Conversely, doing things "the same way" as AWS would mean copying their first-generation public cloud design flaws.
The overall UX of AWS is absolutely crazy. It's easy to "lose" a resource... in there... somewhere... in one of the many portals, in some region, costing you money! Meanwhile, Azure shows you a single pane of glass across all resource types in all regions. It's also fairly trivial to query across all subscriptions (equivalent to AWS accounts).
Similarly, AWS insists on peppering their UI with random-looking internal identifiers. These are meaningless and not sortable in any useful way.
Azure in comparison allows users to specify grouping by "english" resource group names and then resources within them also have user-specified names. The only random identifiers are the Subscription GUIDs, but even those have user-assignable display name aliases.
The unified Portal and scripting experience of Azure Resource Manager is a true "second generation" public cloud, and is much closer to the experience of using Kubernetes, which is also a "second gen" system developed out of Borg. E.g.: In K8s you also get a single-pane-of glass, human-named namespaces (=resource groups), human-named workloads, etc...
A single pane of glass that shows all your resources that are currently choking due to hidden limitations is no flex over AWS. It is my hope I never have to use Azure ever again professionally or otherwise
That’s how clouds try to lock you in, by making you use a custom tool that is different for the sake of being different.
If you use standard tools you don’t have this problem.
Containers running on VMs is standard.
A mesh of microservices that depend on cloud queues and managed services is not.
One argument against standard containers is saving dev time. You can still save dev time by using standard open source software. How many different ways are there to implement a queue or a load balancer?
If you really need access to some proprietary technology then by all means use the cloud that offers it. Eg if your customer demands GPT4.5, then go with Azure.
But if you need something standard, don’t get caught in the trap.
I am an older guy that was building kubernetes clusters before eks, aks, gke. So I used terraform to build shit out to make it happen. Azure was 5x the code just to be different. You can try to blame terraform but if you used MS custom tooling it was no different.
What about the way Terraform is a 3rd class citizen on Azure? And there are multiple ever-changing ways of doing everything, major parameters aren't supported, etc. It just makes it more difficult to deal with.
> I will just say that Azure seems to want to do shit different for the sake of being different.
That's Microsoft's MO in a nutshell in my experience, and I say this as a recent(~5yrs ago) convert to Linux who built a career on Windows endpoints, servers, ADDS, Exchange, SCCM, you name it. It's how they achieve lock-in to their ecosystem, and it's incredibly frustrating to see how they've just layered that method of operation over and over again, decade after decade, rather than fix anything.
Are there issues in Windows? Sure but if you give me 100 laptops, 80% will do this right without any issue. Maybe 30% of those laptops will work right on any Linux distro without major fucking around with bullshit trying to make it work.
Yes those numbers are made up but I have been running versions of Linux since Slackware in the 90s.
I still have a desktop with an amd cpu and nvidia gpu that I can’t get to sleep/suspend right. Works fine when dual boated in windows.
I just gave up and manually do shit now when using Linux
Oh no, Windows Modern Standby is infamously terrible and unreliable. Here is a youtube video with millions of views explaining the problems in detail: https://youtu.be/OHKKcd3sx2c
I can explain my perspective which echos kinda what you say.
I am in my 40s, I make pretty good money. My life is good.
My mom died last year. The medical system and her medicare "advantage" plan killed her. She had a stroke. However, within a day, she was up and walking around with assistance.
However, the hospital was understaffed so two things happened. She fell going to the bathroom AND after that happened, they did not get her moving enough and she got a huge bed sore.
The huge bed sore would not have happened if her medicare advantage plan hadn't denied denied denied having her moved to get physical, occupation, and speech theray. If she had just good ole medicare, they would have approved it the day of request (it was requested the day after the stroke, I was warned that her plan was going to deny because they always do where medicare always approves). Instead, she rotted in an understaffed wing of the hospital for a week while I fought to get shit approved.
After getting approval to be moved, she was making slow slow progress due to the bed sore. It is hard when your body needs to recover and you have a huge wound on your back.
Once again her medicare "advantage" plan denied giving her more time in therapy. Guess what? Medicare would have just approved. Her advantage plan said the "community" could care for her and she could just get better over time. Do you know what that means? They wanted me to quit working and care for my mom 24/7. That is what they meant by community care. I am an only child with no other family except my wife and kids.
The hospital social worker was great and refused to discharge my mom because she knew I couldn't physically move my mom around or give her the care she required. That started a month battle where her insurance was refusing to pay anymore hospital bills, refused to get her more therapy, and essentially killed my mom. If the social worker had allowed my mom to be discharged, I would have been fucked.
