oxymoron

Yes, but that wasn’t engineers.

I’m an AWS engineer and I haven’t seen any evidence of engineering layoffs within AWS since early this year. As others have suggested we generally don’t have ”DevOps Workers” either. There’s definitely a push for AI tools, but there’s no indication that it was related to any off this from what I’ve seen.

Because a lot of the time, not everyone is impacted, as the systems are designed to contain the "blast radius" of failures using techniques such as cellular architecture and [shuffle sharding](https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/workload-isolation-u...). So sometimes a service is completely down for some customers and fully unaffected for other customers.

Countering advanced bits is a game of economics. Sure, we know that they can solve the captchas, but they usually can’t do so for free. Eg. Typical captcha solver services are around $1/thousand solved. Depending on the unit economics of a particular bot that might be cheap or it might completely destroy the business model. I’ve definitely seen a lot of professionally operated bots where they invest a lot of effort into solving the fewest captchas possible to keep the cost down.

That captchas are completely useless is a popular myth.

It was of course co-discovered by another woman, Lise Meitner, who understood the theory while taking a walk with Otto Frisch and discussing the experimental findings by Otto Hahn. Meitner and Frisch were friends with Hahn and learned about the experiment earlier than most, so it’s likely one of those contingencies of history. There’s a good discussion of exactly how it unfolded in _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ which is generally a great book and a comprehensive intro to the history of nuclear physics.

I think it’s at least relevant to note that a lot of things relating to autism was completely redefined in DSM-V. DSM-IV had many different diagnosis such as classic autism, autism spectrum disorder, aspergers and PDD-NOS (Pervasive Developmental Disorder - Not Otherwise Specified). All of those was merged into a single diagnosis titled ”Autism Spectrum Disorder”, where the criterias are communication difficulties and stereotypical behavior. My understanding is that this was mostly due to poor diagnosis stability with the prior set of diagnosis. It seems at least plausible that this general simplification of diagnosis criteria has contributed to an increase in the number of diagnosis. (It’s also worth remembering that any comparison over time has to bundle all of the previously distinct diagnosis to come up with an apples-to-apples comparison.)

Redis latency is around 1ms including network round trip for most operations. In a single threaded context, waiting on that would limit you to around 1000 operations per second. Redis clients improve throughput by doing pipelining, so a bunch of calls are batched up to minimize network roundtrips. This becomes more complicated in the context of redis-cluster, because calls targeting different keys are dispatched to different cache nodes and will complete in an unpredictable order, and additional client side logic is needed to accumulate the responses and dispatch them back to the appropiate caller.

I think our understanding of the inner structure of the earth is another interesting example of something that we’ve deduced scientifically but never directly observed. It surprised me a bit when I first realized that the Earth’s crust had never been pierced (by humans) and that it was all based on indirect observation.

There is a talk by the S3 VP on Youtube which mentions some rough numbers, I think it’s from re:invent 2019. Also, they mention 100 trillion objects here https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3s-15th-birthday-it...

When I started working for AWS as an SDE, I was hoping it’d be possible to visit a datacenter. I was surprised to find out that I’d require L11 (!) approval to so so! The only L11 in my reporting chain is Adam Selipsky.

I’m told the AWS data centers has red zones, which no harddrive can be taken out of, without being mechanically and violently destroyed first.

I’ve been using self-hosted TTRSS since Google Reader shut down.

He is mentioned in the book, _The Man from the Future_, which gives the impression that Von Neumann did the heavy lifting their collaboration. It paints a relatively unflattering picture of Morgenstern.

I am not convinced that AA is actively trying to block this app. I used to work for a major anti-bot vendor, so from that I know that all airlines suffer heavily from price scraping and try to protect their flight search endpoints. The impact to them is due to fees from the centralized data services that all airlines depend on.

Aside from the coolness of the actual thing, I love the early 00’s web site design. For a while, all sites looked like this.

