lokar (u/lokar) - Readit News

lokar commented on The future of Terraform CDK github.com/hashicorp/terr... · Posted by u/mfornasa

Please expand on your experiences, because I've had great luck with Pulumi at my company since October 2021. No engineer liked HCL, our demographic was engineers who were familiar with programming languages who wanted to self service basic infrastructure (AWS SecretsManager, IRSA roles, Databricks Service Principals, etc). We were pretty easily able to shim in a RunAtlantis inspired system that displayed previews that required explicit approval when a PR was raised, performed apply on merge to main, and ran drift checks periodically.

lokar · 4 days ago

For me, the ideal is each team owns its own config/lifecycle mgmt, and does it in the language they wrote the rest of the system in.

lokar commented on Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration ankursethi.com/blog/gemin... · Posted by u/speckx

transcriptase · 4 days ago

The entire lab supply industry is disgusting in this respect. The funding (and recent grants) that a given professor or research lab has is generally publicly available information that vendors will buy in easily digestible formats from brokers and companies that scrape the websites of major granting agencies.

All of their products, however realistically commoditized, will require a drawn out engagement with a rep who knows how much money you’ve received recently and even has an outline what research you plan to do over the next few years since even the detailed applications often get published alongside funding allocations.

The exact same piece of equipment, consumables required to use it, and service agreements might be anywhere from X to 10X depending on what they (as a result of asymmetrically available knowledge) know you need and how much you could theoretically spend.

lokar · 4 days ago

A group of research universities should start a non-profit co-op to produce this for them.

Getting just the university of California should be enough critical mass.

lokar commented on How Much Wealth an AI Stock Market Crash Could Destroy economist.com/interactive... · Posted by u/skx001

lateforwork · 5 days ago

Counter argument: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/business/wall-street-valu...

Excerpts:

In the 1990s and early 2000s, many of the companies leading the stock rally were not making much money, if any. This led to very high P/E ratios for some companies because share prices kept going higher, even when earnings were lagging well behind.

While Nvidia’s stock price has risen roughly 1,000 percent over the past three years, from $17 to $180, its earnings — the actual money it is making — have increased even faster. This means the stock is arguably cheaper today than it was three years ago, said Stacy Rasgon, a stock analyst at AB Bernstein.

lokar · 5 days ago

In the case of nvidia, the price is based on expectations of future revenue, not current. And the future numbers are clouded by a web of opaque circular deals with customers.

lokar commented on How Much Wealth an AI Stock Market Crash Could Destroy economist.com/interactive... · Posted by u/skx001

vanschelven · 5 days ago

I've never felt right about the framing of "destroying wealth" when stock prices go to some new number. If anything, the word "reflecting" seems more applicable?

lokar · 5 days ago

For my financial planning, I discount my stock portfolio by 20%

lokar commented on EU investigates Google over AI-generated summaries in search results bbc.com/news/articles/crl... · Posted by u/hackerbeat

ndr · 6 days ago

It's a prediction. What's disrespectful?

lokar · 6 days ago

It dismisses an entire point of view out of hand without any real argument.

lokar commented on EU investigates Google over AI-generated summaries in search results bbc.com/news/articles/crl... · Posted by u/hackerbeat

re-thc · 6 days ago

> The EU is a big place with a lot going on.

Like investigations into Apple, X and others...

lokar · 6 days ago

Again, why are you here? Either actually engage (make more detailed points based in fact, or ask real questions, or both), or take it to Twitter .

lokar commented on EU investigates Google over AI-generated summaries in search results bbc.com/news/articles/crl... · Posted by u/hackerbeat

akersten · 6 days ago

> The European Commission said it would examine whether the firm used data from websites to provide this service - and if it failed to offer "appropriate compensation" to publishers.

While the EU wastes their time with things like this, they fall further and further behind the curve, still wondering why no one wants to start a business there.

lokar · 6 days ago

This style/tone of discourse is really disrespectful and not very interesting.

The EU is a big place with a lot going on. You will persuade more people and learn more if you engage in a more open style.

lokar commented on I wasted years of my life in crypto twitter.com/kenchangh/sta... · Posted by u/Anon84

alphazard · 7 days ago

I think this is a huge misconception. I certainly don't view this issue as grounded in 'rights' or what governments should or should not do.

It's entirely an issue of what people can and cannot do with this technology. It's a game with sides, and the concern should be that the technology has made playing for one side much easier than playing for the other.

The technology has unlocked total freedom of association, and I don't see a way to reign that in, other than restricting access to computation and the network for the entire population. As long as the average voter wants personal computing to continue, I don't see a way that a government could get the necessary control to shutdown one of these systems.

lokar · 7 days ago

The government has never been able to enforce all laws even close to 100% of the time. Internet copyright violations never went to zero, and never can. But there is a ceiling on how far any large, organized profit-seeking group can go with it.

In the case crypto, there are lots of things they could do to limit the impact. They can forbid government regulated banks (or any corporation) from engaging with it. They can limit all the points where could you, in volume, convert in and out of the normal currency system.

So, obviously, the use of crypto can't be forced to zero, but that's not really an interesting point.

The question is, does crypto have, on balance, a legitimate use in developed liberal democracies? Or should these states suppress it?

lokar commented on I wasted years of my life in crypto twitter.com/kenchangh/sta... · Posted by u/Anon84

alphazard · 7 days ago

It's good to know everyone here is weary of crypto scams, but I don't see anyone accurately describing the significance of these technologies.

Bitcoin failed as a currency, and as that became realized, institutional investors pivoted to the "digital gold" scam, to keep people long, while they divest or hedge. The two reasons why it failed as a currency are transaction latency, and lack of fungibility. Transaction privacy is necessary for fungibility. Both of those are just technical problems; I predict that a distributed ledger currency with private transactions like Monero, but a faster consensus algorithm like Avalanche or Hedera will become popular in the next decade. It's likely to be an Ethereum L2.

That is just the currency aspect of distributed ledgers. It's just one use case that we don't yet have the technology to properly address. The exciting thing that distributed ledgers enable is cryptographic institutions. These technologies allow us to solve coordination problems more easily than ever before. Democracies, businesses, communities, projects can all be coordinated better and more honestly using distributed ledgers. It's not an overstatement to say that distributed ledgers are as big of an advancement for human coordination as democracy was.

If you've been soured on these technologies because most of the currencies built with them are scams, I would encourage you to learn about them as if they were just incredibly robust databases that even governments would struggle to take down. Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn't involve money.

lokar · 7 days ago

IME, these discussions always reduce down to one set of irreconcilable differences:

Does a government have the legitimate right to impose taxes on its people, and to sanction criminals (and criminal activity) via control of the Financial system?

Anti-crypto people say yes (and in fact the government has a responsibility to fight tax evasion).

Pro-crypto people seem (I’m not one of them) to say no, that people have the right to access to technology to evade these government functions.

lokar commented on I wasted years of my life in crypto twitter.com/kenchangh/sta... · Posted by u/Anon84

atomic128 · 7 days ago

Monero is used for criminal activities, not Bitcoin. How do I know? I monitor crime, mostly but not exclusively drug crime, on Tor's hidden services: https://rnsaffn.com/zg4/ Monero is the cryptocurrency of choice.

lokar · 7 days ago

Not all crime is drugs.

Most of it is tax and sanctions evasion.