> - "Prefer New" seems almost useless. You've already spent all this effort doing the job, why are you cancelling it and throwing away the results?
The obvious use-case is if the result depends on a state and the state has changed since the job has started. Examples would be updating the landing page when a new article has come in (you don't need the outdated landing page w/o the new article) or if you did a code change while compiling (assuming it's not a commit).
Usually, yes. There are a few exceptions, such as serious misconduct, tax fraud and not declaring insolvency when necessary. But as long as you're following the law, you're fine.
> I hope there's always someone willing to make this bet and release better and better open models.
What would this bet be? Training is expensive and open weights mean that for hosting you compete on price with people that don't have this item on their bill.
> Unless you have a “every commit must build” rule, why would you review commits independently?
Security. Imagine commit #1 introduces a security vulnerability (backdoor) and the features. Then #2 introduces a non-obvious, harmless bug and closes the vulnerability introduced in #1 [0]. At some point, the bug will surface and rolling back commit #2 will be an easy fix, re-introducing your bug.
Alternatively, one of the earlier commits might, for example, contain credential dumping code. Once that commit is mainlined, CI might either automatically run on it or will be able to be run on it since it's no longer marked as unsafe PR.
[0] Think something like #1 introduces array access and #2 adds a bounds-check in a function a layer above - a reviewer with the whole context will see the bounds check and (possibly) consider it fine, but to someone rolling back a commit the necessity will not be obvious.
Each of our devices spents a lot of energy dedicated to encryption. By now, all disks you did not set up manually are most likely encrypted and hardly any unencrypted package will travel out of your network. That's not to mention the tons of load and dedicated hardware we have just to terminate https and scan traffic for suspicious activity or the hardware being replaced because it's internal security triggered/broke.
In a perfect world, we could send all traffic completely unencrypted and never scan for a malicious payload, saving all that energy and hardware. But we do not live in that world and drawing the line with this minor, mostly unintrusive security feature seems strange.
Usually, it will be where the passenger side is in the cars home market. That is left for Japanese and British vehicles and right for US and German ones.
Fun fact, for single exhaust cars, the exhaust will usually be on the driver side, in order to route around the fuel tank :-)
> Probably because actual time required to manage a db server is really unpredictable.
This, and also startups are quite heterogeneous. If you have an engineer on your team with experience in hosting their own servers (or at least a homelab-person), setting up that service with sufficient resiliency for your average startup will be done within one relaxed afternoon. If your team consists of designers and engineers who hardly ever used a command line, setting up a shaky version of the same thing will cost you days - and so will any issue that comes up.
I dislike those black and white takes a lot. It's absolutely true that most startups that just run an EC2 instance will save a lot of cash going to Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean or whatever. I do host at Hetzner myself and so do a lot of my clients.
That being said, the cloud does have a lot of advantages:
- You're getting a lot of services readily available. Need offsite backups? A few clicks. Managed database? A few clicks. Multiple AZs? Available in seconds.
- You're not paying up-front costs (vs. investing hundreds of dollars for buying server hardware) and everything is available right now [0]
- Peak-heavy loads can be a lot cheaper. Mostly irrelevant for you average compute load, but things are quite different if you need to train an LLM
- Many services are already certified according to all kinds of standards, which can be very useful depending on your customers
Also, engineering time and time in general can be expensive. If you are a solo entrepreneur or a slow growth company, you have a lot of engineering time for basically free. But in a quick growth or prototyping phase, not to speak of venture funding, things can be quite different. Buying engineering time for >150€/hour can quickly offset a lot of saving [1].
Does this apply to most companies? No. Obviously not. But the cloud is not too expensive - you're paying for stuff you don't need. That's an entirely different kind of error.
[0] Compared to the rack hosting setup described in the post. Hetzner, Linode, etc. do provide multiple AZs with dedicated servers.
[1] Just to be fair, debugging cloud errors can be time consuming, too, and experienced AWS engineers will not be cheaper. But an RDS instance with solid backups-equivalent will usually not amortize quickly, if you need to pay someone to set it up.
It would be more correct to say that most _payments_ happen off-platform. They still use the Steam API for trades, but it's just bots trading with players for nothing and payment is facilitated offsite.
> Always, always log in through bookmarked links or typing them manually. Never use a link in an email unless it's in direct response to something you initiated and even then examine it carefully.
If you still want to avoid the comfort of typing in stuff manually or navigating the webinterface, logging in on a new tab and then clicking on the link is also an option.
> There's no proof that your catastrophic imaginary scenario would actually happen.
There is, just read TFA.
> Financial transactions happen all the time and are plenty cheap, they just don't do any with sanctioned entities.
And that's exactly the point. They are cheap because people are protected by the corporate veil (as long as they don't explicitly do something highly illegal). Anything where people are suddenly personally liable, they stay far away from. If we apply the same harsh punishments to all financial crime as we do for interacting with sanctioned countries, people will stay far away from interacting with that and those that don't will either demand truck loads of money or also be shady in other ways (most likely both).
> Nobody would claim such BS in good faith.
Someone reading my comment in good faith would have been able to see the point that I was making, which actually is pretty distinct from what you appear to be arguing against.
> They know what works - threaten executives with prison.
The problem is that it works too well. As you can clearly see, the solution basically everyone individually applies is to stay clear of anything that might be an issue by several miles.
If you apply the same reasoning to things like private data handling, little things like just shipping stuff will be prohibitively expensive, as no one will want to handle private data like addresses and instead go to a provider, which will need excessive amounts of cash and red tape to do anything for taking on that liability. Building stuff will become impossible, as all of the current red tape will be exponentially expanded with liability checks against any possible pollution. Founding a company will basically never happen, because no one wants to risk 20+ years in jail - and if they do, they'll simply turn to crime, because if your risk profile is that off anyway, not paying taxes will just be a minuscule risk increase.
I'm not saying that there's no political incentive to ignore those issues and keep fines low, but piercing the corporate veil is the nuclear option and there is a reason it's used so little.
If you need a lot of (not so fast) storage, 3,5" drives are still by far the best TB per €. For a lot of NAS solutions (backups, video/movie/music storage etc.) their performance is completely fine.
Plus, we're most likely talking about Gigabit networking here, so unless your workload consists of very parallel random access, this is going to be the limiting factor anyway.
It could be made harder, yes. This depends a lot on how the text is hidden and what kind of noise you use, though. Also, this would quite likely also impact legit usecases - you'll obscure intended text and details, as well.
> and successfully avoided using Llm development these last few years.
I'm not sure that's much of an achievement, to be honest. If you tried it and it turned out to be not useful for you, fine, I'm on your side. But refusing to try for the sake of it seems backwards. I mean, then why use CI, version control and those fancy IDEs anyway? Notepad is a perfectly cromulent text editor (and what is code, if not text, anyway?) and my local build.bat and deploy.bat do their job nicely and quickly.
We can talk about excessively wealthy individuals all day, but I'm pretty sure that most knowledge workers are not going to be on the receiving side of wealth redistribution. This is even more likely to be true for the programmers affected by these tech layoffs.
Don't try to contact me on other social media, I'm not active and will usually not read it.
Always open to connect: meet.hn/city/de-Nuremberg