hylaride

Other than some GC issues, meaning we had to give it more memory than we'd otherwise like thereby making them a bit more expensive, it's mostly been fine. The key to ephemeral java is keeping scope limited and not using it when cold starts matter (which can cause a bit of jitter in execution lag). Our use case was asynchronous, so it worked.

We wanted to investigate using the native AWS java lambdas with snapstart and/or using parallel GC, but the place I used them at a year ago was under the tyranny of product having complete control of our backlog, so we didn't get to go that far with it or even more serious tech debt for that matter.

More memory may or may not even be much of an issue depending on your workload. If you can handle the odd OOM error it would have been fine, but for our use case lambdas were so cheap that it didn't really matter, outside of us techies preferring to do it "right". Having the max execution time be less than 15m could also minimize the heap bloat at the cost of more cold starts.

There are edge cases where GC issues can crop up, in particular specific "serverless" models (eg AWS lambdas) where the JVM can get "paused" between executions and GC doesn't cleanly run, causing memory to trend upwards until the next cold-start happens (especially if you're running it within a docker container yourself). Limited CPU situations that can exist in these kinds of runtime environments also limit GC in several ways, too.

Most modern scanners know the backported versions for the major vendors (ubuntu/debian/rhel/alpine), but it was definitely an issue a decade ago.

It's also hard to predict how much money will be burned going down wrong avenues. The internet was the future, but it took a lot of failed companies to eventually land on a sustainable model that brought us the giants we have today.

Railways were also the future, but that didn't stop a rush to build out (often subsidized) lines that were ultimately uneconomical (either because they were corrupt or the planned settlements never arrived).

If AI is similar, then there's going to be a long slowdown on compute spend until the surplus is worked through. A good historical analogy could be the fiber optic buildouts of the late 1990s. The demand for data never really went down much, but the industry eventually commodified and took down some large companies (Nortel, especially)

Stress, PTSD, and overwork can and do aggravate mental health issues. All of these are probably hitting these people - probably at the same time.

> You should revist your stance on unions and start by reading up on how they work and what benefits they confer. Assuming you are not in the 1%, a union almost certianly would benefit you. It is a way of equalizing the playing field when the interests of BIG capital conflict with the quality of life and meaningful human experience of individuals.

I already have that agency. If I wanted money, I'd have long ago worked for a FAANG. I didn't because I wanted something else. I enjoy working at startups and small to medium sized firms for the challenge and flexibility in all matter of things I get to work on. I have shifted my career from being a sysadmin/netadmin, to devops, to development and it just involved getting involved at places I've worked at. There was no need for licensing, meeting requirements, etc.

If I felt I didn't have any of that agency, I'd likely feel differently about it. But I just don't see what any union (small or large) is going to do for me unless I was in a jurisdiction where they provided extra services like healthcare or other universal benefits.

I was canned early last year. Looking for a new job was mostly fine. It wasn't insanely easy like 4 years ago and I had to network a bit, but there very much is still demand for qualified people.

Would suck to be in this market as an entry-level engineer, though.

This is essentially a story about front-line traditional desktop support/sysadmins at a public university.

It's not going to be the same story at much higher paid shops where workers often have equity, good benefits, and the market has provided access to other jobs if you lose yours (in my experience, there are still shortages of qualified and competent engineers).

I would like a different method to deal with the pitfalls, but the politics, drama, overhead, and costs of unionization just don't interest me. I'm not interested in being at one job for life.

> That also means if they sold it right now at that $20k "loss" then they effectively paid $333/month plus upkeep to live somewhere for 5 years!

This also ignores the costs in buying/selling, including agent fees, lawyers, etc. You should probably only buy if you plan on living in a single place for at least a decade.

Home ownership comes with costs, too. There's maintenance, taxes, etc.

It can also be a prison, as many people who locked in at low interest rates are learning. If they move, a lot of them will have to reset their mortgage rates and end up paying a lot more. This has trapped people into housing that is substandard for their living situations (growing families, moving for career opportunities, etc).

