Very much not true. I'm a seasoned network engineer, and very comfortable deep in the Linux network stack. I still have no interest in doing that for 7-10 hours during work and then having to do it for another 1-3 hours after work to get things working properly. I use UniFi products because they're dead simple and work well.
I would challenge you to try supporting your family using your home network doing esoteric things, the juice is not worth the squeeze. I can give my wife the UniFi login and she can figure things out well enough on her own, and it lets us easily integrated networked devices that don't serve network connectivity (e.g. IP cameras) into our day-to-day as well.
Do I think UniFi is bar none the best gear? Absolutely not. Do I think it's a "good deal"? Maybe. Do I think it's better than the alternative uses of my time, that I'd rather spend doing other stuff? Abso-fucking-lutely, which is why I have been buying it for years.
> down to A/B testing a hundred different thumbnail variants for every video
To be fair, this is apparently table stakes for being a YouTuber at the moment. Maybe not hundreds but definitely several. Veritasium did a video [0] about how he has to do this to maintain enough viewership to keep YouTubing viable as a full-time job.
It makes sense though. Or to put it another way, it seems odd to expect that there's always a global thumbnail optimum for a given YouTube video.
So to bring in the most views, put out different thumbnails to attract different viewers. Ideally YouTube would have support for this where you can just upload a dozen thumbnails or so, and YouTube figure out who needs to see which.
Eh, Veritasium is now majority owned by PE now (Electrify). This is why they’ve been introducing new hosts and Derek is doing more intros / voiceovers - the end goal removing reliance on the original channel owner.
So does he need to do it to remain profitable or does PE need to do it to pay for all their overhead / etc?
Ah interesting, didn't know that. The video is at least 4 years old, so suppose it depends on when Derek sold. Anecdotally, I think all the new hosts came after that thumbnail video, but I couldn't say how closely the changes you mention followed.
In general, it seems this is a thing that YouTubers feel they need to do to avoid being swallowed, but the extent to which MrBeast does it could well be extreme, and thereby worthy of suspicion.
> We all, in Europe, should speak about working a bit harder. Especially those, who are not happy with where they are.
There are plenty of people who are not happy with where they are despite working hard. This "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality is cancer to the problem, it solves nothing.
Talking about a 6 day work week aspirationally is truly odd. There are parents of independent school kids who do not work 6 day weeks, I'd dare to wager many of them. It's foolish and naive to assume that grinding harder is the way to make up the difference.
If it's so much easier to get into Oxbridge from a state school, why do you think people with the means send their kids to private school? They'd save so much money not doing so.
There is a growing number of parents who, because of this exact overt and known discrimination against applicants from private schools, will first send their kids to elite private primary schools and then they switch them to the best secondary state schools they can find, using the money to supplement their education with private one-to-one tutors.
This is an entirely expected outcome. Water will find a way to ground.
Oh yes, I have kids in a prep school where half of the class goes to Eton, and the rest to Winchester, Harrow, Seven Oaks, Derby... Now, for the past few years, almost no parents want to send kids to Eton. They know how much are those kids discriminated against. It's better to send them to a school with lower profile.
Doesn’t this prove the reason for the existence of the disparity? The wealthy kid’s parents want tutors to supplement the education they get from their state school.
I understand an argument saying people will game this setup, but arguing that state school kids are not disadvantaged is indefensible, in my opinion
There is absolutely a disparity between private and state teaching quality.
I don't think thats an objectionable statement.
Also, while not wanting to paint with a broad brush, people I know who work in state run schools are aware of how many other challenges students must face when they're on school grounds.
They're fighting more than the test criteria, they're fighting their peers, outside criminal influences, prostitution, drug dealing etc etc.
Meanwhile this stuff is rarer and more swiftly dealt with at private schools because the parents won't have it, and they pay the bills and have some leverage, the financial incentives are different in the model and it shows.
I personally don't have a problem with loosening the grade criteria, even if it's gamed, the candidates are all interviewed anyway, it's not like a free pass, more an opportunity.
It is, via the interview. This is why A-level results are a coarse filter, and why they have different standards for state vs private schools; state school kids with 3 A's presumably excel in the interview to the same extent as private school kids with 3 A*'s.
