Yeah he recently built a rack over a weekend and has been planning to fill it.
He has decent business takes on tech, the podcast/articles are worth paying attention to. The actual tech takes are probably too dumb for the hn audience, but you aren't the target audience.
> Or should things be taken one step further to always use a vpn or similar
Yes. The vast majority of software is not hardened enough to be exposed to malicious actors. Any kind of control panel, device management interface, NAS/file sharing protocol, remote desktop protocols, and anything else that isn't explicitly designed to be a public service should be protected with a hardened outer layer like a VPN, SSH tunnel, or mutual TLS/client certificate authentication.
The sales pitch should change from "probabilistically we will NEVER lose your data" to "you are most likely to lose your data due to wars, terrorists, software bugs, someone losing the master encryption key, the government forcing us to...".
Offsite backups are sadly rare these days, and aws sales is the main reason why.
My experience was I thought everyone was aphantasic and it was a misunderstanding of language.
Then one day when I was 18 I went to the pub and played pool with/chatted up some girls for one of the first times. When I got home I went to bed and closed my eyes and could see the whole scene vividly for the first time ever. I had been drunk plenty of times before so assumed I had been drugged, told my parents and just got a nonchalant 'wtf' reaction.
Since then I've mostly assumed it's a skill issue, and in the past 15 years have maybe visualized ~3 times under similar circumstances (usually sleepy, usually sexual).
I've spent a few meditative sessions trying to train, and gotten the sense that it might be close, but it seems like it would take a good chunk of dedication on my part to make it happen.
If you accept that drugs/trauma can cause altered states then can't you also accept that some people have the altered state as their default?
Modern politeness encourages us to think of all humans as more or less the same, which I think causes a default minimization of difference mindset.
One thing that really blew my mind in my 20's was learning that asians have a different type of earwax -> usually white and dry instead of yellow and waxy. It really shocked me that I was never taught that in school, and if people are unaware of common physical differences I am sure we are largely unaware of common mental difference.
> If you accept that drugs/trauma can cause altered states then can't you also accept that some people have the altered state as their default?
Indeed, that acknowledgement by the GP undermines his entire argument:
> I see things with my eyes, experience has taught me that when I cover my eyes I cannot see things, when I close my eyes I cannot see things. That is what seeing is. I cannot see with my ears, I cannot see with my fingers.
What he and others here don't grasp is that we see with our brains, and the signals that the brain processes do not have to come from the eyeballs.
I spent about a year as a consultant in the AWS space, visited about ~15 clients of varying sizes.
More often than not there's a single pg aurora instance responsible for 50%+ of the bill. Even worse are the serverless aurora offenders.
All the indexes and guarantees of PG don't come cheaply and dynamodb pricing is not cheap but comparatively reasonable. It really is a good product if you know how to use it.
I think people overlook the natural experience of Dunning-Kruger we all have.
You think you are good at chess because you win against your neighbour, then eventually a class mate absolutely embarrasses you multiple times and you realize there is a whole world you don't know, and before now you didn't know that world existed. Then you eventually beat your classmate before getting whomped by the beginner in the chess club and the whole cycle happens again. After this happens a few times, you should begin to find each time less surprising than the last.
To me this is the essence of DK and not really something to be proven/disproven by maths. You don't know what you don't know, and it takes some learning before you are wise enough to realize there are unknown unknowns.
> instead showed that both experts and novices underestimate and overestimate their skills with the same frequency. “It’s just that experts do that over a narrower range,” he wrote to me.
I think this is trying too hard on the researcher's part... if the data were reinterpreted such that small estimation errors are considered correct then the effect would reappear.
That one time I was able to beat a 'good' chess player at school :-) I still remember that one. Usually I lost, but... I also came to the chess club rather to play Magic: the Gathering, so I didn't mind.
With that in mind, it has been a while (more than twenty five years) but what you said sums up the one time I went to my first Magic: The Gathering tournament, by having to build a deck with a limited amount of packs. You don't have the advantage of owning any power cards there (unless if you are lucky). What happened? Well, you could see who was doing well based on where they sat. And, I got absolutely wrecked! But, I also had a very bad (useless) rare [Shauku, Endbringer]. Which I shouldn't even have put in my deck, but I still did, cause.. it was a rare! [1] Still, there's much more luck to be had with decent commons and uncommons. In later tournaments (different types), I did better, and my fav experience (apart from some of my cards being stolen on a later tournament at that location) was the one where you'd buy a bunch of packs, open a pack up, and pass the packs on. Some people would pick only meta cards, some people would only pick expensive ones, others would always pick rare ones. If you don't intend to win, that could be a decent strategy. But I went for the strategy where I would pick the best cards for my deck, and that worked out well.
When "natural experience" gets tossed around, I tend to immediately think: What about the _opposite_ natural experience?
In this case, it would be something like: Most people who are earnestly interested in a subject are so inclined to look upward (at the world elite) or to their side (at their own competition) that they tend to forget how much of humanity is increasingly left beneath them. We perceive everything we have already learned as "the easy stuff," the stuff we will never learn as "black magic," and the stuff we are currently learning as "getting interesting." But these labels are always relative.
reply