Exactly. It's just so much cleaner to do it in the Cloud provider's native tooling. The impedance mismatch from Cloud-agnostic abstractions always just makes thing shitty enough that in the long run you spend more time dealing with weird edge cases.
Besides, actual full-scale Cloud migrations are exceedingly rare.
Terraform is not an abstraction on top of multiple cloud providers, you work with aws, azure etc explicitly. It is , however, agnostic in the sense that you can provision aws, azure, gcp, etc resources within the same iac project
I always hated this meme. Using Terraform no more makes you “cloud agnostic” than using Python to script AWS services and calling boto3 than using bash and calling the AWS CLI.
AWS's native tooling is Cloudformation, and CDK is actually just a wrapper around that that generates cloudformation code (as CDKTF is a wrapper for terraform). And I like to avoid cloudformation as much as possible.
writing HCL is so much more enjoyable than writing CF, even if HCL is fairly verbose (hey, it's not as bad as XML!). CF feels like a series of PM requirements dutifully codified with no dogfooding whereas HCL/TF feels like a tool that was developed by people who actually wanted to use it.
Crypto makes perfect sense if you just understand it's for doing illegal stuff.
No moral judgement, but the only viable use case for the blockchain is doing things with money that the authorities don't want you to do.
Other than that, no, there is no use for a distributed database because doing financial transactions with people you can't even trust to abide by the law is generally a bad idea.
I am a dual citizen. I wanted to buy a condo near my parents where I spend my summers with my family. I have never in my entire life felt like a criminal more than trying to buy something, with the money I made with my wife, going through regular financial system. after weeks of feeling like a criminal over coffee with my cousin who owns the company that was selling me the condo I was like “can I just fucking give you two bitcoins on a thumbdrive…”
I would never own a crypto but working with the current financial system can make you feel like a criminal more than crypto at times… :)
Foreign property ownership is not like buying an Armani bag when you visit Italy. The financial regulations are complementary to the legal ones. Besides, even if you just sent 2 bitcoins, what about all the remaining documentation? It's not gonna fill out itself
And this is [part of] why Dubai has the highest per capita influx of high net worth individuals.
You can call them a dystopic theocracy, which is a bit true, but you can literally just fly over and buy a condo in a neighborhood with basically zero violent crime, with 2 bitcoins with essentially no questions asked.
What made you feel like a criminal? Buying a home is fairly straightforward and has almost no state verification of any piece of it, at least in the US.
Was it something the state enforced, or something being done by the agents of the transaction (ie the mortgage company)?
> Buying a home is fairly straightforward and has almost no state verification of any piece of it, at least in the US.
you mean the purchase deed isn't registered anyplace?
or you mean that the mortgage company didn't do a credit/background check on the buyer before granting the mortgage? Which includes some level of providing a state-backed identity card?
Or do you mean it's easy to buy a house for cash without hassle in the US? Just a suitcase of $100 bills? I'm assuming you've tried this recently?? (and the house cost more than 150K?
Only one of those things is a state enforced requirement (the deed) and everything else are system requirements that do not get solved with bitcoin. What mortgage company is going to loan you a million dollars ("in btc" whatever) without figuring out if you're a good risk? That's not the currency of choice making you get cross examined, it's the nature of the thing you are trying to do.
Maybe the suitcase of anonymous cash bit is easier but only because you're doing that to dodge taxes... In which case feeling like a criminal might be a bit on point.
It's incredibly common in Argentina to buy a property with a suitcase of cash. In fact I think it's about the only way it's done. Argentina has a tax on bank transfers, plus by various measures the tax on profit of business can be above 100% so no one actually uses the traditional finance system for more than a minority fraction of their use.
I bought a vehicle early this year. In the UK we have supposedly instant BACs transfers.
However because opaque anti-fraud stuff, that I am not informed about, I was stuck in the middle of a field trying to convince someone in a call centre that the car I could see with my own eyes (and I had done all the appropriate checks) does indeed exist. This whole process took almost an hour because their anti-fraud team has a two hour response time.
There are obstacles in the banking system that make doing legal transactions difficult.
> If your funds are clean there is zero reason for the (unfounded) anxiety.
Nonsense. Your funds can be frozen with no recourse even if you're innocent. No-one will tell you what you supposedly did wrong. Everyone who hears about your predicament will make up reasons to believe that you'd done something wrong because they want to believe that the system doesn't make mistakes.
You do realize that they get frozen only because of the fiat system regulations/laws?
These exchanges freeze accounts in fear of what governments might do to them if they weren't cautious/suspicious enough. They have no economical interest in freezing account otherwise, that's one less customer trading and paying them fees.
> after weeks of feeling like a criminal over coffee with my cousin who owns the company that was selling me the condo I was like “can I just fucking give you two bitcoins on a thumbdrive…”
and he said no, because you also can't do this. Bitcoin has not solved any problem there.
