ManishR

Product Manager for Bedrock Mantle here. We now have bedrock-mantle endpoint which supports OpenAI API compatibility with Responses and Chat Completions support. See https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock/latest/userguide/endpoin...

> The people at the end of the line who are flipping NFTs do not fundamentally care about distributed trust models or payment mechanics, but they care about where the money is. So the money draws people into OpenSea, they improve the experience by building a platform that iterates on the underlying web3 protocols in web2 space, they eventually offer the ability to “mint” NFTs through OpenSea itself instead of through your own smart contract, and eventually this all opens the door for Coinbase to offer access to the validated NFT market with their own platform via your debit card.

This raises an interesting question - can a new technology ride the hype-train sufficiently long enough to become mainstream and benefit from network effects and ecosystem dynamics kicking in, even if in its best case scenario - it's only a replacement of status quo and not necessarily an improvement? Historically, any widely adopted technological innovation has had the burden to offer and prove incremental value to society to justify paying the transition costs. But here, the incremental value is being pitched as literal "money" to be made by getting in early - which can be hard to resist for your average joe - notwithstanding their passion or stance on the underlying technology. Believe this will be an interesting race condition between dying out of the hype on one side, and technology reaching critical mass to be self sustaining on the other side. In either case however, don't see anything fundamentally changing or improving for society, except perhaps some new players displacing (or getting bought out by) old ones.

We have worked closely and transparently with Apple over the past few months not only on the product definition and platform design, but also on multiple architectural decisions for this offering. Many a times - even though not apparent in those moments (but only in hindsight) - Apple has nudged us in right directions that aligned with their future plans. Granted - it's challenging to keep up with the pace of both Apple and AWS - inadvertent regressions do get introduced with certain releases, but we're building mechanisms to catch and jointly remediate them early. Ultimately, both Apple and AWS are excited about this offering, and share the vision of bringing AWS benefits to all Apple developers. We only expect this collaboration to further deepen going forward.

Disclosure: I work for AWS and am part of the team that built EC2 Mac instances

The 24 hours minimum is applicable to the allocation duration a Mac1 Dedicated Host, and not to the instances running on that host. Put differently - once allocated, a Mac1 Dedicated Host can only be released from your account after 24 hours. You can however can launch, stop, start, and terminate as many mac1.metal instances with fresh macOS AMIs on that host as you need while that host remains allocated to you.

Additionally, Savings Plan (https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/) on Mac1 instances can provide up to 44% savings over On-demand prices for longer term commitments.

Disclosure: I work for AWS and am part of the team that built EC2 Mac instances

1) After every stop/terminate of Mac instances, EC2 runs a scrubbing workflow on the underlying Dedicated Host to wipe the Mac mini's non-volatile storage and reset the NVRAM variables, to enable same security posture as any other EC2 instance. This workflow also upgrades the T2 chip on Mac mini to the latest BridgeOS version if needed. It may take 30-60 mins for this scrubbing workflow to complete, and up to 2-4 hours if BridgeOS update is required - during which the host shows up in "pending" state. We're actively working on lowering this scrubbing duration and really appreciate your feedback here. Important to note - You are not billed for any duration(s) during which the Mac1 Dedicated Host is in "pending" state (or any state other than "Available").

2. Once you have increased the size of the EBS volume on your Mac1 instance, you can execute following commands within macOS guest to increase the size of your APFS container.

1. Copy and paste the first three lines

PDISK=$(diskutil list physical external | head -n1 | cut -d" " -f1)

APFSCONT=$(diskutil list physical external | grep "Apple_APFS" | tr -s " " | cut -d" " -f8)

sudo diskutil repairDisk $PDISK

2. Accept the prompt with "y", then paste this command

sudo diskutil apfs resizeContainer $APFSCONT 0

Since the EBS volume was resized after boot, an instance reboot is required before the additional disk size is available for your use.

>>When reasoning doesn't line up with facts, there are usually flaws in the logic.

I don't think there's an opposition of facts and logic here. Grab was founded in 2012 (https://www.grab.com/sg/about/), Ola in 2011 (https://www.olacabs.com/about.html), and GoJek in 2010 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-Jek). All of these were entrenched players in their respective markets when Uber decided to put up a fight. Uber gave the Grab and Ola's VCs no option but to double down, if they were to save their existing investments. In this race to bottom, it was Uber who blinked first. Losing SE Asia was not an existential threat to Uber, but definitely for Grab. Media likes to talk winners and losers, but Uber did end up taking 27.5% stake in Grab just to leave the market (https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/24/grab-uber-deal-southeast-a...). However, their fight in India with Ola continues. But to my initial argument - back in 2010-2012, we thought that the network effect of social networks (like Facebook) extended to ride-sharing services too creating high barriers to entry. We know now that isn't the case. Imagine how a VC would react today to a startup founder pitching a ride-sharing idea in a market where Uber/Lyft are already entrenched, given what we have learned from Lyft IPO and Uber's SEC filing. My argument may seem counterintuitive here, but I believe that the Uber/Lyft's revealed financials is what may ultimately save them. They have successfully managed to make the ride-sharing market unattractive (at least for 10x return seeking VCs).

People here seem to think that Uber/Lyft do not have any competitive moat. I disagree. What we seem to forget is that just because a VC can burn boatloads of money to capture ridesharing market from Uber/Lyft doesn't mean that they would. From a game theoretic POV, Uber and Lyft have signaled that they're ready to fight for survival in markets they are established in. Unless as a startup founder you can demonstrate that you can achieve lower cost structures than Uber/Lyft, no VC will fund their rapid growth (small offerings will still find a niche, assuming they don't get gobbled up). Uber/Lyft do have a VCs-will-not-race-to-the-bottom-with-them moat, and tomorrow they might as well raise their prices to turn profitable. Their biggest challenge is Waymo and SDC because if a competitor as significantly lower cost structure, all bets are off.