It cannot be understated how much of an advantage someone who went to a private school has over someone from a state school, with respect to the entire process (exams/admissions tests/interview prep).
> [...] It’s an Elixir-like language that supports static typing.
Maybe just me, but when I tried Gleam it really came off much more like Rust. In fact, other than running on the BEAM (and having some OTP libs in the works), it doesn't really _feel_ like Elixir at all to me, but that is definitely an opinion.
They probably just mean "BEAM language that isn't Erlang."
All BEAM languages always bring something new to the table aside from just syntax (for Gleam it's static type, for Elixir it's macros and, well, mix!) but none of them try and abstract away the core tenants of the BEAM being functional working with modules and processes. So ya, in that sense you could say it's like Elixir.
How good is the interop story with Elixir/Erlang currently? Can I include a few gleam modules in my Elixir application and let mix take care of compiling and linking everything properly?
I'm currently working on a prototype that does exactly this (in our case, the Gleam is essentially a typed calculation module wrapped in Elixir's great libraries for network and database interactions but its all net-new application instead of an existing Elixir codebase). Its not yet perfect, but I've been eagerly following along with this PR: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/pull/14262#issuecommen...
Seems like (one of) the next Elixir releases will include the support you're looking for in mix.
This is going to be very good for Gleam IMO. Having a super-easy on-ramp for using Gleam in Elixir projects will let people experiment with implementing eg more complex business logic in Gleam, and allow gradual adoption. Naturally, this is not the focus of the Gleam project itself, but for me, using Gleam for the core of a project while having access to the amazing Elixir ecosystem is a dream come true. I've been using mix_gleam but it's not perfect and since I started using Gleam pre 1.0, and it's a low-velocity project, updating became too complicated and I actually ended up moving everything to Elixir recently.
> The demonstration turned violent when some protesters entered the Parliament complex, prompting police to resort to baton charges, tear gas shells and rubber bullets to disperse the crowd, eyewitnesses said.
14 people dead from so-called "non-lethal" means. How do 14 people end up dead without the police coming with intent to do harm?
Rubber bullets have been shown time and time again to be lethal. Just because they don't kill you every time doesn't mean they aren't lethal. You can survive a gun shot too. Immense shame should be poured on every media outlet that licks the boot of authoritarians when they repeat this lie.
Also note the phrasing. The content is "the police killed 14 people". But the form is "the situation turned violent as a result of the protester's actions".
It’s also irrefutable fact that pro-state or pro-cop agitators throughout history will pretend to be a demonstrator and throw a single brick to give the cops an excuse to break some skulls
In primitive societies where people are expected to resolve their own problems because everyone is roughly equal, violence is the principal currency, for better or worse.
But in "civilized" societies with multiple layers of power structures, you are not supposed to solve your own problem, you are supposed to show somebody in a position of power that you are the victim so they solve the problem for you. This means victimhood is the principal currency of power.
Don't believe me? Every governments which allows protests says they must always be peaceful and "violence doesn't belong in politics". Yet how many of those governments were created by violent armed revolt against a previous authoritarian government? How many by "peaceful" protests?
"violence doesn't belong in politics" is a hilarious one. Off the top of my head, the USA is kidnapping people and sending them to countries they are not from, and telling me as a trans woman that maybe I should not own guns
I'm sure there will be no violence once the thugs have guns and I don't
Sorry to see you getting downvoted or flagged but that's HN for you.
Issue is many people believe that peace is more important than justice.
Or that fighting and losing is worse than not being able to fight at all. And there's a bit of concern trolling too - basically they say if you fought you'd lose so they'll take away your ability to fight to protect you.
This is happening in Europe too with plenty of people trying to stop weapon deliveries to Ukraine because that'll stop the war. It's "stop struggling, it'll be over sooner" with slightly more sophisticated words.
> Yet how many of those governments were created by violent armed revolt against a previous authoritarian government? How many by "peaceful" protests?
This is actually an interesting question.
Many post-colonial governments, notably India, were create through what might be called non-violent means. Would be interesting to have someone properly research that.
Yes, I won't pretend it's clear cut or that the numbers without context mean much.
How I see it:
- Victimhood works when there is somebody to appeal to or other people to gain support from.
