They’re also selling a massive vehicle which was designed for macho aesthetics rather than performance. Bragging about minor aerodynamic tweaks is how they convince buyers that it’s okay to spend even more money to take the edge off of that fashion decision. It’s like the places which brag about their single use plastic using some recycled material because they don’t want to say it’d be even better if you bought something which could be reused many times instead.
It’s more that there’s a career ceiling and ageism is a looming threat. There are far more management jobs than high-level IC and for decades there’s been this thought that older engineers will be replaced with younger ones more aggressively than managers, although the big tech layoffs raise questions about whether that’s still true. I know multiple people who moved into management not because they were enthusiastic about it but because that was the best path for their career.
Some brands have definitely devalued themselves but it’s definitely not “same factories with the same materials”. If I buy a pair of jeans at Walmart and Costco, the latter ones will last years longer.
> he’s the first guy in a long long time to actually do things and not just talk about doing things
The problem is that the things he’s doing are using his office to become an actual billionaire and tearing down protections against abuse and fraud. You don’t fight “institutional rot” by enshrining the principle that loyalty trumps following the law or that policy outcomes can be purchased on the blockchain. Lying about the law and actions by his predecessors similar is building, not lowering, institutional rot by encouraging the idea that cheating is okay as long as you win (c.f. continued lying about election integrity or awarding government funds and jobs based on political affiliation).
> It's not a small problem in Canada. Funny was this patient who got rear ended like 8 times in a few years and needed time off and massage treatment every time.
This seems … reasonable? Car crashes are the leading cause of life-altering injuries in North America and back pain is notoriously hard to prove to the point that a hostile audience can’t say they’re overstated. If you look at case studies from the American opioid crisis, a disturbing number of them start with someone getting in a road or workplace accident and not having a full pain management regimen.
Think about if this happened in the real world. Like if I ran a book store, I’d expect some scammer to try to schmooze a discount but I’d also expect the staff to say no, refuse service, and call the police if they refused to leave. If the manager eventually said “okay, we’ll give you a discount” ultimately they would likely personally be on the hook for breaking company policy and taking a loss, but I wouldn’t be able to say that my employee didn’t represent my company when that’s their job.
Replacing the employee with a rental robot doesn’t change that: the business is expected to handle training and recover losses due to not following that training under their rental contract. If the robot can’t be trained and the manufacturer won’t indemnify the user for losses, then it’s simply not fit for purpose.
This is the fundamental problem blocking adoption of LLMs in many areas: they can’t reason and prompt injection is an unsolved problem. Until there are some theoretical breakthroughs, they’re unsafe to put into adversarial contexts where their output isn’t closely reviewed by a human who can be held accountable. Companies might be able to avoid paying damages in court if a chatbot is very clearly labeled as not not to be trusted, but that’s most of the market because companies want to lay off customer service reps. There’s very little demand for purely entertainment chatbots, especially since even there you have reputational risks if someone can get it to make a racist joke or something similarly offensive.
Why? It’s a pure fiat currency with limited real-world adoption, what reason will people have to favor it over the alternatives next week which they don’t have today?
Why don’t you tell us, focusing on what will be sticky? For example, will wealthy Chinese people evading capital controls or Russians avoiding sanctions stick with Bitcoin at a loss?
Seems like the main reason it's gone up all these years is "Early adopters successfully evangelized to get more mainstream bigger-fools to buy from them at elevated prices".
At this point, Bitcoin is fully mainstream and the biggest fools have bought in. People hoped that the Trump election would mean a new giant pot of dumb money (government/tax dollars) would buy bitcoin, but now that they've realized Trump will just issue his own crypto memecoins that bet is unwinding.
I don't see where the buying is going to come from in the future. Every cab driver and retiree and stay-at-home-mom already knows about bitcoin. Maybe Tether prints another imaginary 10 billion dollars to buy bitcoin and prop up the price though, so it could still maintain for a while.
