If you intend to hold to maturity then you should accrue the bond coupons over time, that’s the modal case
If part of your bond portfolio is available for sale, then you should use mark-to-market accounting, which prices in the present value of future coupons and the discount rate as well.
IIRC this was one of the issues with the failure of SVB, they were forced to sell their bonds
and realize a huge MtM loss
Most cloud providers have a similar offering to AWS Lambda, plus it is not that hard to convert your code from the event handling pattern impose by AWS Lambda to a long running container running in K8s or VMs like you are doing yourself
IMO the lock-in fear is overblown as the top cloud offerings (S3, Lambdas, K8s as a service etc) are already commoditized among the top providers, the exception being specialized databases like DynamoDB, Spanner, Cosmos …
Not saying there wouldn’t be some major work to switch your operations from eg AWS to GCP, but it is also not a hard lock-in
I hesitate to call Hetzner "cloud". Hetzner is an EC2+S3 competitor, not an AWS one. IMO the minimum for being a real cloud is you need hosted Postgres, hosted Kafka, hosted Kubernetes, and S3-compatible object storage. Without the first three Hetzner is just not in the same product category. Nobody sensible buys AWS for the comically overpriced EC2.
Another missed component is a real autoscaling load balancer. This often gets missed and taken for granted. Possibly due to if you haven't seen a good one (AWS) you might not realise what you're missing. Most aspiring "cloud" companies have fixed capacity single tennant load balancers which is not cloud in any definition.
It's far cheaper to do it yourself, but the entire point is that you outsource the management of the service. Lots of people don't want to deal with database failovers, or - god forbid - deal with Kubernetes control plane issues.
On the opposite, it is more expensive, and any large enough company should probably at least consider renting metal rather than services. For a small org, though, it lets you avoid a lot of infrastructure/ops work.
“Air conditioning. … It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics.
Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency.”
I love this video, and similar by NightHawkInLight,[0] but (as they would agree) it's not a commercial product just yet.
For a while I've thought the first thing to coat with a fancy "Free AC" paint should be... the AC! For most sky-cooling rigs the main cost is pipes or panels on the roof to move heat from inside to outside, but AC is already moving heat. AC units operate at a higher temperature, so it should emit more IR radiation as T^4 (meaning a small increase makes a big difference). Most AC has a pretty good sky view, but maybe not as ideal as the roof.
It seems ironic to use "No AC" paint on your AC, but the physics and economics doesn't lie. Per square inch it's probably the most effective place!
As someone who grew up in a tropical country and has moved to a temperate one, this rings very true.
It is significantly easier to walk in 20C, 50% humidity than to walk the same distance in 28C, 100% humidity. You get lethargic really quickly in a hot humid area.
Every physical action just feels easier in a temperate climate than in a tropical one. Which is why air-conditioning is such a big deal - it lets you get temperate conditions in a tropical location.
(I'm not saying that those are a Mafia hallmark, but I do wonder whether the robes would make sense in Brazil. As far as I'm aware they are the gold standard of heat-adapted clothing. They probably don't do much about humidity.)
How do we square this with what happened when imperialist people went into areas with much hotter weather to establish colonies? Were the colonists less efficient back then when air conditioning didn't exist yet? Or could it be that these area weren't as hot in earlier centuries as they are today? Also, what are the implications for countries with imperialist pasts that are getting hotter due to climate change?
Thank you for sharing this article. I had never learned of this type of fan before, but I always wondered about how the people from Europe who weren't used to the heat would have coped with it, especially with how in recent times there has been news coverage about heat domes and infrastructure that might have been designed for a different climate.
These are, effectively, different use cases. You want to use (and pay for) Express One Zone in situations in which you need the same object reused from multiple instances repeatedly, while it looks like this on-disk or in-memory cache is for when you may want the same file repeatedly used from the same instance.
Is it the same instance ? Rising wave (and similar tools )are designed to run in production on a lot of distributed compute nodes for processing data , serving/streaming queries and running control panes .
Even for any single query it will likely run on multiple nodes with distributed workers gathering and processing data from storage layer, that is whole idea behind MapReduce after all.
It's true that formal wealth systems (like land, stock ownership and trademarks) require an elaborate legal and cultural infrastructure to maintain — but only at scale. The absence of such systems doesn't eliminate wealth inequality, it just changes how it's enforced.
In less formal or collapsed systems, wealth and resources are often controlled by a ruling oligarchy or individuals whose hard power acts as a de facto property right.