She slowly got worse and died. The american medical system with its private "advantage" plans took what would have been a recoverable bad health incident and allowed it to kill my mom for greed.
BTW, after a month of fighting, emails to the insurance board of directors and CEO, I got more therapy approved for my mom but it was too late by then. She died a few days later.
You can probably guess how I feel about the CEO's murder........
this right here. all the people in this thread acting like "everything is fine" and things aren't so bad for most people...i sincerely hope they get the reality check they deserve but not like this. to see a loved one - who did nothing wrong other than existing - to be murdered by the system? i've witnessed this first hand and to say one's blood boils is understatement of the century. all preventable but when profits are always always always always the most important thing...you're nothing but a cost; an expense to others' egregious profit motives. and as such....expendable.
I will freely admit, I didn't know shit about medicare advantage plans prior to this shit show happening. Most people don't have a clue. But if you talk to a social worker at a hospital, they see it every single day. They are beat down trying to fight for their patients while watching them get fucked by insurance.
What state are you in? You should be able to get PPO plans in the healthcare marketplace. Expect to pay considerably more a month of it isn’t subsidized
I'm not sure all of this is profit seeking caused given their small margins. It feels like it could be a down stream effect of business sustainability and competition. The bag is necessarily covered by those who have less long running health complications, and so you need to provide a competitive price to them so they pay in with you. The price offered when you don't need care becomes lower than the amount needed to cover everyone when you do. Which would incentive denials out of necessity as well.
Medicare Advantage is HMO right? I just switch my folks to BCBS PPO with Medicare and a “medigap” supplemental plan to cover things that Medicare won’t. My head is still spinning up to my neck in paperwork for the cancer and hemorrhagic stroke bills from out of network physician groups billing, truly 24/7 job. Sorry for your loss. You did a lot to help I can tell after going through this myself. Be kind to yourself. They denied my mom’s chemo drugs it’s absurd. She paid into the system for decades without incident.
I wonder if there is a niche to ameliorate this sort of thing by offering payday loans on insurance payouts.
The incentives are pro-social: insurance companies have an incentive to delay payouts, because their profits come from interest (they pay out more money than they take in) so the longer they can hold onto money the better. But that's reversed for this hypothetical loan issuer - they want to make the payout as fast as possible in order to earn as much interest as possible as quickly as possible.
And if there's a systematic tendency for medicaid advantage plans to deny claims that eventually get approved, and if you could predict which ones will get approved 'just' by really understanding what medicaid would approve, then this might be self-sustaining or even profitable?
The solution is disallow private insurance being the middle man between medicare and the patient.
What possible benefit to the patient is having a whole bureaucracy sit between the gov't insurance and the person in need of medical care? It only exists to make money off the backs of the people they are harming.
Now, if you don't know why people sign up for them, you don't understand what they are doing. My mom, like many others, was on a fixed income. If you sign up for a medicare advantage plan, they will do things like give you an extra $100 a month to you directly. Why would insurance be willing to PAY you? Because they make all their money billing medicare and denying you coverage.
18 billion in profits last year running a middle man between patients and medicare
Network effects. They outsource all the medical billing and management to the big insurance racket companies. Protip: go with a PPO Medicare plan and medigap supplemental plan if you want your loved ones to see any specialists and go to any hospital. I switched mine off the HMO advantage plans to BCBS PPO cause HMO Medicare advantage plans deny everything by default fighting tooth and nail.
Wikipedia says the government introduced intermediaries to cut costs (i.e. create a scapegoat people can blame for denying claims or reducing payments to providers and not have the finger point at the government).
> The act had a five-year savings goal and a ten-year savings goal following its enactment in 1997. The five-year savings goal was $116.4 billion which would be achieved by limiting growth rates in payments to hospitals and physicians under fee-for-service arrangements.[7]
>This plan also involved the change of the methods of payment made to rehabilitation hospitals, home health agencies, skilled nursing facilities, and outpatient service agencies as well as the reduction of payments to Medicare managed care plans and the slowing of growth rates of these same care plans.[7]
>The ten-year savings goal was $393.8 billion using the same savings methods as the five-year goal to achieve the savings in 2007.[7]
Is it just me or does this sound like a terrible bill? I've gone through the page and it just sounds like it was trying to save money by making healthcare beneficiaries worse off.
