There are several tier-two clouds that offer GPUs but I think they generally fall prey to the many of the same issues you'll find with AWS. There is a new generation of accelerator native clouds e.g. Paperspace (https://paperspace.com) that cater specifically to HPC, AI, etc. workloads. The main differentiators are:
- much larger GPU catalog
- support for new accelerators e.g. Graphcore IPUs
- different pricing structure that address problematic areas for HPC such as egress
However, one of the most important differences is the lack of unrelated web services related components that pose a major distraction/headache to users that don't have a DevOps background (which AWS obviously caters to). AWS can be incredibly complicated. Simple tasks are encumbered by a whole host of unrelated options/capabilities and the learning curve is very steep. A platform that is specifically designed to serve the scientific computing audience can be much more streamlined and user-friendly for this audience.
There's a clear distinction between these two modes of transit which is suspiciously absent in this comment: A car or truck is a quickly moving multi-ton metal box with a stopping distance of ~40 feet at only 20mph. As such, a vehicle is an immediate threat to anything around it. In contrast, bicycles may pose an indirect threat to others e.g. causing an accident (a threat posed by vehicles as well) but their immediate threat i.e. loss of life due to collision is essentially zero.
It's also worth noting that drivers tend to be less alert than bikers. Distracted drivers (e.g. drivers on their phone) are a major cause of vehicles running stops signs/lights. When bikers run stop signs/lights, they are generally very aware since their lives depend on them being aware -- they are acting with intention.
In any case, for these reasons and others, there are states that actually observe what is called an Idaho Stop for bikers which allows them to roll through stops signs and lights if it is safe to do so.
> This article compares the wages not of all CEOs, but of 300 of the best paid ones.
That is not true. The report analyzes “publicly held companies with the lowest median worker pay.” They describe the sample probably a dozen or so times in the report.
> tiny fraction of one side to millions
You are making this out to be a random sample of irrelevant companies. These are publicly traded companies of which there are a few thousand in total. The list includes companies such as Amazon, Target, Best Buy, Lowe’s, Estee Lauder, etc.
Your balance sheet is either cash, which can evaporate overnight due to rampant inflation which many economists are predicting, or you can convert some or all of that to BTC. As a company, you need to manage your cash. Companies invest their balance sheet in debt, money markets, etc. That doesn’t imply that you are somehow a fund. You have no choice but to manage your cash. I recommend just reading Michael Saylor’s posts or listen to this podcast which provides a good summary of their thinking: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1VwUjvMNeoOeyiQwP3im6G?si=z...
They are just two different solutions that have pros and cons just like any two solutions :) A few that jump out:
- Setup time: Setting up GCP, setting up a certificate, adding a static IP, etc. is not seamless/adds friction
- Autoscaling and rolling updates (no downtime)
- Team management and collaborative environment with usage tracking, permissions, etc.
- Optional integration with a pipelining service for training, tuning, deploying models in a single tool
And a point of clarification: Practically speaking, neither tool is free. Both require a cloud instance so they will cost roughly the same for the end user (Gradient also supports preemptible instances).
100% agreed that Kubernetes is overkill for many if not most deployments. We constantly see small startups prematurely adopting Kubernetes which is a costly investment in terms of building up internal knowledge and maintaining the cluster. Gradient (https://gradient.paperspace.com) is push to deploy service built on Kubernetes but you don't need to know anything about Kubernetes to use it. We feel like is the right way to leverage the power of Kubernetes unless you're at Netflix or Lyft scale. In Gradient, you just provide a model, you select an instance type (several affordable GPU options offered), and a docker container. Everything else e.g. autoscaling, auth, rolling updates, etc. is handled automatically. Kubernetes does an amazing job providing the backend for these operations but data scientists and even devops teams at startups should not be wasting time rolling their own Kubernetes cluster and installing/maintaining an inferencing service on top.
