In orgs I have seen this it is usually a symptom of the data center unit being starved of resources. It’s like they have only been given the choice of on prem but ridiculous paperwork and long lead times or pay 20x for cloud.
Like can’t we just give the data center org more money and they can over provision hardware. Or can we not have them use that extra money to rent servers from OVH/Hetzner during the discovery phase to keep things going while we are waiting on things to get sized or arrive?
I feel like companies are unreasonably afraid of cost up front, never mind that they’re going to pay more for cloud over the next 6 months, spending 6x monthly cloud cost on a single server makes them hesitate.
It’s how they always refuse to spend half my monthly salary on the computer I work on, and instead insist I use an underpowered windows machine.
Blame finance and accounting... Rent compute in the cloud can be immediately expensed against revenues. Purchasing equipment has to be depreciated over a few years. Also why spending $$$$$ on labor (salaries) to solve an ops issue rather than spending $$$$ on some software to do it happens. If the business relies on the software it looks like an ever ongoing cost of operating the business. Spending more on labor to juggle the craziness can "hide" that and make the business look more attractive to investors... Cutting labor costs is easier to improve the bottom line (in the short term).
The problem is if you over-provision and buy 2x as many resources as you need, this looks bad from a utilization standpoint. If you buy 2x as expensive cloud solutions and “auto scale” you will have a much higher utilization for the same coat.
All the benefits OP lists are at or below mandated minimums for Western EU countries. It’s trivial to lookup and confirm for yourself.
In software the money difference you still end up ahead of where you would be on an equivalent salary in the EU. Also last time I was considering a move to the EU job market was weaker than the US. Also you still need to get all the necessary work visas which aren’t automatic. Even as a dual citizen I can’t just show up to work at a company in the EU.
About 10% of the total world population is using it on a weekly basis. Take out those too old or young or illiterate technically or otherwise. Now subtract out the people without reliable internet and computer/phone. That 10% gets a whole lot bigger.
That seems like pretty strong evidence that it is generally, if not universally, useful to everyone given the opportunity.
It’s interesting with the whole quote:
“OpenAI has 800 million weekly active users, and putting aside the fact that OpenAI’s own research (see page 10, footnote 20) says it double-counts users who are logged out if they’re use different devices”
The number may not actually be too accurate - but I imagine it’s also paired with what another commentator has said - OpenAI is basically giving their product to companies and the companies are making the employees log in and use it in some way - it’s not natural growth in any sense of the word.
My work is apparently paying for seats in multiple AI tools for everybody. There's a corporate mandate that you "have to use AI for your job". People seem to mostly be using it to for (a) slide decks with cringe images (b) making their PRs look more impressive by generating a bunch of ineffective boilerplate unit tests.
Utility and destructive addictiveness are two very different things. You could argue this way about opium back when recreational consumption was widespread.
I’m sorry but I don’t see much logic in an argument that boils down to “A lot of people use it and that means it would also be useful to the people who don’t use it”. Maybe the people who don’t use it have an actual reason not to use it.
Browsers display content that follows a very specific set of standards. There are also suites of tests to verify your compliance with those standards. So, every browser that is standards compliant should work for the vast majority of websites in existence. Still a big lift but doable for talented team.
Now an OS without application compatibility is kind of DoA unless there is a very compelling reason to switch. Add in hardware compatibility and it gets even worse.
Much bigger hill to climb then incorporating an existing browser engine into a custom spin of a browser. Even a browser engine from scratch would be smaller than a new bare metal OS.
I am not an expert here but I am currently researching for a planned project.
For backups, including Postgres, I was planning on paying Veeam ~$500 a year for a software license to backup the active node and Postgres database to s3/r2. Standby node would be getting streaming updates via logical replication.
There are free options as well but I didn’t want to cheap out on the backups.
It looks pretty turnkey. I am a software engineer not a sysadmin though. Still just theory as well as I haven’t built it out yet
That is an interesting point. Co-ops seem like they should out perform from a worker incentive point of view. But, why are co-ops basically non-existent in Big Tech. WinCo, groceries, and REI, expensive outdoor stuff, in the US are both big co-ops but are retailers.
Maybe VC money warps the economics so that every company needs to be winner takes all lotto tickets for the investors. Having it be worker owned gets rid of the extreme ROÍ VCs expect.
If you know any papers on the subject I would be interested though.
> Co-ops seem like they should out perform from a worker incentive point of view. , why are co-ops basically non-existent in Big Tech. WinCo, groceries, and REI, expensive outdoor stuff, in the US are both big co-ops but are retailers.
REI is a consumer coop, not a labor co-op (and WinCo, while employee-owned through an ESOP, is not a co-op at all.)