- Violence works when there's no higher power or when you already have the most popular support you ever will.
Getting more people to join you and openly protest is a lot of implied/potential violence. Meaning you can use victimhood (see how the police are beating us) to gain more potential violence for use later. Either the people in power see this and back down (e.g. Velvet revolution) before the violence materializes, or not. They can also see how successful materialized violence can become and flee (e.g. Syria) or they can try to win a civil war (e.g. Myanmar).
I haven't read much about India yet but my guess is victimhood worked in the case of India because essentially they were getting the support of citizens in the UK (a higher power) to pressure their government into giving it independence. It was costly for the politicians to be oppressors and also get reelected.
Victimhood failed in China and recently Belarus because 1) there was nobody to appeal to 2) the oppressors didn't back down 3) the protesters failed to materialize the violence and were defeated by the government's violence.
> you are supposed to show somebody in a position of power that you are the victim so they solve the problem for you. This means victimhood is the principal currency of power
This doesn't describe how legal systems evolved at all.
They evolved to protect the powerful from each other. You went through the legal system because if you didn't you escalated your problem from a dispute with one powerful person to a dispute with the system of power.
The only way this victimhood notion works is if we describe all claims of damages as claims to victimhood. Which, I guess, they sort of are. But those pleas are made by the powerful, too. If you aren't the victim of something, if you haven't been harmed, what the fuck is the case you're bringing?
> how many of those governments were created by violent armed revolt against a previous authoritarian government? How many by "peaceful" protests?
Since mechanised warfare, I think there have been more peaceful revolutions than (non-state backed) violent ones. The latter tend to just result in failed states.
Is how they evolved relevant? When somebody protests against the government itself, the legal system doesn't even matter, unless it has a mechanism how people can secede legally. Do any have that?
When I meant is that victimhood works when you need to gain support from somebody with more power than you. Either from the legal system or from masses of people. The latter can by foreign (putting political pressure on the government) or domestic (gathering more people to show how many are willing to stand against it). Violence is the only thing that can work when there is nobody to appeal to (again, not just legally but through empathy or intimidation) - see below - a large crowd is a lot of implied potential violence and you need victimhood to achieve that mass.
> Since mechanised warfare, I think there have been more peaceful revolutions than (non-state backed) violent ones.
I purposefully didn't mention examples like the "Velvet" revolution because they too use violence, they just don't materialize it.
Violence is most powerful when it's implied, before it's used physically. Imagine oppressing a nation >10 million and now 1 million are standing on the square in front of your government building, shouting slogans. Anybody would give up power "peacefully" because if they didn't, there's a high chance that implied violence would materialize and they'd end up killed instead of having made a nice deal for peaceful retirement.
> The latter tend to just result in failed states.
Because the latter tend to happen in states which never had functioning institutions to begin with so they have no experience with running a functioning let alone democratic state. Sarah Paine had a lecture about how restoring democracy to Germany or bringing it to Japan after WW2 was possible because they already has the organizational knowledge. But the US failed to bring democracy to Afghanistan or other places it invaded because those were always a mess full or corruption and you'd need several generations to ingrain the principles.
Yes. You described a “primitive” legal system that in truth didn’t exist.
Early legal systems didn’t have anything to do with victimhood beyond demonstrating harm. They didn’t have systems for the powerless because they didn’t concern themselves with them, they were a means by which elites peacefully resolved disputes.
> unless it has a mechanism how people can secede legally
What?
> When I meant is that victimhood works when you need to gain support from somebody with more power than you
How would you differentiate that from demonstrating harm?
I didn't describe a legal system at all. But it is certainly a modern way of thinking that one always needs some higher "authority" to resolve disputes or to defend against injustice.
> What?
secede /sĭ-sēd′/
To withdraw formally from membership in a state, union, or other political entity.
Note, this is a low effort reply to a low effort reply from you.
If you wish to discuss this politely, we can discuss which states have a legal mechanism by which a land-owning individual, a town or region can legally vote to gain independence. I don't know of any.
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Victimhood is perceived harm (by yourself or others). But I don't understand why you focus on separating victimhood from demonstrating harm so much. See my other replies on this article, I explained my views in more depth there.
