The font color implies this comment is downvoted, but I earnestly encourage readers to take very seriously the difference in SLOs and SLAs between high-cost vendors like AWS and GCP and low-cost vendors like DigitalOcean. Read their docs; do not assume DO is "the same, but lower cost."
… are the published SLAs worth more than use as toilet paper?
I think it boils down to who offers the highest quality / $, and that's an impossible metric to really measure except via experience.
But with a number of the "big" clouds, there's what the SLA says, and then the actual lived performance of the system. Half the time the SLA weasels out of the outage — e.g., "the API works" is not in SLA scope for a number of cloud services, only thinks like "the service is serving your data". E.g., your database is up? SLA. You can make API calls modify it? Not so much. VMs are running? SLA. API calls to alloc/dealloc? No. Support responded to you? SLA. The respond contains any meaningful content? Not so fast. Even if your outage is covered by SLA, getting that SLA to action often requires a mountain of work: I have to prove to the cloud vendor that they've strayed from their own SLA¹, and force them to issue a credit, and often then the benefit of the credit outweight my time in salary. Oftentimes the exchanges in support town seem to reveal that the cloud provider has, apparently, no monitoring whatsoever to be able to see what actual perf I am experiencing. (E.g., I have had tickets with Azure where they seem blithely unaware their APIs are returning 500s …)
So, published is one thing. On paper, IDK, maybe Azure & GCP probably look pretty on par. In practice, I would laugh at that idea.
¹AWS is particularly guilty of this; I could summarize their support as "request ID or GTFO".
Posting a quick TL;DW. A minute into the video Chuck Moore says that Windows updates (on 11 and 10) have caused colorForth to crash, with Chuck thinking it's a graphical problem. I may comment more, but I wanted to post this because I don't see it mentioned as a youtube comment.
Did Microsoft seriously deprecate BitBlt and 2D draw calls?
If so, it seems as if Windows is undergoing a Waylandization. "Yeah, we went ahead and removed those because they're legacy. Modern rendering pipelines don't work that way anymore." I don't WANT a rendering pipeline! I want a surface, and to make calls to scribble on it! That's it!
> Did Microsoft seriously deprecate BitBlt and 2D draw calls?
Very unlikely. Far too many applications depend on those things. It's more likely that they accidentally changed something subtle that happened to break colorForth.
> If so, it seems as if Windows is undergoing a Waylandization. "Yeah, we went ahead and
The Wayland idea looks very similar to a Microsoft brain extract: "trust us, it will be the best when it is ready", "your program doesn't work ? update to latest version", "we have updates: we disabled some things which worked before".
The whole GNOME/FD.o complex has been like that for decades. GNOME's founding document is called "Let's Make Unix Not Suck". Its whole thesis is: Unix style system integration is old and busted; the new hotness is Windows style system integration.
But for decades, Microsoft has been willing to support and work on the ancient tech that got it where it is today. The GNOME/FD.o paradigm is like Mao's continuous revolution. Out with the old and in with the new, forever and always, on an ongoing basis. Microsoft is now changing to this model. I suspect it's for similar pragmatic reasons: it's difficult to recruit young and relatively inexperienced programmers if you're just going to put them to work fixing up code bases from the 90s (written in—brotha, eugh!—C and C++). Since we can't get anybody to maintain that old code, it will become a liability in the future, so we're better off throwing it out and telling our users to cope.
It wouldn't surprise me to find that Windows is now flagging and quarantining unsigned, unfamiliar executables that it catches making these draw calls or really any direct Win32 calls. Microsoft, and in particular Windows Defender which you can't really turn off anymore, has gotten pretty aggressive about blocking software for "security purposes".
Yes, I misremembered some things. Apparently Mono has more compatibility with .NET Framework (for instance 4.81) than dotnet (the current, modern recently released in version 10).
I mixed that up to mean that .NET Framework proper was released as open source, but that's unfortunately not the case.
Related: Oxide's podcast, "Whither CockroachDB," which reflects on experience with postgres at Joyent, then the choice to use cockroach in response to prior experiences with postgres.
