donavanm

The normal term would be “velocity” of money, btw. Its a key consideration in addition to total supply whenever you need to evaluate inflation or manias.

Your understanding of monetary theory is somewhere between 110 and 5,000 years off. Furness had a pretty cogent explanation of a monetary system without central authority or functional currency about 100 years ago with the Yap. They even managed to have bouts of inflation without the concept of a bank or state.

Hahahaha, oh my. You think the world was some idyll halcyon pre bretton woods? My man Enmentrna is going to come back and declare a jubilee for your great revelation. When has any historic monetary system been “stable” for an appreciable amount of time. Debasement is a very literal ancient word and problem.

Even your straw man 20th century cut off is hilarious where you just kind of forget about 1873? Or maybe that decade is your shining example of the benefits of deflation. So much joy and global prosperity the peasants just forgot how to eat. Its cool, Bismarks destruction of the bimetallic system really helped usher in that age of stabikity from the international gold standards.

> The amount of data S3 stores "automatically replicating" to other geographical locations would make things prohibitively expensive

It did work like this! And it was! My recollection is that the first S3 was out of SEA and had no user concept of region. Then “VDC” was added in virginia. That provided API endpoints in what became us-east-1. A bucket could be accessed from either location, and the original intent was for object store to replicate between them. By the time dub/eu-west-1 came along that was obviously not tenable; itd take 10s of gbs to replicate.

So S3 became regional. But the original sea/vdc deployments still had shared APIs and data in both regions. Your object would be stored in the region of the API you geolocated to via DNS, but read from either. _eventually_ all the data migrated to IAD, but those API endpoints were transparently proxying across the continent until 2013 or so.

And of course glacier had much more interesting takes on this with cross dc/az/region erasure encoding. But i dont think any of the wacky multi dimensional cross region stuff ever materialised in practice.

PS: hi!

> why should you continue getting money off me and my customers?

Welcome to the concept of fair market value. Less snarkily you're conflating the concepts of price and cost; theyre not the same thing and theyre not the same for you or the seller.

Thats the “what it costs” section? Im a bit impressed if they are down to ~3ms per handshake. When I last looked at TPM signing (many years ago) it was more like single digit transactions per second.

That said, even 3ms TPM signatures are going to be for special cases or novelty. Plain old CPU tls will do about 1ms cpu time per request which will scale by cpu core count. One or two orders of magnitude more throughput per host.

yes, and you can do it entirely in developer instructions (AGENTS.md/SKILLS.md). No hooks or other executables needed. Check out `codex-subagent-router` for an example. Its overly complicated, and has a few things wrong, but it mostly works. In short:

  - Write ~1 paragraph of developer instructions (AGENTS.md): Use subagents for tasks that can be decomposed, worked on in parallel, or delegated. Describe common examples. I put a reference to a "how to use subagents" skill for more details. The "skill" isnt' always read (as subagents arent always useful) which saves some tokens. But you pay the once-per-session read-skill cost when its relevant.
  - Describe how to use subagents in ~1 page or less (SKILLS.md): use them for sub tasks. select model size/quality based on task ambiguity, scope, unbounded work, or conflicting requirements. Use reasoning effort for complexity, interdependence, or ambiguous success criteria. How to evaluate complexity & common subtask examples across the spectrum. give tasks a relevant name like "model-family_version_reasoning-effort_task-description" so you can actually understand what theyre doing by name.
  - in dev instructions (SKILLS.md) provide a table of agent names (low complexity summarizer, bounded implementation, complex implementation), model+effort (gpt-5.6-luna medium, gpt-5.6-luna high, gpt-5.6-sol medium), and short description of 2-3 task "types" for each.
  - Explain they can use "default" or specify their own custom model settings if needed.
  - Define your list of subagent profiles in ~/.codex/agents/ which matches names (low_complexity_summarizer.toml) from previous. In each you'll need to set model, reasoning, and `developer_instructions` that describe *how* to do a task, *not what* to do.

Details to know:

  - IMO subgent profiles are "task centric" because `developer_instructions` are required. You can't just specify model & reasoning, you also have to give valid developer_instructions that will be merged in to every session/prompt. I address this by defining a few different agents for tasks that are commonly encounted like summarization, synthesis, planning, implementation, etc. The different agent profiles (~2-5 per category) will "scale" the model + reasoning based on the complexity and ambiguity. This work pretty well in practice. And you don't need to over due it, the harness/agent can still launch a "custom" profile that uses the parent sessions developer instructions.
  - You need to use agent profiles with codex because "v2" models (terra & sol) can't launch "v1" models (luna). There are a couple of code paths to avoid this, the agent profile is the simplest. 

Anyways, write you skill & subagent profiles and it basically "just works".

