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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Ruby was the most approachable language I found and sheparded me from my limits of bash scripting and Windows batch file scripting into the next level.

    The author derides Ruby’s easy readability and syntax because it has issues scaling to large enterprise applications. I don’t disagree there is a performance ceiling, but how many hundreds of thousands of Ruby projects never rose to that level of need? The author is also forgetting that Ruby had Rubygems for easy modular functional additions years before Python eventually got pip.

    I don’t write in Ruby anymore, and Python has evolved to be much more approachable than it was when Ruby was in its prime, however if someone came to me today saying they wanted the easier programming language to learn that could build full applications on Linux, OSX, Windows, and the web, I’d still point them to Ruby with the caveat that it would have limits and they would be better served by Python in the long run.



  • but I think the realistic reading is it was simply a kickback to fortune 500 companies that got these politicians elected.

    If there were no legitimate geopolitical reasons, then the “simply a kickback” would be much more plausible. Also, if it was a single source company, then “simply a kickback” would look true. Additionally, if was perhaps just domestic companies “simply a kickback” would certainly be even more likely. Lastly, the Chips act wasn’t just about production domestically. It also blocked sales/exports of completed high end chips and chip making equipment to China. If the Chips act was “simple a kickback” you wouldn’t do all that other stuff, and you certainly wouldn’t allow foreign winners (like Taiwan’s TSMC).

    Was their rewards because of industry lobbying? Certainly. However, unless you’re in a purely communist system of government where all the companies are owned by the state, you’re always going to have private companies benefiting from government spending, tax breaks, and subsidies. As to this just applying to fortune 500 companies, there isn’t really a “mom and pop” semiconductor industry making handfuls of chips at a time except outside of engineering sample that are used in R&D for fortune 500 companies.


  • The worst of it hasn’t happened yet. The point where consumers can no longer afford to consume is coming.

    Its mostly already arrived.

    “As of June 30, the top 20% of earners accounted for more than 63% of all spending”

    source

    This means that the other 80% of Americans represent only 37% of the spending done today. If a company is looking to maximize profits the typical path is to do so by marketing to the group where they could earn the most money. That is less and less the bottom 80% of Americans.


  • The creator in that video seems to think the Chips Act subsidies were to benefit consumers by having affordable memory produced domestically. That wasn’t the goal. The goal was to derive drive GDP by having another source of domestic production, and drive job growth/tax revenue from workers working at the domestic facility. Lastly, it was to have strategic domestic production decoupled from other nations so we, as a nation, could not be held hostage by another nation (like we do to so many other nations) for crucial (pun very much intended) resources we need.

    Nothing about that is about making RAM cheaper for retail consumers.


  • The promise of “fiber to the home” is still mostly unrealized, but those trunk lines are out there with oodles of “dark fiber” ready to carry data… someday.

    Counterintuitively, I’m seeing “fiber to the home” deployed more in rural an exurb areas. My guess this is because its lower density meaning installing and maintaining copper repeaters becomes more expensive than laying long distance, low maintenance, fiber. Additionally its easier to obtain permits because there is far less existing infrastructure to interfere with right of way and critical services.

    We got fiber to the home in our exurb about 4 years ago here in the USA. Its really cheap too. 500Mb/s is $75, 1Gb/s $100, and 5Gb/s I think is $200 per month.


  • Again I get your point… but no reasonable plumber would make that mistake.

    To extend your analogy, agentic AI isn’t the “reasonable plumber”, its the sketchy guy that says he can fix plumbing and upon arrival he admits he’s a meth addict that hasn’t slept in 3 days and is seeing “the shadow people” standing right there in the room with you.

    I absolutely understand what happened here. The point is there is no benefit to these Agentic AIs because they need to be as supervised as a monkey with a knife… why would I ever want that? let alone need that

    I can see applications for agentic AI, but they can’t be handed the keys to the kingdom. You put them in an indestructible room with a hammer and a pile of rocks and say “please crush any rock I hand you to be no bigger than a walnut and no smaller than an almond”. In IT terms, the agenic AI could run under a restrictive service account so that even if they went off the rails they wouldn’t be able to damage any thing you cared about.


  • You gotta find a better way to present this other than making it sound like Torvalds is a baby taking a shit. “The one who makes” I’m dead.

