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Given that most string implementations have both a `len` and `cap` field (or eve just `len`), means that for every string data type, there is one more integer variables being used.

So integer definitely gets used more than strings, and I'd argue way more than floats in most programs.


In CPython, a string's length is stored internally as a machine integer (`Py_ssize_t`); when the `len` builtin is called, the corresponding integer object is created (or more likely, retrieved from cache) on the fly.


>"Unexamined legacy subscriptions paid without a thought," is another way of saying, "Has too much money."

I constantly see ads for services like RocketMoney which helps people find and cancel subscriptions. I could arguably be in the "too much money" camp, but I couldn't imagine seeing an unknown/unused charge on my credit card bill and not immediately cancelling it. Nonetheless, RocketMoney seems like a widely used product.


Doesn't help that sometimes the charges are coded like *TST VENDOR ACCT #1541*

I don't go over my bill every month but get a notification upon every new charge, and sometimes the only way I know that a charge I just put on at a store is the same one I got a notification for is because the charge amount is some relatively unique number.


A surprising number of people clearly simply do not look at their credit card bills.


>We now save over $1.2M / yr and we expect this to grow, as we grow as a business.

Am I just naive? How is a uptime SaaS product saving over a million year on managed colo vs AWS? Was every API route in it's own EC2 instance?

AWS is expensive sure, but over a million dollars a year? For this product specifically?.

I got some clarification from their earlier posts and it looks like they were intentionally avoiding any AWS platform features:

>Our goal was to avoid reliance on AWS or any proprietary cloud technology.

>When we were utilizing AWS, our setup consisted of a 28-node managed Kubernetes cluster. Each of these nodes was an m7a EC2 instance. With block storage and network fees included, our monthly bills amounted to $38,000+. This brought our annual expenditure to over $456,000+.

I just think if you are going to deploy on AWS, then treat it AWS like managed-colo, then your bill is going to be high. I understand how that seems unfair, but AWS isn't really in the business of selling virtual machines. If you sit down and ask yourself how you got here, it just seems like you committed yourself to wasting money. If I knew I just needed some linux boxes from the start, there are better choices than AWS.


In almost 100% of cases I've seen this, people are convinced that they are going to go for a multi-cloud situation and using any value added service is "lock-in". The amount of times I've seen the migration scenario play out favorably for people has been absolutely ZERO.

Meanwhile, I've seen huge companies successfully complete cloud->cloud migrations in less than a year, as long as they use the value added services of the other cloud.


Some of these seem less cursed, and more just security design?

>Some phones will silently strip GPS data from images when apps without location permission try to access them.

That strikes me as the right thing to do?


Huh. Maybe? I don't want that information available to apps to spy on me. But I do want full file contents available to some of them.

And wait. Uh oh. Does this mean my Syncthing-Fork app (which itself would never strike me as needing location services) might have my phone's images' location be stripped before making their way to my backup system?

EDIT: To answer my last question: My images transferred via Syncthing-Fork on a GrapheneOS device to another PC running Fedora Atomic have persisted the GPS data as verified by exiftool. Location permissions have not been granted to Syncthing-Fork.

Happy I didn't lose that data. But it would appear that permission to your photo files may expose your GPS locations regardless of the location permission.


With the Nextcloud app I remember having to enable full file permissions to preserve the GPS data of auto-uploaded photos a couple of years ago. Which I only discovered some months after these security changes went into effect on my phone. That was fun. I think Android 10 or 11 introduced it.

Looking now I can't even find that setting anymore on my current phone. But the photos still does have the GPS data intact.


I think the “cursed” part (from the developers point of view) is that some phones do that, some don’t, and if you don’t have both kinds available during testing, you might miss something?


> That strikes me as the right thing to do

Yep, and it's there for very goos reasons. However if you don't know about it, it can be quite surprising and challenging to debug.

Also it's annoying when your phones permissions optimiser runs and removes the location permissions from e.g. Google Photos, and you realise a few months later that your photos no longer have their location.


There is never a good reason to permanently modify my files, if that is what is going on here. Seems like I wouldn't be able to search my photos by location reliably if that data was stripped from them.


Nothing is "permanently modifying your files".

What happens is that when an application without location permissions tries to get photos, the corresponding OS calls strip the geo location data when passing them. The original photos still have it, but the application doesn't, because it doesn't have access to your location.

This was done because most people didn't know that photos contain their location, and people got burned by stalkers and scammers.


It's not if it silently alters the file. i do want GPS data for geolocation, so that when i import the images in the right places they are already placed where they should be on the map


IMO, the problem is that it fails silently.

Every kind of permission should fail the same way, informing the user about the failure, and asking if the user wants to give the permission, deny the access, or use dummy values. If there's more than one permission needed for an operation, you should be able to deny them all, or use any combination of allowing or using dummy values.


And permissions should also not be so wide. You should be able to give permission to the GPS data in pictures you consciously took without giving permission to track your position whenever.


I think the bad part is that the users are often unaware. Stripping the data by default makes sense but there should be an easy option not to.

Try to get an iPhone user to send you an original copy of a photo with all metadata. Even if they want to do it most of them don't know how.


How does it makes sense?


>A part of the issue is IMO that browsers have become ridiculously bloated everything-programs.

I don't see how that solves the issue that PSL tries to fix. I was a script kiddy hosting neopets phishing pages on free cpanel servers from <random>.ripway.com back in 2007. Browsers were way less capable then.


PSL and the way cookies work is just part of the mess. A new approach could solve that in a different way, taking into account all the experience we had with scriptkiddies and professional scammers and pishers since then. But I also don't really have an idea where and how to start.


And of course, if the new solution completely invalidates old sites, it just won't get picked up. People prefer slightly broken but accessible to better designed but inaccessible.


