Everything is an adaptation to something. The one 8 hours sleep a night is also an adaptation for the life style we adapted for in the last 100+ plus years.
One thing I don't understand. US is much bigger than most countries. Why would a country the size of Belgium (~12M people) needs to import as much as it export from the US in order not to have tariffs > 10%?
What I'm saying is that if total exports to the US is a function of the difference between the US and Belgium population size, then why wouldn't imports be a function as well? Belgium has less people buy things to import, but also less people to sell things to export. It's not clear to me what the mechanism is that these two functions should be so different.
I don't know how if it's tariffs or something else, but the US has been preventing importing EVs from China for a long time. You cannot not notice all the Chinese EVs on the roads when traveling overseas. I always wondered why those cars don't make it to the US.
To be fair, the US auto industry has been in various states of mid-implosion since the 80s, and has only barely had a few years here and there (mostly just ford really) of NOT imploding.
Buying domestic has been a sucker's game in the US since at least Reagan. Occasionally a domestic vehicle might be cheap, but it hasn't been a "good deal" in my lifetime.
Becoming old is one solution. Less expectation from older folks to move up if they are happy where they are. But as you know, it's a journey to get there :)
A more practical solution as people mentioned here, is staying away from big tech / corporate America.
Your assumptions are actually not correct. They are behind in many AI areas. Their LLM models for example are not in the same level as the frontier models. The main reason Flash 2.0 is so popular is that it's good enough for most things and is 30 times cheaper from Sonnet 3.7 for example.
They definitely have pricing power and also a large stake in Anthropic, so I'm not worried about them.
More seriously, I"m tired of people thinking they have principles but have no idea what they are actually fighting over. Surveillance saves so many lives. At least explain what so bad about it.
I challenge you to rewrite this so that you're making a strong, optimistic argument for surveillance from your perspective, instead of shitting on a young person for trying to navigate a path through legitimately complex tradeoffs.
The onus is on you to make a thought-provoking case, not for them to convince you that their internal ethical alarm bells are reasonable.
Yeap we did. I wrote it off around the time of the licence change, just after they decided to ditch the TF Team plan in favour of the utterly ridiculous “Resources Under Management” billing model.
I knew the company had lost the plot at that point.
Who's the target audience for this pricing that can afford this? The RUM pricing is indeed quite ridiculous.
It feels quite ridiculous, especially if you are managing "soft" resources like IAM roles via Terraform / Pulumi. At least with real resources (say, RDS instances), one can argue that Terraform / Pulumi pricing is a small percentage of the cloud bill. But IAM roles are not charged for in cloud, and there are so many of them (especially if you use IaaC to create very elaborate scheme).
There is an argument to be made that price-sensitive customers are a neglected market. Granted, marketing to them is very different - they're prone to being scooped if someone comes by willing to sell your same product to them at a loss (hi, Amazon and Walmart) - but there are a lot more of them and you're not fighting every startup on the planet for the same handful of clients.
Business have made a killing in China and India for a reason, after all.
+ There’s an argument against every rule of thumb.
+ For what it is worth, the just-one-percent-of-all-Chinese is historically a poor business strategy.
+ As you point out, targeting price sensitive customers puts you in competition with Walmart and Amazon. Not only that but you are competing for their worst customers.
you're not fighting every startup on the planet for the same handful of clients
Not having access to good clients/customers suggests the business idea might not be viable. Chasing money from people without the wherewithal or will to pay, does not make your business idea viable.
That's fair. I wasn't coming for you and I'm certainly not trying to fight you from some kind of authority - I'm definitely not a businessperson.
The only point I was trying to get across is that even "bad" customers are still customers, and that there's still a lot of money to be made meeting people's needs doing the work others don't want to do. I feel like this applies from the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder all the way to the top - that's all. Perhaps I should've made that clearer, and that's on me.
An unsolicited side note: I think the bristling to this post was because of the language you were using. Talking about the poor as if they were to be discarded made you look a bit as if you have no empathy, which might not be fair to you. I get it - business require being hard-hearted if you want to get ahead because if you don't make tough decisions, someone else will - but it probably wasn't your best look, you know?
Talking about the poor as if they were to be discarded
The context was Hashicorp pricing for a web service, I was not talking about the poor.