The other thing I see is that only existing holders have much loyalty to that particular blockchain. Nobody else has a vested interest in using their funds to re-inflate the net worth of people who bought Bitcoin before them, and it’s easy to create a new blockchain where you’re not buying at a disadvantage.
Sure, you can create a new blockchain, but you probably won't overtake the first and most popular, however good your tech is. Also, your comment suggests, as it is often the case, that new blockchains are created not because they are better than all other cryptocurrencies, but rather as a pump-and-dump scheme, and that's the primary reason the whole field has such a terrible reputation.
In any case, first-mover advantage is another reason why it's highly likely Bitcoin will remain the cryptocurrency with the largest market cap.
First mover advantage still requires some reason to stick, especially when it costs more. Almost nobody _needs_ Bitcoin – most people don’t use it at all so they have no reason to pay more for it and there’s almost no situation where that would be the only option. The only reason to buy in is hoping that there will be more demand in the future, and that can evaporate quickly as we’ve seen because a fiat currency like Bitcoin is valued on the strength of its backers and it doesn’t have anything like a country or large industry driving demand.
> Much of the "cloud so expensive" crowd are just engineers too narrowly focused on a small part of the picture, or in denial about their ability to compete with the competence of cloud providers
This has been my experience as well. There are legitimate points of criticism but every time I’ve seen someone try to make that argument it’s been comparing significantly different levels of service (e.g. a storage comparison equating S3 with tape) or leaving out entire categories of cost like the time someone tried to say their bare metal costs for a two server database cluster was comparable to RDS despite not even having things like power or backups.
That leaves out staffing, backups, development and testing of a multi-location failover mechanism as robust as the RDS one, and a bunch of security compliance work if that’s relevant.
It’s totally possible to beat AWS and volume is the way to do it–your admin’s salary doesn’t scale be linearly with storage–but every time I’ve tried to account for all of the costs it’s been close enough that it’s made sense to put people on things which can’t be outsourced.
If this database is a large portion of the infrastructure required then the fixed-ish costs don't scale so well, but a smaller cloud/hosting company should be considered.
But I have over 60 servers. Using the pricing calculator for the two AWS SaaS services that closely align with our primary service (40+ of those servers), we'd face a cost of over $1.2M/year if reserved for 3 years and paid upfront — that's for the service alone, I haven't added any bandwidth costs, or getting the data into those systems, and I've picked the minimum values for storage and throughput as I don't know what these should be. (Probably not the minimum.)
Add the remaining compute (~20 decent servers), a petabyte-scale storage pool, and all the rest, and the bill would likely exceed our entire IT budget including hardware, hosting, cloud services we do use, and all the salaries.
My rough estimate is our infrastructure costs would increase 8-10 times using AWS, our staff costs wouldn't reduce, and the risk to the budget would increase with variable usage.
This is tax money being spent, so I am asked every few years to justify why we aren't using cloud. (That's why I'm putting this much effort into a HN reply, the question was asked again recently.)
I know someone working in another country on essentially the same system for that country. They went all-in on AWS and pay every 1-2 months what we spend in a year, but have a fraction of our population/data.
They haven’t been truly novel if you want to say that, for example, the Lisa was covering Xerox PARC ideas but I think you’d have to ignore a lot of significant work to say they didn’t substantially innovate in GUIs, personal assistants and handwriting recognition (Newton), touchscreen behavior (iPhone), etc.
The key thing is that they tend not to ship things which aren’t mature enough to be useful (Vision Pro and Apple Intelligence being cautionary tales about why) and voice assistants just aren’t doing a whole lot for anyone. Google and Amazon have been struggling to find a market, too, and it’s rare to find someone who uses those dramatically more than Apple users do Siri. I think most of the big advances need something close to AGI: if you can’t describe something in a short command, it’s usually much faster to use a device with a screen and a lot of the useful tasks need a level of security and reliability which requires actual reasoning to deliver.
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