> Sometimes, words are likely because they are grounded in ideas and facts they represent.
Yes, and other times they are not. I think the failure modes of a statistical model of a communicative model of thought are unintuitive enough without any added layers of anthropomorphization, so there remains some value in pointing it out.
I've been submitting my dad's death certificate to Facebook for 4 years now. His account is still active and people still wish him happy birthday every year.
Facebook has a process for that. You have a dedicated proof, like death certificate, upload form, and the account is supposed to change into "in memoriam".
This actually used to work well. I had to memorialize my ex boyfriend's (long time ago) profile. His mother was using it to spout scripture of homophobic nature, and message his friends acting like he was still around - to this day, I'm not sure to what end.
Once it was memorialized, I got the expected harumph message from her passed through the grapevine, and then never heard about it again. All it took was a link to his online obit from the local newspaper. Took maybe 3-4 days to process.
That was about 15 years ago, so it doesn't surprise me that program has fallen by the wayside since then.
What gets me is these tech companies are all just swimming in money, like swimming pools filled with gold coins, yet they probably only have one person doing this part time. Or just a mailing list where these requests come in and maybe someone gets off their ass to take care of it, maybe they don’t. Or they have some kind of automated system doing it that broke years ago and nobody is looking at the logs.
I'm tempted to make a keybind for this. Then I might actually start using snake_case instead of CamelCase, which on a certain level I know is better I just hate typing it.
I often find Amazon pricing to be vague and cryptic, sometimes there's literally no way to tell ehy, for example, your database cost is fluctuating all the time
Yeah that. We moved to AWS using their best practices and enterprise cost estimation stuff and got a 6x cost increment on something that was supposed to be cheaper and now we’re fucked because we can’t get out.
It’s nearly impossible to tell what the hell is going where and we are mostly surviving on enterprise discounts from negotiations.
The worst thing is they worked out you can blend costs in using AWS marketplace without having to raise due diligence on a new vendor or PO. So up it goes even more.
Not my department or funeral fortunately. Our AWS account is about $15 a month.
Are you using separate accounts per use case? That's the only real way to get a cost breakdown, otherwise you have no idea what piece of infrastructure is for what. They provide a tagging system but it's only informative if someone spends several hours a month tracking down the stuff that didn't get tagged properly.
> They provide a tagging system but it's only informative if someone spends several hours a month tracking down the stuff that didn't get tagged properly.
The way to deal with this is with an org-level Service Control Policy that enforces the tagging standards.
A resource doesn't have the right tags associated with it? It can't be created.
> The worst thing is they worked out you can blend costs in using AWS marketplace without having to raise due diligence on a new vendor or PO. So up it goes even more.
If your AWS costs are too complex for you to understand you need to employ a finops person or AWS specialist to handle it for you.
I am not saying this is desirable, but it is necessary IFF you chose to use these services. They are complex by design, and intended primarily for large scale users who do have the expertise to handle the complexity.
> If your AWS costs are too complex for you to understand you need to employ a finops person or AWS specialist to handle it for you.
The point where you get sticker shock from AWS is often significantly lower than the point where you have enough money to hire in either of those roles. AWS is obviously the infrastructure of choice if you plan to scale. The problem is that scaling on expertise isn’t instant and that’s where you’re more likely to make a careless mistake and deploy something relatively costly.
If you plan to scale to that extent, then why do you not have the money to hire the people who can use AWS? At least part time or as temporary consultants.
This:
> The point where you get sticker shock from AWS is often significantly lower than the point where you have enough money to hire in either of those roles
makes me doubt this:
> AWS is obviously the infrastructure of choice if you plan to scale.
If you can afford the large fixed cost of vertical integration, it's always cheaper to do things yourself, so the sweet spot for using providers like AWS is scaling down, not up. A managed DB lets you hire a fraction of a sysadmin or devops person from AWS.
The moment you end up paying enough to AWS to hire a sysadmin, you basically are getting an antagonistic sysadmin from AWS, whose primary goal is to make as much money off you as possible. The incentives are not aligned.
> If your AWS costs are too complex for you to understand you need to employ a finops person or AWS specialist to handle it for you.
What a baffling comment. Is it normal to even consider hiring someone to figure out how you are being billed by a service? You started with one problem and now you have at least two? And what kind of perverse incentive are you creating? Don't you think your "finops" person has a vested interest in preserving their job by ensuring billing complexity will always be there?
