tempnow987

"Tesla only exists through government largesse, specifically carbon tax credits."

This assumes no subsidies for oil and gas (plenty, including depreciation below cost basis!)

In terms of credits - those are in the 2%-3% range of revenue.

In terms of SpaceX being the most dependent on the govt - totally false. Things like SLS are cost plus, have cost $20 billion with almost nothing to show for it. SpaceX is so available, cheap and reliable they are literally launching ESA payloads (ESA won't even mention them its so embarrassing), most commercial payloads that can actually go to bid and competitors payloads (looking at you Amazon).

Fair point - that cycle took FOREVER. I remember when their marketing slides starting doing comparisons between their unreleased future products and current (and sometimes about to be replaced) competitor products.

No question - but these kind of games lead to poor adoption.

They made a big todo about how much better than AMD they are with things like AVX512.

Then they play these games for market purposes.

Then they have stupid clock speed pauses, so when you try it your stuff goes slower.

Meanwhile - AMD is putting it on all their chips and it works reasonably there.

So I've just found the whole Intel style here kind of annoying. I really remember them doing bogus comparisons to non AVX-512 AMD parts (and projecting when their chips would be out). Reality is you are writing software that depends on AVX512 - tell clients to buy AMD to run it. Does AVX512 even work on efficiency cores and things like that? It's a mess.

The difference is intel chips that support AVX-512 run $1,300 - $11,000 with MUCH higher total system costs whereas AMD actually DOES support AVX-512 on all it's chips and you can get AVX-512 for dirt cheap. The whole intel instruction support story feels garbage here. Weren't they the ones to introduce this whole 512 thing in the first place?

I was a heavy movie goer (no TV at home!) and used to go to a ton of movies - sometimes more than one in a day.

Some things that are tough

Totally ignoring patron behavior

A group of older teens comes in, phones on the entire movie on bright, talking, cursing, just making a ruckus (maybe on purpose even) a row or two in front. If you are trying to watch a movie with your 5 year old kid (what I loved as a kid) this is no good!

Fights / robberies in the mall / shopping area itself. Again, not the right vibe for kids to be part of and again no consequence / action.

I seriously remember going to packed theatres with a totally cool / fun vibe as a kid - everyone pretty pro-social in terms of behavior. My parents would buy the ticket and leave us there. The other folks were basically a positive to the shared experience. The only issue was sometimes talking and the ushers would walk you out if you talked too much.

I wear earplugs for the loudness - which is ridiculous.

We ended up getting a projector for home. We can curl up (with kids and family as relevant) and have a better experience?

So question: When does it come out on streaming?

Also a hack if you still love movies. Go on a total off-beat time if you can a few weeks after opening. The attendance falls off hugely. But can still be a tiny bit hit or miss.

Wow - I was wrong. I thought this would have been something like terraform with a default to immediate delete with no recovery period or something. Still a default, but a third party thing and maybe someone in unisuper testing something and mis-scoping the delete.

Crazy that it really was google side. UniSuper must have been like WHAT THE HELL?

Pulleys and knots can go hand in hand.

With ropes you can start with a basic loop that acts as a pulley. Butterfly, wireman's loop, farmers something - I forget the names.

But you basically create a loop that let's you double back your rope. With a lot of modern rope they are slippery enough you get pretty good mechanical advantage. Some folks then go to a taught line hitch or something to even keep things adjustable basically. Key is usually to give yourself enough space to tighten, and I skip the taughtline hitch in most cases.

They walk to merchandise up to the register. Once you pay you get it. How does that not reduce shrink?

In terms of profiling - some folks are sick of theft - so the sentiment change if they start taking a harder line on theft may be smaller than you think. The profiling is easy. Pushing a shopping cart past the registers and out the front door without paying.

A local place cracked down majorly on this - I think it's been good for the business. The locked up merchandise is an absolute mess to deal with though - they don't have enough staff and so much is locked up so you spend a lot of time waiting to get stuff. I've started going to another location of this one store that is in an area much less impacted by retail theft - it is night and day just in atmosphere and accessibility.

This was the same issue apple was facing with their batteries - basically - the third party alibiba folks weren't doing nearly as much QC as apple did.

Of course, apple got hammered for alerting users to potentially non-apple batteries in their phones. :)

I learned my lesson with I think a thinkpad "hi capacity" battery replacement I got super cheap. Basically burned my lap.

Haha.. That matches what I experienced. It literally disappeared from everywhere but actually just kept on running.

The idea that liability should be 100% on the parents is an absolute horrific ugly hacker news only type take.