    Its capitalized “Makes” which I took to mean a proper name instead of the verb. So this is referring to the GNU compiler Make. Since this is posted in /c/linuxmemes, I think its a safe post for the audience to know the difference.






  • Edit: Redacted a mistaken identity

    I’m not sure you understand what this article is or how our markets work.

    The simple fact that somebody was able even to bet a billion is insanity that should never be possible to begin with. Nobody should have a billion dollars, let alone have so much that you can just safely bet a billion dollars

    He doesn’t have a billion dollars. He’s a hedge fund manager that manages (at least) a billion dollars collectively of other people’s investment money. Its that money he’s betting.

    Them he’s betting.yhst the economy will crash, basically, and we’re okay with that shit.

    No, he’s not. He’s betting against only two companies: Nvidia and Palantir. He has a relatively small bet against Nvidia ($187.6 million), and HUGE bet against Palantir ($912 million). I’m not sure I’d bet against Nvidia yet, but Palantir is co-founded by Peter Theil, trump’s deputy chief of staff which job has a large influence on White House policy. If you ever watched the TV show The West Wing, this would be the Josh Lyman character’s job.

    We already know trump’s favor swings widely and if politics are going against trump (as recent news show) then its not unbelievable that Theil might get the boot or at least trump would punish Theil by killing lucrative government contracts to buy Palantir services.

    All of this should be illegal as fuck, and this guy belongs in a jail cell

    The point of shorting a stock exists so that the market can express a view that they believe a stock will fail. This is an important “canary in the coal mine” for the rest of the market. The other option is a policy that you can’t criticize a company with any meaning and investors continue to put money into failing/risky companies without this important indication of the risk.

    Frankly I don’t like your idea of jailing someone that says “The emperor has no clothes”.


  • The fact that he was even able to make that bet is incredible. How deluded do you have to be to think the AI bubble won’t burst?

    Nobody believes the AI investment/growth trajectory we have right now will continue for infinity. What nobody knows is: when the correction will occur.

    • Do you pull your investments out now and sit on the sidelines waiting for the fallout while your principal loses value daily from inflation?
    • What does the correction look like when it happens? Does all the value evaporate on day 1, the first week, a month? This is important to figure out for this strategy to know when to go back in.

    This is the info/decisions you’d need as an average investor. What Burry is doing is the riskiest type of investments with shorting the market. If growth continue to occur he and his fund will have to pay for the growth to those whose shares he borrowed to short.

    In summary, its not enough to know that a bubble exists, but to profit from it you have to figure out when it will burst and when the full burst is done.



  • There’s a huge gulf between pub clowd and shitty on-prem.

    We agree on this.

    Redundant everything piped in. Redundant everything set up. We run VMs by terraform. Wheeeeee

    For that customer of yours, is that a single datacenter or does is represent multiple datacenters separated by a large distance across a nation, or perhaps even across national borders?

    Point is, posing shitty on-prem as the alternative to the clowd is moving the goalposts a bit.

    I think ignoring that shitty on-prem represented a large part of IT infrastructure prior cloud providers is ignoring a critical point. Was it possible to have well-run enterprise IT data centers prior to cloud? Sure. Was everyone doing that? Absolutely not, I’d argue the majority had at least a certain level of jank in their infra and that that floor is raised with cloud providers. Just the basic facilities is enterprise grade irrespective of the server or app config.



  • That work is still being done by someone in a data centre. But all these jobs went from in-house positions to the centres.

    The difference is scale. When in-house, the person responsible for managing the glycol loop is also responsible for the other CRACs, possibly the power rails, and likely the fire suppression. In a giant provider, each one of those is its own team with dozens or hundreds of people that specialize in only their area. They can spend 100% on their one area of responsibilty instead of having to wear multiple hats. The small the company, the more hats people have to wear, and the worse to overall result is because of being spread to thin.


  • We need to ditch cloud entirety and go in house again.

    For many many companies that would be returning to the bad-old-days.

    I don’t miss getting an emergency page during the Thanksgiving meal because there’s excessive temperature being reported in the in-house datacenter. Going into the office and finding the CRAC failed and its now 105 degree F. And you knew the CRAC preventive maintenance was overdue and management wouldn’t approve the cost to get it serviced even though you’ve been asking for it for more than 6 months. You also know with this high temp event, you’re going to have an increased rate of hard drive failures over the next year.

    No thank you.