snoshy

But also because households have lower expenses due to not being able to engage with the service industry, travel, shopping, and leisure expenditures. People are simply spending less because they're stuck at home.

Electrical distribution in the US is actually aging quite badly and is in deep need of replacement of large parts of it. Inefficiency isn't entirely the problem, although many (including me) would argue that it isn't as efficient as it could be. DC power transmission at high voltages is now feasible due to new technologies, and it is more efficient as well as easier to step up/down. At large scale, even such seemingly small losses do start to add up and matter.

Decentralization brings an obvious benefit - if power is consumed near generation, you need less infrastructure to distribute it, thereby lowering costs. Once we start adding large numbers of EVs charging at home, our energy consumption will tilt more and more towards the home, making generation and consumption on the spot much more efficient and useful.

Another benefit of decentralization is grid resilience. Removing single points of failure by distributing them means that large scale power outages (while already infrequent) would become less frequent.

Why wouldn't they? Maybe not the best of the best of chip designers, but sure, at least a half decent one. Just so you know what kind of chip would be perfect for the kinds of workloads that you have, without divulging secrets to anyone else, all so that you can find the best value for money out there in the market. Honestly, if you didn't do this, I would probably consider you incompetent.

What you're talking about here is the client/inference side, not the server/training side of the ML/DL compute battle. The former is meaningful in a sense, but practically insignificant in relation to the latter. Almost all ML/DL compute GPU, CPU, or otherwise is on the server side of the equation, and if you're relying on vector CPU math for it, well good luck.

Accelerators have a very clear space for themselves on the training side, and no amount of fancy ISA magic is really going to make up for the fact that TPUs and the like beckon. It's where most of the real money is.

> The Financial Report is an interesting read.

Mind sharing a link if you have one?

Glad you called it for what it is.

The fact is that LACNIC, AFRINIC, etc. are actually contractually bound to investigate allegations like these and to follow up on them, no matter where they come from. They're doing the job they are supposed to. To bring racial qualities into a contractual dispute, ouch GP.

Well I'll be glad to see some real competition in search when I actually see it, but if that's all you have to offer, I'm sorry no one's going to believe you.

News Corp [1] is pretty much the definition of the Australian news companies, because of the stranglehold they have on news properties and regulators in the country.

Google has been fighting this basic idea across Europe as well, and just recently came down on the side of accepting French antitrust terms to pay out news publishers for snippets or even headlines of news in search. I personally think the French antitrust regulators held their ground well in the sense that withholding search access to further a Google news property seems clearly like antitrust abuse.

That said, Australia's news market (as well as many other European news markets) have so effectively captured their own regulators that it's just likely all downside for consumers all around. Access to independent news will decrease, competition will decrease, and everyone will rejoice at the Pyrrhic victory over the global behemoth that is Google regardless of the benefits to the consumer, which were never the concern in the first place. Facebook will quickly follow suit, and there will be another celebration of the loss of independent media access by the masses.

IMO, this kind of thing is really the true censorship apparatus at work: the censorship of ideas across journalism broadly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_Corporation

Any search company that is at a Show HN stage is quite far from really even beginning to threaten Google, unless they've managed to play politics to ensure regulatory capture to an extent that product quality is irrelevant.

A public funding source can provide that kind of support for a decade, but even for the likes of Google that's a stretch.

I prefer to think of a moonshot as longer than a longshot, whatever that might be worth.

It sure is sad though, coming from the acquisition before Google X that had just so many great players throughout.

Agreed, I would wager that this is where a good majority of startups begin until they take a good stock of the situation at hand.

For sure. I shared this in another comment earlier, but they literally were using a free trial of Okta [1] to secure prod. This is why all of their user data got leaked. Their code was written to fail open, so if Okta didn't respond for some reason to auth requests, access was granted by default.

[1] https://twitter.com/okta/status/1348191370528256002

I don't necessarily disagree with the hardware capex vs bandwidth tradeoff, but I don't think either of us are aware of their balance sheet to reasonably claim if this is an insurmountable cost for the business today or not. Paying for several thousand servers, getting them up and running, and tuning them isn't exactly a trivial effort... and then you have to deal with bandwidth.

I fear that that moment is not all that far off, given the direction that Mozilla has been taking with respect to Firefox development recently.

Chrome might be playing hardball, but Mozilla seems determined to just walk away due to incompetent management.

Interesting, that explains how he thinks he Streisand Effected himself.

You're quite right, and I stand corrected. Although it's not the datapoint I suggested previously, I suppose there is another datapoint to be gathered: for someone in his position, perhaps nuking the world (physical and virtual) is the only way forward when dealing with such a threat.

He basically had to quit his job and career as a psychiatrist as well as delete SSC in a way, in order to continue with his online no-longer-pseudo-identity.