Hackers love to argue these sort of points into the ground. I'm sick of it. They take these points to absurd lengths.

And yes, these arguments overlap with child protection issues. I'm not a "protect the children" political type, but these types of arguments and derivates show up in a fair bit of ugly stuff.

And no - someone like this who does not believe in third party liability with respect to children should not be on a jury.

SimpleDB disappeared off the marketing pages - but I don't think it got shut down in reality until 2020 maybe? It was easily 5+ years after DynamoDB came along. There was definitely a period where there was little SimpleDB availability publicly but on the backend it kept working.

Would love it if someone had more of the detailed history.

I started with AWS pretty early.

Networking was drop dead simple. Basically I think all my instances got an 10.x.x.x IP address. You had a basic firewall (security groups nowadays) but that was it.

Let's say you had another account for a separate project or a client with another account.

You could literally connect to their instance via private IP.

All your own resources and all theirs were in this same 10.x.x.x address space which seemed to be globally reachable inside AWS.

The layers of config to go across account now between different orgs is wild by comparison.

It's weak - but could easily be modified to a strong parental rights type law - companies have to verify in person parental approval for little kids to have social media, parent is then admin on account, and time limits must be settable by the parents for online account activity. And no vanishing text (snapchat etc).

The effect would likely be the same, but rules to protect kids have stood up pretty well.

I hope you are not on a jury trying a child rapist and blaming the parents as 100% at fault.

Liability is obviously not always 100% on the parents. Sometimes you have to send your kid to school. If they are beaten bloody every day that's not necessarily 100% the parents fault - others can exercise some responsibility with respect to kids in our society.

The takes here on HN are frankly scary as a parent.

Your claim that parents have clicked yes to authorize all the kids accounts and activities is a total joke.

When you say "parental rights" - the issue is that parents DON'T have admin rights to their kids social media stuff.

Most of these companies do some kind of checkbox the 13 year old checks that confirms that if they are under 13 their parents have approved. The idea this is "parental rights" has to be a sick sick joke.

NONE of these companies send anyone anywhere to actually check that the parents OK'ed going on omegle etc.

Tweak the law so that the companies have to actually verify parental approval. Ie, something in person with parent and the kid. And that parents then are the admins on the account and get both see all activity and also control minutes / week of activity on the platform.

We deploy little apps internally. Users have low latency on the network - even home users we steer to use ISPs we know have low latency. I've found that speed can make a difference in user like for an app. Even going out to google etc I'm currently at 5-6 ms.

Some things we might have 1000+ checkboxs to work through on a checklist (cut down by some initial tailoring steps). Even things with a small wait on a click etc are frustrating. If you can drive using a keyboard shortcut and get very immediate response you can really move through things.

It's weird that the focus is so heavily on businesses and alleged harms to businesses (to ie, scam customers with hard to cancel renewals).

One reason folks LIKE apple is because apple has the market power to do things that yes - hurt other businesses but that make the consumer experience better.

When I get my iphone it's not loaded with carrier crap. Seriously, android you might be getting tons of carrier junk on your phone.

When I go to cancel a subscription its super easy. Apple even REMINDS me to cancel if I delete an app with a subscription tied to it (ie, that renews annually). They also notify me in ADVANCE of renewals to let me cancel.

Trial offers with higher renewing rates, the renewal rate is at the same font size and right in the payment acknowledgement for any trials.

And the list goes on.

Look at this against the lack of enforcement against totally blatant scams (billions) from the elderly. Total ripoffs and dark patterns - unconcealable subscriptions etc etc. Of all the consumer harm - apple should be way way way down on the list.

Didn't they also hammer folks using google maps in a business / cloud context?

I was also an old app engine user, but bailed ages ago (original app engine).

The budget cycle for 2024 has likely finished so orgs are moving to execute on 2024 plans.

Executives can finalize things a bit more easily when folks out of the office as the day to day a bit slower. HR / Acctg / IT also usually like doing a one off project in these spots - usually a smaller group is in loop on these things.

The week between Christmas and New Years for the quiet meetings and week after for plans to be finished up.

Or folks will check where their spam comes from. At least 2-3 years ago digital ocean was a ridiculously major source of spam. I've no interest in investigating why, but there is a near zero chance they were following anything like "all the best practices".

This is from DO's own site based on a quick search:

"I am being BOMBARDED, and I mean BOMBARDED with spam from Digital Ocean over 5 spams a day all from the same bunch of domains, all hosted on DigitalOcean and coming from your IPs.

