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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   1887 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 1, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I'm in my 40s and believe I'm finally hitting my stride as a young cranky old man. What did it?

Working at a company full of Python developers using Google Cloud.

OMFG I do not care about

  • Kubernetes
  • Terraform
  • cloud triggers
  • Celery jobs
  • Python in general
  • anything that ends with .yaml
  • Docker

It's not because I don't know these technologies and can't handle it. It's because they're stupid. They seem like they were some half-baked approach done by someone barely competent at the task they were given and bam they're now the industry standard and we all need to use it and everyone frowns at you like you're an idiot if you think people shouldn't be forced to huff that original barely competent developer's farts all day every day.

Well, fuck that and fuck you if you agree with them. We should not tolerate the simplest things taking 100ms (or 5 seconds) or taking 100MB (or gigabytes) or 10 approved PRs.

I'm going knee-jerk write everything I possibly can in C++ from now on. I'm pushing straight to main prod. I don't care if it's not memory safe or difficult to reason about or not "best practice". I will use indomitable volition to solve the problem and when I do it'll be so much faster and I get to really dig in and be cranky and old and superior. Behold, this actually takes only 50 micros and uses 5MB of RAM and the Hertzner server costs 1/10th and the overall cost is 1/100th and this is right and good and just. While you're entering day three debugging some inscrutable GCP error I'm shipping.

I am elite and I know how computers work and this is how you do it. Sorry if you can't keep up, young whipper snapper :sunglasses: :muscle_arm: :smug_smirking_face:

Get. Off. My. Lawn.

and the Hertzner server costs 1/10th

This in particular has me regularly scratching my head as to how we got here. Surely, I must be missing something if the whole industry decided this is the way to go. But why is it that any time I run the numbers, cloud compute ends up feeling like highway robbery? "Noo, you don't understand, you can set up auto-scaling, so you only pay for what you're using at any given time!" Sir, at that price differential I can rent enough servers to cover peak demand several times over, and still have money to spare relative to your galaxy-brained auto-scaling solution. "Nooo, you have to use reserved instances, they're cheaper!" How is that not just renting a server? How are you still making it several times more expensive given the scale you're operating at?

Am I missing something, or did they play us for absolute fools?

Sir, at that price differential I can rent enough servers to cover peak demand several times over, and still have money to spare relative to your galaxy-brained auto-scaling solution.

I like this mental model.

It comes up in health care too. For example, if I get surgery done at a free market place like the Oklahoma Surgery Center, there's a good chance the TOTAL cost will be less than just my personal out of pocket cost using a standard hospital that accepts insurance.

I also use a wealth insurance based approach to health care and I am regularly surprised that a bit of negotiating and shopping around can bring the cash price of something down to less than it would've been with co-insurance.

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