Maybe cloudflares workload is substantially different, but i think youre missing just how long that tail was. A “lot”, maybe half, of unique objects werent requested a second time in any meaningful period time. Like days. And edge nodes have nowhere near the iops or cycles to spend doing _any_ extra work. So yes it is a waste of resources to cache or process in any way.

When I worked on a large CDN the content popularity distribution was heavily skewed. Think 20-40% of throughput from top 1% if content, and 80-90% from the top 10%. Anything outside of that had a very low probability if ever being read again in the effective cache lifetime.

Then the effective cost of scaling CPU > RAM > storage > network due to power & space limitations. Spending extra processing time on 50% of your content would be wasted effort as its never read again.

And yes, increasing effective storage might increase cache width/lifetime, but its not by that much to dramatically inprove access rates. Especially when most content by unique bytes is compressed audio/video in the first place.

NPUs, at least for apple, are built for relatively small scale efficient background processing. Theyre taking care of extracting structured metadata from freetext, recognizing people & text in photos, indexing file contents, etc. they do this really well with crazy low power draw. Theyre generally not even a target for current inference frameworks ala ollama, pytorch, etc.

I did see one prototype someone built using private ios APIs a few months back. They were able to run a reasonable SLM about an order of magnitude slower than GPU but with a tiny power draw.

There are, internally, and theyre pretty good. I always tried to use the AWS Docs style guide when writing internally, for example. Theyre specific on how to refer to products vs services vs features, which nouns to use, tone, grammar, etc.

PS: you might get tripped up on 0x00, 0x2F, or similar control characters? As i recall any valid octet can be included in a label. We definitely saw literal ‘*’ and ‘.’ inside labels. And I wouldnt be surprised to find a bell in there either.

This is just the era of AWS (and amazon APIs). A lot of them look like SOAPy xml rpc because thats how they started, based on internal service frameworks. Check out SQS or S3 for similar examples.

Around 2010-11 there was a shift towards RESTish structures and json for serialization. A lot of methods and payloads still feel SOAPy, but look like json. I think it was DynamoDB which had the most unfortunate API with a literal xml-json transform live in the API service.

And then somewhere around 2015 you started seeing more well defined RESTish APIs with better tooling and adoption for smithy (and some openapi, iirc).

The damage estimate they use will be hypothetical total replacement cost, including multiple employees time, truck use, permits etc. its very trivial for any sort of repair to have a nominal cost in the thousands.

Same again here in AU. Pretty sure i paid about $800 for the labor of installation (inc in the $2500) on top of material. Im more than comfortable with construction/electrical/plumbing. But at that price I stay off the roof, off a ladder, dont have to muck with extending a 240v circuit, and save a solid day if my time. Worth the price.

Yeah, vaguely aware that you could diy the entire setup with refrigerant etc. But its not relevant at local prices here in AU.

One of the interesting things I noticed here is that manufacturers are providing exchangers and head units that can reuse existing pipes. Makes sense for retrofit/upgrades where running pipes through utility spaces and bulkheads is a significant labor cost.

Same in Australia/East Asia generally. Had a mid range daiken 3kw unit installed upstairs last summer; $2500 AUD and ~5 man hours to install including roof access and exterior wall mounting. A bigger 7kw multi head unit would have been about $6-7k AUD but required awkward attic and wall access.

Installed prices in the US are pretty silly. Theres a bourgeoning set of DIY units that come precharged. But even those are pricey compared to the rest of the world.

> Would be great if companies only had to report once a year.

Why and how would it be in the public or shareholder interest?

Im unaware if any public market where similar reductions in reporting led to significant, positive, outcomes. FTSE is the common example. They had a similar “reform” circa ‘14 and FTSE companies continue to generally under perform while the LSE continues to lose listings.

> I have no financial stake in AI-related companies

so zero exposure to any popular index? Even “ex-US” is tsmc and sk-hynix in a trenchcoat. I think it was BHP exclaiming that theyre an AI play because they cover 85% of the raw materials in DC build outs.

In the current mania “no financial stake in AI-related” is a very bold claim.

Nope, different service. We were introducing new methods using POST and (iirc) some differential pricing based on the actual request params. Which made it a different code path, metering value, price, etc than the existing GET requests.

It was the same old kona files for metering until at least a ‘23-24 when I last did metering/pricing work. “Luckily” the size of the EC2 pricing plan was so stupidly large that it was forcing improvements to how those were serialized, and how private pricing plans were created/assigned to different payer ids.

Thats not really how estimates work. The actual metering data is ingested in near real time. The metering * pricing plan is processed within a few hours; thats what youre seeing for “estimated spend” IIRC. The actual billing accumulation is done later, at the end of the cycle, because pricing has cross service discounts, price tranches, credits tied to total spend, etc.

“Rolling back” estimated bills is reprocessing the historic metering data by an older or newer pricing plan version. As i mentioned in another comment someone will have messed up a metering type vale (eg GB/B). Thats why theyll need a few hours to redrive the metering data.

