A friend at my coworking spot had a stroke a month ago. I was coming in on a monday morning and he was being carted off in the ambulance right as I got there. As in... door was open and his coffee and laptop were there, lunch in the fridge, and... I did't make the connection. I didn't see anyone being loaded in the ambulance, lights weren't on, etc. His family came by later to pick up his stuff.
He's been in an intensive care neuro unit for the past month. I visited about 10 days ago and he was having trouble talking, and... I suspect it might be long lasting or permanent.
We'd just spoken the Friday before, and had a meeting planned that morning. It all changed instantly, and there's no going back. It shook me up some, and I'm not affected at all, really, but seeing this happen to someone you know directly is... hard to take (for me anyway).
> But, I don’t think the idea of just stopping charging works.
You don't stop CHARGING. You stop providing the service that is accumulating charges in excess of what limit I set. And you give some short period of time to settle the bill, modify the service, etc. You can keep charging me, but provide a way to stop the unlimited accrual of charges beyond limits I want to set.
> No, I think cloud billing is just inherently complicated.
You're making it more complicated than it needs to be.
> The only reasonable interpretation of “emergency stop on all charges completely” would be to delete those images.
It's by far certainly not the 'only reasonable interpretation'.
"Stop all charges" is a red herring. No one is asking for a stop on charges. They want an option to stop/limit/cap the stuff that causes the charges.
So you want to proactively determine if, at the current rate charges are accumulating, the budget will be exceeded?
That _also_ runs into problems!
Take, for example, a nightly job that spins up a few giant instances to do some batch processing and shuts them down. Running an hour a night, over the course of the month that's going to accumulate ~$300 in charges. Great, we can set a $400/mo budget and have some wiggle room and all is well!
But how can AWS know that you're going to shut the instances down? Looking only at the rate charges are accumulating, the first night those instances start up you are on track to run up a $7,000 bill!
So do we set a $400/mo budget and then just kill the account so it stops accumulating charges when we hit $400, or do we set a $7,000/mo budget to account for the potential rate of accumulation and risk exceeding our budget by 2,000%?
It would be nice if this were in fact just overcomplicating things, but after much thought and many arguments on the internet I really can't see an easy "general" solution to this. The solution is heavily dependent on your specific workload and usage patterns, and the tooling is there to manage that if you want: Create billing alerts, and run code to adjust your usage in response to them.
That all said: I would fully support some sort of "developer sandbox" account that allowed a "kill the account" billing limit. I'd really prefer it had some sort of obvious limitation to avoid people accidentally using it for production workloads or dev workloads turning into production ones. Something like a hard limit that shuts the account down in 30 days, or limiting inbound connectivity to only via a VPN or something. That's purely self interest though--I don't want to see the article on the top of HN every few weeks about how "Amazon killed my startup" because someone set a billing limit and then all their customers' data was deleted.
So, are you looking for some “rate of charges” cap? Like, allow the charges to accumulate indefinitely, but keep track of how much $/sec is being accumulated, and don’t start up new services if it would cause the rate of charges to pass that threshold?
Might work. I do think that part of the appeal of these types of services is that you might briefly want to have a very high $/sec. But the idea makes sense, at least.
A theme of many of the horror stories is something like "I set up something personal, costing a few dollars a month, and I was DDOSed or (in earlier terms) slashdotted out of the blue, and I now have a bill for $17k accumulated over 4 hours".
As someone else pointed out, some(?) services prevent unlimited autoscaling, but even without unlimited, you may still hit a much larger limit.
Being able to say 'if my bill goes above $400, shut off all compute resources' or something like that. Account is still on, and you have X days (3? 1? 14?) to re-enable services, pay the bill, or proceed as you wish.
Yes, you might still want some period of high $/sec, but nearly every horror story in this vein ends with an issue with the final bill. Whether I burn $300 in 5 minutes or 26 days, I want some assurance that the services that are contributing most to that - likely/often EC2 or lambda in the AWS world - will be paused to stop the bleeding.
If you could pipe "billing notification" SNS message to something that could simply shut off public network access to certain resources, perhaps that would suffice. I imagine there's enough internal plumbing there to facilitate that, but even then, that's just AWS - how other cloud providers might handle that would be different. Having it be a core feature would be useful.
I was on a team that had our github CI pipeline routinely shutdown multiple times over a few weeks because some rogue processes were eating up a lot of minutes. We may have typically used $50/$100 per month - suddenly it was $100 in a day. Then... $200. Github just stopped the ability to run, because the credits used were over the limits. They probably could run their business where they would have just moved to charging us hundreds per day, perhaps with an email to an admin, and then set the invoice at $4500 for the month. But they shut down functionality a bit after the credits were exhausted.