I haven't researched how all these came to exist but I assume it is the typical conservative talking point about the free market being more efficient so why wouldn't we want this. It will save us all money. And no, I don't believe any of that BS.
Or, I don’t know, maybe we do what every other Western nation has done and just present a public option for healthcare coverage to the average person?
Nah, better to have millionaires lying to the sick and dying about the company not having the money to pay for the coverage that the sick person paid a hefty monthly premium to provide.
Nice, a hyper capitalistic solution to a problem which only exists because of a hyper capitalistic system. Why not add another middleman with a financial incentive to a system overburdened by middlemen with financial incentives?
The solution would be to remove useless leeches providing no value or benefit to anyone other than shareholders, not add more of them.
And what do you know, most of the rest of the developed world has managed to do that. And even the parts that have private healthcare have managed to put strict rules controlling it, and costs and outcomes are much better.
Yep, and it is preventable. The one thing I can say is NEVER let your parents sign up for a "medicare" advantage plan. There is no advantage. The company my mom was with is one of the largest and profited something like 18 BILLION off medicare last year. How do you think that is possible? Because they overcharge medicare and deny coverage.
People sign up for (or are tempted to sign up for) Medicare C because traditional Medicare is too complex and bafflingly bad. Traditional Medicare requires paying for your Part B premium, a separate Part D plan and premium (from the private insurance companies), likely a third “Medigap” plan and premium (also from the private insurance companies IIRC) and then separate private vision and dental coverages.
And for all of that, you’re stuck paying at least 20% of everything, on top of separate deductibles for each part and no out of pocket caps at all (meaning Medicare isn’t even an ACA compliant health care plan). Part C simplifies this for so many people by rolling all of Part B, Part D and usually vision and dental into a single premium and puts out of pocket caps on the amount of money you might need to shell out. Is it any wonder people keep choosing Part C even if it means their providers have to fight the insurance more?
Source? UNH’s entire net income in 2023 was $22.3B, and their market cap is more than 5x the next biggest managed care organization (MCO).
The other MCOs all had net income less than $8B (CVS/Elevance/Cigna/Humana/etc).
There is no way a business earned a profit of $18B just from Medicare and it not being visible on their net income figures.
That is not to say Medicare Advantage is good for most customers (the common advice is to stay away from it), but fantastical numbers don’t help arguments.
Profit is not income. That $18B could be spend on salaries, bonuses, company assests, etc, and I'm not an accountant but if it's getting spent on the business it doesn't have to be included in their income reports.
Profit without a qualifier is assumed to mean net income, which is all revenue minus all expenses.
But even supposing that the business earns $18B from Medicare Advantage after all is said and done, it doesn’t pass the smell test because at that level of profit, these businesses should shut everything else down and just do Medicare Advantage.
Wish I could upvote this more. Switched mine to BCBS PPO with medigap supplemental plan for their Medicare provider. They got to go to the best cancer hospital and specialists you can just call up the office and schedule. It costs like $900 a month though and they pay 20% with 80% plan coverage up to catastrophic out of pocket limit. PPO if you want to give your loved ones a fighting chance.
I'm genuinely amazed by the distribution of opinions in this thread.
If y'all feel that way, why don't you vote for a "socialist" healthcare system like we have over here in communist Europe?
I mean, I'm over here in Germany and I'm not going to claim the system is that great, but it's really not half bad either, and it does seem to prevent the most extreme tragedies.
It's on the ballot a lot; Obama wanted, but was ultimately unable to, implement a broad individual mandate within the ACA; Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren supported medicare for all.
A number of states have implemented individual mandates; including Massachusetts under Mitt Romney.
It seems quite clear that you'd get it if you (collectively) voted that way, or not for candidates who very actively oppose it.
I would look at Orbstack. Yes it costs money but it is pretty great.
Your situation sounds very similar to the company I work for. Orbstack has been a drop in replacement except one issue. Any dev using IPv6 assignment on their home network has issues where pods try to hit external dns because it tries to use IPv6 and I don’t think the Orbstack k8s instance is dual stack.
There are hacks to get around it but if I could get Orbstack to address this issue, I couldn’t find one other issue.
Orbstack is crazy fast and way better than docker desktop overall
My main dev machine is Linux so I use Rancher Desktop but I also have a MacBook Pro m1 machine. Orbstack is so much better than rancher and docker desktop. I know they are a small company but hell if their product isn’t significantly more efficient and better.
