alien_

I'd probably offer some sort of support/consultancy services and prioritize the work of the paying users, making it clear when filing github issues and pull requests. This could easily sustain you in a passive income way so you can spend most of your time working on things that matter more to humanity.

That's exactly what I have been using Patreon for, it's not a donation but a subscription for an enterprise tier. Still very few people signed up for it, the OSS code is working well enough and there's very little friction in just using it.

Going forward I'm going to offer the enterprise stuff through the AWS marketplace, further reducing the friction, hopefully that will get more traction. It's just a lot of boring billing engineering work that I could have spent on improving the software.

Same here, for most of my 15+ years career in IT I've been doing DevOps stuff, mostly writing small scripts and infrastructure code, occasionally hacking on existing projects enough to do drive-by contributions.

About 6 years ago I started AutoSpotting, an open source tool designed to reduce AWS costs by automatically replacing on-demand instances with up to 90% cheaper Spot instances, it was meant to be my playground project for learning golang.

I estimate it saved in aggregate in the tens or maybe even hundreds of millions of dollars and multiple companies have been built around my code or reimplementing the same idea.

It's still a side project that I work on occasionally but at some point I tried to monetize it through support and custom development. I failed to get enough traction to become a full time job, currently make some $400/month from about a dozen users whom I sell precompiled binaries through Patreon.

The reality is that the M1 beats pretty much all Intel-based laptops when it comes to getting the sweet spot on performance, battery life and silent operation.

Yes it's costly, restrictive, the hardware still has some flaws and you can't replace parts but most Apple users, myself included, are happily paying the price.

I have an M1 Macbook Pro for a few months now and it's blazingly fast, the battery lasts for 15-20 hours and I've only heard the fan for a few minutes so far while stressing it with heavy compilation. Under normal circumstances it's entirely silent. I wouldn't trade it for anything else at this point.

I'd probably compare it to patching tires or installing a replacement tire valve. The pressure in a car tire is around 2.5-3 bar, the bike tires go up to 4-4.5 bar.

Confiscating profits wouldn't work, many companies are reinvesting their profits. Probably the best way would be to just make the fines hurt more, by using a fixed and non-negligible percentage of the monthly/yearly revenue, much like Finland does for traffic fines.

There's this other article https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop... which among other things explains that gain of function is technically defined as modifying existing human viruses to make them more dangerous.

The SARS2 quite likely isn't based on an existing human virus but on a bat coronavirus.

The NIH has been apparently funding modifying bat coronaviruses in Wuhan with minimal guardrails as to be able to infect humanized lab mice but that's not gain of function as per that definition.

This should be relatively easy to verify, we have millions of people who have been infected early last year so we can see how many of them got reinfected recently with one of the more recent strains.

If the immune response of the virus is close enough to what a vaccine gives and the mutation rate remains relatively constant, the number of reinfections would probably be a good indication of how much would we need subsequent shots, at least for a yearly renewal cycle.

I wonder, are there any such studies?

I have an M1 Macbook Pro for almost a month now as work laptop and I've only heard the fan once so far, while doing a multi-file search/replace in VSCode. For whatever reason that maxed out the performance cores for a few minutes.

Other than that it's been entirely silent and blazingly fast and I had no major issues with it.

It's not so hard for the OS to be architecture agnostic. Linux runs on lots of architectures, and also Windows NT was portable enough to run on MIPS early on and also runs on ARM in addition to x86.

The main challenge is seamlessly migrating users to the new platform and Apple did a great job at it using Rosetta.

Both Linux and especially Windows struggle at this because they lack something as well integrated as Rosetta and require all applications to be recompiled to a new architecture.

Yeah, the M1 will kill whatever CPU they'll put in this, I wish they had also an ARM version.

Yeah, the way I read it this allows them to prosecute tax evasion in addition to theft for all property stolen in the previous years that wasn't declared to IRS as income from illegal activities.

Is that a common practice?

Sorry, didn't mean to but as I've said above in the thread just the other day I've seen on Facebook a pretty elaborate FUD/conspiracy theory being endorsed by a former religiously active colleague.

It was linking AZ trial side effects with apocalyptic prophecies and DoD involvement in designing a virus targeting middle eastern religious fundamentalists.

My point was that there should be a way to debunk these with fact-based evidence for people willing to reason from facts or at least to raise a few question marks on their assumptions.

Also from RO, and the other day I saw on FB a former colleague with stronger religious beliefs shared a conspiracy theory. It was pretty elaborate, linking someone who had psychological trouble after being in the AZ vaccine trials with the number of the beast, Nephalem and other apocalyptic prophecies, as well as something about an apparent DoD leak from 2005 claiming to engineer a virus that blocked a gene manifesting in loss of religious beliefs that would be targeted at middle eastern fundamentalists.

I tried hard to debunk it but took me a lot of time and not sure if anyone reasoned with my explanation more than with it.

Can someone please explain the downvotes? I'm trying to understand what was offensive about this.

How else would you describe it, would "spreading FUD" be more appropriate/neutral?

By debunking I don't mean labeling them negatively but fact-checking the claims and showing reasonable people on the fence provable evidence to help them think for themselves based on facts and not just to blindly believe the sensationalist rumors.

There are lots of conspiracy theories spreading FUD especially about the AZ vaccine and such news don't help.

How many deaths were caused by the AZ and other vaccines so far and how does that compare with the mortality rate of the disease?

Is there any website that is gathering and debunking these conspiracy theories?

The people who observe the slow loading time already paid for the game, so I guess R* won't lose much revenue because of this nasty bug.

Wouldn't UPX give similar results in deduplicating binary code?

I would like Apple to be doing some of these against all the apps.

Few app developers have the time/bandwidth to do these things and it would be a very inefficient use of resources to have everyone do it over and over again.

I also find it unbelievable to have so much code for a single app, this is approaching the level of magnitude of OS code bases: if you think that the entire Linux kernel is around 28M lines so roughly 15x the Uber app.

The binary size is also from the same ballpark as the entire Windows 98 needed for installation.

I'm glad Uber is doing something about this, but in my opinion Apple should tackle this across their entire ecosystem at the toolchain level, devices with less than 64GB of storage can quickly run out of space with just a handful of applications installed.

Unfortunately it's in Apple's interest that people buy devices with more storage, so I don't expect them to invest much effort in this.

I'm not a biologist, but shouldn't this only matter in cold climate?

If the climate is warm enough the animals actually would need to have ways to actively cool down, like through sweating. Would capturing heat from their expiration still be needed?

The other week I similarly saw a conversation about calendar optimization to not look like Swiss cheese turn towards discussing the process of making Greek yogurt.

I think relatively few key people at AWS realize the level of popularity of this tool, but I know of multiple AWS employees who are big fans of it and a few have also contributed to it in the past.

AWS has been offering the APIs that the website uses currently as its main data source and also historically sponsored some of the hosting costs.

There's now also a similar table comparison view (although maybe not yet as convenient/comprehensive) available in the AWS console, but it's under active development and improving all the time. As far as I know the intent is to eventually have that view cover this use case. The AWS console team is eager to get feedback from customers to help improve it going forward.

As a former contributor/co-maintainer and currently AWS employee I'm curious about your plans about the open source project behind the website.

Do you have any plans to change the licensing and/or contribution model? Are OpenSource contributions as welcomed as before?

Love how the comments slightly start going off topic by discussing the Swiss cheese and then diverge completely towards the process of making Greek yogurt.

Anyway... This calendar fragmentation is a real problem, I've noticed that my most productive period was when I was working 5h/day and was forced to attend only the critical meetings and ruthlessly make time for deep work as Cal Newport calls it.

Nowadays with a very active 3yo child at home and a wife also working full-time remotely, we're working in 1-3 hour shifts and taking turns in taking care of the child so our calendars are perhaps the best example of Swiss cheese out there and I have no idea how to make it better.

I'm not a specialist in CPU design but to me RISC-V seems like an incremental evolution, nothing really ground-breaking, when compared to alternatives the main benefit is the openness/licensing/cost. But at the same time think that you can get a $5 raspberry pi and embedded ARM chips cost pennies.

The entire effort of supporting it and building the ecosystem will be hard to justify economically at these cost figures.

Mill on the other hand has a lot of interesting ground-breaking ideas that can potentially offer a 10x performance/watt improvement.

Many people have been recently in awe after experiencing the ARM performance improvements around 40% offered by the Apple silicon and AWS Graviton CPUs. Just imagine something offering a 10x based on a Mill design, I'd love to see it built one day and available on the market.

I'm not working closely with the Mac EC2 nor Open Source departments, so I may be wrong but the project should get credits covering a certain monthly bill, the amount would be requested on application for the credits.

It shouldn't matter what type of instances are launched and the credits cover any other services, not just the EC2 compute, as long as the bills are less than the monthly credits.

Amazon AWS will soon add support for the M1 hardware to the macOS EC2 managed offering announced a few weeks ago. AWS also offers free credits to prominent Open Source projects.

It's not available yet but it should be a good option once they become available, you can immediately start the process of applying for the credits.

This way you would get access to the required hardware without any costs and without having to maintain it. They are designed from the ground up towards such CI/development use cases.

You can also use the same credits for getting access to Intel and ARM Linux, as well as Windows EC2 instances. This may improve your project's CI and build times.

Disclaimer: I work at AWS.

Amazon has been using HERE maps internally for many years. It was the map included in the Fire phone and tablet, and also it's used in the online shop, such as for showing the parcel on the map, among other things. When I left HERE it was also heavily using AWS, so it's a two-way relationship.

For those who may not be familiar with HERE, they're huge on Enterprise, especially in Automotive, logistics but also on public sector.

HERE used to be part of Nokia and used to power their maps application. It's now owned by a wide consortium where the well-known German car making companies still have a majority. They also heavily use HERE maps and location based services, as many other car makers do. Not sure if they still do, but when I left, it was heavily used by Microsoft for Bing maps. Yahoo and Facebook maps were all based on the HERE map data and used many of the the same backend services.

Note: I currently work at AWS and previously worked at HERE but this message is not written on behalf of my current/former employer.