epberry

Healthcare is one of the last places I think about for GenAI but maybe I have that totally wrong. Seemingly factual accuracy is a premium in that industry. I guess protein generation is a little different.

On the other side of this, understanding usage based consumption billing as a customer is very tough. First got exposure to this working on https://ec2instances.info.

These looks fantastic. Very slight weirdness in some movement, hands, etc. But the main thing that strikes me is the cinematic tracking shots. I guess that's why they use "scenes". It doesn't seem like a movie could be generated with this involving actors talking.

This only applies if these developers move to the new terms it looks like. So these large apps can stay with their existing setups and not pay the fee.

Yeah. In an infrastructure as code setup there's some more rigor that can be applied, at least in terms of tagging what's going out. But I've generally seen the finops team come in and optimize ex post facto.

This post, along with this Simon Wardley thread, https://twitter.com/swardley/status/1088780650860158978?s=20, attracted me to finops as an engineering problem. Consumption based pricing is really tough for a lot of orgs to handle at the $1M+ range, so much so that it requires dedicated software to line things up.

I started helping maintain https://ec2instances.info in my spare time and the code base is literally full of IF statements to paper over AWS billing quirks. Later, I joined Vantage, one of the companies linked in the article.

It's a little bit undecided whether finops will have the growth that devops did but the problem is seemingly felt very acutely.

If I'm reading this right Apple chose Google 3 times over Bing.

Bard is not bad but it's really Google's search generative experience that you want to have it enabled. I think it is really fantastic.

USB-C actually unlocks this I believe.

If you hook up https://vantage.sh you can filter by RDS costs > Cost by Category on a Cost Report to see this.

Disclaimer: I work for Vantage.

PS. I maintain https://ec2instances.info/rds and recently added support for Aurora I/O Optimized pricing.

The salesforce object model/API is actually pretty reasonable and easy to work with. Their UI is horrible but the Lightning version is fast at least.

I absolutely love LIGO. YC actually did a great interview with one of the lead physicists on the project where he described some of the technical hardware and software challenges - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D2j8nTjOZ4

This is always a startling fact about timelines.

Unfortunately for you my favorite recent algorithms result uses AI as part of improving a very traditional algorithm. The paper is "Learned Index Structures" https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/01/08/the-case-for-learned-ind...

I'm glad to know this was actively studied.

I know at AWS they drill into folks that spot capacity isn’t guaranteed capacity. I didn’t even think about more demand for spot reducing supply or additionally AWS just simply not investing in as much hardware to accommodate spot because of lack of growth. That said, we're seeing leading indicators that this trend will reverse in as cloud growth returns, https://www.vantage.sh/cloud-cost-report/2023-q1

Usage-based pricing in the cloud is a blessing and a curse. To take best advantage of it you need a third party tool. At least, this is the thesis behind my current employer (https://vantage.sh).

My personal next step with LLMs is to use them as completion engines versus just asking them questions. Few shot prompting is another intermediate skill I want to incorporate more.

I have essentially given up the idea of discovering something meaningful. During my first company I believed we were on the cusp of unlocking some new methods of video action recognition. Now I know that our approach was way off and that the great leaps would be made several years later by google et al. I still think I am acquiring skills which will help me form a company or build products with other people who might unlock a breakthrough but I doubt I will be the one to discover it.

The original promise of the cloud was that it was cheaper than on prem. For many companies this has turned out not to be the case. Having worked on a cost optimization product for the past year (https://vantage.sh) my belief is that the cloud _is_ cheaper than on prem but it is difficult to configure it to be so.

In particular it is difficult and stressful to understand all the knobs to turn within each cloud provider. It's a very AWS thing to put a lot of effort into lowering their customers' bills and I do think it makes for longer lasting business relationships.

Surprised to see cloud computing will be affected, but then again some analysts reported that AWS growth slowed to only 20% at the end of Q4. But based on what we are seeing they are still having a lot of success with on-prem to cloud migration deals (Southwest Airlines being the most recently announced one).

We've also been tracking the shift in cloud spending patterns that Amazon is describing on earnings calls and how that may be compressing margins. In Q4 this was particularly noticeable, https://www.vantage.sh/cloud-cost-report/2022-q4

Instead of one large prompt there's now 'system', 'user', and 'assistant' prompts which are meant to be given specific instructions each. So you could tell the system prompt that it's a librarian and ask the message prompt what date a book was published.

I think these were some of the first, smaller stores from Amazon Go and probably very expensive to operate. It makes sense the the larger stores with newer hardware would be better financially.

Does anyone know of a decent GUI for managing settings/packages for NixOS?

The archaeology content on HN is some of my favorite. I think what this find is getting at is more evidence that Sumerian civilization was more egalitarian than we may have thought if we projected our understanding of feudal civilizations all the way back.

Appreciate these insights. I'm just getting into setting this up for my company.

I have one more theory which is that quality has actually improved and therefore is not much of a differentiator. Everyone can get close to (but not really reach) a Stripe level of quality with their apps due to the amazing frontend libraries that are available.

The magic saas of today is architecturally harder, like Webflow or Figma, and takes way more engineering. But this is the minority and there are still so many business applications that have not transitioned to the saas model in certain industries.

Azure is seemingly the leader here but it might also be PR since they have "Confidential Computing" as a checkbox item on several of their VMs.

I also receive strings like this as submissions to a form on my website. One dumb trick you can do is check for too many capital letters in a word and block it. Of course you should check if the word is just all caps and not block that but you'll catch most things like sIlaA.sfOlkWFfslIOILD.

Yes. It was jam packed with hits, probably more so than other performances.