I met a youngster on Boca del Toro island in Panama a decade or so ago. I was about to be fired from my FAANG job so I used up years and years of vacation for one big trip before I was let go. We hung out for a few days while I was there (I don’t recommend the place at all btw). He cashed out from early twitter and was setting up surf schools all of the world. All he did was travel, surf, drink, and fuck. I’m still angry that laughed at all the dumb startups in the late 2000s instead of joining them. But this guy did what you’re suggesting, and I think there are many more unknown techbros who did it too.

Setting up an international chain of surf schools actually sounds quite ambitious and stressful, though.

I imagine stress is relative to risk. I’d hope someone who has retirement on lock wouldn’t risk that for a side project.

Though for me the risk of the shops failing and people being out of a job would still stress me heh

I’m near that magic number age with a few million but I also have health issues and I’m terrified all of it will be spent on treatment because of how the USA is being governed into flames by the current corrupt administration. It never ends, when I was young and healthy I saved as hard as a could for my old age and didn’t vacation. Now I’m there and there’s zero guarantee of safety because of the rightward shift of politics in this country. Maybe you just have to say “fuck it” like gen z. Because being a paranoid gen x sure sucks.

Same here. I may be thinking about this wrong, but in my view, that "magic number" is a constantly increasing target, increasingly unapproachable. I once thought I could retire on $1M saved--at a 4% withdrawal rate, that's 40K per year... add social security and I could probably do it in a very low cost of living state. 5 more years later, when everything costs a little bit more, and my lifestyle inflated a little, I started thinking that the number I could safely retire with was $2M. A few more years of inflation and cost increases later, plus a kid that needs college, I started thinking I had to shoot for $5M in order to be safe. Some more years pass, more societal safety nets are burning down, and now I'm starting to feel the pangs of old age and potential health problems, I feel like that number is even larger and further out of reach....

You can move to somewhere that has a lower cost of living. It's not unusual at all for people to move when they retire. There's a whole big amazing world out there and one of the best decisions I ever made was squeezing in enough travel when I was young, that it totally altered my mindset.

(That, and reading The 4 Hour Workweek. Once Tim Ferriss became famous, legions of people picked it apart and called him a bullshit artist. I took inspiration from that book, and went and lived it. 20 years after he published it I bumped into him completely by chance in a cafe in Phuket Thailand, which was an incredible moment, here were two guys, for decades just doing the thing that everyone had said was impossible or impractical, and we were two of the first to have the exact same idea and end up in the exact same place once Covid restrictions started to relax around the globe.)

I'll grant that kids significantly alter the numbers.

This is complete utter hogwash.

Up until recently, you could hit somebody else's S3 endpoint, no auth, and get 403's that would charge them 10s of thousands of dollars. Coudnt even firewall it. And no way to see, or anything. Number go up every 15-30 minutes in cost dashboard.

Real responsibility is 'I have 100$ a month for cloud compute'. Give me a easy way to view it, and shut down if I exceed that. That's real responsibility, that Scamazon, Azure, Google - none of them 'permit'.

They (and well, you) instead say "you can build some shitty clone of the functionality we should have provided, but we would make less money".

Oh, and your lambda job? That too costs money. It should not cost more money to detect and stop stuff on 'too much cost' report.

This should be a default feature of cloud: uncapped costs, or stop services

Lambda has 1mil free requests per month, so there’s a chance it would be free depending on your usage. But still, it’s not straightforward at all, so I get it.

Perhaps requiring support for bill capping is the right way to go, but honestly I don’t see why providers don’t compete at all here. Customers would flock to any platform with something like “You set a budget and uptime requirements, we’ll figure out what needs to be done”, with some sort of managed auto-adjustment and a guarantee of no overage charges.

Ah well, one can only dream.

> but honestly I don’t see why providers don’t compete at all here

Because the types of customers that make them the most money don't care about any of this stuff. They'll happily pay whatever AWS (or other cloud provider) charges them, either because "scale" or because the decision makers don't realize there are better options for them. (And depending on the use case, sometimes there aren't.)

I low key live in fear that if I die, my personal AWS bill will get out of control and consume my entire estate before probate court can award my assets.

I just don't use AWS for personal projects. I got stung once with a $100 bill. Never again. I just can't accept unlimited liability like that in my personal life.

I don't know why every single person here insists on budget based limits. What you want is resource based limits with throttling and a calculator that takes your resource limits to determine the averaged monthly bill and a traffic spike bill.

Then the goal would be to set the resource limits to something you are happy with.

Yes, this is a pain in the ass to set up and AWS will probably never implement this, but it is the correct solution.

Because infinite downside makes the EV of using AWS infinitely negative. The biggest risk of any business using AWS is that AWS bankrupts you.

I do my test infrastructure with prepaid credit cards. If billing goes over, I just drop the account and start again.

Last time I was looking into this, is there not up to an hour of delay for the billing alerts? It did not seem possible to ensure you do not run over your budget.