> Is it normal to even consider hiring someone to figure out how you are being billed by a service?
Absolutely. This was common for complicated services like telecom/long distance even in the pre-cloud days. Big companies would have a staff or hire a service to review telecom bills and make sure they weren’t overpaying.
Paradoxically you are both right. Yes, the situation seems dystopian. Yes, hiring a finops person is a sound advice once your cloud bill gets big enough.
> Yes, hiring a finops person is a sound advice once your cloud bill gets big enough.
Is it, though? At best someone wearing that hat will explain the bill you're getting. What value do you get from that?
To cut costs, either you microoptimize things, of you redesign systems to shed expenses. The former gets you nothing, the latter is not something a "finops" (whatever that is supposed to mean) brings to the table.
You need to know what to optimise which means you need to know what you are spending on.
I did say it applies IFF and only IFF you choose to use these services, and if you have chosen to use these services you have presumably decided they are good value for money. If not, why are they using AWS.
Of course the complexity and extra cost of managing the billing is something that someone who has chosen to use AWS has already factored in, right?
It's not baffling. They know what they are getting billed for, that's transparent. They don't understand WHY they are getting billed 6x of what they expected. The problem here isn't with AWS, the problem is they don't understand why their usage is at 6x.
Yes, very likely, but then why are you using AWS at all?
I think a lot of people are missing a key part of the wording of my comment, that capitalised for emphasis "IFF" (which means "if and only if").
I am absolutely certain a lot of people would save money using VMs - or at scale bare metal.
IMO a lot of people are using AWS because it is a "safe" choice management buy into that is not expensive in context (its not a big proportion of costs).
But they're also simple and cheap if you're a "one man band" trying out some personal idea that might or might not take off. Those people have no budgets for specialists.
Pricing schemes like these just make them move back to virtual machines with "unlimited" shared cpu usage and setting up services (db,...) manually.
I'm 100% on team "just rent VMs and run the software on there". It's not that hard, it has predictable price and performance, and you don't lock yourself into one provider. If you build your whole service on top of some weird Amazons
-specific thing, and Amazon jacks up their prices, you don't have any recourse. With VMs, you can just spin up new VMs with another provider.
You could also have potential customers who would be interested in your solution, but don't want it hosted by an American company. Spinning up a few Hetzner VMs is easy. Finding European alternatives to all the different "serverless" services Amazon offers is hard.
> You could also have potential customers who would be interested in your solution, but don't want it hosted by an American company.
Not happened yet. The nearest I have come to it was a requirement that certain medical information stays in the UK, and that is satisfied by using AWS (or other American suppliers) as long as its hosted in the UK.
I've worked in places where customers (especially municipalities in Germany) have questioned the use of American hosting providers. I don't know whether it has actually prevented a deal from going through (I wasn't close enough to sales to know), but it was consistently an obstacle in some markets. This is despite everything being hosted in EU datacenters.
Most small business I have dealt with use AWS do just need a VPS. If they are willing to move to a scary unknown supplier I suggest (unknown to them, very often one that would be well known to people on HN) then I suggest AWS Lightsail which is pretty much a normal VPS with VPS pricing - it significantly cheaper than an instance plus storage, just from buying them bundled (which, to be fair to Amazon, is common practice).
> AWS Lightsail which is pretty much a normal VPS with VPS pricing
Except it is still Amazon and subject to the same weird billing practices. I once terminated a Lightsail instance and they kept charging me, claiming that I didn't terminate the static IP address associated with it. The IP address itself cost the same as the instance + IP address did.
Now, that would make sense in "real" AWS, but you'd expect it to be more straightforward with a simplified service like Lightsail.
They have clear numbers for things, but it's not obvious how those numbers would map to what you're trying to run.
If I charged compute based on the number of micro-ops executed then that would be a clear definition, but the actual cost would not be something you could predict, as it would depend on what architecture of CPU you ended up running it on.
AWS is even more complicated and variable than that as for cloud storage you have to deal with not only the costs of the different storage classes, but also early deletion fees, access charges, etc. Combined it makes it impractical to work out how much deleting a file from cloud storage will save (or cost). Sure you could probably calculate it if you knew the entire billing history of the file and the bucket it is in, but do you really want to do that every time you delete a file?