Say you're a parent or teacher and see kids fighting. Do you investigate who started it every single time or do you just get fed up and tell them to stop fighting or you'll punish both?
Incentivizing victims to behave in certain ways such as not fighting back makes it easier to determine victim and aggressor.
I never said victims have power. Just that victimhood is encouraged from a young age.
It used to be normal for kids to fight and for parents to teach them to always fight back, stand up for others, do not let injustice stand, etc. Oh and do not tell on others, nobody likes a rat. Now the message is to not fight or you might get hurt, tell an adult to resolve conflicts, everything you do might have consequences later so be careful about what you do or say. There are schools where if two kids fight, both get suspended. You're literally not allowed to defend yourself. I've seen a video of a girl getting beaten in the head while she was lying on her desk, waiting for it to be over.
And you're right, victims have no power to influence those in positions of power. But victimhood is used as a weapon against those on the same level of power by making the "authorities" punish them for victimizing you.
It works on multiple levels of severity.
Online, if you're in a place which forbids swearing, you provoke others into swearing at you and they get punished - you used mods against them. At school, you make yourself cry and go tell the teacher what supposedly happened - you used the teachers against them. At work, you do pretty much the same thing, minus crying if you're a man. Using the legal system in this way is harder because unlike the previous places, it requires a certain level of proof which is harder to fabricate but false accusations do happen, not with the intent to be prosecuted but as a method of slander through a third party. Look how many men are afraid to make the first move because of the low-probability high-severity event that the woman sees it as harassment.
I dont disagree that people are incentivized to express or misrepresent victimhood for advantage. What I disagree with is that "This means victimhood is the principal currency of power."
It might be one of many local currencies on a playground, but it isn't why the teacher has more power than the student. It isn't a generalizable theory of power.
As long as the student doesn't record him saying something that could be understood as a sexual remark out of context and/or claim he patted her on the buttocks and a friend who never likes the teacher because of bad grades backs it up.
You might think it's fat fetched but I recall a case where several teenagers conspired to accuse a youtuber of grooming them.
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Now, you're right about one thing. I overstated the effectiveness of victimhood in the original post. The principal currency of power is always violence because it overrides all other currencies if you have enough of it available to you.
But for more pedestrian use-cases, other currencies are better. And victimhood is a very effective way to use other people's violence for your goals. It never gives true top-level power but it allows directing the levels of power above you against people on the same level as you.
EDIT: And TBH, it works well to direct those on your level against those on your level too. For example, on the nation-state level, every action Ukraine takes in its fight against Russia has to be weighted against the possibility of being seen as too aggressive and not just purely defending itself.
As someone who has lived in Portland for many years and watched it's decline it's very frustrating to watch the current politicians lack any understanding of the problem. Portland is a shithole for other reasons than he believes and it needs other solutions.
Of course the answer is that people cheer for protests they like and punish riots they don’t. This is politics and that’s why there is so much fighting about how news and history chooses to frame them. The headline we have received today is telling me it’s a good protest.
Also, it’s literally a war crime to use tear gas on the battlefield, yet it’s somehow OK to use it on civilians. (I understand part of the reason is to prevent a slippery slope from tear gas to chlorine, but it’s still telling.)
Tear gas is routinely used at scale on people for training purposes. One of the things you learn (and a major point of the training) is that it is largely a psychological deterrent, you become acclimated to the unpleasant effects pretty quickly upon repeated exposure.
> If something doesn't work then there's no need to ban it
Did you read the article?
Chemical weapons provide no benefit to a modern army. They do, however, to simpler armies. So the world's militaries, who command modern armies, came together and banned them.
Put another way, the U.S. military gains nothing from chemical weapons over high explosives. The Taliban, on the other hand, might.
Zelle limits the amount you can send per day, starting at $500, so you can't even necessarily pay your rent in one go the first month.
With Chase, I don't have the ability to do ACH transfers to accounts I don't own (I hear other banks allow free ACH transfers), so if Zelle limit is too low, my only option would be a paid wire...
Yeah, at a certain point it's just always running 24/7, which they charge you usage-based if your company is over 750 hours in a month.
If you're running databases continuously, I find a lot of their original unique selling point pretty moot, especially if you're paying them extra for it.
Maybe you were referring to specifics of Neon's usage-based pricing.