> People prefer slightly broken but accessible to better designed but inaccessible.

We live in world where whatever faang adopts is de facto a standard. Accessible these days means google/gmail/facebook/instagram/tiktok works. Everything else is usually forced to follow along.

People will adopt whatever gives them access to their daily dose of doomscrolling and then complain about rather crucial part of their lives like online banking not working.

> And of course, if the new solution completely invalidates old sites, it just won't get picked up.

Old sites don't matter, only high-traffic sites riddled with dark patterns matter. That's the reality, even if it is harsh.


> People prefer slightly broken but accessible to better designed but inaccessible.

It's not even broken as the edge cases are addressed by ad-hoc solutions.

OP is complaining about global infrastructure not having a pristine design. At best it's a complain over a desirable trait. It's hardly a reason to pull the Jr developer card and mindlessly advocate for throwing everything out and starting over.


2007 you say and less capable you say?!

Try 90s! We had to fight off ActiveX Plugins left and right in the good olde Internet Explorer! Yarr! ;-)


I imagine this is being posted as a response to the fact that TikTok was forced to sell itself after it didn’t play nicely with US propaganda.

There is (or was) plenty of politically charged content on TikTok. There’s company began to change its tune once its livelyhood required being in Trump’s good graces


Bit ironic that we are finally getting the dreaded draconian Chinese censorship once the company was forced to sell to Americans



Trump claims that China has practically approved the deal, but as of Oct 10th we again have a 100% tariff threat on China and no confirmed Chinese approval:

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/trump-threatens-chi...

With Trump flooding the zone, this news was difficult to find. Much of the press just reported that the deal is practically sealed, which he (probably falsely) bragged about on Truth Social.

So the ICE censorship appears to be still done by Chinese algorithms, perhaps to soften up trade relations or because their algorithms are tuned to censor videos of persons in military gear beating down a citizen anyway.


You can map N-async tasks onto M-threads. This is essentially what Rust does, and if you squint this is how Go works as well.

A go routine is not that different from an async task, except the runtime inserts all the await points for you.


>No, people easily migrate between these platforms.

No? It's rare for these platforms to survive, the one that was closest to challenging Facebook was kneecapped by the US government.

The time between the founding of MySpace to Facebook was a little over a year. Instagram has been the largest social network for close to decade now, and it's not like others haven't been trying. META is up 600% over last 3 years. I'm really question your definition of the word "dying"


He's right on the AI stuff? How do you figure that? As far as I can tell, OpenAI is still operating. It sounds like you agree with him on the AI stuff, but he could be wrong, just like how he was wrong about remote work.

I'm actually more inclined to believe he's wrong if he gets so defensive about criticism. That tells me he's more focused on protecting his ego than actually uncovering the truth.


The fact that OpenAI is still operating and the argument that it is completely unsustainable are not two incompatible things.


Wether or not OpenAI is sustainable or not is only a question that can be answered in hindsight. If OpenAI is still around in 10 years, in the same sort of capacity, does OP become retroactively wrong?

My point is, you can agree that OpenAI is unsustainable, but it's not clear to me that is a decided fact, rather than an open conjecture. And if someone is making that decision from a place of ego, I have greater reason to believe that they didn't reason themselves into that position.


The fact they are not currently even close to profitable with ever increasing costs and the sobering scaling realities there is something you could consider, and if you do believe they are sustainable, then you would have to believe (in my opinion, unlikely scenarios) they will somehow become sustainable, which is also a conjecture.

Seems a little unreasonable to point out “they are still around” as a refutation of the claim they aren’t sustainable when, in fact, the moment the investment money faucet keeping them alive is turned off they collapse and very quickly.


No, it's a question answerable now. If you're losing twice as much money as you're making, the end of your company is an inescapable fact unless you turn that trend around.

What Zitron points out, correctly, is that there currently exists no narrative beyond wishful thinking which explains how that reversal will manifest.


I don't think he's right about everything. He is particularly weak at understanding underlying technology, as others have pointed out. But, perhaps by luck, he is right most of the time.

For example, he was the lone voice saying that despite all the posturing and media manipulation by Altman, that OpenAI's for-profit transformation would not work out, and certainly not by EOY2025. He was also the lone voice saying that "productivity gains from AI" were not clearly attributable to such, and are likely make-believe. He was right on both.

Perhaps you have forgotten these claims, or the claims about OpenAI's revenue from "agents" this year, or that they were going to raise ChatGPT's price to $44 per month. Altman and the world have seemingly memory-holed these claims and moved on to even more fantastical ones.

He has never said that OpenAI would be bankrupt, his position (https://www.wheresyoured.at/to-serve-altman/, Jul 2024) is:

I am hypothesizing that for OpenAI to survive for longer than two years, it will have to (in no particular order):

- Successfully navigate a convoluted and onerous relationship with Microsoft, one that exists both as a lifeline and a direct source of competition.

- Raise more money than any startup has ever raised in history, and continue to do so at a pace totally unseen in the history of financing.

- Have a significant technological breakthrough such that it reduces the costs of building and operating GPT — or whatever model that succeeds it — by a factor of thousands of percent.

- Have such a significant technological breakthrough that GPT is able to take on entirely unseen new use cases, ones that are not currently possible or hypothesized as possible by any artificial intelligence researchers.

- Have these use cases be ones that are capable of both creating new jobs and entirely automating existing ones in such a way that it will validate the massive capital expenditures and infrastructural investment necessary to continue.

I ultimately believe that OpenAI in its current form is untenable. There is no path to profitability, the burn rate is too high, and generative AI as a technology requires too much energy for the power grid to sustain it, and training these models is equally untenable, both as a result of ongoing legal issues (as a result of theft) and the amount of training data necessary to develop them.

He is right about this too. They are doing #2 on this list.


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