@boyperpia@mangeurdenuage@p dragnet surveillance, predictive modelling of large scale datasets, advanced algorithms, all these so the NSA can have amazon recommend me tranny flags.
@mischievoustomato@charlie_root@mangeurdenuage "Cloud" is not a useful metaphor for "servers" and aside from that, the point was that "Grok" is not open and is just centralized/proprietary bullshit owned by Elon instead of Satya Nadella.
In addition to being not useful, it is apparently annoying to people that know what they are talking about and it confuses the retarded: kamala_cloud.mp4
@p@charlie_root@mangeurdenuage i just think saying "cloud is just someone else's computer 🤓🤓🤓" is stupid, and you might as well say that for every single online thing
@mischievoustomato@charlie_root@mangeurdenuage "I ain't got time to read this thread, I gotta go call minecraft.exe a AAA title in the other thread, then I gotta scroll some more to see if anyone's denigrating the classic combo of khaki pants and polo shirts. I ain't got time to read the thread, my buzzer's goin' off, my table is ready at Applebee's."
@p@charlie_root@mangeurdenuage good point, I don't think mc is AAA, but I don't care about the game anymore. Also what's wrong with khali pants and polo shirts?
@mischievoustomato@charlie_root@mangeurdenuage No, I remember your earlier insistence that everyone knows it and that the term "cloud" isn't specifically designed to confuse boomers. I suggest you watch that video, where an actual sitting Vice President (and former SAG, and member of Gen-X) appears to have no fucking clue what a cloud is. Here, here it is again, you don't need to scroll: kamala_cloud.mp4
@mischievoustomato@charlie_root@mangeurdenuage It was common when it was all boomers, and Obama is shitting on John McCain because he had never sent email before; it is not still common to know *nothing*, and that's still no excuse. It's sure as hell no excuse for making the problem *worse*. bidenpdf.jpg
> i want to find whoever first conflated "a bunch of servers" with "the cloud" and see if i can peel them in one long strip
It's from old network flowchart software. Databases are cylinders, the outside network is a cloud, so represented because the internet is a goddamn mess. It became a buzzword some time around 2010.
@p@charlie_root@mangeurdenuage yeah, one could just use online/remote storage. I still think saying "lol cloud is someone else's computer" is still nerd shit but i do agree now
@p yeah, i remember the old diagrams, and depicting the Internet as a cloud doesn't bother me, that's actually kinda accurate normal people absolutely misunderstand what it means and what it does, and so any technical conversation i have with them is now longer and more difficult the marketer that came up with it is definitely a genius, but that won't stop me from stripping him of his skin if i ever track him down
This is how to reach the world around us, outside of us. A lot of new listeners aren't just going to get committed to a 30 min to 1 hour mix. This my candy mix for them. I love that you guys have always appreciated my long form content. In fact I'm missing some data and if anyone has a copy of my Sonic Forces mix and my Lion mix I'd appreciate getting them back. I'm in the process of remastering the old mixes and those are the best. You can see my efforts with this one, it came out good using limiting software https://soundcloud.com/chimera_dnb/meteor-sirens-a-dj-mix-by-chimera
> In fact I'm missing some data and if anyone has a copy of my Sonic Forces mix and my Lion mix I'd appreciate getting them back.
I have a file called root_force_1.mp3 (`Stream #0:0: Audio: mp3, 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 307 kb/s`) that will take me a minute to get up somewhere but is probably one of the things you are looking for, unless it is unrelated to Sonic Forces. It is mp3, though.
I have that one, I think @butterdog is my only hope to getting those files back. I was in-between systems at the time and was a lazy pos for not asking @dcc to archive them like I usually do. It's my fuck up, I'm sorry. It's really irritating now because I'm learned some audio knowledge on how to make them louder and nicer...
"A bunch of servers" has no connotation of redundancy, fail-over, orchestration, a whole bunch of things we expect from "cloud vendors." See Amazon's S3, the first "cloud" offering as I remember. You put your data on it, with a limited full object API, they replicate it across multiple availability zones (miles apart, different flood plains as far as I know), it takes care of a lot of issues with persistent storage.
Your case is much stronger for something like Grok, but it's presumably built on top of many of the same techniques. Almost certainly not multiple sites yet, but that's completely impractical due to the costs and limited availability of GPUs at the moment. Xwitter by comparison has two datacenters far apart, each able to handle the whole load of the service(s).
> "A bunch of servers" has no connotation of redundancy, fail-over, orchestration, a whole bunch of things we expect from "cloud vendors."
I can't hear you over the sound of US-EAST-1 downtime.
> Your case is much stronger for something like Grok, but it's presumably built on top of many of the same techniques.
It's not a matter of redundancy and failover, it's who has control over the system, decides what it costs, decides who can be removed from it without warning, decides what features are suddenly dropped without warning.
:tay: The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it. ovh_cloud.jpeg
"We *meant* to take down half the fuckin' internets."
It's their oldest and thus most strained availability zone. It's not some "chaos monkey" reliability test. Nobody runs a test that takes down half the goddamn internet: https://www.infoq.com/news/2021/12/aws-outage-postmortem/ .
> Using what makes sense for you has never been bad advice
Right, what I said was "don't use what works for you". You haven't read the thread: I have explained to you the context of my remarks--that the only difference between Grok and OpenAI is *who* owns it, which is not a major difference--and you have started quoting Conway's Law at me. Although I can appreciate running into someone that has read Brooks, a recap of the difference between how deployments worked in 2005 and how they work in 2025 is best sent to someone that wasn't there.
FIFY. And last time I checked, it controlled some global AWS stuff....
But the rest of your rant is misplaced, it's all, has for a very long time been a set of trade offs. Using what makes sense for you has never been bad advice, and "clouds" like AWS have some good use cases, like highly variable loads, one off jobs, low upfront capital costs, and as mentioned storage.
"[O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."
@p@charlie_root@ThatWouldBeTelling@mangeurdenuage@mischievoustomato not to mention "cloud" absolutely does NOT automatically mean redundancy or high-availability or anything like it normal people think it does, however, which is why i have to spend the time explaining this just ask the people that lost their files to one of the several OneDrive fiascos who figured the "cloud" would keep their shit safe "cloud" is a marketing term, which by default means it doesn't mean anything
> I just don't agree with some points made in it. Even the "who owns it is not a major difference" one he just emphasized.
A landlord is a landlord; it's not the same as owning your land. This is a major difference.
> I'm reading as time allows.
Those are the two longest articles on the blog now. (7k and 4k words. Third place was 2k words.) Kind of obscenely long; I have a habit of doing that. Hope they were entertaining or informative.
> we discovered the -rf flags to rm
I had a friend whose dorm at MIT had three rules for doing acid: "All of the cars are real", "If you think you can fly, try from the ground first", and "rm is forever".
A "cloud" has both real technical meaning as I've outlined and inevitably became a marketing term with limited to no meaning as you point out. I expect my interlocutors to understand this sort of thing, and @p for one doesn't disappoint.
And here you invoke an also old maxim about data storage, one copy means zero, two copies means one...." Some of us were lucky enough to learn this when we discovered the -rf flags to rm (UNIX™ remove files, with the recursive and force flags, the latter meaning just do it, don't complain). Normies ... are they any worse than us until they too get burned??
'We meant to take down half the fuckin' internets.'"
The purpose of a system is what it does! :cirnoHeh:
Really, I think we're two old souls talking past each other, although I might be older, Fred Brooks' invaluable The Mythical Man Month was published late enough in 1975 it wasn't in the first set of software engineering books I read in high school at my local low tier college (and check the second edition for his later reconsideration of maxims like "plan to throw one away because you will" (your first attempt at writing a system)).
AKA I don't think either of us is really wrong, we're just emphasizing different things (and I can't say I remember all of what I read in the thread). Like for Grok I expect less censorship, albeit neither it nor "Open"AI managed to be as bad as Google:
> The purpose of a system is what it does! :cirnoHeh:
While I can't exactly disagree with this, I think there's a difference between a series of incidents and the normal performance of a system.
> The Mythical Man Month was published late enough in 1975 it wasn't in the first set of software engineering books I read in high school at my local low tier college
You are probably correct when you say you're older than I am; I found out about the book because Slackware's fortune file quoted it at me periodically. (I think instead of rainbow cows telling people ads for new services offered by Canonical, hackers are better served by getting a trickle of knowledge from jokes that appear when they log in. It could stand some freshening up, though.)
> (and check the second edition for his later reconsideration of maxims like "plan to throw one away because you will" (your first attempt at writing a system)).
"Plan to conceal your prototype from management because they'll tell you that it looks done to them and you won't get to throw it away."
"Ensure that there is a dev chat that is invisible to management. Set up an IRC server or something."
> Like for Grok I expect less censorship, albeit neither it nor "Open"AI managed to be as bad as Google:
These are implementation details, you know, it's a symptom of the system being owned by someone that wants to tell you what you can do. Elon's Twitter has less censorship than Jack's lawyer's Twitter, but it's still a system designed to make Elon money by funneling engagement, etc.; fedi exists only because people want to run services. Things are added to the server when they seem useful or fun and are removed from a server when the admin doesn't want them, rather than when they fail to move the needle on the KPIs. This is a really big difference, and it dwarfs any minor difference between Grok/OpenAI/DeepSea/whoever: it's why Ubuntu has a gay cow tell you about product updates and Slackware has some limerick about Lisp Machines, Inc., and 9front has /lib/theo. :theo:
This goes double for the federal government's reach. You remember the warrantless wiretapping scandal, and you can look at when that was disclosed and became a scandal (2007) and the start dates for PRISM (2007). Maybe they can hack into your IME or whatever, but that's really different from having a box at the datacenter that sends them *everything*. Centralization allows that sort of thing.
"A landlord is a landlord; it's not the same as owning your land. This is a major difference."
Unfortunately for the Internet I accept the principle "You will own nothing and you will be happy." IP addresses? Only at the sufferance of your provider(s) and those like governments who can choke its throat(s). Ditto domain names, where that's quite explicit as I understand it (but that's somewhere the law may evolve, to give it a property right). And you pretty much have to be big or graf to not put your site behind someone's CDN, right? I mean, when Facebook for example will in error hammer your site for some photo optimization on their side and not give a fuck what else can you do? See also DoDS.
So if we get targeted, we find we've built our stuff on a foundation of sand, although with enough effort the industrious have been able to find new homes, for example Stormfron (white nationalist 1.0 forum, "Damn this website has absolutely no useful updates on hurricane Florence but i'm pretty sure who's responsible for it now"), Gab, The Daily Stormer, and lately KiwiFarms. But plenty died, like Parler; if I remember correctly, AWS was frantically and repeatedly asking them if they'd give Trump a platform after J6, and they were turned off on January 10th, 2021 (the revival wasn't real from everything I've read).
So it's "landlords all the way down," kinda like real property were in the US you also answer to your county at minimum on up. Except with infinitely fewer protections, from social/political to legal. But I'd agree the higher up you go in the stack the more capricious they are, and at the "AI" level that's very high.
"Hope [the FBI etc. articles] were entertaining or informative."
Essentially both, thanks!
As for "rm is forever," if your friend is around your age, I'm probably older, MIT had no serious UNIX systems at all when started there (by that I mean with split-I and D PDP-11s like the /44, /45 and /70, the point where there's just enough address space to be useful as I saw it). Multics was killed by Honeywell, UNIX™ became big, such is life.
On the other hand, the term “cloud computing” is also (in a twisted way) a weird kind of IT humor when you realize that "raining down" could also be used as an analogy for the moment when the “cloud server” does eventually get hacked.
(Fun fact: On a German equivalent of bash.org was a quote where somebody quipped - roughly translated - "I love to mentally replace the word 'cloud' in texts about IT by the word 'clown'. "We are a clown-based businesss", "We store our data in the clown.")
> "I love to mentally replace the word 'cloud' in texts about IT by the word 'clown'. "We are a clown-based businesss", "We store our data in the clown."
I saw this in English on Twitter. I wonder if it was joke-stealin' or if it was derived independently. Maybe autocorrect wrote the joke.
:tomduff: TomDuff: RT @Cabel: Anytime you see "cloud", just replace it with"clown". "It's ok, we've got it backed up in the clown." "Is clown storage right for me?" http://twitter.com/TomDuff/status/157832859950911490