> After 14 months I got a $7,000 refund. I was told it had to be approved by the head of AWS.

$7,000 of credits is no problem. At that time a friendly neighborhood PM or director could issue the credit without much oversight.

Your problem is the time period. Amending a bill in the same cycle is EZ. Fixing the previous cycle is a PITA but pretty common. Issuing amendments for the previous financial _years_ would be a huuuuge PITA going through finance etc.

Ive dealt with this error at AWS. It’s a unit error. In my case we _meant_ to charge like 5¢/GB, but missed the unit (GB), and then the billing system defaults to bytes. 5¢ per Byte of data transferred meant some customers were seeing MM bills within hours. Got paged by support around 2am, had it fixed and amendments issues by 3-4am, apology emails shortly after.

Services emit metering values that arent directly tied to prices. Every SKU/line item is defined in a “pricing plan”, with a unit type, regions, and price per unit. The metering records are joined to a pricing plan based on account id, region, sku, etc. mess up the unit type in the pricing plan and the metering data conversion doesnt work, and you get crazy bills.

That’s not quite fair. As I recall there were about 1,500 people in that part of the hardware org circa mid 2000s. Before PA Semi there were pretty established teams already doing VLSI/PD/verification/validation, PCB, and of course analog/mixed hardware, in their own work and in conjunction with samsung, old broadcom, qualcomm, etc. Lots of inhouse work went in to all those bespoke monitors, phones, apple tv, airports, etc etc.

My recollection is that PA Semi was very much for the architectural and design talent, even though it was an “asset purchase” and all the existing Power & military chips were hived off.

For Intrinsity I recall a lot of interest was actually in their existing graphics work and EDA. ISTR that those early mobile GPUs were what they focused on.

I was in the mansfield org circa ‘07-11. I spent a lot of time flying between cupertino and austin/bee caves that first year.

Youre out of date. The revenue numbers from cloud infrastructure (iaas) are HUGE the past few years. DB licensing etc are mixed in to “ Cloud services & license support” so it is hard to pull out. But youll notice that:

- “iaas” (OCI) is growing 50% yoy and the bulk of the revenue. - “cloud license and on prem license” (new software licensing) is $5B or ~10% of the segment - ERP, peoplesoft etc arent broken out but are also very large in their market categories.

I dont think those points are in conflict? I certainly read it as yet another example of centralization of power and advisors/advisees who are only interested in “yes.” I read the NSC/JSC/cabinet advise as the passive failure of directly answering what is asked, and not what is meant or needed. To wit, yes the US DoD can absolutely suppress an opfor and infrastructure. No one asked if there was a strategic outcome, and no opinion on that matter is proffered.

Edit: I know recall JCS is reported to have said something like “its bullshit” about the Israeli operational plan/end state. But subsequent discussion focused instead on “can we”, not “how” or “should.”

And the current civilian administration is doing a pretty thorough job of eliminating anyone who _would_ point out previous lessons learned around strategic outcomes, going in to conflict necessitating clear & achievable exit criteria, creeping escalation, conflating use of force with success, etc.

Theres a reason everyone talked about “adults in the room” last time and anyone inclined to those kind of thoughts, or voicing the associated opinions, is absent now. And personally Id say that amplifies culpability, nit diminishes it.

> maybe the Israelis managed to sell a story

This was already reported a month or so back. It also matched some of the early, unprepared, statements along the lines of “acting before they (israel) do.” And matches previous reporting along the lines of JCS/NSC giving “nuanced” advice which is easily interpreted as agreement or compliance.

The VM layer gives you an aspect of fungibility that commodity hardware doesn’t. It’s being able to over provision, dynamically reallocate hardware resources, or do things like live migration and entire system snapshots. That hardware/system management aspect is what VM’s give you and containers don’t.

Note: if you want to conflate “containers“ with an entire job management and scheduling system (“k8s”) then you’re not actually talking about the current target customer for VMware.

Ive been out of the authoritative dns game for a while, but asi recall…

Larger providers can also get bulk zone access for TLD’s and whois/registrar data. For this use case it’s relatively easy to create a time based filter on that. Anything that’s “new” will be de facto absent from your “allow” check and create an implicit deny.

Then your large IT provider or recursive DNS system will probably layer in RPZ where they can insert explicit denies at resolution time. Either based on QNAME, RDATA, zone, etc.

As mentioned defaults do shockingly little to change future funding. Its been years since i looked but its something like a few years of “cool down” on issuance and a few points of coupon premium. The economist has done some great, very accessible, articles on this over the years.

Second, its critical that treasury bonds are denominated in USD. The us gov controls the monetary policy and can choose to inflate away the debt over time. This is in contrast to EM debt where they get trapped with foreign denominated bonds. See also the tensions around EU debt, greece, etc.