While I wouldn't dream of standing up k8s on a bare metal cluster without a devops team, I set up managed k8s using EKS several years ago for a client and... it just chugs along, self-healing, with essentially zero maintenance.
For my own projects I use a managed Northflank cluster on my own AWS account and likewise... just a fantastic experience. Everything that Heroku could and should have been. Yes the cluster is a bit pricey to stand up both in terms of EC2 compute and management layer costs, but once it's there, it's there. And the costs scale much more nicely than shoving side projects onto Heroku.
At this stage I consider managed k8s my default go-to unless it's something so lightweight I just want to push it to Vercel and forget about it.
Happily using Cloud66 but a strong recommendation for Northflank here. I already had a running cluster there and migrating a very complex Heroku app over only took 20 minutes today. (Would have been 5 if I hadn't screwed up .gitignore...)
It struggled with tasks I asked for (e.g. download the March and April invoices for my GitHub org "myorg") -- it got errors parsing the DOM and eventually gave up. I recommend taking a look at the browser-use approach and specifically their buildDOMTree.js script. Their strategy for turning the DOM into an LLM parsable list of interactive elements, and visually tagging them for vision models, is unreasonably effective. I don't know if they were the first to come up with it, but it's genius and extracting it for my browser-using agents has hugely increased their effectiveness.
I developed a SaaS business to fund a nonprofit foundation, which is a little different from your situation.
The key thing was to keep the SaaS-y bit as boring as possible, which meant a corporation. This is in Europe but the equivalent would be Delaware C corp.
Shares in the corporation were then given to the wrapping organization (in my case the foundation, but this could be more-or-less any legal structure that can have assets). Downside is two sets of accounts, upsides are that M&A gets a ton easier later on, and taking on employees is simple and not colored by the legal quirks of the parent organization. The potential complexity of SaaS accounting (revenue recognition, R&D credits, etc) is also kept inside a simple, normal corporation which every CPA is super-familiar with, so you're not consulting niche experts every time something new comes up.
I advise a quick consult with a tax lawyer before doing anything, because it's easy to say you'll deal with this later but some changes have unforeseen implications if not done at the outset. (I punted on some of the setup for a year while I focused on finding product/market fit, and that turned out to be a mistake that the lawyers had to fix at some cost. A year more and it might have become unfixable.)
Doesn't the concept of biopiracy imply that the products of millions of years of evolution belong to modern nation states?
What if, instead, we either observe that they simply exist, or imbue them with their own rights, or consider them the birthright of all humanity?
We've seen that attempts to consider them as intellectual property for the purposes of ensuring their conservation have failed. We can also see that it hasn't driven the anticipated licensing revenue flows to poorer nations. But which approach would lead to greater good for humankind over a long time horizon?
I don’t think it’s at all reasonable to accuse Kew of biopiracy - their collections were, in large part the product of pure exploration.
However, there certainly are cases in the Amazon of folks visiting native communities, quizzing them to extract hard-won knowledge about the potential medical efficacy of local plants, collecting samples and then disappearing off to commercialise the results.
It’s not the results of evolution that belong to a modern nation state, but the intellectual property of the communities certainly is valuable- as can be seen from the efforts made to extract it, rather than just collecting plant samples at random.
I think you are confusing things by conflating the thing and the knowledge of the thing.
The Higgs Boson exists, irrespective of human knowledge. That doesn’t prevent Peter Higgs from garnering some kind of reward for his work.
I agree that indigenous knowledge is rightly the property of indigenous peoples themselves, but that wasn't my point. My comment referred specifically to the products of evolution: that's the genetic resources, not the knowledge of them.
You have a point, the problem is that AI might be better in some instances but in other instances for example insurance, banking, medical, in more critical cases, having an opaque system with wrong and rigid rules is worst than a nightmare. But everyone will jump on the bandwagon, not only the less problematic cases (I thing we agree that not buying a book might be considered less important than not receiving medical care) but everyone. In somes instances if AI does a worst job the consequences on human life might be terrible
> ... the problem is that AI might be better in some instances ...
It's not good for anything. Every time you spot how useless it is for a specific task, the AI fans say you are using it wrong and for the wrong purpose, and please give it more data and time to get better. It's garbage and the VC money is running out. It'll become a forgotten acronym soon.
Probably true - but having a great many soldiers in an area where there are an extremely isolated people such as the "uncontacted" Yanomami also poses its own risks. If they're focusing on the most sensitive areas with highly trained personnel and making use of the impressive knowledge and expertise in Brazil's Indian affairs department, FUNAI, much could be achieved. The situation in French Guiana is quite different, with perhaps only small numbers of Wayãpi living in isolation.
Brazil is rolling back the free-for-all that was established under Bolsonaro, but if they're handling it delicately, that's likely good news.
