"Amazon's AWS cloud computing unit cuts at least hundreds of jobs, sources say" - https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/amazons-aws...
Yes, but that wasn’t engineers.
Readit Newsoxymoron commented on Amazon Allegedly Replaced 40% of AWS DevOps Workers with AI Days Before Crash 80.lv/articles/amazon-all... · Posted by u/petecooper
I’m an AWS engineer and I haven’t seen any evidence of engineering layoffs within AWS since early this year. As others have suggested we generally don’t have ”DevOps Workers” either. There’s definitely a push for AI tools, but there’s no indication that it was related to any off this from what I’ve seen.
Why can't companies be honest with being down. It helps us all out so we don't spend an hour internalizing.
We are truly in gods hands.
$ prod
Fetching cluster endpoint and auth data. ERROR: (gcloud.container.clusters.get-credentials) ResponseError: code=503, message=Visibility check was unavailable. Please retry the request and contact support if the problem persists
Because a lot of the time, not everyone is impacted, as the systems are designed to contain the "blast radius" of failures using techniques such as cellular architecture and [shuffle sharding](https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/workload-isolation-u...). So sometimes a service is completely down for some customers and fully unaffected for other customers.
oxymoron commented on Buster: Captcha Solver for Humans github.com/dessant/buster... · Posted by u/thunderbong
I'm kinda surprised captcha still exists. It's pretty clear that the robots have beaten it, and when they haven't you can hire armies of humans for the price of a latte.
Not that I want trillions of bots hitting up every resource on the Internet. But I don't see how to stop it at this point except by excluding a fair number of regular people.
Countering advanced bits is a game of economics. Sure, we know that they can solve the captchas, but they usually can’t do so for free. Eg. Typical captcha solver services are around $1/thousand solved. Depending on the unit economics of a particular bot that might be cheap or it might completely destroy the business model. I’ve definitely seen a lot of professionally operated bots where they invest a lot of effort into solving the fewest captchas possible to keep the cost down.
That captchas are completely useless is a popular myth.
oxymoron commented on Katharine Way, John Wheeler, and the Dawn of Nuclear Fission amphilsoc.org/blog/kathar... · Posted by u/drdee
It was of course co-discovered by another woman, Lise Meitner, who understood the theory while taking a walk with Otto Frisch and discussing the experimental findings by Otto Hahn. Meitner and Frisch were friends with Hahn and learned about the experiment earlier than most, so it’s likely one of those contingencies of history. There’s a good discussion of exactly how it unfolded in _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ which is generally a great book and a comprehensive intro to the history of nuclear physics.
oxymoron commented on Donald Triplett was autism’s “case 1” economist.com/obituary/20... · Posted by u/jkuria
I think it’s at least relevant to note that a lot of things relating to autism was completely redefined in DSM-V. DSM-IV had many different diagnosis such as classic autism, autism spectrum disorder, aspergers and PDD-NOS (Pervasive Developmental Disorder - Not Otherwise Specified). All of those was merged into a single diagnosis titled ”Autism Spectrum Disorder”, where the criterias are communication difficulties and stereotypical behavior. My understanding is that this was mostly due to poor diagnosis stability with the prior set of diagnosis. It seems at least plausible that this general simplification of diagnosis criteria has contributed to an increase in the number of diagnosis. (It’s also worth remembering that any comparison over time has to bundle all of the previously distinct diagnosis to come up with an apples-to-apples comparison.)
oxymoron commented on March 20 ChatGPT outage: Here’s what happened openai.com/blog/march-20-... · Posted by u/zerojames
I'm confused on why the need to complicate something as seemingly-straightforward as a KV store into a series of queues that can get all mixed up. I asked ChatGPT to explain it though, and it sounds like the justification for its existence is that it doesn't "block the event loop" while a request is "waiting for a response from Redis."
Last time I checked, Redis doesn't take that long to provide a response. And if your Redis servers actually are that overloaded that you're seeing latency in your requests, it seems like simple key-based sharding would allow horizontally scaling your Redis cluster.
Disclaimer: I am probably less smart than most people who work at OpenAI so I'm sure I'm missing some details. Also this is apparently a Python thing and I don't know it beyond surface familiarity.
Redis latency is around 1ms including network round trip for most operations. In a single threaded context, waiting on that would limit you to around 1000 operations per second. Redis clients improve throughput by doing pipelining, so a bunch of calls are batched up to minimize network roundtrips. This becomes more complicated in the context of redis-cluster, because calls targeting different keys are dispatched to different cache nodes and will complete in an unpredictable order, and additional client side logic is needed to accumulate the responses and dispatch them back to the appropiate caller.
oxymoron commented on How We Knew Space Was a Vacuum (2021) sky-lights.org/2021/06/14... · Posted by u/susam
Another interesting one is when we "knew" how the sun worked. Of course we didn't know about nuclear reactions until the early 20th century, so it makes sense we didn't figure it out for a while after that. But before that it was a complete mystery! Scientists had calculated how much energy would be required to produce the amount of light we see and it seemed impossible given the estimated mass of the sun, for any know physical method to produce it (chemical, gravity compression). Some thought it was made of coal (sign of the times I guess) but that would of course require oxygen to react with... And would have only lasted a few million years I think...
I think our understanding of the inner structure of the earth is another interesting example of something that we’ve deduced scientifically but never directly observed. It surprised me a bit when I first realized that the Earth’s crust had never been pierced (by humans) and that it was all based on indirect observation.
oxymoron commented on Amazon S3 now automatically encrypts all new objects aws.amazon.com/about-aws/... · Posted by u/redbell
Does anyone have rough numbers on s3 scale? Most storage classes have redundant copies as well so 3x things maybe from that. YouTube / S3 - a few services seem like they must have crazy storage scale
There is a talk by the S3 VP on Youtube which mentions some rough numbers, I think it’s from re:invent 2019. Also, they mention 100 trillion objects here https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3s-15th-birthday-it...
oxymoron commented on Amazon S3 now automatically encrypts all new objects aws.amazon.com/about-aws/... · Posted by u/redbell
Yeah - physical drive theft I think. I assume that's well locked down (and a crap shoot whose data someone'd get if they stole some drives) but nice to be protected I guess.
When I started working for AWS as an SDE, I was hoping it’d be possible to visit a datacenter. I was surprised to find out that I’d require L11 (!) approval to so so! The only L11 in my reporting chain is Adam Selipsky.
I’m told the AWS data centers has red zones, which no harddrive can be taken out of, without being mechanically and violently destroyed first.