cdf (u/cdf) - Readit News

cdf commented on AI is killing B2B SaaS nmn.gl/blog/ai-killing-b2... · Posted by u/namanyayg

cdf · 9 days ago

The keyword in "Software as a Service" is not Software; it's the Service.

In the early days, the tagline for Salesforce is "No Software". It's secret recipe is this: your sales team only need a browser and a credit card, to get the service. No software installation needed. Even if you have a genius can code something equivalent, it will never be a "service". That genius is not going to support it, not going to add storage for you, not going to restore an accidentally deleted record for you. That takes an army to deliver. It is a service.

Of course, Marc Benioff kind of shot himself in the foot by trying to get ahead of the AI curve... and gutted their customer service division. If the service is delivered by AI agents, what is the selling point again over other AI agents? They have debased their key strengths and are getting punished for it.

cdf commented on Data centers in space makes no sense civai.org/blog/space-data... · Posted by u/ajyoon

spongebobstoes · 10 days ago

by my calculations, the heat dissipation isn't that big a deal

take an h100 for example. it will need something like 1kW to operate. that's less than 4 square meters of solar panel

at 70C, a reasonable temp for H100, a 4 square meter radiator can emit north of 2kW of energy into deep space

seems to me like a 2x2x2 cube could house an H100 in space

perhaps I'm missing something?

cdf · 10 days ago

The typical GPU cloud machine will have 8 H100s in a box. I didnt check your math but if a single machine needs 32 square meter radiator, 200 machines will probably be the size comparable to the ISS.

How much does it cost to launch just the mass of something that big?

Do you see how unrealistic this is?

Given that budget, I can bundle in a SMR nuclear reactor and still have change left.

cdf commented on Data centers in space makes no sense civai.org/blog/space-data... · Posted by u/ajyoon

cdf · 10 days ago

I was listening to a podcast featuring Gavin Baker and he went on and on about models being defined in generations, and we will be moving from Blackwell generation to Rubin generation soon and it will be awesome. This is not something I know a lot about and he sounds like an expert I could learn so much from.

Then he talked about datacenters in space and this is something I have some appreciation for, and I immediately knew he couldnt have done much Physics, and sure enough, I was right.

There are "experts" out there who basically have no idea what they are talking about, "it is absolute zero in space in the shadow!", as though radiative cooling is that effective.

And that's not even talking about part failures. How do we replace failed parts in space? This is a scam, but everybody is afraid to openly challenge eloquent "experts" who are confidently wrong.

cdf commented on You have to know how to drive the car seangoedecke.com/knowing-... · Posted by u/alexwennerberg

ytoawwhra92 · 18 days ago

> FAANG

And yet those five companies are among the most valuable in the world.

There's a cognitive dissonance that arises when you join a company that is performing extraordinarily well only to perceive dysfunction and incompetence everywhere you look.

It's so hard to reconcile the reality that companies can be embarrassingly wasteful, political, and arbitrary in how they run and yet can still dominate markets and print money hand-over-fist.

cdf · 18 days ago

Because big companies can crush competition, either via lobbying for government regulations, acquiring the competitors, or driving the competition out of business by offering something comparable but cheaper or free.

It's the old Microsoft playbook of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, but with more finesse.

It is also why their acquisitions tend to just die, because once the big company inefficiencies get integrated, the acquired startups just cannot function.

cdf commented on OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026 economist.com/leaders/202... · Posted by u/1vuio0pswjnm7

fooblaster · a month ago

There is a pretty big moat for Google: extreme amounts of video data on their existing services and absolutely no dependence on Nvidia and it's 90% margin.

cdf · a month ago

On paper, Google should never have allowed the ChatGPT moment to happen ; how did a then non-profit create what was basically a better search engine than Google?

Google suffers from classic Innovator's Dilemma and need competition to refocus on what ought to be basic survival instincts. What is worse is the search users are not the customers. The customers of Google Search are the advertisers and they will always prioritise the needs of the customers and squander their moats as soon as the threat is gone.

cdf commented on Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers andrewmccalip.com/space-d... · Posted by u/flinner

cdf · 2 months ago

Does anybody actually work with H100s and the like? Their failure rate is so high, I dont understand why anybody will even consider it feasible to put the machines in orbit or even the sea. By my ballpark estimate, if you have 800 H100s, after 6 months, about 100 would be overheating or throttling, and a few will disappear and one or two will crash the machine with load.

cdf commented on Last Week on My Mac: Losing confidence eclecticlight.co/2025/11/... · Posted by u/frizlab

wunderg · 2 months ago

The irony is that we all independently decided QA was a “process smell” around the same time. The logic seemed airtight: developers should own quality, shift left, test in prod with feature flags, move fast. Every tech blog and conference talk said the same thing. What nobody mentioned is that QA teams weren’t just finding bugs—they were the institutional memory of how things break.

