> 5-year treasuries were paying 7-9% with inflation in the 2-4% range
One crucial difference: the US wasn't $40T in debt, and it wasn't pulling trillion dollar deficits. In 1998 the US federal government actually had a surplus! Even 9% interest wasn't going to wreck the Federal budget when the overall amount of debt to be serviced was so much lower.
Everything is relative to size. If your older brother lends you a dollar at 100% daily interest, you can still throw a balled-up Jackson at him a couple days later and walk away clean. But ask anyone who agreed to a crazy 20% interest rate on their car loan what it did to their personal finances, and all you'll hear is horror stories. 9% on $40T would be suicide.
This is a fundamentally political question. When different customers demand different new features, and other customers demand particular bug fixes, who do you satisfy first? The one with a small but growing account, or the old account who has been with you from the beginning? I would challenge anybody who thinks agents mean you can just do everything, immediately - by all means, prove me wrong and build Google again overnight.
And how is growth financed? Reinvestment, equity, debt? I would challenge anybody who thinks this can be reduced to a calculation, because money ultimately flows between humans; even if somebody grants an agent access to a current account (and some are, experimenting with vibe day-trading), a human always retains final control and can liquidate that account whenever they like.
You didn't explain why, in your opinion, opt-out is disrespectful; why respect requires opt-in. For most Western users, the bandwidth is hardly a drop in the bucket, and while there are certainly kinds of telemetry that are disrespectful of a user's privacy, telemetry in and of itself is not (in my opinion) abusive of user privacy, and therefore neither is opt-out abusive.
Indeed, if you were to argue that telemetry violates user privacy, then opt-in (i.e. to help send bug reports) doesn't fix that. If you add a "send bug report" button, but the data collected in the bug report abuses the user's privacy, why is it ethically any better? The data collected is far more important than the frequency or control over how and when it's sent. Users who desire taking that control should anyway run their own restrictive, allowlist-based firewall, which no opt-in/opt-out setting can overcome anyway.
> A quick note about HTTP: ClickHouse® offers a TCP connector with a native protocol, but we don't use it. It does not offer many advantages for the type of application we build
This needs more elaboration. One of the major goals of running a ClickHouse cluster is to provide low-latency queries; a persistent TCP connection removes the need to re-establish a new connection for each query and thus reduces overall latency in line with CH goals. So I really didn't understand this.
> ClickHouse® open source faces a significant challenge: limited support for cloud storage. Modern OLAP databases and data systems should leverage cloud storage for cost efficiency and independent scaling of compute and storage resources. Snowflake established this standard over a decade ago, and ClickHouse® (open source) lags behind
ClickHouse writing to NVMEs is exactly how they provide their latency and performance advtanges. Writing and reading to object buckets is fundamentally slower with multiple network hops to reach what is, in this architectural context, a storage server for your storage server. If you really need far more storage, and are willing to sacrifice query latency to get it... why not architect for one of the OLAP databases, like Snowflake, where that was part of their architecture from day one?
> Because you are testing your analytics queries, right?
No? Half the point of an OLAP database is to let users write their own queries. If we knew the queries ahead of time, we probably wouldn't need an OLAP database, and instead use a less-flexible streaming architecture storing intermediate calculations so as not to need to pay for petabyte-scale storage. The expected value from paying for all of that storage is to support not knowing which queries will be written by users.
> Every single company handling ClickHouse® struggles with ingestion... Backpressure mechanism: Some people put Kafka before ClickHouse®. This does the job
The whole trade-off that you make with column-store databases like ClickHouse (instead of row-store databases like Postgres) is that inserts are slow for column stores (whereas they are fast for row stores). Inserts happen slowly, asynchronously, in the background. It is the price you pay for fast analytics queries. This is why OLAP databases have a latency lag and do not show real-time results. This is why stores like Kafka are usually a good fit, you let Kafka hold onto new data until batch insertions can catch up. If you do need real-time queries, you don't write to an OLAP directly; you write to a stateful frontend that answers the query itself, then streams out historical data from the OLAP that was successfully written there. And the first thing you do in a "I want to have my cake, and eat it too, and yes I'm willing to pay for the privilege" architecture like that is... to keep the persistent TCP connections, because that's really low-hanging fruit.
If you throw something like nginx in front to try to better guarantee the "balance" part of load balancing, as an improvement over TCP connections that are sticky to the initial server they reach, then you're asking different CH servers to handle the same original session. So what did the load balancer give you?
They won't be cheap until there's competition to drive down the price, which will otherwise be as high as possible to justify the initial investments. It's only a matter of time, but likely on the scale of decades.
But I wanted to add on the future benefits front - as more vehicles on the road become autonomous, they could communicate with each other and reduce the buffer distances between them, allowing for faster travel and improved saturation while still being safe.
If buses are autonomous, it no longer makes sense to have arbitrary routes that people need to wait at a bus stop for. They can wait in parking lots, charging their batteries, until they are summoned, and give people door-to-door transportation.
