spark947

@spark947@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Europe is looking for alternatives to US cloud providers⁩ ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you are dicounting how simple most cloud applications are - compute cores, bucket storage and virtual Networks make up the vast majority, with block storage and serverless compute probably making up a second to everything else being a distant third. I agree that there is specialization involved, but I also believe that regulation could go a long way to ensuring better access and making it possible for more competition. Right now, only a few companies have a monopoly on the datacenter infrastructure itself.

  This is actually a lot more similar to power Utilities, which hides a vast and complex system of demand based generation that is hidden by ISOs. A regulatory system could work really well, and deliver much more and better service at lower prices. Otherwise we will see Cloud providers raising prices and offering deals more towards the large enterprises that can build billing support, which was the original complaint.

  Not that I think we are close to that. Legislation around technology is woefully bad and behind in the US at least.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Europe is looking for alternatives to US cloud providers⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The government can get a lot tougher on companies than they currently are in the US. There is a large and somewhat unstoppable public distrust of corporations that will swing the pendulum away from distrust of the government. Whatever part of the federal government that people didn’t trust is having their image re-rehabilitated by DOGE’s idioacy anyway. Corporations will do sneaky lobbying and everything, but at the end of the day they will follow laws that are enforced properly. They don’t have miliataries or private police forces. At least not yet.

  I would hope to see cloud service providers fall more under a utility type of regulation, and have the government set up regional ISOs that can buy and distribute services to everyone at regulated prices, and adhere to certain computing standards. This is why I don’t get too mad at billing deals and schemes - if computation, storage, and virtual network infrastructure can be standardized and treated as a utility it would be great for everyone! They deserve to get paid for the power they have to consume and the maintenance and operations cost of a datacenter.

  Instead, we see these companies play a very tricky game using the egress costs to capture traffic and activity within their infrastructure. The same strategy applies at Google with ads dictating browser development, at Amazon’s winners and losers based retail business, and everyone’s race to the bottom stealing data for hungry AI model training. It doesn’t work Jim. We need to establish fair legislation for democratizing access to computing and storage at a large scale, the same way we already did with internet access. Instead, we are seeing it go the wrong way with the corporate war against net neutrality from service providers, which is bad for cloud services anyway. In my area, cox was doing some bad stuff, which finally prompted google to come in and deliver fiber they had been teasing for around a decade, which drove costs way down for internet. So hopefully all this stuff will work itself out, but we really need to focus on empowering everyone with access to computation and ownership of their data.

  For work, I am lucky enough to work for an employer that has enough pull with AWS that they essentially have to listen to us. But I prefer their open market and transparent, if complicated, pricing to trying to work though a deal with a dozen different other software platform vendors all trying to close business and screw over our clients. Even their sales people are pretty well incentivize to drive service consumption rather than promote lock in. This is leading to a huge problem in AI, but once again I respect the approach AWS is taking with hugging face and making it about flexible consumption than what microsoft and google are doing, trying to shove AI down your throat.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Europe is looking for alternatives to US cloud providers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, vendor lock in is always a concern around AWS. I am of 2 minds about this - the real trade off with on demand resources is cost as AWS has to essentially have hot instances ready for customers, which cost them more to run. So it definitely makes sense to have these billing options that help them save operational overhead and then pass the savings on to their customers.

  But it is a fine line. What should be AWS responsibility and what should be the customers? Amazon’s whole deal is trying to step over it it ways that will ultimately be monopolistic. Personally, I am much more concerned with the egress costs, which is their true and much sneakier vendor lock in trap.

  To me, the only answer is government regulation. We should treat cloud resources as a utility and regulate it as such to make sure that the large players don’t abuse their monopoly on compute power and servers. Instead, the government’s answer has been to do away with net neutrality, which really only makes them more powerful because they still have a monopoly on the physical resources. This is one of the reasons why I have become self hosted for my own personal technology - but for work there are a lot of benefits to just shutting up and working with a monopoly that at least has to try to drive down costs at some level to prevent regulatory action.

  These services only make sense at scale and with large projects that need a ton of planning everyday. AWS will take the little people’s money if they are willing to give it, but they aren’t truly interested in their business.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Europe is looking for alternatives to US cloud providers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, that is why I said enterprise scale. Pricing for personal stuff is pretty terrible, although it is reasonable in some ways.

  I find AWS prices to be very reasonable, but it is much different than going race to the bottom deal hunting on hetzner. That’s definitely where you want to go deal hunting, but it isn’t suitable for a lot of enterprise applications.