Renting can be perfectly fine for society, though the explicit tax benefits in the USA usually tilt in favour of home ownership. But a lot of very wealthy countries are majority renters, including Switzerland (where the home ownership rate is in the 30-40% range). This gives the Swiss a huge leg up on lifestyle flexibility and the majority of their wealth isn't tied up in a single asset.

I'm not trying to shit on owning a place, but ideally there should be nothing wrong with renting (assuming a competitive market where rental units can be built and aren't zoned out due to restrictions, etc).

At a previous job circa 2008-12, we were a sun shop and moved from spark to x86 Solaris. It screamed at sustained, high-concurrency loads and our workloads benefited from the trinity of Solaris' threading, ZFS tiered storage, and zones/containers. By the time the Intel Nehalem chips became available to use, our DB loads screamed, too. There were edge cases where the sparc chips were better, but not at the price points offered. Linux was competitive at a performance level (though we always saw some issues if the machines were pegged for sustained amounts of time), but production containerization in those days was VMWare, which was enough of a performance hit to not be worth it.

I was briefly a network admin way back in the early 2000s. Core ISPs were playing (often petty) games with BGP routes back then for various reasons (eg forcing sub-optimal routes via AS padding unless downstream ISPs paid up). For awhile it got bad after the Dotcom implosion and networks were trying to up revenue. I've been out of the core BGP game for so long, but it's interesting to see how some things never change.

I'm not defending it, but these countries host US bases.

You're right, I misremembered. HP was conned by a British guy named Mike Lynch.

Kevin O’Leary is a grifter and he should be completely ignored. He literally got rich conning HP (though they were stupid for going ahead with it).

That being said, there is a lot of actual buildouts happening right now. The question is how much of the planned future capacity will actually get developed.

Recently the US gov't had Microsoft shut down an ICC judge's work email account. The threat is very real of more serious shenanigans (though I personally think the risk of backdoors introduced to any other software they use is just as real - Europe is just too much of a patchwork of jurisdictions to get this right).

The problem with subscription music is that the streaming platforms have no incentive to get you to discover new music - you're already paying either way.

Before Apple Music, when it was just the iTunes Store, Apple introduced iTunes Genius and it was scary good at recommending music; it worked so well I shudder to think what I spent in total buying $1 songs off of it.

But apple's music "play similar songs" just seems to take the same artists and pump their other album filler songs.

You can't occupy territory with drones (yet). You will need people and moving people in a drone-infested environment will mean protecting them with armoured vehicles. Yes, these vehicles will need enhancements and other new tech to counter drones, but armoured vehicles aren't going away (MAYBE the tank's days are numbered, though).

If you are really interested in this, I highly recommend subscribing to war on the rocks. Their articles and paid podcasts have legit defense industry people publishing studies on this subject. https://warontherocks.com

The Dutch auction wasn't all that smooth, with Google having to adjust prices at the last minute. Most results show that it didn't really produce all that much of a benefit over a traditional IPO, where (the issuing company) at least gets a guaranteed minimum amount of money to raise. Pretty much the only alternative is a direct listing for companies that want to go public, but don't need to raise money. (Well, there's also SPACs, but that's a different beast).

I don't subscribe to the "China is just to big and important to fight" arguments. Countries that peg their currencies distort markets, mask problems, and eventually that comes crashing down (see also Asian financial crisis, the Bank of England pegging in the early 1990s, etc).

I'm not sure if the NT IP stack was ever BSD, but many of the windows 3.11 and early 95 (before Microsoft natively added support) were from the BSD stack, or at the very least re-implemented the BSD socket API (Most famously Trumpet Winsock). This probably fed the rumours. IIRC winsock was also bundled as an "extras" in some pre-native IP supported versions of NT.

Outside of a handful of American cities, public transit is mostly used by the poor, which can include a lot of "undesirables", and many people used to their "quiet, safe" suburbs feel deeply uncomfortable around the poor in general. In some cities, public transit is used as a du-facto shelter system by the homeless.

It's funny when people see celebrities use the subway in NYC. It's just accepted by New Yorkers that the subway is usually the best way to get around Manhattan and getting mixed in with the entire socioeconomic spectrum is normal. But the crowds of people is also a kind of security blanket if something does happen.