In the last 2 weeks I’ve emailed your abuse mailbox 20+ times and filled in the contact abuse form 10+ times.

NOTHING is being done about it. My next plan of action is to keep posting here until Digital Ocean takes action.

Do you even have an abuse team? are they doing any work at all? I can provide 30 more samples if needed."

Absolutely pathetic - all major providers should blackhole email from DO.

Note that this contrasts to AWS. I was on AWS from flat network days (where folks were running scans internally etc. AWS respond with a ticket usually to abuse reports and then usually a bit later a note that things have been taken care of.

How does AWS which is FAR larger in IP address space than DO have so much LESS spam coming from their IP address space? Perhaps because they pay a tiny bit of attention to the issue.

Some of these solutions may not work as well in "big government" cities - they layer on so many non-core requirements the underlying product can become somewhat expensive or challenging. I had to deal with government tech support on something 10 years ago and you'd NEVER want to experience something like that - an entire office (being paid for by the government) would be offline for one silly reason or another. It was always like for x, y and z reasons only Q can do that needful thing, and Q is on a protected leave of some sort.... and cost and disruption was irrelevant. Then put in compliance with McBride Principles for Northern Ireland, required virgin redwood purchasing evaluations, sweatshop evaluations, travel restrictions, purchasing restrictions, first source hiring, purchasing procedures that were both highly complex and product quality / price only a small part of eval and extend this list 20x - all worthy things of course, but tough to get stuff done at times.

But their first efforts in BARD were really not great. I'd just have left the bragging out in terms of how long. OpenAI and others have no doubt sent a big wakeup call to google. For a while it seemed like they had turned to focus an AI "safety" (remembering some big blowups on those teams as well) with papers about how AI might develop negative stereotypes (ie, men commit more violent crime then women?). That seems to have changed - this is very product focused, and I asked it some questions that in many models are screened out for "safety" and it responded which is almost even more surprising (ie. Statistically who commits more violent crime, men or women).

Investors are banking on the idea in part that the governments will make it hard for others to compete with them by restricting new housing. Not a super bad bet.

At least in the bay area the layer of regulations and hoop jumping is very very daunting. Plenty of "funny" stories - all of which mean that it's very very very hard to build new housing at any meaningful scale for reasonable costs.

Boston likely has many of the same factors.

Investors want barriers to competition - and governments and taxpayers provide it.

I'm often confused by folks going to great lengths to "prove" stuff to HR. Why? HR works for the company / manager.

Focus on yourself. Your greatest power is not in arguing with a boss who doesn't like you. You can do things like switch teams internally - just put in for a switch. Start interviewing and work for another company and find someone who does like working with you. Maybe even go work for yourself.

Even when working for yourself, this actually still holds. When it's miserable working with a client, don't "PROVE" to them they are idiots. Do you really want to keep working with someone you've had to do this with? Again, move on.

I've had this happen a few times where the previous boss / client remembers me fondly - and I don't hate them either at the end of it.

Sure. That said, the cost / benefit tradeoffs often seem pretty good for AWS. The cost is low enough to other costs on a project that gain on velocity is worth it. In others gains on reliability, maintenance savings etc.

Ended up doing a small on-prem solution. VMWare for 6 CPUs x 32 cores = 192 cores runs about $3K/year for the software side which is a good deal to get started. That leaves about $240K/year or so to cover other costs. Not a slam dunk necessarily, but the on-prem store with vmware is not unreasonable.

I looked at VMware "in the cloud". It was around $50,000 - $100,000 per year for 48 cores. I've defended AWS pricing many times, mostly because of ability to burst etc. But the VMware workloads are often much flatter in terms of demand - ie, many systems just left running so the AWS value - while there of course, isn't as obvious to me.

Uh, you have a nonprofit board firing a CEO at a board meeting that doesn't even sound like was properly noticed. Was the board president even given time to attend?

And Microsoft has total rights to the models and weights, so they can CONTINUE their services and then spin up with Sam's new company.

If the board has the support of all the staff the board will be absolutely fine.

That said, not clear to me that board is supported by the staff.

So if Sam goes, and many of the key staff go... will be interesting.

And the boards style in all this, if that is the "mission" - is wild. You have partners, staff, businesses - doing a VC round and you blow it all up without it sounds like even talking to your board president? Normally this type of ouster requires a properly noticed meeting!

Does anyone know if this will stop NGP Van emails (seems to be dem party platform). I cannot get off their mailing lists - they seem to resell the email constantly. I've probably unsubscribed from NGP emails 50+ times. It's crazy. How are they not entirely blocked?