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  • 180 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I really enjoy programming, but generally I dislike cooking. I just want to eat, not spend time preparing to eat.

    My experience with cooking has been that because I don’t do it enough, I’m constantly dealing with food expiration dates and having to plan carefully around them.

    In comparison, I’ve got some servers that have been running maintenance free for 5+ years. (Probably not the most secure thing, but meh, I don’t have customers other than myself)

    I think programmers often have hobbies that are more physical though. For me, I like working on my car because turning bolts and working with my hands lets my brain turn off for a while. I could see cooking and following a recipe being in the same category for others.


  • I’ve been able to get demos of autopilot in one of my friend’s cars, and I’ll always remember autopilot correctly stopping at a red light, followed by someone in the next lane over blowing right through it several seconds later at full speed.

    Unfortunately “better than the worst human driver” is a bar we passed a long time ago. From recent demos I’d say we’re getting close to the “average driver”, at least for clear visibility conditions, but I don’t think even that’s enough to have actually driverless cars driving around.

    There were over 9M car crashes with almost 40k deaths in the US in 2020, and that would be insane to just decide that’s acceptable for self driving cars as well. No company is going to want that blood on their hands.









  • I’m not arguing against charging based on bandwidth speeds. You’re right the total data transfered doesn’t really make a difference.

    My point is that even just charging per Mbps, internet will always be cheaper within a data center. Just like water utility service is going to be cheaper next to a freshwater river than in the middle of the desert. There’s millions of dollars in equipment you’re effectively renting to get the internet to your house from the nearest datacenter. Your OVH server in comparison only needs maybe 1 extra network switch installed to get it online, and you’re in a WAY bigger pool of customers to split the cost of service to the building.



  • Fines and taxes are incentives. Companies will do whatever’s cheapest, so you can make the good thing cheaper, or the bad thing more expensive. Both will have a similar effect, it’s just a question of where the margins are.
    If a company is selling something at-cost and gets taxed, then they’ll have to raise prices for the consumer, but if they’re getting a stimulus from the government it gets covered by tax payers. Which one ends up being the right choice depends on the product and company in question.