[1] https://www.sees.com/dark-chocolate/sugar-free-almonds/20037...
[1] https://www.sees.com/dark-chocolate/sugar-free-almonds/20037...
I was in the highschool computer lab, working on a website for the school IT administrator. She wanted me to include a patterned background, blinking marquees, GIFs, the whole nine yards. Another student was working on the project with me, sitting next to me. We were both facing the window, away from the door. The admin left the room. I told my fellow student these choices were extremely tacky, and I questioned the life choices that led her to the point of thinking this looked good.
Turns out she came back into the room and was behind me the whole time. Boy, did I feel like a jerk. I apologized.
What a different time that was.
If I wasn't concerned primarily with returns and instead on just saving money over renting, the math is still way better in any of the top metros in the United States so long as you plan to reside there for 5+ years. And if you aren't living in a major metro, you still need to find a place to live, so you might as well make 1% annually on that money as opposed to just giving it away in the form of rent.
In my experience, renting makes sense when you need to pay for flexibility, because you aren't sure if you will stay rooted in one place for 5+ years. Otherwise, buying for many people is a win financially and has been for decades.
But the real kicker is that I get x5 the cores, x20 RAM, x10 storage, and a couple of GPUs. I'm running last-generation Infiniband (56gb/sec) and modern U.2 SSDs (say 500MB/sec per device).
I figure it is going to take me about $10K in labor to move and then $1K/mo to maintain and pay for services that are bundled in the cloud. And because I have all this dedicated hardware, I don't have to mess around with docker/k8s/etc.
It's not really a big data problem but it shows the ROI on owning your own hardware. If you need 100 servers for one day per month, the cloud is amazing. But I do a bunch of resampling, simple models, and interactive BI type stuff, so co-loc wins easily.
Graham’s (alleged) arrogance about his brightness isn’t really the issue here. Let’s face it, he is bright. That’s not what is causing this boredom/dismay, though.
The issue is that somehow the rest of us became entranced by the “cult of Graham” and his thinking about startups/founders, and collectively we made his way into the way, ostracizing those that lived their life outside the idealized startup paradigm that Graham crafted. Creation of this dismay isn’t on him alone, it’s on all of us.