For example, many argue that Vladimir Putin is one of the wealthiest individuals in the world, despite lacking formal ownership on paper — his political and military power effectively grants him control over immense resources. Wealth inequality ultimately stems from control over resources, whether legitimized by law or enforced through power.
Power people have power because of power is more of a movie trope than the actual mechanics of the world you live in. Wealth is exclusively abstract legal constructs in the modern world. You might be surprised to know that even Putin's wealth is tied to legal ownership structures, (regardless if they're maintained by bogus shell companies, he has effective rights to the property). Whatever niche counter-example comes after doesn't influence how global inequality is administered or experienced by the majority of people.
"Moving on to the real world, I note that following a sea change in interest rates, non-investment grade public and private debt now offer prospective returns that are competitive to those historically seen on equities. I believe investors should consider shifting capital to this area if they are (a) attracted by returns of 7 to 10 per cent or so, (b) desirous of limiting uncertainty and volatility, and (c) willing to forgo upside potential beyond today’s yields to do so. For me, that should include a lot of investors, even if not everyone."
Howard Marks is one of the most respected investors in US with a stellar record. His newsletter (Buffet reads it) and books are widely read and respected. He doesn't need the marketing as some up and coming financial "influencer".
There is now the GLSDB (Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb) which is supposed to be a cheap, longish-range (~ 150 km) guided bomb built on top of the GBU-39 platform. It was developed by Boeing and Saab.
Ukraine has had it since earlier this year.
Apparently, it is not being as effective as one would've hoped though due to heavy Russian GPS jamming [1]
GLSDB is, as the “Ground Launched” indicates, not the same thing as an aerial glide bomb, but is instead a warhead for GMLRS rockets fired from launchers like the HIMARS.’
EDIT: OTOH, its based on the SDB, which is a (small, 250lb) glide bomb with decent (40km) range whichthe US has currently only integrated the on the F-15E Strike Eagle, which Ukraine doesn’t have. There’s a long list of other potential future carriers envisioned by the US (including the F-16, which Ukraine will soon be operating), and integrating Western weapons with Soviet-design aircraft has been happening a fair amount in Ukraine, so if the problems affecting GLSDB were solved, SDB would be a real possibility for them, as well.
You could try using Amazon S3 Express, a low-latency alternative for S3 buckets [0]. I imagine cache invalidation would be relatively simple to implement using lifecycle policies.
> Even when we have billions of transactions, a single missing, late, or incorrect transaction immediately creates a detectable accuracy issue with a simple query—for example, “Find the clearing Accounts with nonzero balance.”
How do you deal with float, transactions where the first leg happens in T+0 but settlement is done in T+N ? Do the clearing accounts have a flag/mark allowing for a nonzero balance?
We model a timestamp which functionally is "when does this activity go on the books"? We compute clearing both based on this "effective_at" and a "system time" (there are some business functions with known periodicity and it makes for a useful debugging tool).
Long-clearing activity makes for some interesting business cases and long-standing float obviously can lead to some detection noise. For example, Brazil has uniquely long settlement times.
I work with payments in a bank in Brazil and as I was reading the question I thought "interesting question, here we have a great 'delay' in clearances and very old and very complex government-embedded systems to deal with it, funny to see that you know about it too.
Not the author, but know a little bit about this. You’re describing a payable or receivable, depending on the direction of the funds flow you’re thinking about. You’d have an account for the payable/receivable that should clear. If it doesn’t do that by the expected settlement date, someone or something needs to go look and find out why. The settlement date itself should be predictable based on properties of the submitted transaction and the network/scheme reporting.
The general way you'd handle this is with undeposited or in-transit ledgers. Funds would go Account A > Undeposited Account B > Deposited Account B, where they're typically in Undeposited Account B for N days. All ledgers would balance.
> Yes, they create money, but deposits are a requirement to do it.
Deposits, although an important source of funding are not a requirement, capital is. There are capital requirements that make starting and running a bank a fairly expensive enterprise - you need to put up a lot of your own money (equity) for use.
If you intend to hold to maturity then you should accrue the bond coupons over time, that’s the modal case
If part of your bond portfolio is available for sale, then you should use mark-to-market accounting, which prices in the present value of future coupons and the discount rate as well.
IIRC this was one of the issues with the failure of SVB, they were forced to sell their bonds and realize a huge MtM loss