To clarify the cause: Google is essentially saying that Chromium will no longer support bookmark/password/history sync across browser installs, even though this has worked perfectly fine for years. Their claim is that sync support was always an "internal API" and that it's basically been an overlooked policy violation this whole time, which is now being "fixed" by disallowing distros from implementing it in Chromium. (Chromium is the open-source-only bits of Google Chrome.)

Chromium installs must clearly be an insignificant amount of the overall Chrome user base, but it's hard to not view this as yet another move from Google to neuter the open source Chromium project to push their own properties.

Gmail and Chrome (to a much lesser extent) have been in no small part about Google wanting to own your web identity. It's a clear part of the value proposition for a browser to remember your bookmarks, history, preferences, passwords, credit cards and more across all of the devices that you use. Removing this support directly pushes users to Chrome, where Google can monetize all sorts of tracking activity through their proprietary bits. All of this reeks, and is hostile to the user community as well as to the Linux community.

This whole episode serves as an interesting datapoint in how long a public person needs to stay out of the spotlight in order to return to their pseudoanonymity after being threatened to be outed by the media. It's not common to face such a threat, and it's not common for those threatened this way to even try to return to their former online identity and life.

Somewhat reassuring to me that it's this short.

Probably because their workloads haven't stabilized at any meaningful threshold. You can only justify the capital expenditure if you know you can amortize it over time. Hard to do for a startup whose existence is being threatened. They are also a political hot potato, and would need the colo provider to agree to take them on and withstand the public pressure, which I doubt most would want.

Interesting, could be fallout from the SolarWinds incident, although if they got to financials, why not go for technical secrets as well?

Yeah, those requirements are quite steep for what Parler does. That being said, it is actually incredibly hard to scale any product that sees a sudden massive influx of users, media attention, and conflict like this. I mean this from a purely technical standpoint.

If your customer base is doubling every few weeks, that's simply not enough time to hire more engineers, onboard them, and get their resources focused on optimizing the stack to improve efficiency. It's also way more realistic to scale up your infrastructure in the short run until you know you've stabilized at a point where you can purchase and operate dedicated hardware to offset the steep margins cloud providers charge.

On top of it all, their product itself seems off-putting to a large portion of tech workers, which would make hiring talented individuals even harder.

This seemed inevitable, as Amazon has done this several times now when asked to pay to support the organizations behind large enterprise OSS offerings.

Unfortunately, this kind of blatantly illegal detention among Indian authorities is not new, and far from uncommon. India has a decades long history of suppressing anti-Hindu speech, largely at the local level due to morally bankrupt bureaucrats, but occasionally also spilling into the highest levels of the legal and justice system.

Censorship is, and has always been rampant as well as widely unacknowledged throughout Indian society. With the right-wing swing of Indian politics of late, perhaps this has exacerbated a bit just as it has across many other parts of the world.

Facebook isn't even a party in this legal proceeding. The only ones are the court, Amazon, and Parler. Facebook could commit genocide tomorrow, and it would not affect this lawsuit.

I'm curious... how so?

This smacks of whataboutism to me. No doubt Facebook hosted large amounts of this activity, but it does not negate the fact that Parler did so as well. Amazon's court filing detailed hundreds of incidents that they had given Parler months to fix.

I'm not sure if I agree with that. Outside of unabashed copyright infringement and grossly objectionable content (child porn, etc.), there hasn't been a real precedent for a tech player getting booted like this on a moment's notice. If a scenario has never occurred before, I don't see why you'd add it to your threat model.

That being said, they did not have the engineering expertise to even make a resilient stack on top of AWS. If you're running a free trial version of Okta to secure your assets in production [1], all of what you're proposing is a distant dream.

[1] https://twitter.com/okta/status/1348191370528256002

It seemed apparent right when the case was filed that Parler didn't have a leg to stand on. It was partly a play for publicity that plays well into their customer demographics, and a dying gasp of trying to seek some kind of injunctive help from the administration, no matter how impossible it seemed.

Judging by how weak their infrastructure was in the first place, getting any kind of resilient hosting in place after all the industry behemoths turned their backs on Parler was clear not a viable option. If you can't get your site to work well with all the best tools, you really have little hope in the wild west.

It must have been a big reason why these sites fell to irrelevance so quickly. And to think of the missed opportunities...

Reading TFA, that was exactly the sense I got: a wistful announcement that a cherished part of the Internet was maintained for years beyond most of its users even noticed, and is being closed down. It seems readily apparent from their actions and words that they truly seemed to care about Tucows Downloads, whatever it might be worth financially.

Glad to get to the comments and see further reinforcement of that feeling. It seems you had a great read on them as people. Kudos.