i am so grateful for this man's effort and content. his ability to distill topics into super accessible and actionable nuggets of information is something i've never really experienced before. it's almost too good to be true - i'm a little worried there's some guruism going on that's subtly increasing my opinion of him (granted he's super charismatic, well spoken, and sharp, but still)
100%. I regularly point people to his video "Why Gifted Children are Special Needs." It and Randy Pausch's Last Lecture may be the only legitimately lifechanging videos I've ever watched.
One of his core messages is that we (meaning his target audience, mostly males under 40) generally have too high expectations of ourselves and place too much importance on what we're "supposed" to be doing with our lives vs what we actually want to do. Internalizing this idea has helped me move towards finding work and relationships that are more fun and fulfilling. I'm finding myself to be increasingly unconcerned with what other people think about me, which ironically has made me more relaxed and likeable.
if you're rotating creds or need to open/close the DB, this will typically just add another select case to your main method, where you also block on e.g. signal catching to cleanly shutdown the app
strange: drunk driving continues to cause grave personal, public health and economic harm to non-participants and has for, what, well over 50 years? yet the US seems to be largely "functioning".
boy howdy, with all the flak i hear about this and the awesome talent in tech, you'd figure an entrepreneur or 1000 would take a stab at this, make it better, charge less. apparently there's gazillions to be made by even charging 50 percent of what AWS does.
so, when should we expect this gloriously efficient competitive market to kick in to action?
my guess is that the AWS ecosystem, despite "price gouging", is simply the best and will be because this is really hard, non-glorious engineering, where solid reliability actually matters. anyone who wants to can go ahead and co-lo, so, whatever. people who want cloud will pay, and those who can't or won't, will not.
There's tons of businesses that are happy to charge less for bandwidth; so it's clear Amazon (and some of the other high tier cloud services) are overcharging on this maybe by a factor of 10, although since transit bits are not all equal, someone with more detail could make a case that the overcharging is less.
It's easyish to compete on bandwidth costs, but Amazon has a lot of other features many people want; it's harder to replicate all of those, especially the part about having a long history of operating such services and not making a lot of changes to make things more expensive or otherwise more difficult. Having to pay a much higher than market price for an easily replaced good in order to get a good that's less easily replaced is textbook anti-competive bundling.
If your bandwidth usage is high enough, maybe it makes sense to send it all through AWS direct connect, and pay for transit yourself; although even then, the AWS direct pricing seems a bit high.
If you ask the fancy restaurant to cater a steak dinner for 1000 people they will charge you a lot closer to supermarket beef.
The point is that if you charge absurd prices for what has basically no marginal cost your pricing model is broken and 1) you are excluding customers that are particularly sensitive to this price or 2) you are liable to undercharge other customers that primarily use other services for which you are not charging what it costs you to provide.
For AWS, given the generally inflated prices, it's probably a lot more of 1) than 2).
As I explained in another commented AWS wants to disincentivize dumb bandwidth usage. They want you to use your bandwidth for traffic that needs it to EC2, and you get much better rates for static data from CDNs, S3, etc.
Your point that "AWS has a bunch of other benefits to where people just accept the bandwidth costs so they can leverage those other benefits" doesn't actually counter the original claim that "the bandwidth costs are outrageously overpriced".
You're replying to a comment that includes a tweet from the CEO of Cloudflare, which is quite literally providing that competition with free bandwidth and an increasing suite of computing products.
There are plenty of other platforms as well, like Digitalocean, that have much lower bandwidth pricing.
Nobody else can give you bandwidth out of Amazon data centers. Amazon's advantage is having a ton of services that work together, and they take advantage of it to price gouge on bandwidth.
If you're buying a standalone CDN service you can get massively better rates.
there are also eg privacy advocates who may now be able to wear masks without too much hassle for the foreseeable future to defeat mass surveillance.
for example, pre pandemic, police in Berlin would absolutely stop and harass anyone wearing a mask in a U station/train; that'd be extremely awkward going forward, at least for a little bit.
Masks don’t help for privacy, and already privacy advocates are becoming aware of this. The extensive networks of surveillance cameras in e.g. Russia and China are now able to identify people wearing masks – this was recently used in Moscow to go to the homes of masked demonstrators a couple of days after the protests and arrest them there, for example.
Modern surveillance software can draw on things like gait analysis, the person’s mobile phone’s IMEI, and tracing people’s movements around the city in order to identify people even if they are masked.
seriously, what's up with this binary thinking where there's just no room for nuance whatsoever? "no, patching systems isn't effective, because unknown 0 days exist, so it doesn't help."
how about - bear with me - wearing a mask is merely /one/ component of not being mass surveilled, and is part of several layers, each one of which is clearly helpful although each one independently may not solve the problem entirely?
The problem is that modern surveillance tech has imposed so many layers that observing them all isn’t realistic for even the most privacy-conscious people: you not only have to wear a mask, you have to change your gait, you can’t carry around a mobile phone, you have to somehow elude cameras being able to track you from wherever you started off that morning (i.e. likely your home) etc. So what is the point of being happy that you can now wear a mask in public?
Public surveillance isn’t like, say, private communications where a person still has the option to install Signal and keep their conversations relatively private. Preventing the authorities from recognizing you in public is already a lost battle.
i really like my https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-ar750s/ : comes with a GUI on top of openWRT that allows easy static IP assignment from MAC, wireguard config as either server or client, etc. you can always drop into LuCI as well, or reflash with latest openWRT. plenty of storage for additional services and packages if that's your thing.
i consider all tech - all forums, social media, etc. - to be similar to a special forces group (or pick your favorite non-violent elite group). it's best deployed with a clear objective in mind - learn more about Haskell from gurus, see how S.V. is reacting to tech workers/wages changing, get a job or work from monthly threads - until either the effort is a success, more time/energy can/should be brought to bear, or it can be easily aborted without much fanfare.
so, what do you want? if it's to network, connect, learn, debate, get a new job - do that, and avoid the addictive type stuff like refreshing every 10 mins, etc. if it's to avoid boredom, well... tread carefully.
