Meta's accounting games are entirely reminiscent of Enron, who famously named their off-balance sheet debt-hiding special purpose vehicles after Star Wars "Jedi 1, Jedi 2," Jurassic Park, "Raptors 1 through 7," and the crooked CFO's kids "LJM" etc.
It definitely has the Voltaire/Onion like snark and cynicism with biting accuracy that really gets me going. We need more well informed rants disguised in heavy sarcasm
True serializability doesn't model the real world. IRL humans observe something then make decisions and take action, without holding "locks" on the thing they observed. Everything from the stock market to the sitcom industry depend on this behavior.
Other models exist and are more popular than serializability, e.g. for practicality, PostgreSQL uses MVCC and read consistency, not serializability.
One big difference:
- ~10% of Americans work in healthcare (i.e. big source of income)
- ~66% of Americans own their homes (i.e. big asset want to protect)
- there's societal stability reasons to encourage home ownership
True, even OpenAI built their castle in nVidia's kingdom. And nVidia built their castle in TSMC's kingdom. And TSMC built their castle in ASML's kingdom.
Its not a new problem though, and its not just billing. The UI across Gemini just generally sucks (across AI Studio and the chat interfaces) and there's lots of annoying failure cases where Gemini will just timeout and stop working entirely midrequest.
Been like this for quite a while, well before Gemini 3.
So far I continue to put up with it because I find the model to be the best commercial option for my usage, but its amazing how bad modern Google is at just basic web app UX and infrastructure when they were the gold standard for such for like, arguably decades prior.
We are talking here about the most basic things- nothing AI related. Basic billing. The fact that it is not working says a lot about the future of the product and company culture in general (obviously they are not product-oriented)
Given how many paid offerings Google has, and the complexity and nuance to some of those offering (e.g. AdSense) I am pretty surprised that Google don't have a functioning drop in solution for billing across the company.
If they do, it's failing here. The idea of a penny pinching megacorp like Google failing technically even in the penny pinching arena is a surprise to me.
Even though my post complaining about google's billing and incoherent mess got so many upvotes, I'll be the first to say that there is nothing basic about "give me money".
Apart from the fact that what happens to the money when it gets to google (putting it in the right accounts, in the right business, categorizing it, etc), it changes depending on who you're ASKING for money.
1. Getting money from an individual is easy. Here's a credit card page.
2. Getting money from a small business is slightly more complicated. You may already have an existing subscription (google workspaces), just attach to it.
3. As your customers get bigger, it gets more squishy. Then you have enterprise agreements, where it becomes a whole big mess. There are special prices, volume discounts, all that stuff. And then invoice billing.
The point is that yes, we all agree that getting someone to plop down a credit card is easy. Which is why Anthropic and OpenAI (who didn't have 20 years of enterprise billing bloat) were able to start with the simplest use case and work their way slowly up.
But I AM sensitive to how hard this is for companies as large and varied as Google or MS. Remember the famous Bill Gates email where even he couldn't figure out how to download something from Microsoft's website.
It's just that they are also LARGE companies, they have the resources to solve these problems, just don't seem to have the strong leadership to bop everyone on the head until they make the billing simple.
And my guess is also that consumers are such a small part of how they're making money (you best believe that these models are probably beautifully integrated into the cloud accounts so you can start paying them from day one).
My first thought was this is the whole thing about managers at Google trying to get employees under other managers fired and their own reports promoted -- but it feels too similar to how fucked up all the account and billing stuff is at Microsoft. This is what happens when you try to "fix" something by layering on more complexity and exceptions.
From past experience, the advertising side of the business was very clear with accounts and billing. GCP was a whole other story. The entire thing was poorly designed, very confusing, a total mess. You really needed some justification to be using it over almost everything else (like some Google service which had to go through GCP.) It's kind of like an anti-sales team where you buy one thing because you have to and know you never want to touch anything from the brand ever again.
We made the bet 2 years ago to build AI Studio on top of the Google Cloud infra. One of the real challenges is that Google is extremely global, we support devs in hundreds of countries with dozens of different billing methods and the like. I wish the problem space was simple but on the first day I joined Google we kicked off the efforts to make sure we could bring billing into AI Studio, so January cannot come soon enough : )
What you probably don't know yet is that ocean calcifying organisms are the only ones left that still remove CO2 from the atmosphere long term.
