krellor @ krellor @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

I've been using Duolingo to learn Spanish, and there are a lot of things I dislike about it. However, credit where credit is due, I don't have a huge drive to learn but rather I'm opportunistically learning as I have time for self improvements sake. And for that, Duo does an ok job of feeding me new lessons and slowly expanding my knowledge of the language in a few minutes a day, and it's free. After about three months I can go to a Mexican cafe, get a table, ask about the servers day, and chit chat about my kids, all in Spanish.

Which, if I'm being honest with myself, is more than I would have gotten self studying.

I noticed the article indicated that the analysis didn't include credit score, available cash deposit, and relationship history with the lender. Honestly, it is usually credit score and cash on hand that gets you approved to receive a loan, debt to income ratio to determine maximum loan amount, and property value to pass underwriting requirements.

CNN's response is basically, we don't have the credit scores because it isn't in the public data, and sort of glosses over it from there.

Now, I'm all for rooting out implicit and systematic bias, especially with systems that have profound effects on life trajectory, and I think credit scores are particularly prone to disadvantage minorities, but I feel like CNN really could have done better here. I know they asked the bank for credit score data, but the bank can't release that information to a third party like that. I would have liked to see CNN being in some more expertise on the subject.

I'm contrast both NPR and NYT have done much more thorough investigative journalism on these topics. NPR in particular did a great podcast on how black home owners were routinely having their homes appraised for markedly less than white peers, and NYT covered discrepancies in underwriting outcomes even when credit history was the same.

I think CNN saw the easy article against this particular bank and took it to fill column space.

Right, Google isn't one to trust. So paid services and clear data handling practices.

I would say don't trust free services in general. There are plenty of paid service providers that handle your data well.

That's a good takeaway. AWS is the ultimate Swiss army knife, but it is easy to misconfigure. Personally, when you are first learning AWS, I wouldn't put more data in then you are willing to pay for on the most expensive tier. AWS also gives you options to set price alerts, so if you do start playing with it, spend the time to set cost alerts so you know when something is going awry.

Have a great day!

So you just asked the most confusing thing about AWS service names due to how names changed over time.

Before S3 had an archival tier, there existed a separate service that AWS named AWS Glacier Storage, and then renamed to AWS S3 Glacier.

Around 2012 AWS started adding tiers to S3 which made the standalone service redundant. I received you look at S3 proper unless you have something like a Synology that can directly integrate with the older job based API used by the original glacier service.

So, let's say I have a 1TB archival file, single tarball, and I upload it to a brand new S3 bucket, without version, special features, etc, except it has a life cycle policy to move objects from S3 standard to S3 Glacier instant access after 0 days. So effectively, I upload the file and it moves to Glacier class storage.

The S3 standard is $24/tb/month, and lets say worst case scenario our data sits on standard for one whole day before moving.

$0.77+$0.005 (API cost of the put)

Then there is the lifecycle charge to move the data from standard to glacier, with one request per object each way. Since we only have one object the cost is

$0.004 out of standard
$0.02 into glacier

The cost of glacier instant tier is $4.1/tb/month. Since we would be there all but one day, the cost on the first bill would be:

$3.95

The second month onwards you would pay just the $4.1/month unless you are constantly adding or removing.

Let's say six months later you download your 1tb archive file. That would incur a cost of up to $30.

Now I know that seems complicated and expensive. It is, because it is providing services to me in my former role as director of engineering, with complex needs and budgets to pay for stuff. It doesn't make sense as a large-scale backup of personal data, unless you also want to leverage other AWS services, or you are truly just dumping the data away and will likely never need to retrieve it.

S3 is great for complying with HIPAA, feeding data into a cdn, and generally dumping data around in performant way. I've literally dropped a petabyte off data into S3 and it just took it and did its thing.

In my personal AWS account I use S3 as a place to dump cache contents built by lambda functions and served up by API gateway. Doing stuff like that is super cheap. I also use private git repos (code commit), private container registry (ecr), and container host (ECS), and it is nice have all of that stuff just click together.

For backing up my personal computer, I use iDrive personal and OneDrive, where I don't have to worry about the cost per object, etc. iDrive (not an Apple service) let's you backup multiple devices to their platform and keeps them versioned.

Anyway, happy to help answer questions. Have a great day.

Just because they don't issue a bill doesn't mean they don't track costs. They track labor, labor rates, and consumables.

That said, this particular treatment is very involved. They harvest cells over multiple periods, send them to a lab to be modified, and when they are ready they do chemotherapy to kill your immune system, then do a bone marrow transplant to introduce the modified cells, and then you have to be in isolation in a hospital until your immune system comes back. Even the best facilities are saying they can only do 5-10 of these per year.

