Let’s be realistic. I love long distance train journeys, but mainly for recreation. Being on a train for 3-5 days is pretty exhausting no matter how comfortable. I’ve done the 30 day Amtrak pass before and it was fantastic but I wouldn’t be looking forward to that if it was a work trip where I want to fly in and then get back to my family as fast as possible. There’s no way that can compare to a 5-6 hour flight+2 hours at the airport.
Amtrak is decent on very specific routes and still an absolute joke to anyone who has used trains in Europe, Japan, Taiwan, etc, and no personal experience but I'd imagine China too. My friend takes the Amtrak route up and down the Pacific coast precisely because she's stuck on a train for days and can't be disturbed while doing boring paperwork as an anti-procrastination strategy. Although the observation cars do have great views.
People who have used trains in Japan or Taiwan - islands have never used a train that is anything like Amtrak does and so have no comparison. Even in Europe long distance cross border rail is in most cases pretty bad as well.
However if you only compare the shorter distance rail in those places to what the US has some of the other trains are actually pretty good. Even then though Chicago's trains are a better comparison than anything Amtrak offers
I mean what do you consider long-distance? Inter-railing is a time honoured tradition for European Youth, and many of my generation alone would be very familiar with economy sleepers from e.g. Krakow to Prague or Budapest.
The ICE trains in particular are magnificent, and a worthy alternative to air travel.
Yes people do it all the time in Europe. It mostly works. However if you follow the space at all you will see a lot of stories about things going wrong - far more than there should be. Amtrak is mostly fine in the US, but there are still far more problems than there should be.
I mean, maybe you had a different experience. In my experience in the northeast , the internet service is about as reliable and consistent as the trains themselves (ie not consistent, garbage fire)
I was rather disappointed by the internet connection on the Cascades line (going Seattle --> Portland and back). As far as I could tell, they use T-Mobile for backhaul. Who are headquartered in Seattle. Yet the connection barely seemed to work for about half of the journey
boo, it's in the middle of no where along part of the route. Tmobile coverage is mainly in urban areas and along free ways no matter what slingblade tells you on the tv commercial. I don't know if you'd get any coverage on parts of that route other than wired.
Just like how sometimes when you're flying over the rockies or into canada you just don't get internets. There's still middles of no where out there. Often not very far from the freeway.
> Romania was basically under German occupation through most of WWII.
that's not correct. Romania was an independent country, with a king, government, etc. Romania was allied to Germany, and there was a German presence, but the Germans did not exercise any power. In fact, there was a "palace coup" that switch alliances in 1944.
Germans did not exercise any power… other than telling Romanians to send their troops to Don’s bend, and to Sevastopol. Or not selling any of their oil to anybody else. Or basically telling the Romanian Prime Minister Antonescu to suck it up while Hungary took a big chunk of Transylvania.
About the coup: it took place on Aug 23, 1944. The Red Army already took all of Moldovan and was gunning for the Carpathian Mountains. The German front broke yet again. That was the end of German influence in Romania: at the end of September 1944 Arab was ‘eliberated’ by the Red Army.
I still don't understand why anyone would use lambdas - except if you 1) trust Amazon blindly, and 2) have no understanding whatsoever of how a server works, and therefore absolutely unable to set one up (even as a AWS instance, LOL).
From my experience, they are clumsy, complex to set up, to manage, you can't easily have CI/CD (I still don't know how you get the code of a lambda from and to git ?!?!), etc, etc...
Seriously, the reason you use lambdas is that they're small self-contained chunks of functionality that you need to scale out.
Let's take an easy example: you want to ingest tracking metrics.
You can write this as a server or as a lambda. For a server you'd listen on port 80 for POST or GET requests, then take that and write it to your data store. You can do this pretty easily in express/node.
Now the question is, how do you scale that up to a few hundred requests per second? How concurrent is your express app? Are you going to run out of memory on your server because you didn't set the TCP buffer sizes for server sized usage? How do you take your service offline for upgrades/updates? Are you going to crush your database/datastore with hundreds of writes a second? If your ISP barfs are you OK with losing data for that time period? What happens when all of your clients try to connect at once because of a regional power failure?
From a code point of view, what if some random change in your code somewhere causes your ingestion stuff to fail?
Seriously, you don't have to deal with any of this crap if you don't want to. For 1 request every few seconds who cares what you use. But once you start scaling your problems with a server side solution become more and more work to handle.
Again, if you don't need scale don't use AWS. You can always do it cheaper with a server from lowendbox.com.
As for vendor lock-in, well, it's trivial to design your lambdas so you can drop them into a server-side solution (or vice versa). And when you think of vendor lock-in you have to consider also that a bespoke solution is locking in you as the vendor.
I've inherited an high rps API built with api gateway + lambda + dynamodb and I've found easier and way cheaper to move the thing on ec2. Less headaches too.
Resources can be managed more efficiently, cold starts are not a thing, you have predictable latencies, it does serve way more concurrent requests at a fraction of the cost.
I go for lambda when i need a service that can scale down, but not when i need to scale up efficiently.
Debugging is easier, connection pooling is not an accident, processes' limits and isolation can be managed anyway.
It’s always funny when you read something and think the exact opposite thing for every point.
I guess what initially converted me was dealing with a data flow that hovered at about 10 requests/min and then every hour jumped to 10k requests/min. Being able to do that without thinking about scaling or cost really changed the way I imagined data flows in the backend.
I guess now that I have boilerplate of code that works and its quickly deployed and tested with GH actions, I consider it a no brainer for most workflows.
> the general view in Sweden is that the school is working terrible
It's quite universal to find that schools in your own country are terrible :)
Having lived (and raised children) in multiple countries, I can tell you I've never seen a country where people would say good things about their own education systems
Not sure why... probably simply because everybody has (good !) ideas on how it could be better, but they are not easy to implement ! :). Probably also because that's really something people care about
The business of VCs is to take risk. VCs _know_ that 8 out of 10 of their investment will return zero, zitch, nada. They just expect one of of 10 to make it even -- and another one to make it 20x.
So that doesn't mean that Arduino is on anything great: it just means it has been able to convince VCs that there's _some probability_ that they will make it big.
But the probability of doing something big is still very low...
( In fact a VC once told me that, 3 months after investing - i.e. a few board meetings max - he already knows if the company will succeed or not. And in 8 out of 10, he will just do the figuration until failure - at best, buy for cents on the dollar)
I can't spend one day without it, as a break every few hours of coding or meeting, it's really great
It's quite a lot of work, but really the best way to make your brain two sides work together - as well as your fingers, arms, body...
I started 5 years ago, with some prior knowledge of music from being a kid.
Oh, and now I can play with people, to people. I started in my mom's retirement home - she loved it, and other residents too, and even the staff, because all the residents would be so quite after that... and now that I play better I can play to my friends, family..
- the internet connection is excellent (even in most tunnels) so you can work, have video meetings, etc, not to mention play chess online