I think I read somewhere that calculating and limiting cloud usage costs is a really hard problem. But I feel that if Google were motivated to do it, they can do it. It's hard, not impossible. They just don't care to solve this particular problem.
If they can COUNT it and charge based on that, that means they can count it and react.
If I, not having their budget or engineers, can have pretty much instant Prometheus event reacting to metrics, surely it wouldn't be too hard for them to have triggers like this -- somehow their AI can automatically ban people based on something, can't they do something for the customers?
It's the same fundamental problem as view counters, something Google is famously good at solving. Eventually consistent solutions are well-understood, and wouldn't have these kinds of massive cost-overruns.
It's more a problem they are incentivized to have. Open Router allows fixed wallets and doesn't run into the same problem, since it would be their money on the line if they let a user overspend their limits.
It seems hard to believe that a one-hour delay on such a counter is impossible to achieve, and one hour would reduce the risk from "catastrophic" to "serious problem" in most cases.
Also, if implementing a cap is a desired feature that justifies trade-offs to be made, then it is psosible to translate the budget cap (in terms of money) back into service-specific caps that are easier to keep consistent. Such as "autoscale this set of VMs" and "my budget cap is $1000/hour", with the VM type being priced at $10/hour, translated to "autoscale to at most 100 instances". That would need dev work (i.e. this feature being considered important) and would not respect the budget cap in a cross-service way automatically, but still it is another piece in the puzzle.
Eh, suddenly turning off all services in your account because you hit your cap is just as much a DoS type event - just of your services, not your wallet.
So? Many would prefer a DoS-type event over spending $WHATEVER_THEIR_HARD_CAP_IS. This is kinda the definition of a hard cap, so you would place it sufficiently high that DoSing your system is indeed preferable.
Also, doing this on a per-service basis doesn't seem that far-fetched to me, so you'd only kill that service and get at least some chance that the rest of your system remains usable.
If you have an actual enforced cap, those services will be disabled until you resolve the cap - which depending on the latency for usage updates, may be hours after you pass the cap, and hours after you resolve the issue.
Or you have ‘warnings’, and your services keep working, but you spend more $$.
Previously, people seemed to be more worried about service outages than raw $$. Now it’s the other way around.
It’s a common issue with disk quotas in on-prem systems too, and they tend to cause a lot of similar types of problems in both directions.
Yeah, there's an implicit assumption was reasonability.
But a big part of the value in large clouds like GCP is the network's interconnectedness. Plus even if there was some global event that made communications impossible only for the billing service, I'd still expect charges to top out roughly proportional to the number of partitions as they each independently exceed the threshold. GCP only has 120ish zones.
They charge for a lot of things "by the hour". Things like S3, load balancers, storage.
Deleting those when a customer hits a limit will lose customer data or remove things that might be hard to add back. The "I hit my AWS limit and they deleted all my data" headlines will result.
and excluding those things makes the limit soft again..
I mean yes, look at Corey Quinn [1] for example. He has built an entire career out of the fact that cloud billing trips people up.
(Generally, tech seems to skate by on creating insanely complicated things, knowing that given enough pain, people will start blogging about their solutions, ie effectively outsourcing the cost and effort of doing something about it.)
Tech skates by on monopoly/oligopoly power. This arises because big players are allowed to buy competitors whenever they like. And since they are already monopolies/duopolies, they have unlimited money for such purposes. Killing off WhatsApp was chump change for Facebook.
We essentially don’t have monopoly enforcement in the US anymore
Keyboard shortcuts are truly a mess on mac os. Windows does it much better and with more consistency. That results in third party apps also having sensible shortcuts. Example: Ctrl+G is widely used in code editors for "Goto line". On Windows it makes perfect sense to use because Ctrl+ shortcuts are used for text editing everywhere. But on macos it is out of place, because there Cmd+ is the standard for text editing. But Cmd+G is used for some obscure find feature. So editors fall back to Ctrl+G which is out of place.
The "goto line" feature on most Mac text editors is Cmd+L. And it's consistent.
On the Mac the Control shortcuts are used for text manipulation everywhere and they come from Emacs: C-a, C-e, C-f, C-b, C-k, etc. The Cmd key is not the standard for text editing; it is the standard for all app-specific commands. For example Cmd+I usually makes text italic in a word processor, but in a non-word processor app italic makes no sense, so for example in Finder it means bring up the inspector.
I don’t know why this comment is downvoted, but I don’t agree with this either because the OS (historical) conventions are different, and there may be unintuitive shortcuts on all OSes. What matters is consistency across applications on the same OS.
One point on macOS is that it’s very weak on keyboard based navigation and shortcuts for apps by default (compared to Windows). Even Apple doesn’t bother with keyboard based navigation in its own apps. One look at any app “ported” from iOS is enough. Apple hasn’t even spent time to check what the Tab key does in these apps. It’s a shame.
The "trust project" feature has been designed to be so extremely intrusive and annoying that the first thing I do is to completely disable it whenever I install VS Code on a new computer. This "solution" was just done to tick some box and put the blame on the user when a security incident happens. It's pretty similar to Windows Vista where it annoyed you with a disruptive popup so many times during the normal course of actions that most people ended up disabling the whole UAC system. Overall security goes down, and Microsoft has a nice excuse.
> It's pretty similar to Windows Vista where it annoyed you with a disruptive popup so many times during the normal course of actions that most people ended up disabling the whole UAC system.
Nothing changed post-Vista. It's exactly the same system in Windows 11 doing exactly the same thing. It did, however, get developers to change how they do things.
To be honest, the solution here is probably more dialogs like this, not less. Having one single "Trust everything here but if you don't then nothing will work" box is hardly a good way to go.
Vista's annoyance had a purpose, to get program developers to change things to run without escalation. They didn't want you disabling UAC, and these days it breaks things to disable UAC.
By only having an upfront project-wide toggle, VS Code is much worse.
Yeah imagine if at boot Windows Vista gives you the UAC "Do you TRUST all the software you are going to run today?" and if you say yes then it just allows any random code to do whatever it wants.
Yes, that puzzles me too. Not only do I not know what the author means, I'm not sure what it could mean: teaching material for wasm is generated by many independent people, each for their own tools and purposes. There is no organization behind all that, much less a philosophy.
In any bet you need a judge who decides which way the conditions of the bet resolved. The judge is someone trusted by both parties to be impartial and fair. If a lot of people stop trusting polymarket to act fairly and impartially, that will simply mean fewer people participating in the bets.
Windows 11 has स्वेद steadily gotten worse. It was better at launch!
For me, the phone link feature seems to constantly consume 8-10% CPU regardless of whether my phone is connected or not. Windows malware process is another big offender, making me wonder if an actual virus might have lesser effect on performance. The start menu sometimes hangs if I try to type something in the search box.
It just screams incompetent software to me.
If you have network infrastructure that supports 400G I'm pretty sure it has solid PTP built in. And as far as I remember from my networking days setting it up is almost as simple as setting up NTP, you just need a single machine with a GPS lock.
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