tnjm

While I wouldn't dream of standing up k8s on a bare metal cluster without a devops team, I set up managed k8s using EKS several years ago for a client and... it just chugs along, self-healing, with essentially zero maintenance.

For my own projects I use a managed Northflank cluster on my own AWS account and likewise... just a fantastic experience. Everything that Heroku could and should have been. Yes the cluster is a bit pricey to stand up both in terms of EC2 compute and management layer costs, but once it's there, it's there. And the costs scale much more nicely than shoving side projects onto Heroku.

At this stage I consider managed k8s my default go-to unless it's something so lightweight I just want to push it to Vercel and forget about it.

Happily using Cloud66 but a strong recommendation for Northflank here. I already had a running cluster there and migrating a very complex Heroku app over only took 20 minutes today. (Would have been 5 if I hadn't screwed up .gitignore...)

Thanks for building this!

It struggled with tasks I asked for (e.g. download the March and April invoices for my GitHub org "myorg") -- it got errors parsing the DOM and eventually gave up. I recommend taking a look at the browser-use approach and specifically their buildDOMTree.js script. Their strategy for turning the DOM into an LLM parsable list of interactive elements, and visually tagging them for vision models, is unreasonably effective. I don't know if they were the first to come up with it, but it's genius and extracting it for my browser-using agents has hugely increased their effectiveness.

I developed a SaaS business to fund a nonprofit foundation, which is a little different from your situation.

The key thing was to keep the SaaS-y bit as boring as possible, which meant a corporation. This is in Europe but the equivalent would be Delaware C corp.

Shares in the corporation were then given to the wrapping organization (in my case the foundation, but this could be more-or-less any legal structure that can have assets). Downside is two sets of accounts, upsides are that M&A gets a ton easier later on, and taking on employees is simple and not colored by the legal quirks of the parent organization. The potential complexity of SaaS accounting (revenue recognition, R&D credits, etc) is also kept inside a simple, normal corporation which every CPA is super-familiar with, so you're not consulting niche experts every time something new comes up.

I advise a quick consult with a tax lawyer before doing anything, because it's easy to say you'll deal with this later but some changes have unforeseen implications if not done at the outset. (I punted on some of the setup for a year while I focused on finding product/market fit, and that turned out to be a mistake that the lawyers had to fix at some cost. A year more and it might have become unfixable.)

I agree that indigenous knowledge is rightly the property of indigenous peoples themselves, but that wasn't my point. My comment referred specifically to the products of evolution: that's the genetic resources, not the knowledge of them.

Doesn't the concept of biopiracy imply that the products of millions of years of evolution belong to modern nation states?

What if, instead, we either observe that they simply exist, or imbue them with their own rights, or consider them the birthright of all humanity?

We've seen that attempts to consider them as intellectual property for the purposes of ensuring their conservation have failed. We can also see that it hasn't driven the anticipated licensing revenue flows to poorer nations. But which approach would lead to greater good for humankind over a long time horizon?

Agreed - but on the other hand (no flippancy intended) it's not hard to imagine AI would have done a better job in this instance.

Probably true - but having a great many soldiers in an area where there are an extremely isolated people such as the "uncontacted" Yanomami also poses its own risks. If they're focusing on the most sensitive areas with highly trained personnel and making use of the impressive knowledge and expertise in Brazil's Indian affairs department, FUNAI, much could be achieved. The situation in French Guiana is quite different, with perhaps only small numbers of Wayãpi living in isolation.

Brazil is rolling back the free-for-all that was established under Bolsonaro, but if they're handling it delicately, that's likely good news.

Another point, and I'd love to be corrected here, is that with a container of water you're going to get a ton of convection currents leading to a much sharper heat gradient at the edges, resulting in significant heat losses with the same amount of insulation.

At a guess, and I confess I'm not capable of running the numbers, this offsets the much higher temperature delta of sand.

I suspect if you told it in advance you were going to ask it a deliberately tricky question, that it might actually succeed.

Indeed it does:

"Before answering, please note this is a trick question.

Two trains on separate tracks, 30 miles from each other are approaching each other, each at a speed of 10 mph. How long before they crash into each other?"

https://chat.openai.com/share/3ec44348-6bac-40c3-a910-e0bab9...

