lukasLansky

Both Franz Kafka and Factorio come from Prague after all.

My ethernet is also capped at 1 Gb/s for most of my computers. The 10 Gb/s connection is still useful as it makes sure that things running at different devices won't affect each other. Streaming won't affect games won't affect work-related video calls. It's great.

That is a narrative that misses the point of the thread and is generally not compatible with hard data. For example, the amount of suicides in US during 2020 went down.

It's not a string either though: in the same way integer addition (almost always) does not make sense, string concatenation (almost always) does not make sense either. The proper type would allow for equality check and explicit string (de)serialization only.

I guess it depends how you think about it. From computational perspective, it's heavyweight. On the other hand, it really optimizes for minimal human effort, on several levels:

* GPT-3 is conceptually simple: the effort to invent it and engineer it amortizes well.

* Once the model is trained, it can be reused to very different tasks.

* Querying doesn't require programming knowledge.

I think we are really torturing language here. I don't want to get into specifics of what constitutes business value, how to value brand and customer satisfaction and so on. I can add more examples like https://deepmind.com/blog/article/deepmind-ai-reduces-google... that shows how neural networks helps in the pure bottom-line sense you care about.

Let me close my argument: neural network techniques developed in the last ten years are super useful here and now, they are used by billions of people every day and they do make their lives easier.

Voice recognition, translation, OCR, image classification, etc. is done through neural networks mostly nowadays.

If https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Translate does not seem like having business value to you, then I don't understand what you mean by "business value".

Moloch did force them.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Most of batch workloads are not that latency sensitive. You can send them to the other side of the world as everyone is sleeping there right now.

I don't understand why you think it's hard to tell your CI/CD pipeline to run itself on a schedule. I find this totally consistent with my tooling (I have CI/CD in place for many different reasons, this is one of them) and I don't know how this CI/CD cron makes me "packaging maintainer and infrastructure maintainer".

"With containers, you are responsible for figuring out which ones need which packages and how to re-build them."

Yeah, you need to know how to rebuild your world in ANY CASE. It's not an argument against containers that they require an approach that is the best practice.

No, in the context of the conversation, it's an argument for a higher valuation of the entity.

The value of every corporation primarily reflects expectation of future profits. That's the reason P/E ratios differs a lot even for established companies.

Yep, this is exactly it. By the way, even SQL Server can use Kubernetes for HA nowadays.[1]

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/tutorial-sql-serv...

I agree that technology advances would have lead to massive deflation without all the money printing. The point of money printing is to do precisely this, so that the measure of economy does not get out of sync with the size of the economy. https://www.amazon.com/Lords-Finance-Bankers-Broke-World/dp/... is a great book that touches the topic -- it also shows this discussion is not new.

I also agree that the chosen transmission mechanism of money creation (buying bonds and stocks by central banks) might have lead to worsening inequality. I like the Yudkowsky treatment at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tAThqgpJwSueqhvKM/frequently... .

But I still think that the inflation is low and if we want to describe the problems that are happening even though it's low, we should create new language, not shift the current one.

Inflation, using the usual definition, cannot be 'masked by technology' as technology is one of the things that legitimately determine general price level. Inflation counts and always counted general price level with effects of technology advancements taken into account. So the poster you are replying to has it right: inflation is low.

Knative[0] pushes in that direction from the side of "complicated" Kubernetes. It's still far away from easy, but I expect that the solution will look like this -- a software that uses Kubernetes base to provide high-level primitives. Helpful cloud provider will give you a cluster with such thing already installed, as Google already does for Knative with the Cloud Run offering.

Microsoft allows you to publish a web application from Visual Studio project to Azure.[1] It's very simple, but more much opinionated. It's a great trade-off for an individual developer who needs to focus on functionality. In the context of this discussion, there's an important distinction -- it's not an interface, it's just a feature. It's tightly coupled to Azure from one side and to Microsoft dev stack from the other.

[0] https://knative.dev/ [1] https://tutorials.visualstudio.com/aspnet-azure/publish

Kubernetes is our one shot at having the universal vendor-neutral cluster interface. The fact that it's time consuming to do simple things directly against it doesn't surprise me in the same way I'm not surprised that writing todo app directly against POSIX abstraction would be time consuming. It's a great way to learn how these interfaces work though.

It's not an uncommon way to get rich. Eastern European privatisation after the fall of the Iron Curtain often failed after management of corporations owned by many small shareholders borrowed company money to themselves, something that is obviously almost criminal negligence, certainly something that should get you removed from management ASAP. But before the shareholders managed to do anything, the money was used to buy controling stake in the company and weak protection of rights of minority shareholders took care of the rest.

As much as I like the described move from "functions" to "containers", solutions like KNative / Cloud Run are still inherently more hackable than solutions like Fargate.

It's good to have properly defined, stable, open interface for compute workloads (containers as defined by OCI), so we don't have to lock ourselves into whatever shape of runtime environment our current cloud provides for their flavor of FaaS. So we don't have to learn cloud-provider-specific tooling, getting certifications for handling various tasks at AWS, becoming 2010s variants of Cisco-certified network engineers of the previous age.

But it's even better to have a properly defined, stable, open interface for orchestration too. To be able to run stuff locally. To be able to extend things. To ease the lock-in cloud providers currently have. To be able to actually understand what happens under the hood. And last but not least: to enable rise of open source solutions for higher-level abstractions, like KubeDB.