When you dissolve QA and tell developers “you own quality now,” that knowledge just evaporates. Each developer tests the happy path for their feature and calls it done. The edge cases? The interaction effects? The weird state machines? Those all ship to prod. The really insidious part is the metrics looked great. Velocity up, deployment frequency up, cycle time down. We were measuring output, not outcomes. Exec dashboards showed green across the board while user experience quietly degraded.

Now we’re in the equilibrium state: software ships fast and breaks often, every deploy is a dice roll, and we’ve normalized “hotfix Friday” as just how things work. The velocity gains were real, but we were measuring distance traveled, not value delivered. Turns out “everyone owns quality” means nobody owns quality. Who knew.

cdf · 2 months ago

During my army days, the sergeant major always seem to know where we would fail to clean during inspection standbys, eg the top rim of doors. Part of it is a hazing ritual, but it also means if you know where to look, you know where people will consistently fail. As an SRE who previously had to manually inspect changes and releases, I quickly learn what to check for, and saved many production issues from happening, but I guess nobody will know about the failures that didnt happen, but they will notice the delay I introduced and the inspection process was automated together with the CD system and I am cut out. Fingers crossed the automation is as thorough or can learn common failure modes.

cdf commented on Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race nbcnews.com/politics/elec... · Posted by u/jsheard

doubletwoyou · 3 months ago

got any tips on what to look for on how obama bumbled obamacare? not too familiar on the subject myself

cdf · 3 months ago

Despite his public persona, I read recently Obama is actually quite aloof and didnt have the patience to charm the politicians in person.

cdf commented on Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout theregister.com/2025/10/2... · Posted by u/raw_anon_1111

kaladin-jasnah · 4 months ago

> I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun.

I'm not even out of college, and I feel the same way. Especially for Sun, everything they did was so cool. "The network is the computer" and all that.

cdf · 4 months ago

Even though I worked for companies that killed Sun, I never stopped admiring the foundational work the company was doing, which was not just cool, but critical for technological progress, and was very sad when the company sold out to Oracle and was gutted alive. HPC stuff Sun pioneered is still very relevant today. In an alternate timeline, Sun fully embraced Open Source and became a key pillar of the internet today.

Unfortunately, while we are well aware of cool tech companies that were ran aground by the finance/sales/management consulting types, Sun felt like a company ran aground by engineers.

Zuck famously kept the Sun logo up for quite a while when Facebook bought Sun's HQ campus, as a warning to the employees of what they could become. In some ways, Facebook/Meta is the spiritual successor of Sun, just like Google became the spiritual successor of SGI when they bought the SGI campus.

But these two ad driven companies never quite became the new Sun/SGI, for better and worse.

cdf commented on Big Data was used to see if TCM was scientific (2023) mcgill.ca/oss/article/med... · Posted by u/mgh2

genman · 7 months ago

Is this yin, yang somehow measurable? If not then there is a fundamental problem.

Also Western medicine is very well aware of side effects, it's actually one of the fundamental concepts. For example it knows that taking Paracetamol is good against pain, but increases risk to the liver, especially when taken with alcohol. It's also very well aware of causes of fever and doesn't recommend lowering it for the sake of it, only from certain dangerous level. It also knows that taking antibiotics affects gut bacteria, so it's often recommended to take also probiotics. It knows that some medicine could affect women differently, especially when they are pregnant or are breast feeding. The list goes on, it's never black and white.

cdf · 7 months ago

Most religions have the concept of ritual cleanliness for thousands of years, esp touching dead bodies make them unclean and yet at some point, doctors have to be reminded to wash their hands after performing autopsy.

How did we get there? Because "modern science" rejects superstitious beliefs and ritual cleanliness is superstition. Right?

I chose antibiotics and paracetamol as examples precisely because it is well understood _now_ . You go back 50 years before we understand gut bacteria or the difference between male and female bodies and suggest the same, the then modern medicine will laugh at you and call you a witch doctor.