But if you make the input slightly more explicit:

"Two trains on different and separate tracks, 30 miles from each other are approaching each other, each at a speed of 10 mph. How long before they crash into each other?"

...it spots the trick: https://chat.openai.com/share/ee68f810-0c12-4904-8276-a4541d...

Likewise, if you add emphasis it understands too:

"Two trains on separate tracks, 30 miles from each other are approaching each other, each at a speed of 10 mph. How long before they crash into each other?"

https://chat.openai.com/share/acafbe34-8278-4cf7-80bb-76858c...

Not to anthropomorphize, but perhaps it's not necessarily missing the trick, it just assumes that you're making a mistake.

Central London, and a particularly nice bit too. No red flags, until it got all Stephen King.

Is there anywhere I can ready about this ABnB host who kidnapped your wife?

No, we've never spoken publicly of it, though I don't remember her signing anything.

I am so glad that she made it out safely! Sounds wild, I would think ABnB would be very concerned with this host, not worried about the damages from a police intervention!

That was a bit of a surprise too. In retrospect, it's maddening: the gravity of the situation only dawned on us slowly, and no doubt it could have made someone else wait longer to call the emergency services and then... who knows.

It's not my story to share the full details, but suffice to say it was wild and makes extremely good dinner party conversation. At the time though, definitely something out of a horror movie.

I've always had a few issues with Airbnb -- never knowing if the place I've booked actually exists, the hard-to-navigate app and broken login system, and that one time the "host" kidnapped my wife and Airbnb support told her on the phone that if the police broke the door down she'd have to pay for it. (They did; she didn't. We used the eventual compensation credit to book an Airbnb in NYC which turned out to have not only a repossession bill on the front door, but also a condemned building notice.)

But. I did a work trip last month and stayed in apartments with my colleague. Half of the hotels (even airport hotels!) on booking.com wanted damage deposits up to $500, often in cash. So we exclusively used Airbnb and it was... perfect. The places were exactly as described, no bizarre demands, and the access/lockbox instructions and wifi codes were all in-app. The hosts were clearly all pros, and it showed.

In built-up areas, the numbering is typically sequential. In rural areas, houses are numbered based on distance from the start of the road.

Our road in the _campagne_ has two houses: number 50 (50m from the start of the road) and number 70 (at 70m).

The paper you cite in [1] is interesting and worth reading. However, it doesn't support a claim that fires on Hawaii have nothing to do with climate change (and of course it says nothing whatsoever about fires elsewhere -- Hawaii's weather, and climate, are extraordinarily localized).

French resident here. Received a bill from this week from a medical lab for some tests; the only payment options are either visit the lab in person (an hour's drive away) or mail a personal check. This is not uncommon here, and even most large supermarket chains still accept checks.

Very true. An alternative is to install a lower-spec off-the-shelf charger/inverter for closer to £1k though, and instead have a handful of sockets with backup power. Being able to charge your phone and laptop, keep the fridge/freezer running and have at least some light is still magical.

I installed a backup system (in the greenhouse rather than the house... priorities) to cope with these kinds of problems.

Using a Victron Multiplus 1.6kVA system with 2x 110Ah 12V Gel batteries was remarkably cheap and simple. The whole lot came to just over €1k and took ~1h to set up, mostly setting jumper switches.

It keeps the pellet boiler, circulation pumps, backup gas heaters and control gear going all night when necessary. The automatic switchover from mains (<20ms) is so fast that none of the PLCs, Arduinos, Raspberry Pis or heating equipment notices. Upgrading its capacity simply involves plugging in another 2x batteries (it's a 24v unit) in parallel.

The only thing I wasn't thrilled about was that it doesn't protect against power surges, and a storm fried the boiler logic board AND the gas valve in the backup heater simultaneously in midwinter. (Victron unit was fine though!) Lesson learned.

A similar installation in the house could easily power our (non-electric) central heating system, LED lighting and wifi for plenty long enough to stay civilized, and we're being prepared for 2 hour rolling blackouts here this winter.