Completely agree. I moved from docker desktop to rancher after an update blew away my kubernetes cluster, and then from Rancher to Orbstack due to a number of bugs that were crashing the underlying VM. Orbstack has been rock solid (aside from one annoying networking issue), and it uses significantly less battery. They’ve done a fantastic job.
I’m not saying you’re making the wrong move, but if you’re willing to go with a carrier like ATT, you can get $1000 trade-in value for that iPhone 13 Pro towards a new iPhone 16 Pro. You can even just buy an unlocked iPhone 12 off of eBay (for about $250) and get the same $1000 trade-in credit for you son. There are some caveats. For example, the credits are paid out evenly over 24 months, but if you plan to keep it for 2 years, you basically get a $250 iPhone 16 Pro.
Again, it might not be the right decision for you, but I thought you might like to be aware of the option.
I've tended to buy iPhones that are 2 or 3 generations old from eBay and Swappa for my family and use Mint or Tello for cheap cellular service. Our costs might be $350 for a phone and $100 - $150 per year for service.
We do get them a nice new phone when they graduate high school.
I consider that state of the art and brand new. I just inherited an iPhone XS and the battery is at 91%. I figure I can go at least another 3 years. For reference I was using a Oneplus 3T which is still going strong.
I have that same phone and have been using it now for six years, and according to the battery health in the settings, the battery is still in good shape, there’s no notice of it being degraded.
I used the same OnePlus 3T that I bought used, until it was stolen. Would have probably considered a new OnePlus but all their models were too big and expensive at the time, so went Pixel 7 near the end of the cycle. Even though I've been a mac user for about 12 years, iPhones have never made it into the realm of consideration.
It is indeed the most comfortable of the phones in the last decade perhaps. I am still rocking it. Recently my battery died and they replaced it but that battery too wouldn’t charge for hours and then would charge by a trickle. They said they’d just replace my phone so now I have a brand new XS max ready for another 5 years.
This reply seems eerily similar to folks months/years before the wright brothers proved flight was indeed possible.
All the building evidence was there but people just refused to believe it was possible.
I am not buying that AI right now is going to displace every job or change the world in the next 5 years but I would t bet against world impacts in that timefram. The writing is in the wall. I am old enough to remember AI efforts in the late 80s and early 90s. We saw how very little progress was made.
The progress made in the past 10 years is pretty insane.
Precisely. I remember back in the late 90s, some Particle Physics papers were published that used neural nets to replace hand crafted statistical features.
While the power was not amazing, I've kind of assumed since then that scale was what would be needed.
I then half-way forgot about this, until I saw the results from Alexnet.
Since then, the capabilities of the models have generally been keeping up with how they were scaled, at least within about 1 OOM.
If that continues, the next 5-20 years are going to be perhaps the most significant in history.
I am not the person you are replying to but it is blantantly obvious that IF you have google play services on your phone, they have full access to your device.
They have accidentally shown their hand previously by turning on battery saver mode on everyone's phone on accident.
They can try to say it is limited to whatever, but I think all the smoke means there is fire. I used to exclusively use Android devices until this incident happened.
At the end of the day, I realize that even if I buy a google phone, I am still the product. I do not believe it is the same with Apple. Do I trust apple? No way, but I feel they have more incentive to not treat my data as a product to be sold and my device to be used to spy on me.
Congrats, it looks great, love that you have Linux app support.
Question, have you done the business analysis to know how long you can afford to run the system when giving away 500MB? Even your paid model seems really inexpensive. Do you have enough margin to immediately not go broke?
I am not trying to throw shade, I am just curious because it almost seems too good to be true since you aren’t running any ads and your price is free and/or cheap
This type of analysis is kind of pointless because the chances of the key assumptions being correct are almost none. How many free vs paid users will sign up? How much resources will they actually consume? The answers aren’t known until you test the market and probably change over time too.
That said, if he’s just bootstrapping this as a hobby with low overhead these prices are just fine. He probably actually makes a good profit once his user counts climb a bit. This type of service can be easy to keep afloat in these prices is my gut feeling and that’s probably good enough.
Besides there are some easy solutions to an emergency situation. Raise prices. Stop offering free plans. Change the resource limits. Etc. so much he can do before going broke.
Yes. Over the past 3 years I've been researching and re-iterating different monetization strategies. While I don't want to divulge exact operating costs, I can tell you that it's sustainable to provide free storage and the amount on the paid Everest plan.
I will just say that Azure seems to want to do shit different for the sake of being different.
It is really annoying to write infrastructure as code for aws/gcp then go to do the same for azure and realize how dumb some of their stuff is.
Just my personal experience.