Shrezzing

A server idling on Function A can't be called for Function B. 144 servers idling for 10 minutes each before expiring makes up a day of compute-time for 1 server. For every 144 expected idle servers, Meta needs to purchase and maintain an additional physical machine to keep up with healthy throughput on xfaas.

Every 15 minutes, the 100k server network has 1,500,000 compute-minutes available.

For an extreme example, every 15 minutes, 50k DB Cleanup processes run for 5 minutes, and then sit idle for 10 minutes, totalling 15 mins each. In this scenario, to satisfy 250,000 demanded compute-minutes (16.6%), 750,000 compute-minutes were supplied (50%). All else equal, to keep up healthy throughput on the rest of the network, Meta needs to purchase and maintain an excess 33,400 (50%-16.6%) physical servers to satisfy this DB Cleanup process.

Reducing the idle-time to 1 minute. The 50k process runs for 5 minutes, and then sits idle for 1 minute, totalling 6 min each. In this scenario, to satisfy 250,000 demanded compute-minutes (16.6%), 300,000 compute-minutes were supplied (20%). All else equal, to keep up healthy throughput on the rest of the network, Meta only needs to purchase and maintain an excess 4,000 (20%-16%) physical servers.

That's an extreme example, but hopefully it demonstrates why at Meta's scale, the energy requirements of the servers can be secondary when optimising for hardware. Since optomising for hardware can make a difference large enough to mothball a moderately sized datacenter.

> Shubham Mittal, co-founder and chief technology officer of RedHunt Labs, alerted TechCrunch to the exposure and asked for help in disclosing to the car maker. The London-based cybersecurity company said it discovered a Mercedes employee’s authentication token in a public GitHub repository during a routine internet scan in January.

That's a strange way to disclose a security security issue.

> If you've ever paid by credit or debit card, they can associate the name on the card with your Tesco Clubcard account.

If you're shopping in-store in the UK, the supermarket can't profile you based on your bank card without express consent, as it falls under personally identifiable information.

The way I see it, there's a tradeoff to being algorithmically profiled. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc profile you, and in return you get a time-sink, and some moderate recreation (and possibly some societal disadvantages in the aggregate).

Sainsbury's give you 1 nectar point per £ spent in store or in petrol. A nectar point's average value is a half penny, but annually they put on an offer to "double up" your points. That's a full percent off your annual petrol and shopping bills (more if you include the algorithmically generated offers).

The typical UK household spends £1,500/yr on petrol, and £6,500/yr on groceries, so the trade-off is that they give you £80/yr to profile you based on your preference of beans.

>The password may not be known to HIBP at the time it is registered. This will very likely be a large enough fraction (>0.2%) that you can still get into sufficient accounts to access plenty of relatives' data.

To be clear, the password can be checked at login-time, rather than registration-time, at which point the service should send the user through an account recovery process. There's still scope for passwords not appearing in the HIBP dataset, but it's massively reduced.

Do you mean this link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39116531 ? I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion. You should be able to successfully highlight a unique IP address making ~4,400 discrete login attempts across a month as suspicious - and further highlight that there are 1,000 other IP addresses behaving in the same way. Most users login from a handfull of predictable IP addresses, and most IP addresses login with only a couple of predictable accounts.

These types of login analytics aren't beyond the ken of man, and a service like 23-and-me should definitely not be able to allow 4.4m attempts and 14k successes from a small set of IP addresses without it raising some internal alerts.

23-and-me could implement something like Troy Hunt's K-Anonymity API. The password is hashed, then the first n characters are sent to the API. The API then returns the count of times that password has appeared in data breaches. If the result is >0, the user's account is blocked until they've gone through a forgot password journey.

23-and-me could probably check if large numbers of people have all tried to sign in from common IP addresses within the space of a few hours. Even checking their login APIs for enormous spikes in unexpected traffic too.

The requirements for your hobby projects are different to that of 23-and-me, but you could potentially implement a similar feature too.

> I don’t see why software should receive special treatment when 99.99% of software engineers/developers are not in any way engaged in what might be considered genuine scientific research and development, which R&D tax advantages should be reserved for.

Why? There's a clear relationship between R&D spend and economic growth. This is including R&D spend on non-scientific endeavours like commercial products + processes, which the majority of non-maintenance software work falls into.

Estimates vary, but I've never seen a cost/benefit analysis of unrestricted R&D that finds anything lower than a $2 return for every $1 spent in unrestricted R&D.

For clarity, the Rosenfeld study referenced in the Pinkerton article (while talking about inflation rather than Interest Rates) also uses the UCR dataset as its primary datasource, while its european equivalent, also collected from police reporting, is used for its non-American datasource.

The report uses data from the Uniform Crime Report. UCR records crimes reported by the police, which isn't the same as crimes occured.

It's likely the link here is between Government Budgets (including budgets for police resources), and Interest Rate. Low IR generally happens in response to recessions. Budget cuts (including police budget cuts) also happen in response to recessions. Police activity reduces with reduced police budgets. Crimes reported to UCR reduces with reduced police activity.

> the current generation of electronic vehicles are a terrible idea... Although perhaps a mere half is not what people would think at first when they just compare tailpipe emissions

The methodolody used by IEA for that chart uses the 2021 global average grid carbon intensity to calculate its electricity generation. If you live in Iceland, Sweeden, UK, Vermont, or similar regions with highly decarbonised grids, the majority of the chart's Electricity co2e isn't generated for that vehicle.