While I don't know enough to say if this is intentional, as it could result from simply blindly optimizing for profit, this sort of pricing model is anti-capitalistic as it prevents consumers from truly making informed decisions. We see the same thing is the US healthcare system, where no one can actually tell you how much an operation will cost ahead of time. That creates a very inefficient (but very profitable) market.
> an "oops" in a car is not immediately life threatening either
They definitely can be. One of the viral videos of a Tesla "oops" in just the last few months showed it going from "fine" to "upside-down in a field" in about 5 seconds.
And I had trouble finding that because of all the other news stories about Teslas crashing.
While I trust Waymo more than Tesla, the problem space is one with rapid fatalities.
> But whenever someone answered the call and built a Smartphone with QWERTY keyboard, the product failed commercially, simply because also to people claiming they want such a phone, at the point of sale they were less attractive than their slimmer, lighter, all-screen counterparts.
I bought Motorola Droid 4 when it came out. I was so desperate to have a new phone with physical QWERTY, that I bought it blindly, even though it wasn't available in Europe, even though I have never seen it, even though I knew it *didn't support mobile networks* in Europe for a few months, to be fixed by an update. I had to use a coworker who was going on vacation to Florida.
When it arrived, the first thing I saw was that the black screen during boot shines bright blueish, horribly bad contrast. Then when image appeared, I've learned that it has two subpixels per image pixel, for efficiency. This made single color areas show the pixels very visibly.
Then I took a photo. The quality reminded me of a Sony Ericsson Walkman phone I had 6 years back, except the colors were much worse. Everything was blueish. It had a physical (touch) "search" button below the screen, but companies like Google didn't seem to understand why it would be useful to search for anything, so most of their apps didn't react to it. Especially Gmail.
But hey, I could touch-type any long message, and I could use SSH client conveniently (it even had a physical CTRL button).
Other than the keyboard (pretty solid too), it was one of the worst phones I ever had. So yeah, based on that model the market decided that "nobody wants keyboard phones", and the Droid 5 never came out.
Because it's easy to blame the most standing out feature.
> Because it's easy to blame the most standing out feature.
This is an odd conclusion considering that the Droid 4 was already the FOURTH iteration of a QWERTY device from that ONE brand on that ONE carrier, each iteration selling less than the one before as each faced more competition.
If you're interested, the actual reason for the end of the Droid QWERTY series was that the entire "Droid" brand was a Verizon-exclusive product-line with a big focus in sales and big budget in Marketing, just to compete with the iPhone (which was not available on Verizon until 2011).
For a vendor to win a slot in that lineup meant that Verizon Sales and Marketing put all weight behind selling that device, no matter what device it is. This made the Droid 1 and 2 a huge success, not because of the product but because of the sales channel.
But in year 3 (2011), the iPhone launched on Verizon, which put a huge dent in both sales-focus and budget of Verizon's "Droid" product-line.
Later that year, Droid 3 launched but was selling significantly less than its predecessors.
In that year, Verizon instead sold 6.5m iPhones (up from ZERO iPhones the year before).
So Motorola had to cut their losses on the already ongoing development of the Droid 4, the device was redesigned for a much lower total sales-expectation and then launched in 2012.
But the sales turned out even lower than expected: By Q4 2012 Verizon sold 14m Smartphones, with 10m (!) of them being iPhones.
The most successful Motorola device of that year was the Droid RAZR MAXX HD, a non-QWERTY flagship.
It was clear: That QWERTY keyboard didn't drive sales.
It's simpler than that. People often don't know what they want until they're actually presented with the buying decision. Economists call this stated vs revealed preferences and it's a well documented and understood phenomena.
No, I don't really accept that in the discussion about phones re: size and keyboard.
People do ask the wrong questions.
Yes, I would buy the phone with the keyboard, but the keyboard is not the single most important feature. After the Desire Z there simply was nothing comparable. If it was 400 instead of 300 I would have said no, if it was from a brand I hate because they mess up the default Android install I might have said no. If it was 1:1 like some other phone except the battery being atrocious I might have said no.
The problem is that they are changing 10 variables at a time, including size, cost, software, camera, battery, whatever.
They don't like the black one more. The yellow one caught their attention, but when it comes to the actual buying-decision, they find that drawing attention is not a feature they want.
But the existence of the yellow one helped sell the black one.
If I ask you what's 2+2, there's a single answer I consider much more likely than others.
Sometimes, words are likely because they are grounded in ideas and facts they represent.