I'm trying to avoid editorializing in my above summary, for fear of mischaracterizing their opinions or the current state of postgres. Their use of postgres was 10 years ago, they were using postgres for a high-availability use case -- so they (and I) don't think "postgres bad, cockroach good." But like Bryan Cantrill says, "No one cares about your workload like you do." So benchmark! Don't make technical decisions via "vibes!"
We need a different word than "hallucinate" or "bullshit" because the LLM is executing the same functionality when it _gets_ the correct answer or incorrect. It doesn't _know_ the correct answer in either case.
It is praiseworthy Microsoft straightforwardly reported the increase.
I haven't paid attention to these kinds of optional disclosures. Never thought about it but were I asked I would have said these are advertisements. I don't dislike sustainability, but I thought those function as advertisements because you can expect to get more sustainability "for free" over time, because of many things (Moore's Law, ephemeralization, societal investment). So of course savvy corporations publish sustainability reports that say, "We're doin' great : )."
Therefore I'd argue their commitment to sustainability is shown by their disclosure of the increase.
"Therefore I'd argue their commitment to sustainability is shown by their disclsoure of the increase."
Alternatively, one could argue the increase shows their commitment to profit at the expense of the environment and the voluntary disclosure shows a commitment to greenwashing.
It's funny how that happens sometimes. Reminds me of the United Nations' "Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples". The only four countries that didn't sign it initially were the ones that actually looked at it and thought about whether they could really achieve it.
That’s a charitable description of the states that voted against and an uncharitable description of the ones that voted for. A less loaded description would just observe that the opposed countries were the ones where the indigenous peoples would have the greatest claims and the governments would have the greatest resources to claim.
How do you know it isn't so much worse than what they're saying that this is actually part of the cover up? I'm not saying I believe that, just following your own logic.
> It is praiseworthy Microsoft straightforwardly reported the increase.
Didn't they just learn a lesson about the additional bad press you can be subjected to if you try to hide the severity of your security issues instead of just owning up to what's happening?
Can you think of any ulterior motives behind the oligarch's actions? Such as how global warming is causing increasing insurance rates worldwide as both severe and more mundane weather events cause more and more property damage to their extensive property portfolios?
Let’a assume the hypothesis that they believe that to be true. Why would anyone that believe that shut off nuclear plants that emit zero CO2 in Germany and burn wood as well as gas instead?
Are you saying that the ones holding up the ESG cartel that incentivize businesses to do communist climate justice are all morons that just happen to have incredibly competent execution? It’s the UN, EU, BlackRock, vanguard, the state department, all the WEF oligarchs etc
I suppose that might be more related to left wing populism as embodied by the German Greens who worked for decades to get nuclear energy out of Germany. Also because the plants would have had to be decommissioned anyways and modern nuclear is not SO competitive for practical concerns to outweigh political expediency.
I truly don't think it was a result of the actions of a centralised oligarch elite that drove this anyways.
They are also forbidding fossil fuel derived fertilizers and heavy machinery used to produce cheap food.
BRICS is allowed to build coal plants to replace the industry that dies in the west. This Marxist climate justice is like how DEI achieve equity, redistribution of outcomes, to favored activist groups or in this case the communist CCPs rule.
For communists like the greens it’s about destroying the west to put their oligarchic tyranny in place by destroying middle class economic independence, the issue never happened the revolution did.
How do you suppose, keeping in mind we're trying to avoid emitting carbon in the process, and keeping in mind 3 of them have nukes, we're to disallow BRICS from building coal plants?
It's also simply the case that if all Co2 production stopped tomorrow that countries like the United States would have all the stuff, as a consequence of a history of more overall pollution, so the resistance to stopping all coal production is naturally higher in poorer places.
Basically the only card one can pull is to decide not to reduce Co2 oneself, which ultimately does nothing directly to solve the problem.
ESG which is used to enforce climate justice is a a cartel environment that creates a total top-down, public-private sector controlled by a Stakeholder Soviet that determines the parameters of doing business.
This model was pioneered in China under Deng Xiaoping. The ultimate vision here is that the West, after "Degrowth" (Communism), and the East/South, after the full implementation of PRC/CCP hegemony and the Belt and Road Initiative, will dialectically synthesize into a single global system. Both the CCP and UN think they'll control it.