  With the bigger CSPs, you really have to take care of the billing yourself to get the best value. Last year, my team was able to cut our client’s cloud bill by 85% while improving service. Kind of unfair - AWS will happily take your money to do stuff incorrectly. They have business units at AWS around customer success that aims to help cut costs, but I can kind of tell they aren’t a priority at the company compared to account execs. Pretty normal for this business, unfortunately.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Europe is looking for alternatives to US cloud providers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Let’s be clear here: I would never say about oracle.

  But yeah, idk what to tell you. What cloud vendor have you had a better experience with than AWS? Genuinely curious.

  Enterprise is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I would never use them for my smaller scale personal stuff.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Justice Department asks judge to order Google the "immediate" sale of Chrome⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Just make them put support for manifest v2 back.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Europe is looking for alternatives to US cloud providers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  For lower end, absolutely. For higher end enterprise space? Not so much. For me, AWS is the gold standard for product support and price at enterprise scale, and I do think I have ever worked on an enterprise application that could orchestrate 100% on its own (only for bad reasons, this is what I do at home).

  I do hope a lack of reliance on these services leads to better technological solutions to come out of Europe and make its way back to the states. The enterprise made the Faustian bargain with these CSPs, and although the cloud networking is somewhat nice, the applications are a disaster.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I’m not even that down on using LLMs to search through and organize text that it was trained on. But in it’s current iteration? It’s fancy stack overflow, but stack overflow runs on like 6 servers. I’ll be setting up some LLM stuff self hosted to play around with it, but I’m not ditching my brain’s ability to write software any time soon.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  What are you guys working on where chatgpt can figure it out? Honestly, I haven’t been able to get a scrap of working code beyond a trivial example out of that thing or any other LLM.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does this pic show that Elon Musk doesnt know SQL?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Another commentor pointed out a legitimate use case, but it’s not even worth thinking about that much. De-duplocated is usually a word you use in data science to talk aboutakong sure your dataset is “hygienic” and that you aren’t duplicating data points. A database is much different because it is less about representing data, and more about storing it in a way that allows you to perform transactions at scale - retrieval, storage, modification, etc. Relational databases are analyzed in terms of data cardinality which essentially describes tradeoffs in representation between speed of retrieval (duplications good) vs storage efficiency (duplications bad).

  The issue is that Elon is so vague and so off the mark that it is very hard to believe that he even has the first clue about what he is a talking about. Even you are confused just by reading it. It is all a tactic to convince others that he is smarter than he is while doing extreme damage to the hardworking people that actually make this stuff possible. Have you noticed that the man has never come to a conclusion that wasn’t in his interests? This is not honest intellectualism, or discussion based on technical merit. It’s self serving propaganda.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Open Source Software and Corporate Influence.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  No I agree, that’s what I’m trying to say. Open source is the only way to create better software, but the software we have is pretty good. Better software won’t cure what ails us.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Open Source Software and Corporate Influence.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a useless discussion open source is as good as to is gonna get technology wise. Their will always be a problem as long as profitable anterprise is what people rely on to make a living and feed their families. Fixing that requires more than open source software.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI is Stifling Tech Adoption.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly, might be a good thing kinda. Adoption in the front end world is out of control.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does this pic show that Elon Musk doesnt know SQL?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  As someone explained in another comment, you often duplicate information due to rules around cardinality to gain improvements in retrieval an. structure. I would be pretty worried if SSSNs were being used as a a widepread primary key in any set of tables - those should generally be UUIDs that can be optimized for gashing while avoiding collisions.

  Even if we are being generous to Elon, we could assume that social security payments are processed on mainframes given how many have to go out and the legacy nature of the program. Most mainframe shops I know have adapted an SQL interface for records in some capacity, but who knows what he is looking at.

  Government federal IT is done at a per agency basis. I would say oracle database is pretty much the most licensed piece of software the government does use outside of Redhat Linux and windows desktop.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does this pic show that Elon Musk doesnt know SQL?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It really is baffling trying to make sense of what he is saying. It’s like the only explanation that makes any sense at all is that he has no idea what he is talking about. Even if he knew just cursory knowledge about database cardinality you wouldn’t say stuff so stupid.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does this pic show that Elon Musk doesnt know SQL?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Excel is accounting workbook software, it is not suitable for data storage. Although people certainly use it that way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does this pic show that Elon Musk doesnt know SQL?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s an insanely idiotic thing to say. Federal government IT is myriad, and done at a per agency level. Any relational database system, which the federal government uses plenty of, uses SQL in one way or another. Elon doesn’t know what he is talking about at all, and is being an ultimate idiot about this. Even in the context of mainframe projects thatif we are giving elong the benefit of doubt about referring to, most COBOL shoprbibknow have adapted to addressing internal data records using an SQL interface, although obviously in that legacy world it is insanely fractured and arcane.