It sounds like an autonomous taxi, but not necessarily. A taxi usually has only one rider, whereas a bus would have more seats, and potentially pick up and drop off other riders that are more-or-less on the way. This is Via's Microtransit[1] model, but without the cost of a human driver, it becomes much more cost-effective to deploy at large scale.
That model doesn't really work with high demand I wouldn't think. The thing with the fixed route case is you no longer have to serve the many edge cases, you force people to solve it themselves and maximize the service you can offer over a more collectively beneficial routing.
In principle, but there are hard physical challenges such as the lack of space efficiency between a typical four occupant sized vehicle and a bus that holds some 10 or 20 fold more people on maybe only double the road footprint. Time to seek out your paired ridemates is something to consider, it melts away as you pack more people into the same vehicle and increases both in time as well as space as you start introducing more lower capacity vehicles.
You're not comparing against real-world fixed-route bus routes.
In the real world, most bus routes run nearly empty if not completely empty most of the time, belching diesel smoke and paying a driver, in order to ensure that service is provided to remote locations and that service is made available on a regular schedule. In cities, utilization is usually higher, although you see the same pattern off-peak.
In suburban and rural environments, the footprint is nearly irrelevant, but the lack of riders means that early attempts would start with designs that prioritize battery capacity and range over the sheer number of seats. In urban environments, the final mix of buses will look closer to a combination of mid-size buses for door-to-door and full-size buses for trips that are door-to-door but in practice are no different from fixed-routes due to the sheer number of people who take the current routes at rush hour.
You'll throw Hollywood and most of the publishing industry out of business overnight if you "abolish" copyright. Not a good idea to throw so many people out of work.
Copyright needs to be reformed, absolutely. Not abolished.
Compared to the economic and human disruptions of shipping most of America's manufacturing jobs overseas since WWII, that sounds very minor.
Yes, I understand that Hollywood & publishing carry much higher social status than mere manufacturing, for the "right" people to object at them being tossed.
No, I'm not disagreeing with your "reform not abolish" ideal.
Which side you're taking here? Sudden and Legal are pretty unobjectionable to folks who aren't pro-copyright for other reasons. But could sound excellent to (say) folks who "bought and owned" digital property...then had their access cut off suddenly and legally.
Even if you don't have sympathy on an individual level for hundreds of thousands of ordinary, working-class people with decades-long careers suddenly losing their livelihood (and you really should have sympathy for them), you should at least care on a selfish level for the increased risk of civil unrest that such a socioeconomic upheaval can cause.
I'm from a country that transitioned from free market and private property to planned economy and socialism, and then, 70 years later, back again. I'm sure it'll be fine. You can't scare me with such things :)
Hollywood was created by ignoring (Edison) patents, not copyright.
On the other hand, Disney's success is largely owed to public domain adaptations, and for a century, it did its best to shrink the public domain and expand copyright.
Your argument is non-sequitur and nihilist. America was created by colonizing Native land, so should we somehow evict hundreds of millions of people in the name of justice? (/rhetorical)
Original sin is a sunk cost. If you want to make the world better, you focus on what's right for tomorrow, not what was right for a century ago.
I don't see an argument for removing copyright being a good thing other than people wanting other's work for free, not just free to use but free to sell as their own.
Was it is a good thing and it was created by ignoring copyrights and therefore we shouldn't protect copyrights as an absolute because other good things can be created out of it, or is it a bad thing and is using that copyright to restrict others.
You can't have it both ways. My point was just that defense of Hollywood is a terrible example.
It's not only Hollywood, these ML tankies that want to abolish private ownership will destroy pharmaceutical innovation. (This is where people's brains will turn off)
Why would a firm invest in research improving Super-Rare-Disease therapies if I don't get exclusive rights to the monetary benefit?
And to the inevitable room temperature IQ DSA crowd, why would the ML government with state research firms ever direct public resources to improving Super-Rare-Disease? Something that affects 1-in-10000 people doesn't deserve public resources like common diseases.
> these anarcho-capitalists that want to abolish private ownership will destroy pharmaceutical innovation
> why would the AnCap government
Do you know what an anarcho-capitalist is? There is no way an ancap would want to destroy private ownership. They also are also anti-government everything.
And how do you know if you have been breached if you (negligently, in my opinion) have no audit logging, multiple principals sharing the same account, and no anomaly tracking? Does a breach only happen if the attacker brags openly about it?
The difference with accounting is that, relatively speaking and certainly within this context, few businesses are cash businesses. Your bank is keeping at least a basic audit log of money coming in and out of the corporate bank account. Your payment processor is keeping at least a basic audit log of who paid you and how much. You won't make your auditors happy if they're the only documents you have, but they're at least something to be handed over in an audit that pretty much every software business will have. Cybersecurity? By default, nothing is collected.
forensic accounting and audits also require a paper trail.
So if you have no logging and such, you will have already failed regulatory reporting standards - just like you would fail an accounting audit if you have no paper trail of where your money went!