Not being able to afford a B2B service is not an injustice.
there's still a lot of money to be made meeting people's needs doing the work others don't want to do. I feel like this applies from the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder
Are you betting your breakfast on walking your talking?
even "bad" customers are still customers
That’s why I don’t recommend going out to find them. They tax your ability to provide high quality. You will have enough problems without trying to get lava from a turnip.
it probably wasn't your best look, you know
For better or worse, it’s not going to keep me up grieving on long winter nights.
Good for who? Good for people getting bonuses? Good for executives?
It doesn't seem to be good for the customers or the people using the software or the people contributing to the open source code. It also doesn't seem to have been good for the investors, looking at the other comments.
It also creates horrible incentives. Oh I won't run this in isolated project or under a separate service account since that costs more, let's just pile everything together.
I’m finding that the basic backend functionality of Pulumi and Terraform managed cloud is fairly easy to build (especially Terraform, I can’t quite believe how absurdly simple their cloud is…)
It was made apparent right after the IPO. Our team got a new VP in charge who changed the mantra from practitioner-first to enterprise-first. Soon after they then laid-off anyone not working on enterprise features. It was a sad death of a great company culture. Mitchell left around the same time which, IMO, speaks volumes.
The older I get, the more I'm convinced that practitioner-first is the only reasonable way to drive a product's features, while enterprise-first is the only reasonable way to drive a company's revenue.
Which is to say strong sustainable products need both.
... but ffs don't let the entire company use enterprise as a reason to ignore practitioner feature requests.
This is probably inaccurate, but it seemed like they wrote it off as a safe move, with their main competitor, Pulumi, getting away with it.
However, to play devil's advocate, the number of Terraform resources is a (slightly weak) predictor for resource consumption. Every resource necessitates API calls that consume compute resources. So, if you're offering a "cloud" service that executes Terraform, it's probably a decent way to scale costs appropriately.
I hate it, though. It's user-hostile and forces people to adopt anti-patterns to limit costs.
> forces people to adopt anti-patterns to limit costs
The previous pricing model, per workspace, did the same. Pricing models are often based on "value received", and therefore often can be worked around with anti-patterns (e.g. you pay for Microsoft 365 per user, so you can have users share the same account to lower costs).
> Every resource necessitates API calls that consume compute resources
In that world, I think it'd make more sense to charge per run-time second of performing an operation. I understand the argument you are making but the issue is you get charged even if you never touch that resource again via an operation.
It might make sense if TFC did something, anything, with those resources between operations to like...manage them. But...
> However, to play devil's advocate, the number of Terraform resources is a (slightly weak) predictor for resource consumption. Every resource necessitates API calls that consume compute resources. So, if you're offering a "cloud" service that executes Terraform, it's probably a decent way to scale costs appropriately.
That would make sense if you paid per API call to any of the cloud providers.
What happens when you run `terraform apply`? Arguably, a lot of things, but at its core it:
- Computes a list of resources and their expected state (where computation is generally proportional to the number of resources).
- Synchronizes the remote state by looking up each of these resources (where network ingress/egress is proportional to the number of resources).
- Compares the expected state to the remote state (again, where computation is generally proportional to the number of resources).
- Executes API calls to make the remote state match the expected state (again, where network ingress/egress is proportional to the number of resources).
- Stores the new state (where space is most certainly proportional to the number of resources)
This is a bit simplified, but my point is that in each of the five operations, the number of resources can be used as a predictor for the consumed compute resources (network/cpu/memory/disk). A customer with 10k resources is necessarily going to consume more compute resources than one with 10 resources.
you can probably get a sense of it based on your own usage of terraform and the log output (or the time various resources take to get managed in the Terraform Cloud/Enterprise UI). I think in the majority of cases you'll see that the bulk of the compute time is actually network bound, not because of the number of resources, just because the server at the other end (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.) is doing a lot of work. I know in some cases things like SQL Server Clusters on Azure can take literally hours to provision. Terraform will spend that "compute" time sitting there waiting, it's not actually doing much resource intensive though.
And then at the end as you said "stores the new state". Which is basically a big JSON file. 10 resources? 1M resources? I'll leave you to work out how much it probably costs to save a JSON file of that size somewhere like S3 ;)
Yeah, I'm not putting it forward as a justifying argument (just playing devil's advocate). However, it's probably how they justify it to themselves :) What makes it extra absurd is the price they charge per resource. That's where it turns into robbery.
The previous "per apply" based model penalized early stage companies when your infrastructure is rapidly evolving, and discouraged splitting state into smaller workspaces/making smaller iterative changes.
