In his book "Soccer in Sun and Shadow", Eduardo Galeano beautifully captures the essence of Pelé's status: “those of us who were lucky enough to see him play received alms of an extraordinary beauty: moments so worthy of immortality that they make us believe immortality exists.”
I've been following Dmytri since he developed Thimbl, a distributed micro blogging protocol in the early days of Twitter. His analysis always brings context into why decentralized systems are more about politics and power than technologies. The uptake in Mastodon usage given the recent twitter acquisition reminded me of this talk where he addresses some of these issues. "Never be deceived that the rich will permit us to vote away their wealth."
- CERN started planning its computing grid before AWS was launched.
- It's pretty complicated (politics, mission, vision) for CERN to use external proprietary software/hardware for its main functions (they have even started to MS Office like products.)
- [cost] CERN is quite different than a small team researchers doing few years research. the scale is enormous and very long lived, like for decades continue
- and more...
HPC and scientific computing aside, I would have loved to be able to use AWS when I worked there, internal infra for running web apps and services wasn't nearly good & reliable, neither had a wide catalog of services offered.
I think the spirit of the article is to put the cloud in perspective of the organization size and the workload type. There is a sweet spot where the cloud is the only option that makes sense, definitely with variable loads and capacity to basically scale on demand as big as our budget, there is no match for that. However... there are organizations with certain type of workloads that could afford to put infrastructure in place and even with the costs of staffing, energy etc they will save millions in the long run. NASA, CERN etc are some. This is not limited to HPC, the cloud at scale is not cheap either see: https://a16z.com/2021/05/27/cost-of-cloud-paradox-market-cap...
The vast majority of researchers don't need anywhere close to the amount of resources that CERN needs. The fact that CERN doesn't use EC2 and lambdas shouldn't be taken as a lesson by anyone who's not operating at their scale.
This feels like a similar argument to the one made by people who use Kubernetes to ensure their web app with 100 visitors a day is web scale.
He should make way more based on what FB pays their average Engineers(and Dan is not average by any means), I know people that knows/does half of what he knows and make 200+. That said, I think salaries in tech are crazy!
Internet and facial recognition made the world a lot smaller and the past a lot harder to erase. And unsurprisingly the fact that you put something in your social media timeline only has value until something casts suspicion over it.
You don't need a trial to decide that the guy who claims this and that is the same guy from an older article being arrested for faking this and that. The suspicion alone is enough to kill the con.
If you see your kid's pediatrician's picture in a police station on the other side of the country, as a con-artist on the run, you will not care that their Instachat account says "world's greatest doctor". And you probably won't even dig too deep before dropping their service.
Some comments here are along these lines: "emancipation is an insult to those who worked hard to pay off their masters for their liberty" give me a break. I paid student loans and I'll be happy that the next generation won't have to.
This is how I see it, too. Colleges at this point are just siphoning money out of the federal government by jacking up tuition by rates several times the rate of inflation every year, and it doesn't take much effort to realize that the next generation of students will have to take on insane amounts of debt to gain even the opportunity of entry to the professional class. Even nowadays I have a hard time believing the pseudonymous internet bootstrappers who somehow paid for a bachelor's degree in 2012 by waiting tables between classes.
