blackandsqueaky's comments

Cloudflare currently markets successfully to a very different calibre of engineer. Meanwhile, Vercel don't even support 2FA login yet, and publish mandatory cache-busting query string parameters to the public Internet. Their "CDN" is a BYOIP range running on AWS Global Accelerator

> revolutionary

...

> caching

There was a time when Google did more engineering than marketing.

I have been a member of the Python community since 2002 and followed the lists for just as long, not least because of the quality of technical discussion up until the start of the 3.x saga.

I don't think anyone would deny Python has changed since then, I think most notably in the years following the release of Django, Python becoming a go-to web language, and the size of the community exploding.

12 references to people in one statement, 5 referring to the post author, 1 reference to social fraternity membership, 1 statement of authority.

I'm not sure if there is a common name for this particular source of discomfort, but that quote definitely contains a lot of it. I'm a historical contributor to the Python source repository, but something about the social structure of the project has changed significantly in recent years that would dissuade me from submitting changes in future. The focus in the statement above no longer feels like it is on the actual productive output of the project itself, and in previous years it wasn't like that, nor needed to be like that.

Reminds me of something like the minutes of a professional schmoozer's business lunch, rather than a technical meeting, or something like that. If you have ever seen a stray engineer at an event like this (or had the misfortune of being that engineer), this feeling probably captures the problem well. Whatever it is, I'd love to see less of it.

Extremely powerful 5 minute interview with an obviously intelligent homeless person addicted to heroin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6ZFzEW7_Q4

Terrifying

Beware of proper insulation, even low energy devices can start a fire

All that changed is a breakdown in perception management. Google definitely had positive and idealistic beginnings, but through growth eventually innate properties of the species will express and become difficult to centrally control. This is a feature Google has in common with any other large organization, be it IBM, Amazon or the Catholic church.

Your solution is finding a good employer who you know and vet personally, and avoiding working entirely for large companies. Managing human rot at scale is an unsolved problem, and few seem to survive exposure to extraordinary cash flows without some aspect or other of their humanity being impacted.

> What's "real consumption"

Workloads you couldn't host on a cable modem

Does this mean we should contact our enterprise account manager regarding our existing spend? For the sake of absolute clarity: we're currently paying for bandwidth

> So if R2 is S3 with no egress, suddenly there is a value proposition again.

That doesn't appear to be what they're doing, they don't seem to have changed their existing operating model at all:

> R2 will zero-rate infrequent storage operations under a threshold — currently planned to be in the single digit requests per second range. Above this range, R2 will charge significantly less per-operation than the major providers. Our object storage will be extremely inexpensive for infrequent access and yet capable of and cheaper than major incumbent providers at scale.

What I read this as is "we won't bill you until your traffic spikes, then you'll pay us, oh how you'll pay us"

Transparent bandwidth pricing would be a far more interesting announcement. This is the second post I've seen from CloudFlare in recent months throwing bricks at AWS over bandwidth pricing, while failing to mention CloudFlare bandwidth is some of the most expensive available.

Does Vantage offer comparisons for Backblaze B2, OVH etc?

When looking at object storage, tail latency is probably the single most overlooked metric, and the most material differentiator between providers after bandwidth costs. Don't sweat the cent spent on storing an object, worry about the cost of the 6,000,0000 copies of it you'll ship after it's stored.

As for bandwidth, CloudFlare becomes uninteresting the moment your account starts to see any real consumption, even AWS are easier to negotiate with.