Trees take CO2, but when they die, bacteria and fungi oxidize the wood back to CO2. Same for everything else that's greenwashed as "removing CO2". That removal is temporary - only a few years or decades at most.
Without the oceans to trap CO2 into new limestone deposits, we're doomed and we can do absolutely nothing about it.
It's not the only mechanism for CO2 removal. There is also a geo cycle. I've forgotten the exact details, but it involves the acidity created by CO2 increasing the speed of rock weathering, and the result sediments being incorporated into the plates, plate tectonics removing the carbon from the upper crust and volcanoes re-introducing it. It's self regulating but very slow, taking millions of years.
Granted, biological removal is much faster, now. But during snowball earth in particular there was so little biological activity the geo cycles dominated CO2 regulation.
Neither of those two mechanisms are relevant right now, as mankind's production of CO2 has swamped both mechanisms. That will stop one way or another of course.
New (open source) PostgreSQL index type for analytics workloads, which is a read-only drop-in replacement for B-trees. Smol is multiplicatively faster than B-Trees and radically smaller.
Sure - How clever of you. It’s also the world’s largest religion by far. That alone says something about how deeply the message of Jesus resonates across cultures and centuries. Billions of people have found truth, hope, and transformation in Him. Not because they were born into it, but because the story holds up when you actually look into it.
Religion is not my jam, but isn't it a little... crass to talk about your deity like that? The evangelical industrial-scale proselytizing always seemed kinda disrespectful to the whole "finding truth, hope, and transformation in Him", like god-almighty needed a used car salesman to connect with people.
Plus, it's not the best moment to make this point considering that Mohamed is probably going overtake Jesus on the race in the next decade. I know, conversions are cooler than births, but the reality is the same (also conversions in LATAM are just raiding the Catholics for followers).
I get that. I’ve felt the same cringe at times. The sense that faith is being sold instead of shared. The irony is that the heart of Christianity doesn’t need promotion. It’s supposed to be recognized in how people live, not in how loudly they talk.
For me, following Jesus has nothing to do with market share or population stats. If every chart in the world dropped tomorrow, He’d still be who He is. Faith isn’t about the numbers (Christianity has waxed and waned for centuries). It’s about the truth of one life, one death, and one resurrection that keeps changing hearts in every century.
The Church has made mistakes in how it presents Him, but the reality behind it, the Person Himself, doesn’t need a salesman. He just keeps finding people, quietly, the way He always has.
PS - Conversions in Latin America were deeply shaped by how God met people in their own culture and symbols. Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico and Our Lady of Aparecida in Brazil are perfect examples. Moments when faith didn’t arrive through conquest like most believe, but through divine encounter.
I know you feel deeply about this, but you started with the angle of "Christianity numba 1", then after I disagree you say numbers actually never mattered.
>Moments when faith didn’t arrive through conquest like most believe, but through divine encounter.
You imply that syncretism rather than conquest was the reason LATAM became catholic, but just an hour before you said:
>You’re absolutely right that many nations were converted by force or politics. History is full of that tension. The message of Christ abused in ways completely opposite to what He taught in the Scripture.
>What’s always struck me, though, is how the faith survived despite those abuses. Every empire that tried to use Christianity as a weapon eventually crumbled, but the core message kept resurfacing through people who lived it voluntarily. Saints, reformers, monks, ordinary believers who loved instead of coerced.
So after all it was conquest, but the divine message resurfaced despite the abuses. It all sounds very Groucho Marx "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them...well I have others".
There are those of us who were raised to believe all that and truly believed it for years, and then, when we actually looked into it deeper, it all fell apart and became impossible to continue to believe.
You do realize that most countries that are Christian today have been made so by force sometime in the past, not because the locals were so happy about it?
Where I'm from, they're still celebrating the "national baptism" event where the ruler basically forced the entire (allegedly) population of his capital into the river for mass baptism by Greek priests invited for the occasion.
You’re absolutely right that many nations were converted by force or politics. History is full of that tension. The message of Christ abused in ways completely opposite to what He taught in the Scripture.
What’s always struck me, though, is how the faith survived despite those abuses. Every empire that tried to use Christianity as a weapon eventually crumbled, but the core message kept resurfacing through people who lived it voluntarily. Saints, reformers, monks, ordinary believers who loved instead of coerced.
Christianity spreads most truthfully through witness, not power. The fact that so many who first met it under pressure later kept it freely says something deeper is at work than politics or force.
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