“Immigrants, we get the job done.”

Instead of building our own clouds, I want us to own the cloud. Keep all of the great parts about this feat of technical infrastructure, but put it in the hands of the people rather than corporations. I’m talking publicly funded, accessible, at cost cloud-services.

I worry that quickly this will follow this path:

• Someone has to pay for it, so it becomes like an HOA of compute. (A Compute Owners Association, perhaps) Everyone contributes, everyone pays their shares
• Now there’s a group making decisions… and they can impose rules voted upon by the group. Not everyone will like that, causing schisms.
• Economies of scale: COA’s get large enough to be more mini-corps and less communal. Now you’re starting to see “subscription fees” no differently than many cloud providers, just with more “ownership and self regulation”
• The people running these find that it takes a lot of work and need a salary. They also want to get hosted somewhere better than someone’s house, so they look for colocation facilities and worry about HA and DR.
• They keep growing and draw the ire of companies for hosting copies of licensed resources. Ownership (which this article says we don’t have anyway) is hard to prove, and lawsuits start flying. The COA has to protect itself, so it starts having to police what’s stored on it. And now it’s no better than what it replaced.

If I was in my 20’s I’d have thought about that 2.5x offer. Now that I’m in my 40’s I can say i wouldn’t even do it for 5x. You can’t buy back missed time, no matter how much money you have.

Part of me says that I’d do it for 20x… but I’d just end up quitting in a few months, take my money and retire early.

I haven’t purchased a new canon in years because my current TS5020 has been a workhorse for years… and I can buy a box with 5 complete sets of 3rd party ink carts (C,M,Y,K & BK) for $15 on Amazon… and they just work.

I’ve heard rumblings that they’re no longer as good, but as long as this continues to work well I’ll keep it. The current printer landscape is a mine field.

“Worst crime of the 21st Century” , so far!

Personally, I hate crypto, but I like the idea of crypto. Like decentralized currency, useable anywhere by anyone, independent of locale/government, is an awesome ideal. What drives me away from it is the fact that it’s not reliable (it fluctuates all over the place, and there’s no guarantee what you have one day will be there tomorrow), it eats more power than a country just to track transactions, there’s tons of different ones, and it’s generally used for scams and illicit purchases. Which I suppose is part of its reason it be, but no legit storefront I use takes it… probably for the first reason.

It also doesn’t help that it’s got a bad rap from all the crazy crypto-bro/fly-by-night scams and NFT stuff.

It’s almost like people can buy and enjoy whatever they want. If you want to buy a switch2, go ahead, if you don’t, that’s cool to. Gatekeeping has no place here. People are allowed to like what they like.

Man, I almost ran into the piece of shit car you had so many times… what even WAS that thing?!

Honestly, this isn’t a surprise or really a big surprise. Gamification like this has been a thing since the 90’s or earlier. As soon as the web became ad revenue driven, sites figured how to drive clicks and keep people on them. More engagement == more page views == more revenue. Video games have done achievements for decades. AOL even did this in the 90’s. More “you got mail”, more AIM messages, more things available, more engagement, more likely you’re going to pay that hourly charge for access. It’s the same reason there’s clickbait everywhere and everyone has a newsletter the automatically sign you up for. Here Facebook does it… everyone’s slightly different, but all have the same premise. Gotta keep you hooked, give you that dopamine hit and make you keep coming back.

This goes back to the age old “if we could make the internet monetarily self sufficient without ads, how would that work?”

Same. I kinda wonder if it’s saturation… when 5G was first announced and I happened to be in one of the first cities with it on a business trip, and I happen to have just bought a new phone that had it and it was AMAZING. Sites were snappy, it was like I was on my personal wifi.

Ever since it became more widespread, I can rarely tell a difference between LTE and 5G and honestly, If anything, my phone is slower when I see the 5G icon.

This was Elrond talking to Isildur, right?

You must be in the US! Isn’t it great?!

I can’t wait for discovery and Trump being forced to do a deposition. That worked so well for him in the past.

Honestly, I feel like somehow they’re just going to settle out of court and he’ll get a few million sent his way for no apparent reason.

I’m sure the board will soon be calling for Elon… to get more money.

God wouldn’t have given us all these coal deposits and oil fields if he didn’t want us to strip mine and frack our way through life leaving our planet a used up husk!

Come on man, Speaker phone, video calling, Snapchat, and just the fact that most of them seem to choose text messaging over phone calls.

Do young children even hold phones near their heads anymore? I rarely see a kid less than their early teens doing anything but FaceTime or games. And after that point, video chats, texting, and doom scrolling.

Even my 15yo daughter never holds the phone against her head.

While I 100% agree with the fact that even modern things can be fixed with some knowhow and troubleshooting (and spare capacitors or the like), there’s a few things at play: `

• people generally don’t have this skill set
• electronics tend to be made cheaper, this means they may fail faster but also means they can be replaced cheaper
• it costs real money for tech support that can fix said issues, often many times more money than the thing costs to replace `

As a retro enthusiast, I’ve fixed my share of electronics that only needed an hour and a $2 capacitor. But there was also $7 shipping for the cap, and 30-60min of labor, and my knowhow in troubleshooting and experience. If the company had to send someone out, they’d likely spend well over $200 for time, gas, labor, parts, etc. not including a vehicle for the tech and the facility nearby and all that good stuff. Even in the retro sphere, the math starts to side towards fix because of the rarity, but it’s not always clear.

As a DevOps manager who regularly talks with development about hiring/architecting, and works at a Fortune 500. Here’s our short list:

• kubernetes/containers (like deep knowledge, not just “I ran helm once”)
• CI/CD, and IaC + GitOps
• golang/rust/dotNet… modern statically typed and compiled languages are greatly preferable. Python/bash/PHP is clutch, but it’s also easy to pick up if you know the above, and honestly I kinda just assume it at this point.
• actual complete understanding of Git.
• solid full stack development experience/understanding
• cloud experience (AWS or Azure mostly, but GCP is close enough)
• thinking/problem solving skills

Honestly, I’ve seen so many people with AI experience of some sort, it’s not a difference maker. It’s fairly easy to learn and no Fortune 500 is hosting their own LLM unless that’s the point of the business. If you actually understand the stack and how things relate, it’s huge.

A big part of hiring is understanding what the person knows and how well they know it to know if they can apply their wisdom to other things. You know some day AI is going to burst, something better than Blockchain will happen, Rust or Golang will be superseded, a new cloud provider will appear, etc. I need to know you can apply your understanding and knowledge to some new challenges using tools that aren’t even concepts now.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed publicly.