So both China and western oligarchs behind this are interested in western degrowth through energy & food & job poverty as a tool to destroy individual liberty that holds capitalism up and introduce communist religious rule.
Yes -- and companies or governments don't want to be _contacted_ by you. It's a cost to them. The median "contact us for a sales quote" form is clearer and has less friction than the median "file a complaint / ask a question" form.
One reason not in the article people might use forms instead of email is the "set and setting" of being a guest on a website and filling out their form. When in "your" email inbox as opposed to on "someone else's" site, you may conduct yourself differently.
An example of this is the sometimes-onerous Github issue template questions. I'm not arguing they're not necessary, but they do two things: mandate required information and _imply_ that you are a guest and you must hold yourself to someone else's communication norms.
> but they do two things: mandate required information and _imply_ that you are a guest and you must hold yourself to someone else's communication norms.
To be honest, tools like this do quite a good job of filtering out people who want you to bend over backward for them. If someone is so stubborn that they refuse to take a couple minutes to fill out someone’s form, they’re likely to be very demanding and uncooperative with every future engagement.
Of course, these people never see themselves as such.
> Yes -- and companies or governments don't want to be _contacted_ by you.
For a company to make a sale, there needs to be a way for the client to contact them, a way to make a purchase. Having crap contact forms makes as much sense as having restaurant waiters spit clients in the face to greet them. With the world we're living in that might become the norm in a few years or months.
I've worked for client who spend a lot of money optimizing form fill-out rates down to the nth degree.
I once worked on a mortgage form. It had a pic of a call center person next to it. I persuaded my boss to try a pic of a dog with a tie, glasses and headset I found instead. It increased the conversion rate by 17%.
I pay for Youtube Premium, which uses third-party cookies to not show ads on embedded videos.
https://privacysandbox.com talks about advertising, but not "logged in elsewhere" functionality. Does Youtube or Google have something ready, or will all Youtube Premium subscribers see ads on embedded videos?
>Ads appear on brand safe sites: YouTube works diligently so that our advertisers' brands appear on sites that reflect our respective core values. Our systems closely evaluate websites and their content against various factors when finding out whether to turn on In-stream ads on YouTube embeds. These factors include a strict set of guidelines on content like adult imagery, violence, inappropriate and hateful language, and sites that promote infringement.
The recommended solution for embedded content is the Storage Access API, which has broad browser support. (I don't know that YouTube has implemented it yet, but I'd be surprised if it's not there soon.)
Oh, that's worrisome. I'm trying to implement it in our embedded content soon, because some of our customers got caught up in Chrome's third party cookie blocking 1% trial that started a week or two ago.
Any specific problems you ran into that you could share?
Aren't those just iframes, which is effectively just youtube loading inside an existing web page instead of its own tab. I would assume first party cookies would work just fine for this.
Nope, an iframe on an unrelated site is exactly what turns it into a third party cookie. (The user and the site they're visiting are the first two parties; the embedded site is the third party.)
Put another way, an ad iframe loading a tracking (identity) cookie is indistinguishable from a YouTube iframe loading a login (identity) cookie.
i still don't follow. i guess my point is, when an embedded video loads for me, youtube still knows that it's me. it gives me the same recommended videos i'd get if i were on youtube.com directly. so i assume since i pay for premium, it'd also skip ads on embedded videos too. i wouldnt know because i use ublock.
> when an embedded video loads for me, youtube still knows that it's me
If/when third party cookie blocking is fully deployed, this won't be true. Your browser won't send YouTube's session cookie to YouTube when it's loaded in an iframe on an unrelated site, so YouTube won't know you're a premium user.
I'll try to invoke Cunningham's Law by saying: Housing is close to a perfectly-competitive market.
I think the above is true, but I'd welcome counterexamples.
So, the way to depress housing prices is to build more houses. _Most_ housing regulations, including making it illegal for people to own four houses, reshuffle the ownership of existing houses, and don't depress their prices. As regards that regulation: if the super-rich aren't able to own $many houses, the merely-rich will buy more, and thus housing prices would be the same.
This makes sense to me, if 10 families want a place to live and there are 8 places to live, housing prices will trend towards infinity, until people give up and multiple families live together.