Cooperative Home Care Associates, a home health care agency HQ’d in the Bronx, appears to be the largest US labor cooperatives (and labor intensive service industries are probably the most common places to find labor coops in the US.)
> Maybe VC money warps the economics so that every company needs to be winner takes all lotto tickets for the investors. Having it be worker owned gets rid of the extreme ROÍ VCs expect.
Right. VC goals and labor coop goals are almost never aligned, and instead are almost diametrically opposed. Labor coops tend to favor conservative expansion and risk mitigation and stability. VC’s want to swing for the fences on scale—a succesful steady-state business that will pay its founding employees good pay forever but not expand much is a massive failure for VCs, but a win for a labor coop.
VCs don’t have ROI. They’re gambling with someone else’s money and taking big fees.
ROI implies that there is a return — but they’re already making more than they deserve just for the fee, and they are not investing anything themselves.
Oh thanks for setting me straight on WinCo and REI. I didn’t realize they weren’t labor co-ops. That is what I get for being lazy and not questioning the marketing. Too late for me to edit my post though.
No, Costco is a public company that sells annual memberships and then retails to its members at prices that are just about break even not counting the membership fee. The shareholders of the company elect the board of directors who runs the company.
REI is owned by people who pay a one-time lifetime membership fee. Those co-op members elect the board fo directors who runs the company.
REI is not worker-owned FYI. It's a consumer-owned co-op. Different beast
VCs are not interested in worker-owned coops. Economic climate works against the concept at scale. Workers are also divided on it and are not organized around enabling it. Employers are highly coordinated on maintaining current employer-worker relations.
edit: here is some related reading you might find interesting:
Thank you for the links and the correction on REI. I wasn’t aware that consumer co-ops were even a thing. I have some reading to do. Too late to edit my parent post unfortunately.
There are a lot of retail consumer co-ops, especially in the grocery area. REI is a relatively large example although it's not huge by retail and certainly tech standards.
And? Paying Cloudflare or someone else to block bad actors is required these days unless you have the scale and expertise to do it yourself.
Why is outsourcing this to Cloudflare bad and doing it yourself ok? Am I allowed to buy a license to a rate limiter or do I need to code my own? Am I allowed to use a firewall or is blocking people from probing my server not free enough?
Why are bots or any other user entitled to unlimited visits to my website? The entitlement is kind of unreal at this point
> And? Paying Cloudflare or someone else to block bad actors is required these days unless you have the scale and expertise to do it yourself.
Where are people getting this from? No, Cloudflare or any other CDN is not required for you to host your own stuff. Sure, it's easy, and probably the best way to go if you just wanna focus on shipping, but lets not pretend it's a requirement today.
> Why are bots or any other user entitled to unlimited visits to my website? The entitlement is kind of unreal at this point
I don't think they are, that's why we have rate limiters, right? :) I think the point is that if you're allowing a user to access some content in one way, why not allow that same user to access the content in the same way, but using a different user-agent? That's the original purpose of that header after all, to signal what the user used as an agent on their behalf. Commonly, I use Firefox as my agent for browsing, but I should be free to use any user-agent, if we want the web to remain open and free.
My point is that people choose to outsource the complexity of running a rate limiter and blocking bad actors to Cloudflare and others like them is not the issue you make it out to be.
Why is it good for me to do it myself but bad to pay Cloudflare $20 a month to do it for me. No one is forcing me to use their services. I still have the option to do it myself, or use someone else, or not use anything at all. Seems pretty free to me.
Many AI scraping bots are notoriously bad actors and are hammering sites. Please don’t pretend they are all or even mostly well behaved. We didn’t have this push with the search engine scraping bots as those were mostly well behaved.
You are setting up a straw man with a “hey why not let this hypothetical we’ll behaved bot in”. That isn’t the argument or reality. We didn’t have the need to block Google, Yahoo, or Bings bot because they respected robots.txt and had a reasonable frequency of visits.
Exactly, it drives me insane that people are still thinking this administration is in any way acting in good faith. The argument you quote above is assuming an awful lot of good faith when this administration continually lies and violates court orders.
Hell they lied about Trumps weight and height on his physical.
Not OP, but of course they can’t be sure. No one can but if it doesn’t come along we will just be kind of screwed.
Better to be optimistic and make moves to position yourself for the “new thing that comes along” then to give in to despair. Then if it does come along they are ready to jump on that train.
In this case their is nothing lost with cautious optimism.
Like can’t we just give the data center org more money and they can over provision hardware. Or can we not have them use that extra money to rent servers from OVH/Hetzner during the discovery phase to keep things going while we are waiting on things to get sized or arrive?
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