It's so sad how much money leaders will effortlessly pump into something like this, when we still have existential threats of climate change, incurable diseases, poverty, housing, and so on.
Meanwhile ungodly amounts of money are being used so some boomer can generate a AI video of a baby riding a puppy.
A company I worked at also did this, though there was no limits. Some folks would choose to spend the whole week working on a larger refactor, for example, I unified all of our redis usage to use a single modern library compared to the mess of 3 libraries of various ages across our codebase. This was relatively easy, but tedious, and required some new tests/etc.
Overall, I think this kind of thing is very positive for the health of building software, and morale to show that it is a priority to actually address these things.
I've struggled throughout my life with anxiety, ADHD, and bouts of depression.
I've done years of therapy, and use some medication to help with my ADHD. I will say though, singlehandedly, the best (and hardest) thing I've had to do is fight my own phone/internet/computer usage.
I grew up with computers and still work professionally with them day to day, but have made a serious effort in the last year to cut down my usage in an extreme manner:
- Using a 'brick' device to control which apps work on my phone, requiring I physically tap my phone to the brick to lock/unlock the restricted mode. This is always on.
- Blocking tons of sites via multiple means (iOS screen time, eero network profiles)
- Turning my iPhone into a very very basic phone: in "bricked" mode, which I will find myself using for continuous days at a time, I can only use: gmail, photos, notes, weather, maps, spotify, telephone, imessage. No news, no internet browsing, no social media.
- I've deleted all social media accounts (except LinkedIn, but this too is blocked on my phone).
From all of this, the initial realization was, "wow, I'm bored..", which is hard at first to sit with as a feeling, when normally my first instinct to that feeling was "let's open some app/youtube/etc." Then you slowly find positive things creeping in to occupy that boredom time: reading, calling friends/family, getting chores done, etc. And for anything "restricted" that I can't do on my phone, I largely can do on my computer (though I still block sites like reddit, youtube). But this is much healthier as I'm much less likely to pick up my laptop for hours on end, vs. opening my phone at every moment I'm bored.
> It would be a good thing, if it would cause anything to change. It obviously won't.
I agree wholeheartedly. The only change is internal to these organizations (eg: CloudFlare, AWS) Improvements will be made to the relevant systems, and some teams internally will also audit for similar behavior, add tests, and fix some bugs.
However, nothing external will change. The cycle of pretending like you are going to implement multi-region fades after a week. And each company goes on continuing to leverage all these services to the Nth degree, waiting for the next outage.
Not advocating that organizations should/could do much, it's all pros/cons. But the collective blast radius is still impressive.
the root cause is customers refusing to punish these downtime.
Checkout how hard customers punish blackouts from the grid - both via wallet, but also via voting/gov't. It's why they are now more reliable.
So unless the backbone infrastructure gets the same flak, nothing is going to change. After all, any change is expensive, and the cost of that change needs to be worth it.
I think you’re viewing the issue from an office worker’s perspective. For us, downtime might just mean heading to the coffee machine and taking a break.
But if a restaurant loses access to its POS system (which has happened), or you’re unable to purchase a train ticket, the consequences are very real. Outages like these have tangible impacts on everyday life. That’s why there’s definitely room for competitors who can offer reliable backup strategies to keep services running.
Talking more about some unrelated function taking down the whole system, not advocating for "offline" credit card transactions (is this even a thing these days?). Ex: If the transaction needs to be logged somewhere, it can be built to sync whenever possible rather than blocking all transactions if the central service is down.
Payment processor being down is payment processor being down.
Do any of those competitors actually have meaningfully better uptime?
From a societal level, having everything shut down at once is an issue. But if you only have one POS system targeting only one backend URL (and that backend has to be online for the POS to work) then cloudflare seems like one of the best choices
If the uptime provided by cloudflare isn't enough then the solution isn't a cloudflare competitor, it's the ability to operate offline (which many POS have, including for card purchases) or at least multiple backends with different DNS, CDN, server location etc.
If it’s that easy to get the exact same service / product as another vendor the maybe your competitive advantage isn’t so high. If Amazon would be down I’d just wait a few hours as I don’t want to sign up on another site.
I agree. These days it seems like everything is a micro-optimization to squeeze out a little extra revenue. Eventually most companies lose sight of the need to offer a compelling product that people would be willing to wait for.