We need more places to live, at the end of the day there's no way around that.
Regulation might help though. If we regulate it so that it's harder to profit from real estate, then people will find other investments instead. This is good, because as long as real estate is a favorite investment for the wealthy, there will be a "mysterious" resistance to any efforts to lower the prices by building more houses.
I'm not an expert here, but this makes sense to me. Did I miss anything?
No a good portion of them are turned into rentals controlled by a few.
The demand will not go down. The supply always lags behind, and can face hurdles to build, for example - renters are generally not present in city politics.
The supply then use price controlling algorithms to slowly increase and extract the wealth and income of the renters.
> Housing is close to a perfectly-competitive market.
Pick any US jurisdiction (with the possible exception of Puerto Rico? I’m not very familiar with how taxation works there) and contemplate the tax implications of selling an appreciated property. Further contemplate how those implications are different for different potential buyers and sellers of that same property at the same price. Then say again that it’s perfectly competitive.
Hint: there are all manner of effects here. Capital gains. The basis step up at death. 1031 exchanges and their associated rules. Transfer fees, title fees (which is pretty close to being a tax).
Transfer fees and title fees equally affect any buyer and any seller in the long run, don't they?
>Further contemplate how those implications are different for different potential buyers and sellers of that same property at the same price.
Sure -- this is why I was asking for examples. "Rich people having more options than poor people" (which is what I think 1031 exchanges and your nod to capital gains refers to) is true across all domains without exception. It's true that I tend to discount that, acknowledging its unfairness. My point was prices are public(!), and historic sale-prices are public(!). A _particular_ (rich) buyer may have individual reasons for buying a house, but the market is almost perfectly competitive, because prices are public.
> "Rich people having more options than poor people" (which is what I think 1031 exchanges and your nod to capital gains refers to)
Not really. They affect buyers and sellers in ways that are, for the most part, quite arbitrary. In expensive markets, capital gains taxes can hit homeowners harder than landlords, which has all manner of weird effects. (And homeowners are not necessarily poorer.)
Look around any old-ish city with heavily appreciated property values, especially in California, and you’ll see older people in oversized houses who can’t really afford to downsize. This, IMO, seriously corrupts the market and hurts people who want cheaper housing.
No, although that also would help (though I don't think the downside is worth it).
I'm talking about people up north realizing that massive amounts of immigration isn't exactly great for home/rental pricing. "Build more homes" is easy to say but hard to do - you need skilled workers, there's only so much land in specific areas, NIMBYism, etc. "Reduce immigration" for some is hard to say but in practice is easy to do, and it has the exact same effect.
The problem is that people generally have good reasons to immigrate. People don't deserve a lower standard of living just because they weren't born in a first-world country.
People in our country don't deserve a lower standard of living because other people want to live here either. A country/government exists to help its own people.
Where's the line? How many people should be allowed, and of what caliber? That number is the whole point of having an immigration system.
If the electorate wants to restrict immigration so be it. But it won't solve housing shortages caused by restrictive zoning. When apartments, duplex, townhomes, condos, etc. are literally illegal this will cause a shortage. Parking minimums mandates, setback requirements, floor area ratio rules, may issue permitting processes push down supply and push up cost.
Just imagine if we banned building new grocery stores or expanding existing ones. Lines would get longer and longer and produce would quickly go out of stock. And then instead of fixing the root of the problem, we banned people from moving to the area due to grocery shortages.
The thing is I think you city people can't see the forest for the trees. Yes, on a city level zoning/permitting can be an issue.
However, I live in the middle of nowhere. The nearest town to me has a population of 600. Homes that were $300k pre-pandemic are now $500-$600k. Zoning is no issue here. There aren't many places in our country where home prices have gone down or stayed the same.
When people are priced out of urban cores they select housing in suburbs. When those seeking suburban housing are priced out they bid up the price of rural housing.
There are a lot of immigrants working in construction. Decreased immigration in the past few years has pushed up wages especially in lower wage jobs like construction laborer. Trade wars and the aftershocks of the Covid pandemic have pushed up the cost of materials. 3% mortgages supercharged demand.
Restricting immigration won't stop a San Jose, CA resident from moving to Boise, ID.
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