Lots of people here mentioning reasons to both use and avoid the cloud. I'll just chip in one more on the pro-cloud side: reliability at low scale.
To expand: At $dayjob we use AWS, and we have no plans to switch because we're tiny, like ~5000 DAU last I checked. Our AWS bill is <$600/mo. To get anything remotely resembling the reliability that AWS gives us we would need to spend tens of thousands up-front buying hardware, then something approximating our current AWS bill for colocation services. Or we could host fully on-prem, but then we're paying even more up-front for site-level stuff like backup generators and network multihoming.
Meanwhile, RDS (for example) has given us something like one unexplained 15-minute outage in the last six years.
Obviously every situation is unique, and what works for one won't work for another. We have no expectation of ever having to suddenly 10x our scale, for instance, because we our growth is limited by other factors. But at our scale, given our business realities, I'm convinced that the cloud is the best option.
This is a common false dichotomy I see constantly. Cloud vs, buy and build your own hardware from scratch and colocate/build own datacenter.
Very few non-cloud users are buying their own hardware. You can simply rent dedicated hardware in a datacenter. For significantly cheaper than anything in the cloud. That being said, certain things like object storage, if you don't need very large amounts of data, are very handy and inexpensive from cloud services considering the redundancy and uptime they offer.
This works even at $1M/mo AWS spend. As you scale, the discounts get better. You get into the range of special pricing where they will make it work against your P&L. If you’re venture funded, they have a special arm that can do backflips for you.
Isn't the problem with deflation that it de-incentivizes investment (why accept risk when you can just stuff your mattress with money and grow your wealth risk-free), which tanks the economy?
Lowering prices sounds nice, but my understanding has always been that it would come at the cost of less actual wealth overall.
That's the macroeconomic argument I alluded to. Of course, what this argument amounts to is that economic growth should be fueled in part by devaluing the money of the working and lower-middle class, who earn their money through wages and have limited means of preserving its value through capital investment, while the wealthy, who have more opportunity to invest in capital and use leverage, are largely shieled from, or on the extreme end even benefit from, its effects. Hence, a regressive tax.
The most obvious argument against this notion is that many things are effectively deflationary anyway, such as computers, which at least until recently were deflationary in the extreme. Not only did they tend to get ever cheaper over time, but while getting cheaper they have and continue to become more powerful, at times by miles in the space of a few years. And yet, people still buy computers, and firms still engineer and manufacture them, because at some point it doesn't matter that if you wait 6 months you can get a vastly better computer for half the price, at some point you have to actually buy a computer.
> That's the macroeconomic argument I alluded to. Of course, what this argument amounts to is that economic growth should be fueled in part by devaluing the money of the working and lower-middle class
You have it literally backwards. Like 100% backwards. In a normal healthy economy, salaries grow faster than inflation. So workers living on their wages are not affected.
Transient periods of high inflation might even benefit them, as they also devalue their fixed _debts_. It's the rich people who are affected by the inflation, they are forced to invest money, rather than just leave them sitting in a risk-free account.
Conversely, deflation primarily causes pain for the working class (that's how Hitler came to power!), because it slows down the economy and makes their debts grow. While rich people can just enjoy having a risk-free real income growth.
I don't have it literally backwards, because that's not what happens. You do have your Hitler argument completely backward though. Weimar Germany was undergoing runaway _hyper-inflation_, not deflation.
Interest rates move in the same direction as inflation with some lag, so the idea that poor people benefit due to reduction in debt is weak at best, but given that the rich rely on debt so heavily themselves, any positive effect on the poor would be even greater for the rich barring some special reason I can't think of.
As for rich people being the ones affected by inflation, it does in fact change their incentives dramatically, so that's true as far as that goes, however it doesn't actually result in loss of wealth for them as again, they are the ones with the capacity to invest it in assets to protect or grow its value, and the ability to use leverage to use money now that they don't even have yet, in exchange for devalued money in the future. It might have some effect of weeding out the truly incompetently or indigently rich, but of that group the ones who don't have smarter family around to save them from themselves will be those who probably come from lower class backgrounds anyway.
Its true that rich people often (always?) "have debts", but not true that they are "in debt" overall, otherwise they wouldn't really be rich anymore. Poor and middle-class people are often in debt in the sense that they have borrowed against their future earnings. For things like a house, borrowed over 30 years, the inflation on that amount really does benefit them. By the end of the loan, people who stayed in one house barely notice the cost of the mortgage, and if the intrest rate is low enough they may choose to deliberately not pay it off as they invest their current cash elsewhere. For things like a credit card, no the inflation doesn't really help anyhing.