I remember a Google cloud outage years ago that happened to coincide with one of our customers' massively expensive TV ads. All the people who normally would've gone straight to their website instead got 502. Probably a 1M+ loss for them all things considered.
You need to be punishing the services you "paid" to use, but had downtime. So did you terminate any of those services for downtime, or had any sort of punishment done to them as a result?
> Checkout how hard customers punish blackouts from the grid - both via wallet, but also via voting/gov't.
What? Since when has anyone ever been free to just up and stop paying for power from the grid? Are you going to pay $10,000 - $100,000 to have another power company install lines? Do you even have another power company in the area? State? Country? Do you even have permission for that to happen near your building? Any building?
The same is true for internet service, although personally I'd gladly pay $10,000 - $100,000 to have literally anything else at my location, but there are no proper other wired providers and I'll die before I ever install any sort of cellular router. Also this is a rented apartment so I'm fucked even if there were competition, although I plan to buy a house in a year or two.
Downtimes happen one way or another. The upside of using Cloudflare is that bringing things back online is their problem and not mine like when I self-host. :]
Their infrastructure went down for a pretty good reason (let the one who has never caused that kind of error cast the first stone) and was brought back within a reasonable time.
I'm Canadian and American, and have lived in both places and seen the stark differences myself. In the US, the police culture is certainly militarized and proud of it. Even in small towns you have days where the police roll out the biggest armored vehicles they have to show off, and that's their idea of a "community event", kids think its cool obviously, but it's really just "lets show off all of our high power toys".
Those high-powered toys by the cops are merely for showing off and to victimize the weak.
Those toys typically never come into play to protect the citizens.
Case in point: during the Uvalde school shooting incident in 2022, when a shooter (Salvador Ramos) went on a killing spree inside the school, then hundreds of cops gathered outside
with brand new body armor (gifted to them just months ago) and armed with automatic guns, but they never dared to go inside to tackle the shooter. Not only that, those cowardly cops actively prevented parents and state patrol officers from going in to rescue their kids. The cowardly cops were led by a cowardly police chief, who later gave excuses for the delayed response to the deadly situation and his mishandling of the police force, by claiming to have forgotten his walkie talkie!
Ultimately one of the border patrol officers and some US deputy marshalls (who had travelled 70 miles to reach the scene after getting an alert) managed to sneak in to the back, break the locked door, and used a tactical shield to corner and finally kill the shooter, thus ending his bloodbath (19 children and 2 teachers were tragically killed).
And if you think arming cowardly showoff cops with guns and armor is useless and potentially dangerous, you should know the Uvalde school shooter was a minor but he managed to buy the guns legally from a gun shop on credit!
That's how lax and evil the gun laws and resulting shootouts in USA are.
USA has more mass shootings and more school shootings than any other place in the world.
No wonder they facilitate and glorify high-speed car chases. It is all a thrillride for these adrenaline junkies high on power.
```you should know the Uvalde school shooter was a minor but he managed to buy the guns legally from a gun shop on credit!```
That does not appear to be true. The investagiom reporting shows that the shooter bought the guns after he turned 18 - the legal age to purchase them (long guns, aka rifles - different from pistols) in the state of Texas.
Buying things on credit seems like a reasonable way to do business in general - are you suggesting that all deadly weapons should be sold for cash to increase the difficulty of legally acquiring them and so lowering the frequency of mass shootings?
In my country, no firearm can be issued to any civilian (certainly not a minor), without verification and license from police.
In Texas, there is no minimum age for purchasing ammunition beyond federal limits, no requirement for an ammunition seller to keep a record of the purchaser, and no specific license to buy or sell ammunition, according to the Giffords Law Center.
Salvador Ramos, the Uvalde school shooter, legally purchased two AR platform rifles Ramos got his guns legally through Oasis Outback, a Uvalde sporting goods store and federal firearms licensee, according to published reports. He also purchased hundreds of rounds of ammunition, on his 18th birthday.
I know the USA has a bad habit of buying things on credit, but firearms & ammo should never be allowed to be purchased on credit. Let it be purchased only after a verification and license from police, and only via debit card or bank transaction with proper legal paper trail, not credit or cash. And any firearm and ammo purchase should be ratified with local police, so they know if someone is making a suspicious purchase.
> The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.
It's gimmicky and it seems the only people "impressed" or "mindblown" with AI content are boomers on Facebook.
