It fits, in my head, very much in that same toy niche as Teenage Engineering's Pocket Operator series of music making devices: https://teenage.engineering/products/po
> I work 128GB M4 but not run inference, just too many electron apps running at the same time.
This is somewhat depressing - needing a couple of thousand bucks worth of ram just to run your chat app and code/text editor and API doco tool and forum app and notetaking app all at the same time...
Crucial (Micron) sold 128GB of DDR5-5600 in SODIMM form for $280 a year ago. It would be slower tham the same amount on an M4 Mac, but still, I object to characterizing either as “a couple thousand bucks worth”.
I watched a youtube vid recently (so use that to calibrate your bullshit detector here) that said there are a bunch of companies and even freely accessible satellites with Synthetic Aperture Radar covering the entire earth every 12 days.
That's fine, so long as your aware of the costs of that decision.
That choice is what tends towards a"minimum prod deployment" consisting of something like a pair of app servers behind a load balance with a pair of redundant databases behind them and usually some sort of object store as well. Assuming you engineer you app and db schemas sanely, you can reliably get four nine out of a setup like that. On AWS that looks like an aELB with two EC2 instances and a multiAZ RDS with a few S3 buckets. At on demand rates with .medium ec2 and rds instances that runs about $150/month - or maybe as low as $100 with reserved instances. You could probably deploy that for $60 or so on something like Linode or Digital ocean.
That's usually fine when you're spending someone else's money, and they're fully-but-incorrectly expecting their idea to need Netflix or Facebook scale within six months.
|||||If it's _my_ money, something "less scalable" that runs closer to $20/month that will easily support enough traffic to prove product market fit and generate enough sales/profit to suppot both otself and a team to rebuikd it when/if it ever needs it is a really sensibly approach.
For most things I personally use AWS Lambda and S3, with some SimpleDB. If I needed something more in the DB department, I'd probably use DynamoDB, but S3 actually works well for most of the data I need to store. I pay about $0.50/mo and most of that is S3 cost for media files. I don't have a lot of users, but even if I did I'd still be paying way less than $20/mo. And when I do have a lot of users, I don't have to worry about scaling anything (and that will happen soon). I think the first million Lambda invocations are free, and if/when I start paying for Lambda invocations, the AWS costs will definitely be covered easily by user subscriptions.
I also use pretty much the same stack at work, where we currently have about 150,000 users. The cost is about $15/day, mostly in S3 costs, we have a lot more data at my day job. We also do use a few hundred EC2 instances in short bursts, and the VPC has stupid high costs, and other costs add up, but it's probably about 1% of what the rest of the teams cost that run on EC2 and Postgres and other AWS tech.
I saw Balint Seeber demo this at Dorkbot in Sydney, which must have been in the early 2000s, definitely before he left Sydney in about 2010.
He was using live ADS-B data from an SDR, because this was way before global ADS-B websites and APIs existed.
(I wonder what he's up to these day, he was a fascinating person and presenter, and used to be a prolific blogger on interesting subjects. I also wonder what Pia van Gelder who used to run Dorkbot Sydney is up to?)
My gmail account still has the "First off, welcome. And thanks for agreeing to help us test Gmail." mail in it from June 2004. The account itself is over 21 years old. I wonder if I'll get forced to age verify myself any time?
As the owner of a GMail account which is also of legal adult age (and a Reddit account which will be 18 this year), I am morbidly curious what will happen once these mandatory "age verification" start to be enforced.
It should be trivial for Google and Reddit to grandfather-in accounts which are more than 18 years old (arguably less, who created their account when they were, e.g. 5 years old?). However, I'm betting they will come up with all sorts of rationalisations as to why this is not possible, anything from the bullshit ("not technically feasible" my ass) or the self-contradictory ("an account may have changed owner"... so in violation of the ToS? And what's to stop an account from changing ownership after age verification?).
I admit I am prematurely riling myself up with indignation for something which may never happen. Maybe I am wrong and Google, Reddit, etc. take the common sense approach, but I have no hope in it.
Mine did, once, and it hasn't been requested again. It was also, until recently, accepted by age verification services as indication of non-minor status.
Yeah. I got bored a couple of hours after I posted that speculation and found several other colo facilities that mentioned that they'd do remote KVM. I'd figured that it was a common thing (a fair chunk of hardware you might want to colo either doesn't have IPMI or doesn't have IPMI that's worth a damn), but wasn't sure.
You (the person paying to co-locate hardware) don't buy the KVM that the colo facility uses. The colo facility hooks up the KVM that they own to your hardware and configures it so that you can access it. Once you stop paying to colo your hardware, you take your hardware back (or maybe pay them to dispose of it, I guess) and they keep the KVM, because it's theirs.
> Yeah but for $6/mo you can get a tiny linode or digital ocean droplet
That gets you, what, 1 "vCPU" with maybe a gig of ram and a couple of dozen gig of disk.
If you (or a friend) work for a company of any size, there's probably a cupboard full of laptops that won't upgrade to Win11 sitting there doing nothing that you could get for free just by asking the right person. It'll have 4 or 8 cores, each of which is more powerful that the "vCPU" in that droplet. It'll have 8 or maybe 16gig of ram, and at least half a TB of disk and depending on that laptop quite likely to be able to be configured with half a TB of fast nVME storage and a few TB of slower spinning rust storage.
If you want 8vCPUs/cores, 16GB of ram, and 500GB of SSD, all of a sudden Digital Ocean looks more like $250/month.
If you are somewhere in that grey area where you need more than ivCPU and 1GB of memory, grabbing the laptop out of the cupboard that your PM or one of the admin staff upgraded from last year and shipping not off to a datacenter with your flavour of linux installed seems like it's worth considering.
Hell, get together with a friend and have two laptops hosted for 14Euro/month between you, and be each others "failing hardware" backup plan...
that would certainly be a very interesting thing to add, but in the current iteration that is not possible.
The biggest issue here is that there's not really "one" microtonal system out there. The entire fretboard of a conventional guitar is mapped to work in 12tet - and the libraries I'm using to do all the musical operations also only supports 12tet.
to accommodate all the microtonal temperaments out there would be a pretty daunting task. But I'm not saying never!
It fits, in my head, very much in that same toy niche as Teenage Engineering's Pocket Operator series of music making devices: https://teenage.engineering/products/po
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