This was my exact thought when I hit that point in the article. How am I supposed to know the probability to make these calculations? And if I make up numbers that "seem" reasonable, how is that better than buying insurance to sleep better?
Many of these probabilities can be looked up in official statistics. Then you can adjust a tiny bit depending on whether you think you have more or fewer risk factors than the average.
When I feasibility tested by asking my wife to guesstimate a couple of these she ended up very close to official statistics. The first-level trick she used is Fermi estimation.
You can totally do it and it's worth practicing. There are even competitions in it open for anyone! I like the Quarterly Cup at Metaculus. The next iteration starts early January.
Except it's not anywhere near as complex because you need to manage far far less using the AWS services than if you ran all of your own inside a k8s cluster. And even if you use k8s, you're probably already using most of those anyway. Who bothers building their own container hosting and file hosting at a startup?
Certainly seems that way, and it's written by a guy who promoted ivermectin as a "wonder drug" and had his certification revoked by the American Board of Internal Medicine. WTF is this doing on HN?