The bullet I quoted makes it seem like you feel punished for having to pay more because you used more resources. That's, like, the fundamental idea of usage-based pricing. If you feel punished, it seems as though you misunderstood the whole idea.
I see. Yeah I'm not against usage-based in general. Just specific to database's, especially in my instance where it feels like I'm paying more for the luxury of having a scale-to-zero feature that I've quickly grown beyond.
I'll reiterate that it's not the only reason why I'm moving off of them. Reliability, performance, insights, etc.
Having plugged your numbers into the pricing for both Neon and Planetscale I'm rather confused. At Planetscale, given the numbers cited in the post, you're paying for 4 servers (+ replicas) with one eighth of a vCPU each, running 24/7. That's equivalent to about 375 Neon compute-hours per month. Your $69 Neon plan included twice that. Neon only goes down to 1/4th of a vCPU, but that does include the same amount of memory as the 1/8th at Planetscale, so take that 4 times and you have 4 databases running all month for the price of your $69 plan at Neon. How did you get to $250?
Honestly, I don't even know. My last month bill was for 1947 compute hours for a total of $260. I just have the 4 databases. Looks like two of them are at .5 instead of .25, maybe that's it? Unless they are auto scaling me up occasionally and I'm not aware?
Two of them being at 0.5 brings the total to 1.5 vCPU, which over an entire month adds about another 375 compute hours for an extra $60, which is still much lower. Indeed autoscaling seems like it could be the cause. According to the documentation that's a setting you can configure per "compute", but I don't know if it's the default.
In the database world, serverless/autoscaling pricing is almost always more expensive for real workloads. The % of workloads where it makes sense is small. Ones where 90% of the time there's little small traffic and 10% of the time the DB sees large traffic spikes. Otherwise, just pay a fixed cost for the hardware you need.
This pitfall of "serverless" has been widely known since people started abusing lambda to be "always on". Serverless is a PaaS gaslight to make you pay more for the perceived convenience.
Serverless is often cheaper just so long as your workflows are bursty/infrequent. For example, we don't need to pay to permanently rent/colocate a beefy server, just to run a batch job once a week.
If you have a constant base load of requests, lambda is just the wrong tool for the job.
Even if it's pretty bursty, usually a perm server is still cheaper. Running the server only half the time isn't burning too much money since AWS is already 10x the cost of raw compute. You need really bursty workloads to make serverless make sense.
If we're talking about relatively small workloads, and relatively stable traffic, then sure.
But I think for large workloads with unpredictable requirements, the capacity planning alone in a perm setup is a nightmare for most early-stage businesses. Spinning up an extra hundred instances in EC2 takes minutes - getting the same number of boxes installed a colocation facility takes weeks at best
It's not a gaslight, but it's only cost effective for specific usage patterns. It's only a "gaslight" if you think you need to run every workload the same way and don't cost estimate before you roll it out.
Not necessarily. Netlify told me as I had blown past 20 bucks for 1TB of traffic that paying 50 bucks for every additional 100GB was 'a good problem to have'. Well no, not at all. If your project is one of love, the end game is not subjecting your audience to boatloads of ads.
> the more common/sane thing is cheaper unit pricing as you hit scale.
Depends on the provider's business model.
Many devtools want to make it trivial to get started, and zero/low prices facilitate that. They know that once you are set up with the tool, the barrier to moving is high. They also know that devs are tinkerers who may take a free product discovered on their free time and introduce it to a workplace who will pay for it.
But someone has to pay for all those free users/plans (they aren't using zero resources). With this business model, the payer is the person/org with some level of success who is forced up into a more expensive plan.
This is a valid strategy for two reasons:
- such users/orgs are less likely to move because they already have working code using the system and moving introduces risk
- if they have high levels of traffic, they may (not certainly, but may) be a profit making enterprise and will do the cold hard calculus of "it costs me $50/100 GB but would take a dev N hours to move and will have X opportunity cost" and decide to keep paying
The successful "labor of love" project is an unfortunate casualty.
It's definitely a business model. Just like a dark pattern is a pattern :)
The counter to that argument is that it's creating an adverse effect on your most profitable customers, with an incentive to move to offerings that don't have free tiers (or where the free tiers are not considerably affecting your own costs).
