I’m literally afraid of the cloud console dashboards from the big providers. That’s especially true with the quagmire that is AWS.
It’s so easy to leave a resource turned on that you are no longer using, and so hard to tell which resource belongs to which project, or have high confidence you set up permissions correctly. They have multiple products whose only job is to monitor and configure your AWS accounts. Multiple. That’s not a brag. That’s an admonition.
Digital Ocean, Hetzner, Render, etc, seem to have figured out how to rent millions of dollars of computers and services out every month without requiring you to become “certified” on their platform.
Yes, I get the impression he has been fighting this fight internally since the day he arrived. He can’t exactly talk about how infuriating it must be, but I look forward to his memoir.
I think this is true at larger organizations, but even a “small/medium” startup can easily sign contracts for single services for $100k+, and in my experience, salespeople really do care about commissions at those price points.
A lot of software gets a foothold in an org by starting with the ICs, and individuals, not groups, are often the ones that request or approve software.
Github and Slack are good examples of services who make very good use of their ability to self-serve their customers out of the gate, in spite of also supporting very large orgs.
In these conversations, I never ever see the buyers justifying or requesting a sales process involving people and meetings and opaque pricing.
It’s true that complicated software needs more talking, but there is a LOT of software that could be bought without a meeting. The sales department won’t stand for it though.
> A lot of software gets a foothold in an org by starting with the ICs, and individuals, not groups, are often the ones that request or approve software.
Not really. Even if we keep the conversation in the realm of startups (which are not representative of anything other than chaos), ICs have essentially no ability to take unilateral financial risk. The Github “direct to developer” sales model worked for Github at that place and time, but even they make most of their money on custom contracts now.
You’re basically picking the (very) few services that are most likely to be acquired directly by end users. Slack is like an org-wide bike-shedding exercise, and Github is a developer tool. But once the org gets big enough, the contracts are all mediated by sales.
Outside of these few examples, SaaS software is almost universally sold to non-technical business leaders. Engineers have this weird, massive blind spot for the importance of sales, even if their own paycheck depends on it.
> Filesystems, databases, all kinds of systems do this. They have some hacks to prevent it from corrupting the entire dataset, but lost writes are accepted.
Woah, those are _really_ strong claims. "Lost writes are accepted"? Assuming we are talking about "acknowledged writes", which the article is discussing, I don't think it's true that this is a common default for databases and filesystems. Perhaps databases or K/V stores that are marketed as in-memory caches might have defaults like this, but I'm not familiar with other systems that do.
I'm also getting MongoDB vibes from deciding not to flush except once every two minutes. Even deciding to wait a second would be pretty long, but two minutes? A lot happens in a busy system in 120 seconds...
All filesystems that I'm aware of don't sync to disk on every write by default, and you absolutely can lose data. You have to intentionally enable sync. And even then the disk can still lose the writes.
Most (all?) NoSQL solutions are also eventual-consistency by default which means they can lose data. That's how Mongo works. It syncs a journal every 30-100 ms, and it syncs full writes at a configurable delay. Mongo is terrible, but not because it behaves like a filesystem.
Note that this is not "bad", it's just different. Lots of people use these systems specifically because they need performance more than durability. There are other systems you can use if you need those guarantees.
Hasn’t the definition of autism in the DSM changed to the point of requiring only a single characteristic to be “technically” on the spectrum, whereas it used to require many more criteria? I think it’s literally “not what it used to be”.
It seems like a diagnosis that would benefit from more distinguishing words so as not to conflate people at different ends of that spectrum.
It must be infuriating or
Bewildering to see someone knowingly nodding along saying, “oh yeah. I’m autistic too,” when other autistic people you know literally aren’t capable of doing that.
Yes! Thank you! He is talking about AI generated summaries being inaccurate, which is plenty to get up in arms about.
A lot of folks here hate AI and YouTube and Google and stuff, but it would be more productive to hate them for what they are actually doing.
But most people here are just taking this headline at face value and getting pitchforks out. If you try to watch the makeup guy’s proof, it’s talking about Instagram (not YouTube), doesn’t have clean comparisons, is showing a video someone sent back to him, which probably means it’s a compression artifact, not a face filter that the corporate overlords are hiding from the creator. It is not exactly a smoking gun, especially for a technical crowd.
I, for one, find it extremely odd that any of these video posters believe they get to control whether or not I use, directly or indirectly, an AI to summarize the video for me.
They're under the encouraged belief that they are in control over what is shown on their youtube channel. They think they should control what text is shown under their videos on "their" channel. This illusion of control of presentation has been unconvincing for quite a while but now Alphabet is just throwing around it's weight because there are no other options except youtube for what youtube does: allowing money to flow to people who make videos without the video file host getting sued out of existence. Alphabet does this by mantaining a large standing army of lawyers and a huge money supply. Trivial technical issues like file hosting and network bandwidth have been repeatedly solved by others but when they become popular they're legally attacked and killed.
This is where “managed” bug bounty programs like BugCrowd or HackerOne deliver value: only telling you when there is something real. It can be a full time job to separate the wheat from the chaff.
It’s made worse by the incentive of the reporters to make everything sound like a P1 hair-on-fire issue.
I’m literally afraid of the cloud console dashboards from the big providers. That’s especially true with the quagmire that is AWS. It’s so easy to leave a resource turned on that you are no longer using, and so hard to tell which resource belongs to which project, or have high confidence you set up permissions correctly. They have multiple products whose only job is to monitor and configure your AWS accounts. Multiple. That’s not a brag. That’s an admonition.
Digital Ocean, Hetzner, Render, etc, seem to have figured out how to rent millions of dollars of computers and services out every month without requiring you to become “certified” on their platform.
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