I think "free or low cost tier that doesn't rack up a $100,000 bill" would be pretty common actually, enough to warrant a prominent preset template/option in their UI. They'd probably save a lot in support requests too.
There is no such thing as a “free or low cost tier” in AWS. Or at least there wasn’t before July 15th of this year when they actually added a free tier where you can’t go over $200.
There are services that give you a free year and there are services that give you a free amount every month.
If you want AWS with training wheels, use AWS Lightsale
The disconnect comes from the difference between 'shut it off' and 'clear the account'. If I read an earlier poster correctly, the claim is "the only reasonable interpretation is to immediately delete the contents of the entire account". But to you point, yes, this seems like it would be pretty easy to grasp. Stop incoming access, don't delete the entire account 5 seconds after I go 3 cents over a threshold.
I missed a water bill payment years ago. They shut off the water. They didn't also come in and rip out all my plumbing and take every drop of water from the house.
That assumes that you can, in fact, install that software in the first place. "Developers" sometimes get a bit of a pass, but I've been inside more than a few companies where... no one could install anything at all, regardless of whether there was a cost. Requesting some software would usually get someone with too much time on their hands (who would also complain about being overworked) asking what you need, why you need it, why you didn't try something else, do you really need it, etc. In some scenarios the 'free' works against, because "there's no support". I was seeing this as late as 2019 at a company - it felt like being back in 1997.
The defence isn't against malicious developers writing evil code, but some random third party container launched via a curl | bash which mounts ~/ into it and posts all your ssh keys to some server in china... Or whatever.
Or so I was told when I made the monumental mistake of trying to fight such a policy once.
So now we just have a don't ask don't tell kind of gig going on.
I don't really know what the solution is, but dev laptops are goldmines for haxxors, and locking them down stops them from really being dev machines. shrug
> some random third party container launched via a curl | bash which mounts ~/ into it and posts all your ssh keys to some server in china
it's pretty stupid because the same curl | bash that could have done that could have just posted the same contents directly to the internet without the container. The best chance you actually have is to do as much development as possible inside a sealed environment like ... a container where at least you have some way to limit visibility of partially trusted code of your file system.
Looks like a lot of small ISPs have been procrastinating about getting their robocalling mitigation/compliance policies implemented, and didn't think the FCC was serious about the “Final Warning”. They'll get their stuff fixed eventualy.
Worked in a mall in the 90s and thought a store that let people 'shop' but not actually pay money for things might be fun/useful. Or... sort of like a membership. $10/month, come in to some luxury type store - browse, test out stuff, etc. Go through a 'checkout' step with your 'store card', just... leave the items in the store as you leave. For some folks, the leaving and driving away is the 'high', but for a lot of folks, the 'purchase' itself is the high, and it's downhill after that. I saw so many people buying things they shouldn't buy - and that was over 30 years ago(!). I know it's only become worse over the years.
FWIW - my idea was possibly sort of dumb, but I was a bit of a dumb kid at times... :)
I do this all the time with online shops: fill the cart with things, come back later or after a couple of days and I don't check out because I feel I was dumb for wanting that stuff.
That's how I do my online grocery shopping - I fill the cart with things that are interesting, needed, etc., and when I'm ready to actually buy, I empty the cart and fill it with the things I actually need. Many times, what seemed like a good idea was, in later reflection, not such a good idea.
There are utilities to your idea and by that virtue, Just Buy Nothing.
With a bit of contributed enhancements this could actually solve a niche problem.
I'm already imagining a situation where you can opt in for a discovery/assessment after checkout; each item is assessed for utility of need vs want and whether a smaller or less expensive replacement could meet the same needs.
At the end of this, a user could come off with a smaller basket that they could then take to a real shopping site and or be charged for the session.
Privacy has to be nailed quickly though.
Closing remarks:
AI could help in the aspect of scaling the discovery/analysis with users.
This was about 15 minutes of thought. There's something here for sure.
I like this idea a lot. Been working a ton on the site to get it to where it is today and make updates based on user feedback.
AI has been helping me create product images. Right now I have it limited to 150 products on the site at the time. I originally had 1K+ and realized that cloudinary is very expensive. It provides the best user experience but had to cut back a bit for now to not break my own wallet.
Just replace "leave the items at the store" with debt, buy-now-pay-later or "30 days return" guarantees and you have a business idea! Car culture and oversized suburban homes even absolve you from the pain of carrying things you don't need, and finding storage space for them.
It is a win for the economy!
And if you need to free up storage space, dispose for free, it's societies responsibility!
> but it's laser focused on education and has zero agenda.