China's got its own set of economic problems that they're masking. Their domestic economy is stagnant and they're trying to keep factories pumping out stuff. Since their domestic economy isn't biting, they're flooding the world with exports. This isn't sustainable, especially if and probably when the rest of the world decides that they're done with government backed Chinese companies killing theirs (and you're starting to see that).

Counter-take:

Linux is only secure because of OpenSSH.

In all seriousness, the OpenBSD guys are very conservative with technology. The OpenBSD pf stack (as well as much of the kernel) isn't heavily threaded due to the risk of race conditions. They also (correctly) predicted a lot of the speculative CPU attacks by not supporting it by default.

They've done a lot of security research and pioneered a lot of open source work around OS-level stack smashing technologies, like memory executable-space protection (W^X), early process privilege separation, memory space randomization, etc. Some of these features are not great for performance, but do help and have been adopted by other systems.

You're basically arguing that an armoured car sucks because a Ferrari can smoke it on a race track. There are times you want a Ferrari and there are times you want a Brinks truck.

What people miss about the US phone market is that while it's almost 60% iPhones, the vast majority of the top half of the income spectrum use them. I'm not sure if it's the same as it was a decade ago, but being excluded from iMessage group chats was a real exclusionary move for many teenagers.

I don't recall them refusing to support x86, but BSD development was mostly done by academics rewriting and improving AT&T UNIX, which was mostly on big iron systems of the time. They were focused on academic computer science work. The lawsuits stopped a lot of BSD work as the universities were sorting it all out. William and Lynne Jolitz start porting 4.3BSD to the Intel 80386 at Berkeley in 1989 (but the code wasn't released for years due to said lawsuit) before Linux existed. That is the first BSD-on-x86 work; by December 1990 they had contributed a working port to UCB. Most of the code didn't see the light of day until ~1992.

Also, usable and production ready BSDs were running large websites on x86 long before linux became mainstream and well-supported enough to be used. The BSD TCP/IP stack was the reference implementation for ages and BSD was heavily used in the internet's early days as a lot of early companies spun out of Californian universities. Hotmail ran on FreeBSD. Early SunOS variants were based off of BSD, as were some other commercial unixes.

The bigger killer, I think, is that BSD was (and still has) a bit of closed mindset to newcomers and were and are more conservative to new technology, despite some foundations of techbeing started with them. Docker's origins can be directly traced to FreeBSD jails. Sometimes the conservatism is warranted and a benefit (eg OpenSSH).

It would depend on the laws of the jurisdiction. I would imagine if you can show you kept the firmware up to date and had a secure as possible config (eg not having admin interfaces exposed to the internet), you could argue that there's no negligence - outside of maybe using a known insecure vendor; sometimes I think that would be a good idea (cough cough Fortinet).

Germany has some sensible laws about personal responsibility, like it being an offence to run out of gas on the autobahn and seriously treating driving in general as a privilege. But it requires a certain cultural mindset.

Sticker prices are usually designed for specific cases (eg wealthy international students). However, the fact that there's no clear price is a huge problem, much like the American medical industry.

Serfdom continued in practice in Russia for decades and often serfs became indebted to the landowners in a form of financial bondage that pretty much lasted until the Russian revolution, where...well things didn't get much better for them.

The fact that serfdom de-facto remained is one of the primary reasons Russia's industrialization lagged the rest of Europe for so long as factories didn't get the initial cheap labour. It was only finally fully picking up steam (pun not intended) when WW1 broke out.

> It's also trivially easy to not end up in involuntary servitude.

Look, you're not entirely wrong. But you're not entirely right, either.

In some states, the prisons are privately run and the prison labour is part of the profit motive. They have no incentive to rehabilitate and the states with these "programs" have some of the highest recidivism rates in the USA.

That also ignores the fact that some people are born into situations that make it far harder to live a "legit" life than others, and I'm not even talking about historical racism as part of that equation (which certainly does contribute).

I'm also NOT saying that prisoners shouldn't be made to work, but it should be outside of a system designed to exploit them.