It’s poorly worded but I believe the OP was using an example where both the right and the left abuse a system for control and not necessarily the greater good. While it’s true that both the left and the right both abuse gerrymandering, I don’t believe that the latter part of the assertion that they do so purely in the pursuit of power/control is accurate or a fair representation of everyone’s motives. There are people involved in politics that truly believe in what their party stands and moreover, that the opposing party will induce some sort of harm (regardless if they’re well intentioned or not) if their policies are implemented. There is no law against Gerrymandering and this objectionable tactic will invariably be used by the opposing party. By not Gerrymandering, you are giving the opposing party a distinct advantage and the opportunity to enact policies that you are fighting against. The cynic would say that everyone involved cares only about power and while that is almost certainly true for certain individuals, it’s not true for many. It concerns me how some bad apples, opportunists, and some folks with an agenda in politics, the media, etc. have turned so many into cynics. There are many good people in politics and the media — people who care deeply about their work and their impact on society. We should find ways to discuss specifics and not in generalities.
What exactly do you expect to learn from debating anti-semites, self-proclaimed Nazis, or people that are shouting “hang Mike Pence”? https://youtu.be/Fag0aC_M0_U
Today’s news:
Joe Biden condemned the rioters who stormed the Capitol as “a bunch of thugs,” “domestic terrorists” and “white supremacists.” The president-elect specifically called out the rioters who wore shirts saying “6MWE.” “6MWE” is an anti-Semitic phrase that stands for “Six million wasn’t enough,” referring to the six million Jewish people who were murdered during the Holocaust.
If you feel like we are where we are because we’re not listening to these people than you can count me out. I have absolutely nothing to learn from a white supremacist or someone inciting violence. And likewise, they have absolutely nothing to contribute to political discourse.
I was referring the absurdity of empathizing with drivers who kill people while texting, drunk, etc. (hence the quotation). What part of that statement do you agree with?
But I’ll go further and double down and say the entire post is nonsense. Why? Because the author’s skepticism doesn’t extend to the human factor. The position is not an accurate representation of the facts i.e what causes accidents (humans) and the known data around AVs today. If AV risk is so obvious as you claim then why does the enormous amount of data show that AVs are involved in the less accidents and lead to less fatalities than cars operated by humans on a mile per mile basis? And how is the negligent human driver not obvious as a source of automobile fatalities? The notion that we are safe because we can read humans is not substantiated by anything. Maybe you believe this number of fatalities is acceptable or the best we can do but I certainly don’t. There will be flaws in autonomous vehicles, no doubt. But will there be a net reduction in automobile related fatalities as a result? Like anyone else, I can’t predict the future. But to paint a rosy picture about how our ability to read other drivers is somehow safer relative to AVs is nonsense. It just is. The data doesn’t support this argument. And separately, if we’re talking about will happen in the future, the notion that humans will ultimately prevail over AVs because for safety reasons seems preposterous. We can debate the “when” in terms of AVs but debating the “if” seems pretty out of touch with the way society has progressed with respect to our willingness to depend on technology.
> When a human kills someone with a car it is almost always in a way we can empathize
Nonsense. You can empathize with someone texting and killing someone?
This whole post reads like an attempt to appeal to people’s emotional attachment to human drivers coupled with fearmongering about robots.
You are placing far too much emphasis one our ability to “read” other drivers intent and the impact this has on automobile accident fatalities. Many accidents occur without any chance to see the offending driver e.g. accidents at night, someone switching lanes when you are in their blind spot, a drunk driver suddenly doing something erratic, etc. Moreover, this so-called advantage of human drivers is statistically meaningless unless you believe that the number of deaths due to automobile accidents is at an acceptable level and that it cannot be improved with technology, in this case, AV. I certainly don’t believe that. In the not too distant future, I believe this position will be laughable. Through adoption of autonomous vehicles, many predict we will drastically cut the number of fatalities. Will there be issues along the road? Most certainly. But as long as the overall number is falling by a significant amount, we simply cannot justify our love affair with humans “being in control”. We’ve proven to be perennially distracted, we have terrible reaction times, we have extremely narrow vision, we panic in situations instead of remaining calm, etc. and yes, these faults do lead to the deaths of children. These are not theoretical deaths like the robot scare tactic examples, these are actual deaths from human drivers.