This a logical fallacy of false dilemma.

I made it clear that you ask the user to choose between 'accept risk of overrun and keep running stuff', 'shut down all stuff on exceeding $ number', or even a 'shut down these services on exceeding number', or other possible ways to limit and control costs.

The cloud companies do not want to permit this because they would lose money over surprise billing.

Isn't that the definition of metered billing?

Cats doing tricks has a limited budget.

YES!

Where do they fit a motor, battery, controls, and transmission on a 4kg bike? I can’t find any online to buy and I would expect it’s a poorly kept secret.

The first thing I did when I signed up for Claude was have it analyze my website for security holes. But it only recommended superficial changes, like the lifecycle of my JWTs. After reading this, I’m wondering if a prompt asking it to attack the website would be better than asking it where it should be beefed up. But I no longer pay for Claude, and I suspect it won’t give me instructions on how to attack something. How would one get past this?

Try framing your prompts as security assessments rather than attacks - ask the model to identify "potential vulnerabilities" or "security considerations" while providing specific technical details about your architecture.

Yes.

Exactly.

There’s the problem. It wasn’t a political ad for Al Gore, it was published 8 years before he ran. It just so happened he was actually interested in improving things and leaning on smarter people for policy, but that made half the country go “Eeeewww… facts! Elitism!! we want someone dumber we can have a beer with for president!” That was literally an argument in the 2000 election: who would you rather drink with. Then GWB put on his yokel hat and yokel accent and dumbed it down so that people wouldn’t be scared. Instead of voting for someone with a plan, they voted for some rich cokehead fail-son from the Bush dynasty because he seemed more “of the people”. But Al Gore takes the flak for trying to raise awareness. Unbelievable how dumb this country is as a whole. And 10x dumber now that the current POTUS is unwriting history at rocket’s pace.

Something something Florida recount and now those people are in trumps cabinet and even in the supreme court. The federalist society has been subverting democracy for a long time.

And did you stick around to see what happens after they go full tabula rasa? I have: they fall so far behind they close up shop. The proper response is to move slowly and intentionally and use indicators. Like ‘design thinking’, with prototyping and feedback and incremental feedback, not burn shit to the ground because planning is too hard mentality. But I realize that’s what shareholders demand. And now that gov’t is being run like a business, prepare to see bankruptcies.

Fortunately other, more rational countries, will fill the gaps. They’ve just been complacent because the US was on its game for so long. Especially the ESA.

That’s a good way to put it. I hadn’t realized how gamified it has become. I originally felt like Claude and I were a team, but it goes off the rails so much that I find myself pulling the lever with increasing febrility. Fortunately I’m old enough to know when to quit but I’ve seen a friend just disappear into coaxing Claude for hours instead of writing code himself. I wonder if he’s got Claude gambling addiction

I’ve played around with this (the KIT-CSK-BGT60TR13C). It is a very interesting gadget and the kit doesn’t need much configuration. In an afternoon I made a car detector for my bike that detects the presence of an approaching car from behind. I thought I had a winning startup idea then found out this idea has existed for years. :(

I'd like to know about this product, got more info? Not a bot, just a cyclist who's fed up of drivers who don't care about my safety.

Garmin do one called Varia

Can it detect the distance of the car? If so what's the range/accuracy like?

Could you share how you did it? Interested in this as a hobby

Those implementations might still suck.

They don’t suck. The Garmin one is also a rear light. It integrates with the bike computer to show detections.

When a car approaches from behind you get a visualisation on the bike computer showing you how far away the car is and an audio alert. If the car is approaching fast you get a different audio alert and the light flashes differently to warn the approaching car. It also detects up to three cars.

There might be improvements to be had but the implementation is pretty solid.

Ah. The Garmin Varia looks like it’s $200-300. Would be hard to go up against a brand like that, but wonder if you could compete on cost. The margins look great.

There is tons of cheaper alternatives now. Some chinese brand. The implementation is particularly hard to get right (how to avoid object that enters the radar field of view like passing next to a fence among other tricky scenario like a car that follow at the same speed as you but suddenly accelerate to pass you, etc). A lot of competiting radars will have false positives or negatives. That’s why Garmin is still the favorite product on the market. Wahoo just released one as well, and the reviews are quite positive so far. Bryton makes one, Magene, Giant, Trek, igpsport, etc.

Not even that. I think I had mine for under 150 (on some sale). Also, there are a few cheaper alternatives, but some tests have shown them to be less reliable (either false positives, or worse - false "all clear").

There's one feature they all miss. They only measure relative velocity to You. That's definitely better than nothing, but in my experience the most dangerous drivers aren't necessarily the fastest ones, but those who pass too closely. So, something like "angle of approach" measurement would be a feature I'd personally be willing to switch my Varia for something else.

There's some cheaper knockoffs but they tend to struggle with false positives, poor integration with our device, or weird noncompliant USB ports. (Most versions of the Garmin are still micro-usb so they're not perfect either)