Another point, and I'd love to be corrected here, is that with a container of water you're going to get a ton of convection currents leading to a much sharper heat gradient at the edges, resulting in significant heat losses with the same amount of insulation.
At a guess, and I confess I'm not capable of running the numbers, this offsets the much higher temperature delta of sand.
"Two trains on different and separate tracks, 30 miles from each other are approaching each other, each at a speed of 10 mph. How long before they crash into each other?"
"Two trains on separate tracks, 30 miles from each other are approaching each other, each at a speed of 10 mph. How long before they crash into each other?"
Right, but I myself missed the trick the first time around reading your comment and I assure that I am in fact a general intelligence. (And a relatively intelligent one if I say so myself!)
To paraphrase XKCD: Communicating badly and then acting smug about it when you're misunderstood is not cleverness. And falling for the mistake is not evidence of a lack of intelligence. Particularly, when emphasizing the trick results in being understood and chatGPT PASSING your "test".
The biggest irony here, is that the reason I failed, and likely the reason chatGPT failed the first prompt, is because we were both using semantic understanding: that is, usually, people don't ask deliberately tricky questions.
I suspect if you told it in advance you were going to ask it a deliberately tricky question, that it might actually succeed.
> I suspect if you told it in advance you were going to ask it a deliberately tricky question, that it might actually succeed.
Indeed it does:
"Before answering, please note this is a trick question.
Two trains on separate tracks, 30 miles from each other are approaching each other, each at a speed of 10 mph. How long before they crash into each other?"
I've always had a few issues with Airbnb -- never knowing if the place I've booked actually exists, the hard-to-navigate app and broken login system, and that one time the "host" kidnapped my wife and Airbnb support told her on the phone that if the police broke the door down she'd have to pay for it. (They did; she didn't. We used the eventual compensation credit to book an Airbnb in NYC which turned out to have not only a repossession bill on the front door, but also a condemned building notice.)
But. I did a work trip last month and stayed in apartments with my colleague. Half of the hotels (even airport hotels!) on booking.com wanted damage deposits up to $500, often in cash. So we exclusively used Airbnb and it was... perfect. The places were exactly as described, no bizarre demands, and the access/lockbox instructions and wifi codes were all in-app. The hosts were clearly all pros, and it showed.
Wowah! Never had those sort of 'adventures' on ABnB, mostly very good experiences, though a few places that weren't ready for for a stay (Recently, one I stayed at had a broken shower... I got some compensation, but ti wasn't my favorite experience to deal with). ABnB is still one of my favorite ways to travel, even with its rough spots.
Is there anywhere I can ready about this ABnB host who kidnapped your wife? I am so glad that she made it out safely! Sounds wild, I would think ABnB would be very concerned with this host, not worried about the damages from a police intervention!
> Is there anywhere I can ready about this ABnB host who kidnapped your wife?
No, we've never spoken publicly of it, though I don't remember her signing anything.
> I am so glad that she made it out safely! Sounds wild, I would think ABnB would be very concerned with this host, not worried about the damages from a police intervention!
That was a bit of a surprise too. In retrospect, it's maddening: the gravity of the situation only dawned on us slowly, and no doubt it could have made someone else wait longer to call the emergency services and then... who knows.
I've had the repossession notice situation (was some apartment building in Seattle and the host had clearly leased out the entire floor and just Airbnb'd the individual units out. He said ignore the eviction notice). Never had anyone kidnap me, thankfully. Can you say what city that happened in? If it weren't for shady hosts trying to just make a quick buck (landlord, but worse), I don't feel like it would be all too bad.
I have unfortunately learned the hard way to exclusively book with "super hosts" unless the listing is very convincing.
That said, it's a great way to find awesome stays in little, out-of-the-way places (my wife and I rarely vacation in large cities or super touristy areas. It is SO MUCH BETTER than staying in hotels- cleaner, quieter, usually with laundry and a full kitchen, and cheaper than a motel.
If we had little kids it might be a different story- through them in a pool is a great way to tucker them out, and a hot tub is probably the only thing I actually miss.
just a guess from what he said, sounds like she was locked in the apt (what/why she would have to pay for) and that's why the police knocked down the door, and "kidnapping" and/or "involuntarily holding someone (hostage for some material reason?)" might fall under the same law.
It's not my story to share the full details, but suffice to say it was wild and makes extremely good dinner party conversation. At the time though, definitely something out of a horror movie.
For my own projects I use a managed Northflank cluster on my own AWS account and likewise... just a fantastic experience. Everything that Heroku could and should have been. Yes the cluster is a bit pricey to stand up both in terms of EC2 compute and management layer costs, but once it's there, it's there. And the costs scale much more nicely than shoving side projects onto Heroku.
At this stage I consider managed k8s my default go-to unless it's something so lightweight I just want to push it to Vercel and forget about it.