Charging by RUM more closely aligns the pricing to the scale/complexity of the infrastructure being managed which makes more sense to me.
That said it has tempted me to move management of more resources into kubernetes (via cross plane/config connector)
The previous model I was referring to was a flat-rate TF Cloud team plan at (in the UK) <$30/month.
There were runtime limits IIRC but there was nothing stopping Hashicorp offering a “per user” fixed rate plan at several hundred dollars per month to enterprises for the same service.
The various clients I’ve worked for who used TF would have lapped this up. RUM (or the equally opaque “call us” - we won’t answer! - enterprise pricing that proceeded it) not so much.
Depends how you define insider. Employees were subject to a 6 month lockup and during that time the price dropped dramatically, but they still had to pay taxes on the $80 IPO price. Execs and institutional investors that were able to sell at IPO made out quite well though.
It's really not. Let me know if you find any lenders that will let me pay off a mortgage with a capital loss.
At least in the startup narrative that circulates on HN, most early employees at a company with that kind of IPO would hope to have a lottery like level of financial windfall. Now their upside is if they manage to get luck a second time they get to offset their winnings? :/
Where you paying Terraform for anything at the time?
My doubt in the value of the company was that I've been using Terraform for years in Enterprise settings and never needed to pay the company for anything.
Broadcom VMware play. If you’re invested as an enterprise in the ecosystem, is going to be a while before you can extricate yourself. In the meantime, you must pay up.
I'm pretty good at engineering fast moves. I took a company off of Salesforce in 45 days. VMware servers are even easier to changeout. Never done Terraform though.
I've been in healthcare/finance for a decade. C level. I'm not a cowboy, I'm incredibly thorough, and I have a reputation for excellent work done fast. I'm in the third company for this PE firm because of the strong reputation I've created working at their companies. In 2021 they brought me in part-time consulting on one healthcare company where in 7 months I reorganized the IT structure, helping them land a very nice 9 figure exit.
My kind of operations work VERY well in highly regulated industries because I'm meticulous about regulations. Just because I can do it quickly doesn't mean I do it poorly, and I don't appreciate the assumption that I'm a "cowboy" being reckless.
And it would appear to me you are underinformed about how much migration off of VMware is really happening in these highly regulated industries. There's a tremendous amount of low-profile engineering going on to migrate away. No one is tipping off Broadcom because they don't want BCom to try turning the screws even more.
terraform is OSS, unless you're using the hosted HCP version (workspaces? I think they're called), which, I've been using terraform heavily and at scale since v0.7 and I have never once thought I needed or would pay for something like that.
I'm well aware and have contributed to OpenTofu project in a small manner. I hope you'll forgive me slightly misspeaking - any version of terraform before that license change is OSS. It is, however, perfectly free to use and most companies I've worked with are hard-pinned on a particular version of terraform and rarely on the bleeding edge.
Eh. Lots of retail investors do well with the right stock. Lot's of Apple investors have done well over the years. Microsoft even with the right timing.
They didn't with HashiCorp certainly. Bought some but not too much and were part of a housecleaning a few years back (which I'm glad I did).
This is likely to get downvoted, but in my experience with the health care system in America, I'd prefer consulting ChatGPT over ~50% of the doctors. Too many doctors who I have no idea how they graduated from med school, and even worse, advocate for solutions that maximize profits.
If I can provide one advice is to always question your doctors. Get multiple opinions on serious issues, and educate yourself like this person did. Come prepared to doctor visits and don't be afraid to challenge them if they tell you something that contradicts what you learned.
DeepSeek wouldn't be able to train R1 without their ~600B parameters base model, so you should consider the cost of that model when you compare with Grok.
In any case, Elon won't win this race cause the best talent will not work for him. He used to have good reputation and a lot of money, which is a deadly combination. Now he only has the latter -- not enough when leading AI people can make 7 figures in other companies.
To be clear 1: I'm not saying that people who currently work on Grok are not great. It's not about hiring some great people. It's about competing in the long run - people with other options (e.g. offers from leading AI labs) are more likely to accept those offers than joining his research lab.
To be clear 2: I'm not talking about Elon's reputation due to his politics. I'm only talking about his reputation as an employer.
He has the vision and marketing skills but it's not going to be enough for leading the AI race.
Actually, the 5 million figure is for the compute cost for the base 600B parameter model. Training R1 was just 8000 steps of reinforcement learning, so I expect that the vast, vast majority of the training cost is already included in the pretraining stage.
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