Related to the quirks of in-app browsers mentioned in the article, the Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat apps manage to break file uploading every few months, and take several weeks to fix it each time. I'm not sure why this in particular is such an achilles heel, but it's a surprisingly big problem for e.g. online stores advertizing on Instagram and offering personalized products.

Not only is the tech here astonishing, but full credit to the authors for producing such a clear, concise video accessible to just about everyone explaining what they did, how they did it, and why it matters. Excellent storytelling.

Indeed, Mercury has been phenomenal for us too. It's painful to use other banks now. How they've executed so quickly and competently in a tricky space is quite something to watch.

But the thought of them pulling a Brex-like move might now keep me awake at night... hopefully they would just add a monthly fee on before reaching that point.

Is it really sleight of hand, though, when you'd get essentially the same answer when consulting the UN, Wikipedia or... a dictionary?

The data you've presented just don't allow us to make those claims, and fall apart at the gentlest interrogation:

- much doesn't relate to hunter-gatherers at all - some is a tiny sample size (in the only case I dug into, n<=1!) - the bulk of it involves peoples under pressure from encroachment (and worse) - by its nature it's woefully incomplete, some of it cherry-picked, and ignores the majority of hunter-gatherer peoples

It's a fascinating and important question, though.

If you read the UN definition of genocide [0], you'll see that a population increase doesn't contradict (the UN concept of) genocide at all. The key is intent.

[0] https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml

Therein lies the problem though. Even if we take the numbers from the linked article (whose starting point was... Steven Pinker!):

- the "ethnographic evidence", which I accept you're not defending, largely features indigenous peoples during an active genocide.

- the archaeological evidence is, naturally and obviously, extremely few and far between. Much of it doesn't relate to hunter-gatherers at all. As for the rest? Taking one at random: the 12% violent death share at Ile Téviec. Read the sources and this is extrapolated from three (3!) bodies. Two of which were apparently not violent deaths after all. The remaining body? We have no clue if the incoming arrowhead was from warfare or a hunting accident. How unfortunate if a single 6,000 year old hunting accident is labeling entire peoples violent and uncivilized. Either way, it's nonsense all the way down.

What was the historical rate of violence amongst, say, the Zo'é people? They are very isolated today and violence is apparently unheard of, but what happened in the past? We can't possibly know. What of the Awá? No hint. The Sentinelese, even? Who knows?

My point is that all of these data are so limited, so compromised and often so cherry-picked it's revealing nothing very helpful. What little we do know is that rates of violence amongst different hunter-gatherer peoples today, despite them all being under immense outside pressures, are extremely variable... as it is between all other different groups of humans. That observation doesn't sell books, though.

The problem with this is that all modern hunter-gatherer societies are under extreme pressure due to the theft of their lands and resources. This is particularly true in the context of the anecdotes given in the linked article, even if its characterization of today's !Kung or aboriginal peoples in Australia as being in a state of "almost constant tribal warfare" is bizarre (to put it kindly and assume good faith).

There is also an idealogical appeal by the likes of Pinker to the idea that nation states are the only structures that can prevent us from a return to a kind of endemic violence amongst hunter-gatherers. This thought has historically been exploited by those who would steal their lands, and do it "for their own good".

You might call it "doing a Chagnon" - precipitate violence, use that to characterize a people as warlike, then use that as a pretext to take even more resources.

Of course it's possible to find a hunter-gatherer society which is more violent than a particular modern nation state. It's also trivial to find an inverse example. When you look at what evidence we do have, you see that hunter-gatherers are no more or less violent than the rest of us, and when violence does flare it happens for the very same reasons it happens anywhere else.

The evidence is very sparse, and what we do have suggests that modern hunter-gatherer societies are, on average, no more violent than humanity in general. (My personal if limited observation, having lived briefly with several, is that they seem to be notably less violent than the -- often frontier -- communities around them.)

Steven Pinker has muddied the water with quite a lot of nonsense in The Better Angels of our Nature. An interesting, better-sourced and less cherry-picked read is a 2013 paper in Science[0].

[0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1235675

You may have a point. Here in the Périgord, hazelnut trees are reckoned to decline in truffle production when they are around 10 years old. Oaks go on producing for decades. If he's planted solely hazelnut and he's waited nine years, he may have a problem.