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luhn commented on California is free of drought for the first time in 25 years   latimes.com/california/st... · Posted by u/thnaks
foolfoolz · 24 days ago
strange because this is one of the warmest winters in decades. snow levels are far below normal, i saw 8% of normal in truckee. full reservoirs now are great but keeping them filled depends on a long snow melt going into june. i don’t think this is going to be a good year for that
luhn · 24 days ago
It's not quite that dire. Statewide 69% normal to date. Snowpack peaks March-April, so still have a ways to go in the season. https://snow.water.ca.gov

But yeah, snowmelt plays a huge role in supplying water into the summer, so just looking at precipitation totals isn't the full picture.

luhn commented on GPT-5.2   openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/atgctg
tenpoundhammer · 2 months ago
I have been using chatGPT a ton over the last months and paying the subscription. Used it for coding, news, stock analysis, daily problems, and a whatever I could think of. I decided to give Gemini a go when version three came out to great reviews. Gemini handles every single one of my uses cases much better and consistently gives better answers. This is especially true for situations were searching the web for current information is important, makes sense that google would be better. Also OCR is phenomenal chatgpt can't read my bad hand writing but Gemini can easily. Only downsides are in the polish department, there are more app bugs and I usually have to leave the happen or the session terminates. There are bugs with uploading photos. The biggest complaint is that all links get inserted into google search and then I have to manipulate them when they should go directly to the chosen website, this has to be some kind of internal org KPI nonsense. Overall, my conclusion is that ChatGPT has lost and won't catch up because of the search integration strength.
luhn · 2 months ago
That's hilarious and right on brand for Google that they spend millions developing cutting-edge technology and fumble the ball making a chat app.
luhn commented on Cloudflare outage should not have happened   ebellani.github.io/blog/2... · Posted by u/b-man
cyberax · 3 months ago
> to find a sole root cause

"Six billion years ago the dust around the young Sun coalesced into planets"

luhn · 3 months ago
"Workaround: If we wait long enough, the earth will eventually be consumed by the sun."

https://xkcd.com/1822/

luhn commented on A $1k AWS mistake   geocod.io/code-and-coordi... · Posted by u/thecodemonkey
perching_aix · 3 months ago
I personally prefer to just memorize the data and recite it really quickly on-demand.

Only half-joking. When something grossly underperforms, I do often legitimately just pull up calc.exe and compare the throughput to the number of employees we have × 8 kbit/sec [0], see who would win. It is uniquely depressing yet entertaining to see this outperform some applications.

[0] spherical cow type back of the envelope estimate, don't take it too seriously; assumes a very fast 200 wpm speech, 5 bytes per word, and everyone being able to independently progress

luhn · 3 months ago
8kbit/min, you mean.
luhn commented on Tell HN: Azure outage    · Posted by u/tartieret
Insanity · 4 months ago
Maybe they are and no one realized yet.. :P

That said, I don't hear about GCP outages all that often. I do think AWS might be leading in outages, but that's a gut feeling, I didn't look up numbers.

luhn · 4 months ago
They had a pretty massive one earlier this year. https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/ow5i3PPK96RduMcb1S...

This isn't GCP's fault, but the outage ended up taking down Cloudflare too, so in total impact I think that takes the cake.

luhn commented on AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1   health.aws.amazon.com/hea... · Posted by u/kondro
leptons · 4 months ago
Lots of stuff is priced differently.

Just go to the EC2 pricing page and change from us-east-1 to us-west-1

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/

luhn · 4 months ago
us-west-1 is the one outlier. us-east-1, us-east-2, and us-west-2 are all priced the same.
luhn commented on AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1   health.aws.amazon.com/hea... · Posted by u/kondro
avs733 · 4 months ago
i'll bet there are a large number of systems that are dependent on multiple cloud platforms being up without even knowing it. They run on AWS, but rely on a tool from someone else that runs on GCP or on Azure and they haven't tested what happens if that tools goes down...

Common Cause Failures and false redundancy are just all over the place.

luhn · 4 months ago
Case in point is recent-ish Google Cloud downtime, which ended up taking down Cloudflare and half the internet with it.
luhn commented on Building the heap: racking 30 petabytes of hard drives for pretraining   si.inc/posts/the-heap/... · Posted by u/nee1r
nodja · 4 months ago
Yeah from memory on-prem was always cheaper, it just removed a lot of logistic obstacles and made everything convenient under one bill.

IIRC the wisdom of the time cloud started becoming popular was to always be on-prem and use cloud to scale up when demand spiked. But over time temporarily scaling up became permanent, and devs became reliant on instantly spawning new machines for things other than spikes in demand and now everyone defaults to cloud and treats it as the baseline. In the process we lost the grounding needed to assess the real cost of things and predictably the cost difference between cloud and on-prem has only widened.

luhn · 4 months ago
> IIRC the wisdom of the time cloud started becoming popular was to always be on-prem and use cloud to scale up when demand spiked.

I've heard that before but was never able to make sense of it. Overflowing into the cloud seems like a nightmare to manage, wouldn't overbuilding on-prem be cheaper than paying your infra team to straddle two environments?

luhn commented on How AWS S3 serves 1 petabyte per second on top of slow HDDs   bigdata.2minutestreaming.... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
iamtedd · 5 months ago
My speculation: writes are to /dev/null, and the fact that reads are expensive and that you need to inventory your data before reading means Amazon is recreating your data from network transfer logs.
luhn · 5 months ago
Maybe they ask the NSA for a copy.
luhn commented on How AWS S3 serves 1 petabyte per second on top of slow HDDs   bigdata.2minutestreaming.... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
temp0826 · 5 months ago
In the early days when there were articles speculating on what Glacier was backed by, it was actually on crusty old S3 gear (and at the very beginning, it was just on S3 itself as a wrapper and a hand wavy price discount, eating the costs to get people to buy in to the idea!). Later on (2018 or so) they began moving to a home grown tape-based solution (at least for some tiers).
luhn · 5 months ago
Do you have any sources for that? I'm really curious about Glacier's infrastructure and AWS has been notoriously tight-lipped about it. I haven't found anything better than informed speculation.

u/luhn

KarmaCake day3540September 18, 2015
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