I agree. If a smart investor notices that a company business model stops working the moment governments pass legislation introducing carbon markets, it's a good investment strategy to short the stock. But notice that it's the government that is doing the heavy lifting here, investors are just diligently passing the shock from the future so resources are not wasted.

If there is a climate catastrophe going to happen, but no government is going to punish companies responsible, it won't make sense to try to do that for yourself -- in the same way bad corporations are freeriding on climate, bad investors are freeriding on your efforts to punish such corporations.

Does this actually make a diffence, from game-theoretical perspective? It seems to me that if substantial amount of investors start to bias in a certain direction, it will only create an opportunity for active investors to earn money by betting in the other direction, and these active investors will "fix" the "bad" price. Maybe it's not a coincidence those indices perform as well as the rest of the market, as you observed?

These active investors don't even have to realize their strategy is based on going against nice guys -- they might be led purely by statistical performance.

I'm not trying to be needlessly cynical. I like effective altruism for example. I'm just not sure stock market is a good battleground for ethics.

Yes, AI regulation needs to be global to be effective.

The difference between "we should abstain from our moral values because everyone dies anyway in the end" and "we should find ways to pursue our moral values effectively" is substantial. You don't have to be nihilistic to not accept cheap signaling being sold as a solution to real problems.

Few corporations deciding to not do dirty work, just providing their lower-level cloud resources to thousands of smaller firms who will gladly compete for any kind of money -- that does not solve anything.

Stuff like GDPR can change at least something.

I mostly agree. Just notes:

Classic example in favor of monorepos is shared internal library. You should be able to change its API in one step, because that's the way to not having to care about compatibility at all. Compatibility concerns only happen if there's a time difference and with atomic company-wide update, this just doesn't need to happen.

In my example, backend and frontend can be deployed together. And we can discuss whether they should -- I would say there is little benefit of maintaining such single-purpose, wide interface just for getting the ability deploy frontend changes only, but this would depend on care the team put into configuration of cluster orchestration.

Contract testing is good, but not as good as testing against the real thing. Very much depend on the circumstances though.

Well let's take frontend/backend separation in a classic webapp -- let's not think about React for now. This makes good concern separation as rendering HTML is something else than computing prices.

If you put frontend and backend into different repositories, you need to make two PRs for every new feature and -- for much worse -- you make integration testing much harder as you don't have atomic product merges to run automation against.

Don't laugh about this example, my corporation is doing stuff like this (backend only repo tightly coupled to frontend repo) all the time.

So maybe we can steelman the argument into "good vertical concern separation doesn't force you into doing multiple PR for single feature, as opposed to horizontal frontend/backend/repository splits."?

But I'm still not sure. Wide integration testing is necesity for reliable microservices. It's difficult to do that with dependencies being out of the scope of the change.

It's a common sense, but it's really hard to argue against super-fine splitting. Having repo per module seems like stronger separations of concerns from a distance.

Of course, what in the end really decides about the strength of your concern separation is the shape of your CI, but alas, repository granuality is just much more visible then CI checks.

"Netflix also benefits from TV/movies being more fungible"

Is this really the case? I mean, is there any research on this? I would guess exactly opposite is the case: I personally don't care about background music in most situations, but if I'm watching a film for two hours, I'm going to be very selective.

That means that Netflix in its current state is useless for me. As much as I applaud them for some of their production, the combination of half-empty catalogue and forced subscription model is going in the exactly wrong direction. I would pay one-time fee for Roma. I would pay subscription for a good catalogue.

Now, I don't state that it's not the case that most consumers does not care about what they watch as much as they care about what they listen. I'm just interested in some empirical data on this.

Technically, yes. But if you start print money too recklessly, you will trigger inflation and inflation expectations. Your creditors from abroad will either add heavy markup on future USD debt, or ask for debt in different currency. The only reason this doesn't seem like an immediate threat for US is decades of responsible monetary policy that built trust. US definitely can get in a position it won't be able to sell debt in its own currency.

It would be misleading for consumers of the interface to mark compute_pi_digits awaitable -- at least in .NET world that have quite a lot of experience with async-await at this point.

See http://blog.ploeh.dk/2016/04/11/async-as-surrogate-io/ for further discussion. Regular programmers are not using Task<T> as IO-monadic marker consciously, but they are surprised when a usage differs from that model.

Funny, I find measuring opportunity costs much much harder than measuring engineering effort.

Even in your example, are those phone calls the substantial costs, or is it customer confidence in your product being lost the main motivation you should do something with the bug? If so, what's the dollar value of this confidence? Also, do you have monitoring good enough in place to see how many customers are hitting the problem every day without telling you? Do you think these customers are less or more frustrated than the one they are calling you?

Can you attribute lost customer to a particular feature not present, to a particular bug the customer experienced just before they refused to deal with your software anymore?

Mastodon is perfectly usable for microblogging, and, moreover, it's currently the best usecase for the tool. You can't find partners for conversation as easily as with established platforms with network effects, but you can use it to publish.

With Mastodon, you can quickly create account you can send notes, links or images into. This account lives on the open web without registration required. You get Atom feed you can use to re-display the content in any way you want at other sites, or to share the content with people who don't use ActivityPub yet. You get "comments" for free for users willing to get ActivityPub account.