Any time I see some obviously AI generated content, whether it be some LinkedIn-influencer type or some blog spam that got well ranked on SEO, I'm immediately disgusted. The internet is eating itself.
How, exactly, is private equity responsible for our medical system and our massive government budget problems. Please explain to me step by step like I'm stupid.
Not the guy you asked, but PE focuses on short-term profits via high-debt acquisitions, cost-cutting, and price increases. In the context of healthcare, for example, this means higher costs for both out-of-pocket and government payers, fewer staff and lower quality of care, and, in some cases, even closure altogether due to the acquisition debt (which was dumped onto the acquired org itself) pushing the org into bankruptcy (of course only after the PE firm has squeezed all the juice possible out).
>The long and short: In 2010, private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management purchased Caritas Christi Health Care, a struggling eastern Massachusetts hospital system, from the Archdiocese of Boston, converting it from non-profit to for-profit and rebranding it as Steward Health Care. In 2016, after years of continued financial instability, Steward signed a sale-leaseback agreement with Medical Properties Trust (MPT), selling the land and buildings occupied by its hospitals to the real estate investment trust then leasing them back. Steward made $1.25 billion from the agreement—enough to steady its financial footing, pay off Cerberus, and fund a growth spree. The next year, the company purchased 26 more hospitals across the country. But with the agreement came what many viewed as inflated rents.
There is a new doc on Netflix called "Country Doctor" which follows a doctor who works in a very rural area, it shows what happens when the hospital goes through another round of being sold off to a new firm and the difficult access of the county.
Others have pointed out how PE has degraded the medical system. The debt crisis I referred to is the private credit crisis, though no doubt private equity has played a key lobbying role in creating our national debt crisis as well. Regarding private debt, Jeffrey Gundlach sums it up:
"'This is starting to show up to be the problem that I've been referencing… that private credit and private equity, frankly, is being borrowed from private equity. It's sold on a volatility argument, primarily," Gundlach added. "Maybe there's some excess return for your illiquidity that you can get, but it's largely a volatility argument.'
Illiquidity could turn paper losses into real ones, Gundlach cautioned, pointing to the kind of liquidity squeeze that worsened the 2008 financial crisis, when investors were unable to meet capital calls."
And here’s a ChatGPT summary of it for the TLDR crowd:
Private equity ownership of hospitals and medical practices is linked to worse patient outcomes, higher prices, and weakened physician autonomy. The paper argues that PE’s standard playbook — heavy debt loading, cost-cutting, consolidation, and short-term profit extraction — is fundamentally misaligned with long-term medical care. Case studies like Hahnemann University Hospital show how sale-leasebacks and aggressive financial engineering can push essential hospitals into collapse. Consolidation of physician groups reduces competition and raises prices for patients and employers, while staff cuts and reduced investment correlate with lower care quality. The author calls for stronger antitrust scrutiny, transparency of ownership, and limits on practices such as asset-stripping to prevent further harm in the healthcare system.
I actually took this to heart and deployed it natively on multiple VLANs in my home. Then, even with the abundance of address space, Comcast pulled the ability to use IPv6 in this manner and I'm back to to using NAT on all my VLANs except for one. Progress.
> Comcast pulled the ability to use IPv6 in this manner
Can you expand on this?
It's been a while since I've explored IPv6, but I'm on Comcast and I recently switched from OpenWRT to an Ubiquiti router and was surprised that 1) it doesn't enable IPv6 by default and 2) It asks for configuration [2] that I'm not sure how to answer. I thought everything "just worked" with Router Advertisement.
In a nutshell, Comcast used to provide a /60 to residential customers and this could be subnetted into more than one LAN. Nowadays they only provide a single /64 and this can only be used for one subnet.
It sounds like your router can request a larger prefix length than /64 and Comcast will give up to a /60. That requires a router that knows how to do that.
That seems like reasonable approach when most people just need /64, and those who want more have to configure to get it.
It feels as if every CEO used ChatGPT once and said “wow this is incredible, pivot hard to make our product use AI”, and that’s about all the thought has matured to.
The problem is entitled, lazy, sociopathic bastards who think everyone else is an idiot who should be killed and replaced with a robot. They're seeing a thing which confirms these biases, and reacting predictably. Unfortunately people like this are found in higher concentrations the further up the class hierarchy you go.