If deflation were expected, rich people really would just leave money in a bank account (as long as investing gave smaller returns, or seemed too risky.) The inflation is an incentive for cash-rich people to put that cash to use instead of sitting on it. This can be a huge driver for the economy.
I didn't say that rich people are "in debt", I said they rely on debt and leverage.
A mortgage on a single home seems kind of like a special case, they tend to have unusual rules that insulate borrowers from the effect of interest rates to a certain extent, which otherwise work to cancel out the time-preference effect on money. Otherwise the working classes have their wealth tied to the sale of their labor, something (wages) which is notoriously sticky, hence a greater effect on them.
I don't disagree that the macroeconomic argument does incentivise rich people to use their wealth productively, but it is precisely this argument that relies on the idea that the wealthy have means available to them to protect the value of their wealth. You can't have the former and not the latter.
> I don't have it literally backwards, because that's not what happens. You do have your Hitler argument completely backward though. Weimar Germany was undergoing runaway _hyper-inflation_, not deflation.
That's a common misconception, propagated by people who want the economy to stagnate (goldbugs earlier, crypto bros now).
Germany experienced actual _deflation_ in 1929-1932 as a result of the governmental austerity. It's exactly what put Hitler in power. Deflation rose up to 12% in 1932!
Hitler then immediately started an expansionist fiscal policy, using state funds to build up the infrastructure and military. This immediately resulted in the GDP growth.
> but given that the rich rely on debt so heavily themselves
Rich people are not in debt. Their net worth is not negative. That's not the case for poor people.
Unlike microeconomics, macroeconomics is pretty simple. The total amount of debt held equals to the total amount of debt owned.
I don't think minor deflation after a period of hyper-inflation is much of an argument that deflation was the cause of Germany's woes.
I never said rich people are "in debt", I said that they use and rely on debt. In the sense meant in the argument about why inflation helps the poor, the advantage also comes to the rich, if I even concede that it's true, which I do not, because rising interest exists specifically to counteract the long term effect of inflation.
Rich people's wealth is protected from inflation, while the working classes' wealth is not, that is the key difference. That is precisely inflation's alleged reason detre, that it incentivises people, in effect, those with more wealth, to use their money in ways that protect its value.
You can't have the macroeconomic argument for inflation driving growth and then simultaneously allege that rich people are just as affected by inflation as wage earners, the former relies on the idea that there is a way to use excess wealth through investment that will protect its value.
You can claim that wages should grow with inflation, but not only is that self-evidently not what happens when you look around, but the stickiness of wages is so well recognised that it's treated as almost apriori in macroeconomics, which is why I take it to be a either a feature or accepted consequence of inflation that it is regressive, depending on the specific policymaker.
There's no such thing as a "minor deflation". And yes, it was the proximate cause. And keep in mind, it was not a month, it was 4 years.
Quite simply: you can't have noticeable economic growth with deflation. You _can_ have robust economic growth even during hyperinflation.
I lived through one myself.
> I never said rich people are "in debt", I said that they use and rely on debt.
It mostly means that they _own_ debt (usually indirectly), not that they are _in_ debt.
> Rich people's wealth is protected from inflation, while the working classes' wealth is not, that is the key difference.
That is the opposite of the actual history. Rich people are the ones who suffer the most from inflation. Hyperinflation wipes all debts nominated in the currency, and more importantly, it forces people to invest in risky enterprises.
Workers, in general, simply don't have a lot of savings and instead rely on the constant stream of income from salary.
That's why the ruling classes are so obsessed with the inflation.
>Quite simply: you can't have noticeable economic growth with deflation. You _can_ have robust economic growth even during hyperinflation.
I'm not really arguing against either of those positions, though I'd push back against the first more strongly. I'm arguing that inflation as a driver of economic growth comes at greater expense to wage earners than the wealthy, that it's regressive.
>It mostly means that they _own_ debt (usually indirectly), not that they are _in_ debt.
Dude, enough nitpicking my specific language, you know exactly what I mean, this isn't productive or interesting.
>That is the opposite of the actual history. Rich people are the ones who suffer the most from inflation.
No they don't.
>Hyperinflation wipes all debts nominated in the currency
Nobody benefits from hyper-inflation, wealthy people don't want it, working class people don't want it, nobody wants it, except maybe a kleptocratic government. This is why interest rates track inflation, albeit with some lag.
>more importantly, it forces people to invest in risky enterprises.
I agree, although with the caveat that the wealthier you are, the more you can insulate yourself from risk. Again, I agree that the incentive to drive economic growth works, I just don't agree with your assertion of who actually pays the bigger price on aggregate.
>Workers, in general, simply don't have a lot of savings and instead rely on the constant stream of income from salary.