Author has a good head on their shoulders, but few if any companies are going to spend time on incident simulations for their SREs.
Why not? Because even pre-AI, very few companies spend time practicing restoring their backups, or disaster recovery, or picking infrequently-used runbooks to practice, or seeing whether they can easily rotate secrets without downtime, or trying to redploy the system onto another vendor's cloud/platform, or, or, or... It is the least-sexy operations work that exists. No executive cares about this. Ops organizations push for flashy work, same as everybody else: new infrastructure for new projects, cool chatbots, new flashy dashboards, make charts go up and to the right, etc.
Airline pilots go through disaster simulation training because the government mandates that training. If it wasn't a condition of holding a pilot's license, no company would pay for it.
Want SREs to spend time training for disasters? Take a step back. Support professional licensure. Make it a condition of holding a license. You won't get industry-wide professional behavior until you professionalize the work. It won't happen without licensing because every corner cut that is not immediately visible to consumers translates to additional profit, and increasing competition eventually requires these corners to be cut in order to keep up with competition and stay in business. Forcing all players to submit to licensing requires all players to pay these costs and thus forbids them from cutting them to become more competitive.
I was the head of a global SRE team at a top tier hedge fund.
We started doing a weekly meeting where whoever was on call would do a table top exercise of an outage that happened the prior week.
The idea was to have someone else be the simulated person on call while the SRE from last week's oncall would talk them through the symptoms, what happened and where to look.
The idea was to spread knowledge around how incidents looked, what tools were used, what could have been done differently etc.
This was largely inspired by the following quote:
"Drills are for working on the infrequent actions that lead to big outcomes. A good example is heaving the ball from half court in basketball when the game is close. You can't control who will have the ball in that situation but you want everyone on the team familiar with what to do and how to do it."
How often are there outages? Is there a significant outage every week to do simulations for? The problem with our organization is that outages are so rare that weekly we have nothing to discuss.
They were usually small outages that we caught before they got out of hand.
If you never have outages, then you need to start getting either creative with the "table top" exercises or you set up a test environment that is very prod like and have someone randomly turn off components aka chaos engineering.
Hmm that’s strange, in my experience it is the other way around - Claude is super diligent with infra and will _insist_ on double checking and trying everything for real before committing.
When I was doing this myself I would read the docs and just implement them - claud is going about doing real software archeology to figure if what is said is actually the truth or it’s stale/inaccurate/buggy.
I’ve become 10 times more diligent because it is a lot easier to do. It’s no longer Urgh it’s good enough let’s ship it, now it’s “sure put a leg on it to figure it out and double check it”.
Backups are _tested regularly_ now because LLMs make it cheap to do so.
The only problem is when new engineers who haven’t learned these things Pre-ai now don’t really get why it is needed in the first place and will often lead the agent astray.
I think to address this we need to change or improve our training routines in general for humans. I think a lot of companies nowadays just skip that and deploy a company wide skill/policy for the agents, but don’t transfer the underlying skills to the devs themselves.
> Backups are _tested regularly_ now because LLMs make it cheap to do so.
sighs heavily in 90's sysadmin
Testing backups is not just a question of whether or not the restore command works. Go back and read the Tao of Backup: http://www.taobackup.com/history.html . The application itself (in its current version, with its current features) needs to work with the backed-up data, and the only way to verify this is to attempt to actually work with the data.
If you don't trust your agent to ship to production without manually reviewing the output (in some way), you have no business trusting your agent managing your backups. The agent writing some tests doesn't mean that the tests adequately handle all of your actual scenarios, let alone that your system will adequately handle data that is missing since the last backup.
>Why not? Because even pre-AI, very few companies spend time practicing restoring their backups, or disaster recovery, or picking infrequently-used runbooks to practice, or seeing whether they can easily rotate secrets without downtime, or trying to redploy the system onto another vendor's cloud/platform, or, or, or...
Exact. Let insurance cover it, say sorry to your customers twice and shwoop never happened.
The stock market isn't fundamentally a gamble. Spending money to buy a share of a company's future dividends is a sound way to invest money and earn a return on it.
The problem with the stock market is when there aren't enough new companies going public to soak up the spigot of all the capital that people want to invest, leading average P/E ratios to increase over time. There is too much money chasing too few earnings. When the underlying fundamentals don't match up, then all that investors are doing is speculating that someone else will be the bigger fool and buy from them at an even more unreasonable price - and that is a gamble.
One crucial difference: the US wasn't $40T in debt, and it wasn't pulling trillion dollar deficits. In 1998 the US federal government actually had a surplus! Even 9% interest wasn't going to wreck the Federal budget when the overall amount of debt to be serviced was so much lower.
Everything is relative to size. If your older brother lends you a dollar at 100% daily interest, you can still throw a balled-up Jackson at him a couple days later and walk away clean. But ask anyone who agreed to a crazy 20% interest rate on their car loan what it did to their personal finances, and all you'll hear is horror stories. 9% on $40T would be suicide.
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