't just evicted themselves from us-east-1. It's the worst region for outages and it's not even close.

Our company decided years ago to use any region other than us-east-1.

Of course, that doesn't help with services that are 'global', which usually means us-east-1.

There's been many layoffs attributed to AI. That seems like an excellent cover for market conditions.

You don't "lose" an argument just because the other side doesn't have the attention span to understand what you are saying.

Windows might not have build containers, but it has an enormous compatibility layer. API calls may work differently based on the executable running. Windows goes as far as changing the freaking memory allocator to not deallocate pages for buggy games. Raymond Chen's blog is a good source for some of these compat workarounds.

One could argue that Proton is a kind of a container. It has a runtime system, filesystem, wine itself has several executables and interprocess communication, etc.

It has a billion different branches and choices you can take. It's pretty surprising. Replayability is great.

Not really. Companies would still be founded, but there's no way to tell if they would ever grow to the point that would be listed in the S&P 500.

They will not get fines and lawsuits if they make a foldable phone with a display that degrades over time.

They got lawsuits because of batteries that degraded over time.

I don’t really know anyone who uses an iPad mini for anything productive

I guess you don't know many pilots? :)

Anecdote.

The strapped air reservoir could come in handy for when it rains...

There's no good reason to do that.

Terrible, this is Internet curfew.

If you think this is bad...

You can't even have a blog in China without authorization. It doesn't matter if you pay "AWS" for a machine. It won't open port 80 or 443 until you get an ICP recordal. Which you can only do if you are in China, and get the approval. It should also be displayed in the site, like a license plate. The reason "AWS" is in quotes is because it isn't AWS, they got kicked out. In Beijing, it is actually Sinnet, in Nginxia it's NWCD

You can only point to IPs in China from DNS servers in China - if you try to use, say, Route53 in the US and add an A record there, you'll get a nasty email (fail to comply, and your ports get blocked again, possibly for good).

In a nutshell, they not only can shutdown cross border traffic (and that can happen randomly if the Great Firewall gets annoyed at your packets, and it also gets overloaded during China business hours), but they can easily shutdown any website they want.