I totally support public broadcasting of all stripes, and do not advocate for this POV at all, but ... there are people who claim the opposite. Sesame Street is 'full woke', apparently, because it has talked about skin color and race with muppets.
What many people consider normal... is 'full woke agenda' to others.
>and this is also not how you educate or convince people
It is not my job to educate people. In fact, I receive advantage if I live in a world where you're more ignorant than I.
The term goes back to the 1970s or the late 1960s, and was invented by the puppeteers on Sesame Street. It's documented. It might be generous to assume they were making a tasteless joke, because not everyone who makes such jokes engages in such behaviors, but given their sexual orientations I'm reluctant to give them the benefit of that doubt. Of course, none of this would have been known to anyone in those decades, or even until much later when the internet made obscure trivia available on a global scale. But it's all ok, as it turns out my wife and I didn't have any problems teaching our kids to count to 10 by ourselves.
>I'd suggest you log off and go touch grass.
I'm at work. But even if I weren't, I'd not take any advice from you. It's apparently news to you that the children's shows are all made by perverts.
Sesame Street used the term "rusty trombone" in a song by Oscar the Grouch about the wonderful things you can find in trash, written and performed 30 years before there is any documented use of the term "rusty trombone" to refer to a sex position.
>The term goes back to the 1970s or the late 1960s, and was invented by the puppeteers on Sesame Street. It's documented.
Where, exactly, is this "documented?"
Perhaps my Google(well, DDG, actually)-Fu is deficient as I was unable to find any links to "analingus with a reach around" associated with Sesame Street. The only broadcast media references I could find were radio and movies references from the 2000-2010 period.
As such, please do let me know where to find this documentation. I'd really appreciate it. Thanks!
I can't reply to the previous post now, but the 'bailout' to Central States Pension Fund. $36b to deal with a pension fund serving 350k people. Yes, seems high. Yes, was an 'unusual' move, done during 2021 - height of covid. Why did CSPF need assistance? It never quite recovered from 2008 financial crisis - banks and other companies got 'bailouts' but not CSPF. Massive economic turmoil during 2020/2021 because of covid impacted the fund further.
Might have been other or better ways of trying to address this (and many other covid issues). But we got what we got.
Thank you. I feel this frustration about the 'both sides'ing of every political argument. There is a huge difference in the quality and quantity of the basic political/social norms (and laws) being broken under this administration compared with previous administrations. Bush, Clinton, Obama and Biden had faults, but none were so blatant about power, control, retribution and self-enrichment, and none had surrounding supporters so eager to push a self-serving agenda. It's not even a close comparison.
People got riled up when Biden was 'violating the Constitution' with multiple attempts at loan forgiveness. Some of the same people who hated Biden for this 'unconstitutional' behaviour voted for Trump because he promised to get rid of the Department of Education, in the misguided hope that their own student loans would be eliminated with the department. I don't quite know how we got to this level of stupid in the US - it may have always been there, just easier to see via social media?
> There is a huge difference in the quality and quantity of the basic political/social norms (and laws) being broken under this administration compared with previous administrations.
Indeed, but it's not just the administration that has issues whenever Republicans control it.
I distinctly 'member McConnell filibustering his own bill, the Republicans sabotaging ACA (aided, of course, by Democrats trying to achieve bipartisan ownership even though they had a majority at the time [1]), or worst of all the Republicans refusing the appointment of Merrick Garland (citing that Obama was a lame-duck outgoing President) [3], only to do just the same thing with Barrett at the end of 2020, right before the elections [4].
Republicans, when in power, demand that Democrats cooperate with them (and Democrats are spineless enough to always play ball) - and when Democrats are in power, even if they have majorities, they obstruct in all ways possible. It's madness.
> Instead I keep on because my wife is going back to school and such, so everything relies on me.
This has been so apparent to me over the last 20 years. I've seen so many people who wanted to switch jobs - perhaps a move to other parts of the country for a new job - but are very tied to employer-provided insurance. People with family members with varying health issues often feel especially 'stuck' to particular jobs because of the 'good' insurance, perhaps tied to specific regional hospitals with specific networks of doctors and specialists. I've heard this from multiple colleagues over the years and it's so disheartening. We've got so much unlocked human potential, and we get tied to specific areas because of arbitrary self-imposed constraints. Self-imposed I mean on ourselves as a whole, not individually-imposed.
He's been in an intensive care neuro unit for the past month. I visited about 10 days ago and he was having trouble talking, and... I suspect it might be long lasting or permanent.
We'd just spoken the Friday before, and had a meeting planned that morning. It all changed instantly, and there's no going back. It shook me up some, and I'm not affected at all, really, but seeing this happen to someone you know directly is... hard to take (for me anyway).