I’m curious how they knew EC2 instances were sitting idle waiting to process a file.

AWS SA here, but speculating, so take it with a grain of salt.

A lot of customers -- especially the larger ones -- actually share their architecture and have in depth conversations about what they are doing and pain points, etc, with their account teams.

My guess is that they knew because their customers told them (or complained?) that they had fleets of EC2 instances just waiting

I would guess host metrics show they're idle, and talking to say 10 such customers showed obvious patterns. Is it harder than that?

Wouldn't AWS have metrics about physical and virtual CPU utilization from the hypervisor?

I’m in no way qualified to answer, but I recall reading about a slew of publications being retracted across all fields after the results couldn’t be replicated. If I remember right there was a team that has become infamous for simply trying to replicate studies and finding a very large number of them can’t be.

Are you able to dig up that paper or the findings the team found around replication and share?

I remember my Grandmother got some and shared. If I remember correctly it seemed a lot like Velveeta.

Correct

I really don’t get the need for vulgarity. Oh well.

Those who don’t know their history are cursed to repeat it. And unfortunately, if 51% of the population doesn’t know their history, everyone gets to repeat it :(

Or 49% (or even less) if you're in a winner-take-all country with a system more baroque than one person, one vote.

This time the supreme court has already given him immunity. This time he has less to lose (he’s old, and term limited _unless_ he “fixes” that).

Ooooh, that’s was unexpected! :)

Yes!!

Sludge is exactly right - they’re ugly. This is the best example of Dr Seuss’ story about Sneetches that I’ve ever seen in real life.

The auto industry occasionally goes through phases where they intentionally make cars ugly. I don't know why. I think we're in the early days of such a phase right now.

I dunno about early. Look at all the huge holes in the front of cars, fake grilles and black plastic everywhere - it’s been getting worse and worse for years.

But is the moral of the story that the guys that made the bad decisions got their bonuses and moved on, and aren’t affected by the aftermath? That’s what I fear the MBA’s will learn - don’t stick around.

It's not just MBAs that don't stick around. Even in the tech world, it's common for people to bounce around. Usually what ever the vesting period is.