This utility is what helps stabilise its value, but the side effect of that is that it is a good store of wealth. These two facts make BTC go up. People say Bitcoin isn’t used for anything when in reality it’s being used every day to store and move wealth between big financial players (many of them being organised crime). Why wouldn’t they continue using this useful technology and therefore why won’t its value hold/increase? Is it moral to piggy back off this? That’s for you to decide. It’s worth considering that many major banks have been involved with organised crime since forever…
The internet is more resilient than that. I wouldn't want to live in a country where the banking system has collapsed, and one of the reasons is because I expect that this correlates with unreliability of the power grid; but you can run a lot of useful pieces of software on a computer powered by solar panels and batteries in the wilderness with a satellite uplink, including a bitcoin node.
Yes. And if a country with say 200m people suffered a banking collapse, everyone could do a Bitcoin transaction every 40 days (assuming everyone else stopped using it), and would use only about 1% of the world's electricity. Great stuff.
I feel like the cloud hosting companies have lost the plot. "They can provide better uptime than us" is the entire rationale that a lot of small companies have when choosing to run everything in the cloud.
If they cost more AND they're less reliable, what exactly is the reason to not self host?
> If they cost more AND they're less reliable, what exactly is the reason to not self host?
Shifting liability. You're paying someone else for it to be their problem, and if everyone does it, no one will take flak for continuing to do so. What is the average tenure of a CIO or decision maker electing to move to or remain at a cloud provider? This is why you get picked to talk on stage at cloud provider conferences.
(have been in the meetings where these decisions are made)
Plus, when you self-host, you can likely fix the issue yourself in a couple of hours max, instead of waiting indefinitely for a fix or support that might never come.
I mean, I still prefer to have the ability to fix it myself, because I know I can probably do it in 1h max. I know this doesn't apply to most people, especially those outside of HN though.
Even if resolution times are equal, there is some comfort in being able to see the problem and make progress on it to feel like you're actively doing something. I work in a large enterprise and we have a team dedicated to managing critical incidents and getting everyone together for a resolution. When a 3rd party vendor is the reason for the outage, those calls are really awkward. It's a bunch of people sitting around pressing F5, all frantically trying to make it look like they are actively helping, when no one is actually doing anything, because they can't.
I equate it to driving. I'd rather be moving at a normal speed on side streets than sitting in traffic on the expressway, even if the expressway is technically faster.
Today a client is having some issue with Zoom because of some artificial rate limits they impose. Their support is not responding, the account can't be used, courses can not be held and there's not much we can do.
We already started looking into moving away from Zoom, I suggested self-hosting http://jitsi.org
Based on their docs, self-hosting is well supported, and probably a $50-$100 server is more than enough, so a lot cheaper than Zoom.
Artifical limits, because they have 40 paid licenses that they can not use, because of a non-disclosed assignment limit that is NOT mentioned in the pricing page nor in the ToS.
If a company doesn't respond to this it tells you they likely only respond to lawsuits. As a paying customer whose business operations are impacted, you should have standing to sue. Your company could potentially extract from Zoom the entirety of the money that their dumb decision made your company lose. Consult a lawyer for actual advice and next steps.
Of course, it's also possible you signed a contract that basically says "we can just decide not to work and you can't do anything about it" in which case, sucks, and fire whoever negotiates your B2B contracts. But also, those clauses can be void if the violation is serious enough.
Probably not worth the effort, for a couple days of downtime, we'll just move somewhere else.
But I agree, I recognize the silence in that forum thread that was locked without a resolution: some boss said "let they complain or pay, we don't care about them otherwise".
For a start-up it's much easier to just pay the Cloud tax than it is to hire people with the appropriate skill sets to manage hardware or to front the cost.
Larger companies on the other hand? Yeah, I don't see the reason to not self host.
I don't know about war, but I'm more interested in where AI goes from here.
We are currently coming around a corner in the information landscape where the majority of content on the Internet may well be AI output. It's going to be interesting seeing how the frontier AI companies deal with separating the wheat from the chaff otherwise, it's not clear to me how they will avoid model collapse from the LLMs being trained on their own excrement.
Statistical content generation isn't going to advance (and will actually regress) if the LLMs are just going to be trained mostly on what they said a few months ago.
It seems like back-testing an LLM is going to require significant white-washing of the test data to prevent the LLM from just trading on historical trends it is aware of.
Scrubbing symbol names wouldn't even be enough because I suspect some of these LLMs could "figure out" which stock is, say NVDA, based on the topology of its performance graph.
All these engineers working 70 hour weeks for world class sociopaths in some sort of fucked up space race to create a technology that is supposed to make all of them unemployed.