Correct, exactly why they suffer/lose the most wealth from the effects of inflation. Their wages are devalued while remaining sticky, and their capacity to save enough wealth to make investments that protect their wealth is curtailed by inflation eating its value.
>That's why the ruling classes are so obsessed with the inflation.
Obsessed with a "healthy" rate of inflation, find me evidence that a substantial number of people with their hands on the levers of wealth or power advocate that we should have no inflation? They don't.
which should disproportionately affect the wealthy. Another way of saying that: we pay higher prices with inflation so the wealthy are more wealthy. That money goes somewhere.
My feeling is that the most important situation to consider here is where the updating happens from third-party JS. If you're writing your own JS, it isn't that much harder to just target the selectedoption as well as the original one, and if you're using a full-fat framework like React or whatever it's downright easy. So I think the benefit of providing an explicit API to trigger a clone is limited.
So that leaves the various automatic options, either synchronous, debounced, or the fancy targeted version. This seems like a pretty straightforward complexity/performance tradeoff to me, with the synchronous version being the simplest (both to implement and to understand) and going up from there.
With that in mind, I'm inclined toward the middle option (changes are synced automatically, but batched in the next microtask) since it feels like the best balance of complexity/usability. Seems like it would eliminate some of the biggest performance footguns, without being too much of a bear to implement or too difficult to understand.
On the other hand, I would personally also be ok with no syncing at all, just the initial clone when an option is selected, if it would mean we get this feature sooner. Really looking forward to not having to roll my own dropdowns.
I'm with you! I've always had a hard time finding Literary Works anything but a total slog. Recently I tried The Road by Cormac McCarthy and just couldn't get through it. Far too grim for my taste.
Anyway, if this is where to share our trashy fantasy guilty pleasures, I recently discovered and devoured the Cradle series by Will Wight. Fun if you're at all into "progression fantasy" (also known as LitRPG) where the characters go through a very clearly-delineated "leveling up" process.
Also the only books I've ever run across with outtakes at the end, which I thought was fun.
The problem with a "kill list" like that is that most of these overused tropes are overused because originally, they worked really well. E.g. if you strictly followed the first item on your list, you'd miss out on the Belgariad, which is really quite good (in my opinion, and that of the GP poster, at least. I'm personally less sold on the Malloreon, it's a bit too much of a retread for my taste.)
That said, I do agree that too many red flags like that and I will put down a book. And some are stronger than others; I'm 100% with you on the harem thing because any book like that is most likely just an excuse for all the sex scenes.
I think I need a "kill list" when I'm just not engaged with the book.
There have actually been plenty of books that probably had elements on the list, but were thought provoking, entertaining, or had excellent character development or some other novelty that I didn't even think of stopping.
It's also interesting to look at the list when you're thinking about continuing with book 2 or book 3.
I don't know, I think pinch-to-zoom + pan is a pretty decent way of dealing with pages that have more complex layouts than basic document, but were designed using e.g. tables for layout. Given that most non-trivial pages would have been laid out that way back when mobile browsers were first coming out, it seems like a reasonable tradeoff to me.
That is to say, it's definitely a hack but I wouldn't call it useless, at least originally. These days it's a lot less useful since the number of pages that do benefit from this treatment has decreased dramatically. But at this point the die has been cast.
(assuming that we're talking about the AWS serverless functions) Like everything else, it's situational.
Upsides of lambdas are ease of deployment (no need to worry about servers, that's kind of the whole point of serverless), virtually infinite horizontal scaling, and a very generous free tier.
Downsides are relatively slow cold starts, difficulty of exposing to the outside world (eg via HTTP route), and lack of state management.
Personally I like using Lambda as glue between different parts of the AWS ecosystem, or to handle events, dispatch notifications etc.
However I would definitely not use Lambda for anything remotely resembling a stateful web app, for instance. The slow cold starts and inherent statelessness are going to make that difficult. Also API Gateway is a huge pain to work with, or was last time I looked at it.
To expand: At $dayjob we use AWS, and we have no plans to switch because we're tiny, like ~5000 DAU last I checked. Our AWS bill is <$600/mo. To get anything remotely resembling the reliability that AWS gives us we would need to spend tens of thousands up-front buying hardware, then something approximating our current AWS bill for colocation services. Or we could host fully on-prem, but then we're paying even more up-front for site-level stuff like backup generators and network multihoming.
Meanwhile, RDS (for example) has given us something like one unexplained 15-minute outage in the last six years.
Obviously every situation is unique, and what works for one won't work for another. We have no expectation of ever having to suddenly 10x our scale, for instance, because we our growth is limited by other factors. But at our scale, given our business realities, I'm convinced that the cloud is the best option.
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