You've got to consider your local average grid carbon intensity, and how that will change across the 20 year lifecycle of the vehicle.

Did the iphone take years to catch on? Apple sold >1m units in the first six months, 10m in the first full year, and then had near double digit sales growth for a half decade - even though it launched during the global financial crisis.

The article isn't an admission of failure & call to abandon all hope. It's a call to action, aiming to mitigate the worst impacts of the polycrisis.

Copyright doesn't stop the collection of content, it stops the copying, processing, & redistribution of content. Internet Archive acts as a library, so its widely accepted as fair-use when it makes collections of webpages available.

OpenAI's distribution is materially different to that of a library, so it's not a like-for-like comparison.

One of the main tests of copyright law (at least in the US) is if the entity distributing is _selling_ the copied/derivative work. It's unambiguous that OpenAI is selling something akin to derivative works, which is why NYT feels they can go after this claim. Meanwhile IA's operations don't create sales or incur profits, so while NYT's legal team may be able to establish that copies have been distributed, without the _sale_ aspect of the infringement, judges aren't guaranteed to side with NYT in an legally expensive PR nightmare.

Taking an original "one of one" piece from a museum without permission and hanging it up in your livingroom isn't exactly copyright infringement though, is it?

The framework is fundamental for all the rest of the stuff. You transfer it before the majority of the site's content. The faster it arrives, the faster your site is usable. It's also always in use. A badly sized image can cost a few MB, but that's a trivially addressable problem on one page of your site. The framework being 10x its required size is a huge development hurdle to overcome.

Your local mom-n-pop laundry place's website probably doesn't need these types of efficiencies, but if you're running a large ecommerce site, time-to-interactive is an important metric which can cost a lot of money.

I agree with your point in general, and disagree with the OP's sentiment. However, seigniorage via central bank Interest Rates is considered a tax by most economists (or at least most economists would reasonably accept an argument that it was tax as legitimate), and does materially impact prices.

As a result, it's not entirely correct to say that tax rates haven't increased in Europe over the last 2 years.

Escaping an already-playing 30 second YouTube advert on their iOS app may be the most challenging UI experience in the modern era. I've landed on forcefully closing the app, and re-opening it as the only escape.

>one could easily claim that it is the most harsh regulator on the planet.

The argument that the EU is a more harsh regulator than Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, (or even on par with those regulatory regimes) entirely undermines the rest of your comment.

There's pretty well tested and highly respected indexes which fundamentally disagree. Of the 7 most economically free nations, three are in the EU, and a fourth is automatically party to the majority of the EU's economic regulations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_ec...

In the Index of Economic Freedom, more than a dozen EU member nations outperform the United States with regards to Economic Freedoms.

>How do people see things going in the future?

The EU and other European governments will throw absolute boatloads of money at Mistral, even if that only keeps them at a level on par with the last generation. AI is too big of a technological leap for the bloc to ride America's coattails on.

Mistral doesn't just exist to make competitive AI products, it's an existential issue for Europe that someone on the continent is near the vanguard on this tech, and as such, they'll get enormous support.

>There’s no ads in Shazam

I'd argue that Shazam doesn't have ads, rather it is an ad. You search for the song, then see links to buy it in Apple Music. You'll also see "subscribe to Apple Music" type widgets on just about every screen on the app.

If they're not already in one, you might want to get your kid enlisted in some gifted child programs.

I live at flat 8 of building 5, which through a strange quirk in the way addresses are created in my city & then recorded at the post office, accepts mail intended for both 8/5 and 5/8. A nearby neighbour in flat 5 of building 8 also receives mail intended for both 5/8 and 8/5. Most mail providers automatically adjust "flat 5 building 8, street name" to "5/8, street name", so we've got no way of fixing it.

Everyone in the estate who lives in flat 9 or lower in their respective buildings has the same issue, and the issue also occurs in a bunch of other new builds in the city.

Was the Capital One breach not a result of gross internal malpractice on the part of Amazon? That allowed an Amazon employee to gain priviledged access to CC data in Capital One's environment.

The media's very busy dealing with the Prime Minister announcing a policy that'll be reversed before it's ever implemented.

The hyperinflation example is quite interesting because:

1) If it happens, it happens rapidly, and you don't want to implement this in a hurry

2) If it happens, the global economy could well be melting down, and your financial institution will have other priorities to attend to

3) Retaining existing staff, and hiring new engineers, will be challenging at best

You really don't want to be implementing this change in those circumstances.

There are more Excel databases in the wild than any of us could reasonably fathom.

I don't mind "plant meats" too much on occasion. I am a bit frustrated that they've largely displaced all other vegetarian options at restaurants and stores though. Bean/veggie burgers have mostly stopped existing, replaced with obscenely expensive and ultra-processed "plant meat" burgers.

> French farmers and meat companies have long complained that customers are unjustly confused by the notion of vegetarian “meat”.

I'd be really interested in meeting someone who was legitimately confused by the notion vegetarian meat.

How poor would someone's lateral thinking skills need to be that they can't manage to square "vegetarian meat" on the fly?

>Is it a coincidence that 1280 = 2⁷ * 10?

1280 is the nearest threshold we can estimate to, for the reason you've describe. In the OP's title it suggests "exactly 1280", while the original published piece in Science[1] uses the phrase "around 1280".

[1]https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487

The entire world deforests around 10m hectares per year commercially[1]. It doesn't follow that the global economy could support 200m+ hectares of plantations, never mind 200m+ in Canada alone.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation