>What I can’t live with is the new policy, implemented this year, where you must buy your drives from Synology.
Used to do the same thing at EMC back in the 90s-early 2000s with Symmetrix. The cover story was that the EMc-branded drives, which were marked up like 1000x had “special firmware”.
The reality was that it was to prevent procurement guys from putting a BOM spreadsheet in front of the sales rep and saying “why are you charging me $2M for $100k of parts I can buy at Fry’s?
> Three of the sources said officials at the Department of Defense had previously raised concerns about political donations made by Beck to Democrats.
If true, this is insane. I don’t understand how the US government firing an employee for personal campaign donations squares with modern interpretations of the first amendment.
It doesn't. Nothing squares with anything anymore. "Rules for thee, not for me" is the name of the game from here on out.
Once you stop treating this administration like previous ones, and start treating it like the banana republic it is, things start to make much more sense.
As the source article describes, it has nothing to do with the First Amendment. The Secretary of Defense is conducting a political purge of the Pentagon. The administration has stated repeatedly and at length that they expect personal loyalty to Donald Trump from the entire federal government, and that they have the right to remove anyone who doesn't show that loyalty or won't do what he wants.
I had kidney stone surgery (laser lithotripsy) in Manhattan last Friday morning and literally the first thing I was given after changing into the paper gown was 2 500mg Tylenol pills and a cup of water. I don’t know if you’re a physician but the medical staff in manhattan tend to be at the top of their game, and they are cool with Tylenol.
I am saying this as a lifelong supporter and user of open source software: issues like this are why governments and enterprises still run on Oracle and SQL Server.
The author was able to rollback his changes, but in some industries an unplanned enterprise-wide data unavailability event means the end of your career at that firm, if you don’t have a CYA email from the vendor confirming you were good to go. That CYA email, and the throat to choke, is why Oracle does 7 and 8 figure licensing deals with enterprises selling inferior software solutions versus open source options.
It seems that Linux, through Linus’ leadership, has been able to solve this risk issue and fully displace commercial UNIX operating systems. I hope many other projects up and down the stack can have the same success.
When the author is talking about rolling back his changes, it's not referring to a database, but a version of his library. If someone tried used his new version, I assume the only thing that would have gone wrong is that their code wouldn't work because Pandas didn't support the format.
This article is about how a new version of the Parquet format hasn't been widely adopted, and so now the Parquer community is in a split state where different forces are pulling the direction of the format in two directions, and this happens to be caused by two different areas of focus that don't need to be tightly coupled together.
I don't see how the problems the article discusses relate to the reliability of software.
This is a small Java library used for data science/engineering purposes, and the upgrade would stop it from being able to read Parquet 2 files. If that causes an "unplanned enterprise-wide data unavailability event", that is the fault of the application developer that chose to upgrade their dependencies, not the library author. Furthermore, you could say the same things about any third-party library in the world, so drawing the connection to big vendors like Oracle is a non sequitur at best.
People keep using Oracle because they have a ton of code and migration would be too costly.
Oracle is not imune to software issues. In fact, this year I lost two weekends because of a buggy upgrade on the cloud that left my production cluster in a failed state.
It doesn't do me any good. All I can get from Oracle is the possibility of opening a support ticket and then having to send them tons of log files. If I use max severity, they expect me to be available 24/7, any other severity means they'll take weeks to look at it.
Most times I prefer to wade through the knowledge base until I find a solution.
Polite disagree; governments and enterprises remain on Oracle / SQL Server because it is borderline sisphean. It can be done (we are doing it) but it requires a team who are doing it non-stop. It's horrible work.
> The author was able to rollback his changes, but in some industries an unplanned enterprise-wide data unavailability event means the end of your career at that firm
If a (major) software update cause you an outage, you shouldn’t blame the software, but insufficient testing and validation. Large companies (I worked for many) are slow to adopt new technologies precisely because they are extremely cautious and want to make sure everything was properly tested before they roll it out. That’s also why they still use Oracle and SQL Server (and HP-UX, and IBMi) - these products are working and have been working for generations of employees. The grass needs to be significantly greener for them to consider the move to the other side of their fence.
So did I :-) but I think the concepts are related: Linus’ ability to shift into autocratic leadership mode when necessary seems to prevent issues like the 4 year indecisiveness on v2/core from compromising product quality to the point where Linux is trusted in a way that rivals commercial software.
To be fair, CERNs needs do seem fairly niche. Petabyte numeric datasets with all sorts of access patterns from researchers. All of which they want to maintain compatible software forever.
As someone who’s likely soon wrapping up 18 years of psychodynamic-based therapy, where I learned to ask all right questions (and opportunity cost could have bought a brownstone in brooklyn), but didn’t get any actionable answers, I really appreciated the timeliness of this article.
Back in the day I was mostly on slashdot, Reddit, digg, and metafilter.
Digg was the first site where I started seeing brainrot nonsense content on the front page every day, with orders of magnitude larger than usual upvotes of tech news, from the same small number of usernames (Mr BabyMan, I hate that I even remember your stupid username).
For me, Digg was the first time experiencing product managers experimenting with modern proto-influencer virality algorithms. It made the internet worse, and now every site does it.
You forgot Fark! Except that was unironic brainrot and everybody knew what it was. Unlike now, where critical thinking went out the window and everybody takes things at face value.
One of my favorite things here in New York City is how Con Ed gets approval to pass infrastructure upgrade costs directly to consumers, but at the end of the financing period the asset is mysteriously owned by their board of directors, not the public who paid for it.
Public ownership can be extremely detrimental, I think it is even worse than state ownership by a few margins. Especially for setting long term goals required for infrastructure. There are investors for that as well, but they are rare and an exception.
I evade working directly for publicly traded companies like hell or let myself be paid very, very generously. Most often your time will be limited in the first place. Better to be employed as a freelancer in that case.
My power company has the state guaranteeing a monopoly, effectively sets prices, sets safety standards, approves new construction, requires every home be connected to the grid, etc.
Throwing out the corporate management will probably save money simply because they're pointless middle men. They aren't making the decisions that truly matter.
My local electricity infrastructure provider is a private company, with the twist that all residents within their area are also automatically shareholders.
They operate "for profit", but profits are distributed amongst shareholders in the form of reduced bills, ie last year we didn't get bills for electricity transport for december, and the year before that there were no bills from august through december.
The "for profit" part pays infrastructure upgrades, so some years we pay the normal prices if there is infrastructure work being done, which in the end benefits all shareholders, meaning me (and other users).
Politicians lack the will to push for public utilities. That requires asking voters to go along with the government taking on financing, planning, operations, customer service, and being the bad guys who raise prices. It's easier to point to companies as the bad guys who raised electric rates, likely sparked a wildfire, or are taking so long to fix an outage.
The problem is this is set up as a dichotomy. Either you have privately owned infrastructure (and then a private monopoly), or make the utility company a government entity which then becomes an unaccountable bureaucracy captured by public sector unions etc.
Whereas the better thing to do is have the government own the physical plant (utility poles and conduits etc.) and then hire private contractors -- large numbers of small entities, not small numbers of large entities -- to do all the actual work of operating and maintaining it.
Make each contracted role simple and fungible so that none of them are too big to fail and they're all in competition with each other.
You don't want a public monopoly. You don't want a private monopoly. But who says those are the only options?
In New York, the cheapest utilities by far are public utilities owned by municipal governments. Same in Massachusetts — I saved a fortune dropping some stuff in Holyoke.
Generation is pretty low intensity from an employee standpoint. I know you’re brainwashed to hate unions, but they have little to do with it.
Generation is the thing where you don't even need the government to own the infrastructure. Just don't prevent anyone who wants to from building a power plant and then have the grid buy electricity from whoever supplies it at the lowest price.
It's the transmission and distribution which are the "natural monopoly" -- the government should own the utility poles -- but that's also a thing where there is a non-trivial amount of labor involved for tree trimming and storm damage etc.
Cheapest to the consumer, maybe? What's the actual financial standing of said companies? Plenty of government-owned utilities require lots of propping to cover their losses.
The three I’m familiar with are cash cows. Electricity is regulated and the rates have to be supported by the business model.
The small operators are mostly vertically integrated in a small area, so they can deal with the capital buildouts and aren’t subject to as many swings in commodity cost. They often even own the utility rights of way, generating additional income and avoiding property taxes.
It takes alot of union workers and pensions to make up for the pay of one private CEO.
To add an anecdote my city has a publicly owned electric utility. Most of the surrounding metropolitan area is served by an investor owned utility. My city has noticeably fewer outages than nearby areas. Although that might be because this city has buried utilities and was built later but this trend of fewer outages includes the main drag that was built in the 1800s. The private utility has raised bills much faster than the public utility. Both utilities face the same underlying cost push factors of labor costs, materials, and rising wholesale prices. The private utility announced a record quadrupling of quarterly earnings to 1.2B (year over year).
The public utility employs linemen. They don’t contract out operations.
The interstate road system in the US is world class. Airports and ports are publicly owned, and seem to function very well in most cases. Education including the infrastructure and buildings is managed incredibly well in many jurisdictions. There are many, many examples of well run public infrastructure. We only notice the failures because 1. they are an easy punching bag 2. they are noteworthy because we expect them not to fail.
It is hardly a maxim that public operation of infrastructure is incompetent, and I would argue that "often" is not the right word.
Many airports and ports are privately owned in the US. Much more infrastructure is privately owned than you might realize, including water systems, sewage, roads, bridges, ports, railway, pipelines etc.
Agreed, and much of that private infrastructure is mismanaged as well.
The point I was making is that public or private management is not a determining factor in the competence of infrastructure management. That is the point from the GP that I was rebutting.
While it's hard to prove in any water tight way, folks who understand infrastructure management will tell you it is a determining factor all things considered (ie, cost included).
This is common mythology but it's a bit more complicated than that if you look at the data. Student performance is highly correlated with their parent's socio-economic status – a trend going back roughly a century in studies – and our educational system includes a wider range of students differing in both SES and, starting around that same time period, mainstreaming of many disabilities which used to get kids excluded.
That means that when you're making comparisons to either the past or other countries now, you want to compare cohort-matched groups. If your area has a bunch of poor brown kids used to leave school for jobs in the 8th grade and are now going all the way through graduation, that looks like the schools are getting worse even though the school's educational practices haven't changed and the problem you really want to solve is poverty or social mobility. This is especially true for international comparisons if you have things like tests where the population in one country going in is highly selective but broader somewhere else – everyone's acting in good faith but you still have distortion due to sampling bias.
The situation is similar: if a kid with dyslexia, ADHD, etc. in the 1960s would have been pushed out but now they're included, if you're looking at the global average it looks like test scores have gone down but if you look at subgroups of the student population you'll see that the top performers are still doing well and what changed was that another group was added.
At my son's school and some of the schools I went to as a kid, the subgroup breakdowns on stats are really stark: the kids from stable, middle-class or better groups do fine but the children of immigrants who are still working on their English skills struggle – and the lesson I've drawn is that we should have more support available for them outside of regular classes because it's such a powerful amplifier for everything else.
This feels like Churchill's democracy quote applies:
"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time"
It has been said that public operation of infrastructure is the worst form of operation of infrastructure except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
It's gone fine.
It's always fun to hear about the wonders of privatization where everyone conveniently ignores that the vast majority of private businesses fail miserably. Over 50 percent in five years. Mostly due to mismanagement of money, the thing they are supposed to be better at. The rate is even higher (80-90 percent) if we were to look at small businesses.
We are all aware that public projects can fail. However, it does not logically follow that because some public projects fail, that all public projects fail, or even that most fail. Nor does it logically follow that because some private projects succeed, that all private projects will succeed.
Your LLM mentions two examples of failed public airports. Counterpoint: ATL is the worlds busiest airport by a few different metrics, and it is publicly owned and managed. So are most (maybe all?) of the rest of the worlds busiest airports. What does that mean?
By analogy: just because a person doubles down on a misinformed take using an LLM's output as evidence, that everything they think and know is false and misinformed by LLMs is not a foregone conclusion. It would be silly for me to think that someone that uses bad arguments once, or the same bad argument repeatedly in an online thread, is always going to be wrong.
You could do us all a service if you used your chatGPT account to learn about the basics of formal logic and sound arguments instead of spamming this thread with the same response from a machine that you asked for a biased output.
All over Europe state utilities were privatized over the past 30 years or so. Has it been an improvement? Not really, things just got more complicated and more expensive. Rail especially is a disaster. Upgrading the electric and telecom grid is made more difficult because of all the (supposedly) competing utilities.
OK, that didn't really do a comparison. But here are the examples that are considered better run than corporate infrastructure:
Singapore MRT (Mass Rapid Transit)
Fully government-owned and operated through Temasek holdings. Known worldwide for punctuality, efficiency, affordability, and cleanliness. Consistently outperforms privatized systems like the UK railways in reliability and customer satisfaction.
Paris Métro & RATP (France)
State-owned, with fares subsidized for accessibility. High ridership, integration with buses and trams, and affordable tickets outperform privatized systems in cost to the public.
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (USA)
The largest municipal utility in the U.S. Provides electricity and water at lower rates than surrounding private utilities (like PG&E), and is often more reliable due to public accountability.
Norway’s Energy Sector (Statkraft, state-owned hydropower)
Provides cheap, renewable electricity. Profits flow back to the public treasury instead of shareholders. Norway has among the lowest power costs in Europe.
Germany’s Municipal Waterworks
Almost all publicly owned; provide safe, affordable, and reliable water with strong reinvestment in infrastructure, outperforming privatized systems in the UK (like Thames Water, plagued by leaks and debt).
Singapore Changi Airport
State-owned and consistently ranked as the world’s best airport. Clean, efficient, profitable, and reinvests in expansion. Private-run airports often prioritize concessions and profits over passenger experience.
Dallas–Fort Worth Airport (USA)
A publicly owned joint venture between Dallas and Fort Worth. It is one of the busiest and best-managed airports in the world, consistently profitable and reinvesting in facilities.
ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation)
While not "utilities" per se, ISRO’s infrastructure (satellite launch facilities, tracking networks) is a prime example of state-run infrastructure outperforming expectations at extraordinary low cost.
Has launched satellites at a fraction of the budget of Western private and public space agencies, and even provides launch services internationally.
There are many more such examples. Public ownership tends to work best in natural monopolies (water, power grids, rail systems, airports, healthcare infrastructure), where competition doesn’t function well and the priority is universal service rather than profit.
When you include costs, "better run" takes on a whole new meaning.
But, more simply - no one is suggesting all public ownership is bad, or all private is good. There are situations where governments have just decided they aren't doing a good job running something (all things considered) and that the amount of money they'd get for selling it is a better option all things considered.
Could you list some examples of where public infra hasn't "gone well"? Because from my own view of things it's the exact opposite, whenever anything became privatized that shouldn't have been (rail, water, electricity, public transportation, healthcare) it inevitably follows the same churn as all the other things getting enshittified continuously.
The national railway in the Netherlands is a great example of this. They've privatized but with gov't subsidies, yet there's less trains, less people getting moved by the remaining trains, ticket prices skyrocketing YoY, worse service, rail workers getting shafted and basically being forced to go on strike in order to improve conditions. They're (NS) a monopoly too and handle something like 95% of all rail traffic within the Netherlands.
I believe the UK is going through a similar issue, where their railways are now privatized and in turn it's lead to increasingly worse service despite there being plenty of competition in the market in the form of many rail companies.
This lolbert fantasy of the "free" market being good for literally everything, including critical public infrastructure is a complete farce.
The basic problem with the way you are thinking about it with respect to the national railway is that you don't seem to include cost to the government (ie, the people) to run it. Much infrastructure might appear to be "well run" by the government until you see the massive hole in the their budget. Sometimes the service has to get worse. When the government decides some piece of infrastructure must "pay for itself", they often sell it or hand over management to a private entity as a way to shift blame.
There are many private companies/PE firms etc who are competitively bidding to own these assets. It's not some license to print money, they are low return low risk assets.
Erh... if a public service is publically deficit financed (no debts incurred) and not for profit (lower priced) those are two positives, not negatives as your generated answer seems to suggest.
No, it's not positive. It's just a choice - do you want users of said infrastructure subsidized by non-users or not? Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes no.
The railway system in the Netherlands is not privatized. The structure is publicly owned but operated under a concession model where both state-owned and private companies may run services. There are some regional operators that are private companies, but by far the largest part, NS and Pro-rail, are wholly government owned.
I'm not in favor of privatizing a natural monopoly like railway infrastructure, but in the case of NS I'm not sure privatization would be worse than what we have now: "market friendly" salaries for management, and yearly losses go to the tax payer.
Yup, they are low cost. But not zero. The money is still owed, too. The bondholders are not going to just let the public take the asset back because people have been paying for the service all these years.
Yes, of course it should be. You point out of of theain flaws in our system. Those who actually produce things and pay for them never get any ownership. They remain disadvantaged dispite their contributions.
They pay for the thing they get. They exchanged money for product or service. Anyone can start a company and contribute the money required for that company.
> Anyone can start a company and contribute the money required for that company.
No, anyone can't. That's the point. If the money is siphoned out of the lower class, then they have no capital (or free time) to start a business. They're barely getting by. It's a positive feedback loop in both directions (up and down). Rich get rich, poor get poorer (in general).
If you are upset about 'rich get richer, poor get poorer', you should read up on quantitative easing and how it inflated assets if you're not familiar with the topic yet.
Anyone in the USA can. I've met people who started successful small businesses doing things like landscaping and pest control with basically zero capital or free time. They just went ahead and did it.
If you try hard enough you can always find an excuse for failure.
They are given a de facto monopoly. It’s weird that a private company is building and owning public utilities, but if they’re going to be granted a monopoly, then it’s not unreasonable for that privilege to come at a price.
The problem is, in the last few years NYC and NYS have mandated all kinds of green energy goals. One of the biggest one that is causing a fuck ton of concern and spending is "no more new gas cars after 2035". Well guess what that means! _infrastructure_ that someone has to pay for and the mandates are unfunded by the state. The city and state have also been pushing various schemes to ban decrease natural gas installations as well, resulting in _surprise_ more electric for heating and cooking.
The other problem we have is moronic NIMBY and environmentalist behavior that led to our only nuclear power plant shutting down and a second one never being allowed to go online at all. The entire Long Island region is still on the hook financially to pay for vetoing a previously approved and built nuclear power plant decades ago. This leads to NY to now depend on imported electricity from other states and Canada at increased rates. And it's only going to get more expensive as datacenters eat up cheap electricity from the same sources.
And good luck getting transparency on those asset transfers or executive benefits. It's all buried in regulatory filings that nobody reads except lawyers and lobbyists
Funny how the chef passes his costs on to me, but at the end of the day he owns the restaurant. What Injustice!
If people don't like paying a private entity for a goods or service, the solution is to make it yourself, not complain. Tons of cities, counties, and states do just that
Does the chef's menu and pricing get approved by a state regulator and prevent you from eating anything but that restaurant's food while they operate on land they don't own?
The place that your analogy falls is that electric companies are private companies operating legal electricity monopolies where much of the infrastructure in question is placed on right of ways across public and private land not controlled by the operator.
>Does the chef's menu and pricing get approved by a state regulator and prevent you from eating anything but that restaurant's food while they operate on land they don't own?
You're dishonestly compressing a spectrum of regulation down into a binary to advance your point.
There's a spectrum of regulation from black market tamales to the power company. The restaurant is like 45% of the way there. There's a lot of things that they, their landlord, etc, etc, are all but forced to do in certain ways (because of the financial impossibility of proving that any other way is fine) that effectively set cost floors.
funny how the largest most modern power utility and grid infrastructur ever built is owned by the citizens who built it, in China, AND they have some realy fancy privatly owned resteraunts.........almost everywhere
To me Woz is a connection back to the hippy-libertarian utopian engineering roots of Silicon Valley, decades before the current leaders, who seem to be much more misanthropic and ethically challenged than the generation of CEOs before them.
This article brings back fond memories of the UNIX workstation days. The first time I used Photoshop was on an SGI Indy in college. Remembering those times is like a peak into an alternate timeline where Microsoft Windows fizzled out instead of dominating the desktop market.
It was an incredible time because workstations were 10x faster than PCs with applications built very much to use specific hardware. I didn't have Photoshop on IRIX but I did have Matador and the legendary 3D stuff such as Softimage.
These dinosaur computers were the last ones that impressed mere mortals, just the box and the Trinitron screen with the SGI logo on it made people think they were in the future.
We know how that ended with Fahrenheit and other problems, but since then, very few computers have had that wow factor.
As for office, we mean MS Word and Excel, which worked brilliantly on Windows, with WordPerfect and the like lagging. For me it was no problem not having Word and Excel on IRIX as we had PCs for those things.
If I remember rightly, it was quicker to access files off the IRIX workstation SCSI disk over NFS than it was to access local files on the PC. Everything was 10x.
For Sun workstations there were the great SunPCI cards - a full x86 computer in the form of a PCI-X card. You had some USB and a VGA port if you wanted to hook up an external display, but more often you'd use the video redirection and have it displayed in a window on your desktop.
No connectors for disk drives - it'd emulate an IDE disk from file in your Solaris filesystem. So pretty much the VM experience, just in not bad.
VMWare was around since the late 90s - but at that time you typically had a computer with a single thread. If you were splurging, a system with two CPUs (two threads). Even a moderately load intensive VM would make working on the host system annoying.
Due to power and thermal constraints the hardware on there wasn't the fastest - but it was fast enough, and due to the absence of resource sharing (apart from disk bandwidth, which wasn't an issue) the overall experience was way better than using VMs.
I still have my final workstation around - a dual CPU Blade 2500 with 2 SunPCI 3 cards.
> VMWare was around since the late 90s - but at that time you typically had a computer with a single thread. If you were splurging, a system with two CPUs (two threads). Even a moderately load intensive VM would make working on the host system annoying.
VMware released their first product in May '99. Where you thinking of Wabi?
Used to do the same thing at EMC back in the 90s-early 2000s with Symmetrix. The cover story was that the EMc-branded drives, which were marked up like 1000x had “special firmware”.
The reality was that it was to prevent procurement guys from putting a BOM spreadsheet in front of the sales rep and saying “why are you charging me $2M for $100k of parts I can buy at Fry’s?
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