canucktrash669

A lot of people don't understand what using AI as an output multiplier means. They take it literally, resulting in multiplying busywork across the company.

Misguided HR / people Ops aggravate the situation, by using slack engagement as a productivity measure. Flagging people that are brief but relevant as slackers.

They claim to be 1/3 the price of AWS, so I calculated for fun and it's 8x more expensive than my server auction machine I just got from Hetzner. Which itself is 6x cheaper than on-demand pricing at AWS, but only 3x cheaper than spot. Of course I get free egress. And my RAID1 perf can't be matched by the baseline EBS storage I've used in the comparison.

In any case, they don't seem to really have an edge on AWS unless you have huge egress. What did I miss?

Not strictly about climate, also about surface area in optimal climate.

You could say that about any other determinism. Nevertheless, it's a huge factor in the wealth of nations and a pillar of geopolitics. It's also why we don't all speak german today... /s

Argentina's arable land is just 27% of what the USA has. Fact-checking myself... the USA has more arable land than Canada, Australia and Argentina combined. Russia has a lot, but the USA has the most. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_arable_la...

Not sure where to find an aggregate growing days figure, but there's clearly less of them per arable surface area in Canada compared to the USA.

With shitty climates. The surface area of optimal climate in the US is likely larger than that of all the countries you've named combined. What's optimal? For example in Canada most farmed areas yield only one harvest per year. And most of the land is barren wasteland. You have some of it as well, but it's not the majority of the territory.

It’s about the agent. Not the model or the format.

The "bitter lesson" only applies if the model makes the agent redundant. We aren't there yet. Agentic loops are just software engineering on top of CS constructs; they help current models produce better results.

Could models eventually internalize the logic used in Claude Code / Codex / OpenCode / Aider? Maybe. But for now, keeping that complexity in the agent is more energy-efficient. Even if complex agents eventually get replaced by simple loops, these standards save tokens and time today. That’s worth something.

WW3 called and said solar is harder to disrupt through bombing than massive power plants. Seems like a great deal even if it was more expensive.

13k CAD is €8.000

Hi Peter, let's play hypotheticals. USMCA (CUSMA) is dead, Trump actually acted on his threat and the US left the treaty.

I assume it means TN visas are dead in six months if the written notice clause is respected.

Is the zombie CUSFTA now out of dormancy? Can we now use the TC visa? If CUSFTA dies as well, what are the other options and how long does it take to process?

I persuaded my bank out of $200 using AI to formulate the formal ask using their pdf as guidance. I could have gotten it directly but the effort barrier was too high for it to be worth it.

However, as soon as they put AI to handle these queries, this will result in having AI persuade AI. Sound like we need a new LLM benchmark: AI-persuasion^tm.

Wifey works at uni. From all her stories, sounds like a strategy I'd adopt to boost my GPA, if it existed back then.

Of course, there are also true cases where it takes 4 hours to complete a 30-minute test.

All it does is kill the GPA signal completely. One amongst many before, pure noise now.

[edit: not denying people need it. but it appears like folks that don't also use it]

Neither of them tracks leaders. They just say:

"This fund, which we like to refer to by its trade ticker, “[NANC/GOP],” invests in equity securities purchased or sold by [Democratic/Republican] members of Congress and their spouses

https://subversiveetfs.com/nanc/ https://subversiveetfs.com/gop/

So far my YTD is right in their range. But if leaders have a 47% edge, then I'm interested.

Many people mention unusualwhales.com to follow lawmakers's holdings.

Do you get insights early enough or is it too late to turn a profit? Anyone knows how they get the data?

turns out cross AZ is recommended for ES. perhaps our data team was rewritting the indices too often. but it was an internal requirement. so I think the data schema could have been more efficient to append deltas instead of reindexing all. but none of that will inflate your bill significantly at Hetzner. of course it will at AWS as that's how they incentivise clients to optimize and reduce their impact. and that's how you cut your runway by 3-6 months in compute heavy startups

At some point our cross-AZ traffic for Elasticsearch replication at AWS was more expensive than what we'd pay to host the whole cluster replicated across multiple baremetal Hetzner servers.

Could we have done better with more sensible configs? Was it silly to cluster ES cross-AZ? Maybe. Point is that if you don't police every single detail of your platform at AWS/GCP and the like, their made-up charges will bleed your startup and grease their stock price.

7 figures is single digit millions. 5 figures is a single silly mistake. Just enabling more verbosity on logs is enough to trigger that in a day. Such mistakes would be found monthly. We could have easily had 10% more engineers with the same budget if it weren't for lighting our runway on fire that way.

I've seen this in startups with 7 figure ARR (where annual cloud costs were also 7 figures).

Also seen that in F500 where a single architect caused a 5-figure mistake which remove cloud privileges from the entire architecture team. Can't make it up.

Managed servers reduce the on-prem skillset requirement and can also deliver a lot of value.

The most frustrating part of hyperscalers is that it's so easy to make mistakes. Active tracking of you bill is a must, but the data is 24-48h late in some cases. So a single engineer can cause 5-figure regrettable spend very quickly.

Ultimately these owners hire me to cut their 6-figure AWS bill by 50%. It's mostly rearchitecting mistakes. Amongst them is taking AWS blog propaganda at face value. Those savings could be 80% if they chose managed bare metal (no racking and stacking).

She crossed overland. Imagine you do pre-clearance out of a Canadian airport. Can they kidnap you out of country and ship you to a US detention center?

All great till the last line. Given fakes and product commingling, I’d be careful about ingesting anything bought there.

Is commuting on a TN visa possible for a Canadian living in Canada? Let’s say I had to commute to the office in the US 2 days a week, and live the remaining 5 days back home in Canada while working remotely. Is a TN good enough?

I’ve seen an analysis a while back showing that compared to US and EU, Canada subsidized agriculture to a lesser extent by a few multiples. Quotas might effectively shift the cost of subsidies to consumers, but they’re still lower. Now, if I could find this now.

Canadian living in Canada with a EU citizen on a PR (permanent residency in Canada). Let’s say I get in on a TN, I understand she can accompany me without being allowed to work. How long would it take for her to get a work permit? Months, years?