If your free tier is so lucrative that you need to 25x the cost, then your free tier is too expansive and you need to tone it down until the economics make sense.
> The counter to that argument is that it's creating an adverse effect on your most
> profitable customers, with an incentive to move to offerings that don't have free tiers (or where the free tiers are not considerably affecting your own costs).
> If your free tier is so lucrative that you need to 25x the cost, then your free tier is > too expansive and you need to tone it down until the economics make sense.
It does make sense, though. That's how almost every subsidized system works, and the benefit applies for everyone until they scale to a point where they are not legible for it. It does suck for the pool of people that just began paying the actual price of the service instead of the subsidized one, and certainly more so if they're not actually getting profit from it but then again, it isn't like they weren't benefitting from the price up to that point, otherwise they wouldn't have chosen it. Luckily enough, as far as databases go, there's a gazillion options to choose from and experiences like this are invaluable when it comes to picking one with a pricing model that fits the scaling requirements of a given project, and not only the technical merits.
Also as a side rant, I honestly don't think "projects of love" are a good counter argument to anything. They're clearly not of love because otherwise they would find a way to make them profitable. Most people are either lazy to, or lack the knowledge of how to turn their hobby into a marketable thing. Which is fine, nobody wants to deal with business when it comes to their hobbies, but one can't have it both ways. Either your hobby project gets successful and you find ways to cover its expenses, or you realize that your hobby project needs to be kept just a hobby project.
> Also as a side rant, I honestly don't think "projects of love" are a good counter argument to anything. They're clearly not of love because otherwise they would find a way to make them profitable.
I appreciate the... tough love here, and also acknowledge that 'doing it for love' is ambiguous. But I strongly disagree that declining to make something profitable indicates that it's not out of love.
To clarify my own situation, it's more out of wanting to share knowledge with the world and build a community. It's a very popular site, ubiquitous in its niche, but that's about as much as I'll divulge.
I'll grant that we've been benefitting from the subsidy/hook up to now. But I'll also add the wrinkle that a substantial increase in bandwidth is due to AI harvesters. They are becoming an existential threat to projects like these.
> But I'll also add the wrinkle that a substantial increase in bandwidth is due to AI harvesters. They are becoming an existential threat to projects like these.
Hmmm. I looked at one site with a fair amount of traffic that I have access to and the user agents that identified as AI crawlers were not significant in terms of traffic. Low single digits.
Curious what percentage of AI crawlers your site is seeing?
I don't know about you, but I make many choices every day that are sub-optimal when viewed globally (or even across my life) but "make sense" or that I want to do in the moment. I suspect that is the cause.
> And yet people (devs) keep signing up for free plans.
Yeah, because devs are stupid. Because consumers, as a whole, are stupid. They're short-sighted and self-destructive. Just ask Marlboro.
> I don't know about you, but I make many choices every day that are sub-optimal when viewed globally (or even across my life) but "make sense" or that I want to do in the moment.
Yes, this is a fundamental character flaw present in every human, to varying degrees. Its a function of how our reward center works.
Exploiting that flaw for money-making is a dark pattern at best, and a crime against humanity at worst.
This right here is just a dark pattern. Using a vulnerability in the human mind for an exploit that, on average, extracts cash you wouldn't otherwise get.
Personally, I don't think it's that bad. But it is a dark pattern and I don't like it. So, there.
For the moment, streamlining bandwidth delivery and distributing across other free/cheap tiers. After that, the plan is to find a sales team that'll discount/sponsor the site in exchange for putting their logo in the footer. After that, maybe self-host or close up.
I hear you on that, but I would say "usage-based pricing" does not equate to "increasing marginal cost" at all. There are both usage-based providers that have increasing marginal cost and those that don't.
Seems reasonable to me? After all, they went to "predictable pricing" which seems to be generally better than usage-based one.
I think the only reason to go with usage-based pricing is if you want to take a risk to save money - you are getting unpredictable bills but hope that average is going to be cheaper. As any gamble, you can win or lose.
I sort of feel like their own product, Maple.AI, have the same issue. The more users use the product, the more they have to pay. So they clearly understand that the pricing model is problematic, but they still use it themselves?