They are paid exceptionally well though. Way above market rate for their skill set was at any point in history.
Work long hours for a few years and enjoy freedom for the rest of your life. That's a deal a lot of people would take. No need to feel sorry for the ones in position to actually get the choice.
On the other hand, nothing is quite as liberating as finding out that being batshit insane doesn't automatically disqualify you from tremendous economic success.
Regardless of whether or not life exists out there, I think sadly from an energy perspective interstellar travel doesn't really make sense - other than unmanned probes.
There's a really good chance that the speed of light is the universal speed limit. If that's the case, then interstellar travel isn't going to be worth it for resources because the time and energy it takes to do it will almost certainly eclipse what you're going to gain from the trip. Especially if that trip is going to take thousands/millions of years.
The reality is that if you have the energy and resources to move a significant population to another star system, you're going to have to solve permanent space habitation; and if you did that, why the hell do you need to go anywhere?
"Shits and giggles" just doesn't seem like much of a reason to load the next 300 generations of your family into an interstellar RV.
I agree, I think this is highly logical if we accept the constraints of current physics.
However, what if we try the idea that it's incomplete? That maybe the "warp bubble" is possible? Somehow, spacetime provides a way to use material science to stabilize it and not use enormous energy. Suddenly you are in your own inertial frame, and everything we see as anomalous follows.
I can also conceive of a universe why my FTL drive is powered by good vibes, 40K-style. Much to my chagrin, I'm expected to show an ounce of proof for that hypothesis.
Throw in some sci-fi mumbo jumbo with fringe theories that require matter that doesn't exist and defies causality as we understand it, and apparently that requirement goes away for some otherwise intelligent people.
Light speed is the limit. The greys have mentioned 80% the speed of light is a good average clip.
As a human, you think anyone has to “get up and walk around.” 99.99% of their population never leave their embryonic sac. I don’t want to freak you out, that’s just how they are. They spend their whole lives interacting through their minds and technology.
So yes, all of their generations are packed in an “RV” and yes, they do what they do for as humans say “shits and giggles. What else would a long lived life form who has conquered perpetual space habitation do with their time? Mass produce consume? Start wars? That is for impatient Man.
The greys were actually traveling from outward of the galactic disc toward the Pleiades cluster. They only noticed Earth (an otherwise unassuming system) on account of its unusual radiological signatures. Other than Earth being a beautiful gem, the Plaidian star cradle looks much more interesting from afar. Arguable.
You have good data, you just have to figure out how to shape it into a way that other people can understand. I see that sometimes in what you write! But othertimes the pain and trauma of this perception for which you have no frame of reference nor training from society comes through. You have a heavy burden, but you bear it nobly. Good on you, keep going, but only you can find your way. Yours is a hard path. But you will inspire. I think you are heading in the right direction, but you still have a long way to go. good luck. :)
Thanks for your balanced words. Those karma critics dig in when their tastes are not regarded. Hypocrites.
There is so much more, and I hope those stories come to you. I did not make these things up, I heard the fragments of stories in the decades before the Internet was a thing, and I only became a part of this drama when my world was deprived from me. To be condemned is the surest way to Power, for those who cannot help but reach for mastery of their own destinies.
Those comfortable in the conveniences of modern prosperity, the lie that is America, want their curiosity to be without risk to their certainties.
What can I say that you might want to hear, yet will do you no good?
The closest known civilization near us is ~124 light years away. They are sad, a civilizing stuck for thousands of years in a proto third world level. Their muddy ball of a world, slightly larger and more massive than Mars has no seasons. They will never in a million years achieve radio communications let alone space flight. I’m told they look sort of like the “Aughra” in the Dark Crystal, without the extra arms.
Abyss was a wishful thought of theirs (to greet us in a cute benevolent way.) they are actually seven feet tall fully grown, and humans tend to be terrified of their appearance so they represent themselves as small or green in the imaginations of Man to appeal their more affable qualities.
Stargate is a cute example of how they would like to be known. And they dislike being called “greys.” They are actually milky white and their skin turns grey only after thousands of years of oxidation. They prefer “Alluvian” though it’s pointless as no one calls them that.
About technology discovery. As their technology is biological annd immorally harvested, the technology has been impossible for Man to interpret, until the last decade or so.
Air Force experiments with mushrooms in space and those articles on mushrooms storing information are related to their technology, only the persons doing those things are led through the backs of their minds, not clandestine government secrecy.
They have no idea where these inspirations come from. I mentioned humans have this ability. So it was a matter of practicality, not cover story that has inhibited these developments. I equate some of these to the immoral WW2 experiments on humans.
If you all accept my world on quantum holography, I will have set you ahead further than corrupt Americans have innovated by such discoveries.
Sure, that's a sensible stance to take... assuming that there will be no further technological development.
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