TL;DR Businesses just pass these costs on to their consumers.
Businesses have somewhat standard target gross margins, customer acquisition costs (CAC), LTV:CAC ratio, etc. and will determine pricing based on multiples of these variables. Ad spend is often a huge component of CAC and this directly feeds into what companies need to charge their customers in order to use their products. The assumption that businesses will just eat a higher cost as sort of consumer benefactors is quite naive. I can assure you they won’t.
Antitrust does not discriminate against a single company. If Apple is in violation of antitrust regulations either today or at some point in the future, regardless of how they got there, they would be subject to the same legal action. So no, theoretically speaking and practically speaking, this is not a risk.
Because more competition in the ad space is invariably better for consumers. The alleged practices at play are illegal because they are known to harm consumers. And this is sufficient to demonstrate harm. For example, collusion is illegal not because someone necessarily sues and says “I was harmed by this” but because collusion invariably harms consumers. That’s the whole motivation behind collusion/price setting. Seems clear as day to me though I inquired with my friend who works in antitrust litigation and this was the response:
“There’s the broader principal that if they’re setting prices illegally they may not be harming consumers right now but they certainly could. Second, consumers are hurt when innovation/competition is curbed, and that is what they allege the deal’s purpose is. The bottom line is that if there were illegal deals and they can prove there were, those agreements are per se violations and you’re not really looking at consumer harm. This is what the case is alleging.”
The brief actually sums this up really well. The claims start at p. 100, which is where they allege harms but they provide good explanations throughout.
Interesting, I have never heard this argument before. I don’t think there is a case to be made that the individual entities that make up Google or Facebook couldn’t operate independently. Google Search, G Suite, Google Cloud Platform, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. are all viable businesses in their own right. Many of them would still even qualify as “tech giants” eg WhatsApp is absolutely enormous with 2B monthly active users. In other words, a breakup wouldn’t result in failure and therefore wouldn’t satisfy the too big to fail criteria.
This is actually pretty explosive news. Several of the ongoing antitrust cases involving the tech giants would require a more relaxed definition than the current antitrust standard which necessitates linking direct consumer harm. This standard was established by a somewhat radical pro-free market court decision that reversed an earlier interpretation that viewed monopolies in and of themselves as a condition subject to antitrust litigation (without the direct consumer harm piece). The current definition poses an almost insurmountable challenge for regulators as all companies need to do in order to avoid meeting the statutory requirements for antitrust is to refrain from colluding and/or abusing their market dominant position (engaging in anti-competitive practices). It seems like Google and Facebook crossed that line in a pretty blatant way which is quite shocking considering they are fully aware of the consequences. They opened themselves up with this one in a way that could lead to their undoing. Crazy stuff.
I don’t disagree that Walmart is making strides on the online shopping front but I also think they are only fighting for survival/relevance and would not produce anything new or interesting without this pressure. In contrast, companies like Amazon relentlessly develop new products and new technologies (see AWS). It’s not a response to external pressure — they don’t need to innovate to stay alive. They really embody the disruptive ambition / anything is possible mentality that fuels Silicon Valley. I sound like an Amazon fan boy but I’m the opposite haha just pointing out a difference in the DNA of these two companies.
Some folks in my network are ex-Oracle and my understanding is that the company is run by the CFO and a huge group of MBAs. Any company where the bean counters are at the helm are optimizing for things like quarterly earnings, tax savings like you said, etc. This is the stage where they milk whatever they can out of a dying cash cow. There’s nothing interesting to me about this flavor of capitalism and I don’t think it’s something America should be proud of producing. Conversely, technology innovation and the entire ecosystem in Silicon Valley is really special and almost irreplicable.
Note: I have nothing against MBAs, I just don’t think it’s appropriate for them to have the loudest voice at a non-financial institution. They serve a critical role but it’s a supporting one and not suitable to leadership / company direction.