I also agree with this sentiment, although there are some examples of really weird meta programming that remains opaque to me. For instance, I’m able to use `warp` as a framework, but the use of things like type level peano arithmetic is mostly incomprehensible to me at the moment. I also find that I run into Higher Rank Trait Bounds so rarely that I have a poor grasp of it (which might be as intended). All that to say that there are some odd corners of the language, given that I’ve been using it for five years now and as my main professional language for three years.

I absolutely adore the Baroque Cycle. Question: Since I read it I’ve wanted to read more about the development of money and financial institutions, but I’ve had difficulty finding good books on the topic. Does anyone have any good recommendations?

Building a UI is usually tedious irregardless of stack. The fun part is what’s new and creative in the project, which is usually a small part of the overall thing.

My solution is generally to work at many different things in parallell, but that largely works because I’m a senior engineer and I’m naturally pulled to step in and assist in various places. I don’t think there’s an universal answer. Fundamentally, it’s probably not reasonable to expect that all aspects of once work should be thoroughly enjoyable.

I haven’t seen it explicitly banned, but the Operational Readiness templates does have a question about that which has to be answered for all product and feature launches. I guess some orgs may just have banned it outright though.

Different customers have different attitudes towards this. Some of them are _very_ focused on conversion and will disable anything which causes additional user friction. For others, the economic damage of bots is just so painful that it makes economic sense for them to add friction for a few percent of users.

I'm a linux user myself, so I know for a fact that neither my previous employer, nor other bot vendors, will block linux user agents in particular. Customers generally don't mind a universal requirement for JS execution, so that's just a fact of life. We generally did try to avoid blocking privacy focused browsers, though. We certainly monitored false positive rates and knew pretty well how we affected users.

Thanks for the clarification! I probably misremember some of the details.

Yeah, there’s a central service that all Flight search is connected to, irregardless of airline. The airlines are charged per search to that api, so they monitor their ”look to book” rationvery closely. That ratio remains quite stable im the absence of bots, but skyrockets with any bot activity. Hence, they know from that metric how big of a bot problem they have and how much money they are losing. Major flight search software vendors have dedicated teams for this.

Yeah, I used to work for one of the major anti-bot vendors. Customers weren't clueless. Nobody buys these solutions because they're so much fun, it's a cost center and they monitor their ROI quite closely. Credit card charge backs, impact to infrastructure, extra incurred cost due to underlying api's (like in the Airline industry in particular) etc are all reasons why bot mitigation is a better option than nothing for a lot of companies, even if it's not 100% effective.

Tenets as used internally at AWS are a set of principles that each team decides for themselves, as guides in the face of ambiguity. There's no overarching set of tenets (that I'm aware of), so this is probably just referring to the idea of having a guiding set of principles to resolve tradeoffs.

I’m sure there’s machinery in use which is powered by fossil fueles. You did mention separately that the mining industry is a heavy user of electricity, though, so I was referring to that aspect in particular. Apologies for not making that clear.

Swedish electricity production is essentially carbon neutral. There’s a 50/50 split between nuclear and renewables. At times, there’s imports from the European grid, which does include coal and gas &c, so by that accounting it may not be fully neutral. However, the mining industry is in the far north which has an abundance of cheap hydropower, so it’s probably true that the ore can be mined entirely using renewable energy in Sweden.

That seems unlikely. Plenty of electronics engineers working in Verilog, who haven’t ever glanced at Javascript.

I like the argument that Taleb makes in _Fooled by randomness_, which is essentially that most news has negative informative value because most of it is just noise. Only with time does the signal appear.

Haha. This is halfway between psychedelic and hyper realistic in a way that made me think of Thomas Pynchon.

That’s the one! Thank you!

Semi-related: I remember a story from HN a few years ago where someone started experiencing crashes and tracked it down to a single flipped bit in memory which went away when he purged his page cache so the binary was reloaded from disk. Does anyone happen to have a link to it?