Pretty crazy.

My advice is a little different than others. I recently got my in-laws outfitted with smartphones and a new nuc. My father in-law has Parkinson's, slow onset, but it means he is clumsy. It's not likely that his phone will survive shaky hands for 8 years. What I did was buy refurbished OnePlus phones, install a simple launcher, install Bitdefender, and then add a lock app that let's me add a pin to the system settings app and the play store.

They can't install anything out change things. They can browse, play games I preload, take pictures, etc, but I don't have to worry about them installing things they shouldn't. If one of the phone dies I'll just get the latest affordable refurbished of the same line and configure it the same way.

I had originally tried without locking the phone down as much but my father in law could not stop installing spammy weather apps and clicking ads on games and following there instructions.

I also created new Google accounts for them that I manage, so they can't get stuff stolen with bad account management practice.

If you are in the US, I've also found mint to be a good deal for cell service.

Thanks for posting. I just deployed to my container host in AWS ECS and it's working well in my testing. Very easy deployment with docker.

It's complicated. I gave the most expensive pricing, which is their fastest tier and includes stripping across three availability zones and guarantees 11 nines of data durability. Additionally, the easy integration with all other AWS services and the feature richness of S3 buckets makes it hard to do a fair apple to apple comparison unless you really have well defined needs. So I gave the highest price to keep it simple, and for someone who says they just have a few GB, any cost should be trivial.

AWS S3 has a free tier that covers the first 5Gb. I recommend it because the AWS cli is excellent, and gives you lots of options for how to sync your data. The pricing is $0.023/GB/month after the free tier. It can be overwhelming to get into AWS but it is worth it to have access to the ultimate IT service swiss army knife.

I wasn't saying you did it for clicks. The site published an article that is a rehash of a 11 year old article. They are the ones scraping the barrel.

No idea but it definitely feels like scraping the bottom of the barrel for clicks.

Am I wrong or is this article simply re-reporting a Eurogamer article from 2012? Because the only source this article cited is a 2012 article from Eurogamer.

I run a lot of tech, containerized workloads in AWS, home firewalls running on protectli boxes for all my family around the country, wireless controllers to run APs for my family around the country, but as I got older one thing I stopped rolling my own instance of was data backups. My data backs up to OneDrive and iDrive, so two copies of my data. My wife has access to both via shared credentials in a 1password folder that she knows how to access and uses regularly.

As I got older and I had a family, the pictures of our kids, wills, financial records, insurance documents are all just too important. Every service that holds my data is paid annually for less than $200/year total and auto renews. She could call either company and prove ownership if she ever did need help getting access. Also, I can easily share folders to her.

It's funny how getting older makes you think of the sorts of issues enterprise teams have. Don't implement solutions where you will be one deep, have a succession plan, and complexity is the enemy. All the tech I run now is fun and helpful, but can be replaced with a trip to BestBuy. The data and pictures however must be easy to retrieve for her.

So I don't have a good self hosted solution for you other than to say that at some point it's ok to change your strategy. And if you are worried about privacy, you can encrypt subsets of your data locally before it is backed up.

Because they are referring to engineering disciplines that predate all of the stuff you mention. When mechanical, structural, civic, etc engineers sign off on a design (stamp it) the incur personal liability if there is a defect in the design that kills someone or causes damage. There are certifications for telecom design and processes that require them to stamp designs, but otherwise most of what is lumped together as technology doesn't constitute engineering from a legal or historical perspective. However the titles sort of took off and created two sets of meanings.

If software engineering was treated as engineering in the way that mechanical or others forms are, you would get a degree, get an entry level job at a firm as a junior, and after a few years, study and get certified to stamp designs/code systems, etc.

Now, outside of places like code for flight systems, medical devices, power plants, etc there isn't a need for that kind of rigor, but those are the areas that would require licensing if it was available.

Good example. There's some domains that do carry some liability and weight to the title. Flight systems, medical devices, etc. Domains where failure can kill people and can't easily be rectified.

As of 2013 I believe, but it was discontinued in 2019. Fairly rare to see in the wild outside of specific domains like medical device coding or other areas where failure isn't acceptable.

You do have stamping engineers for telecom design. As far as I know that's the only real engineering title from the perspective that the sign off of the work carries well defined legal liability. I was director of engineering for a large org and the only stamping engineers in the org were telecom designers, not the security, software, systems, cloud, network, etc folks. Nothing against then either, but historically engineer meant something very specific prior to the rise of information technology.

Edit: actually in 2013 NCEES added a PE cert for software engineering, but it was discontinued on 2019.

When writing basic business code, structuring the code well and having good naming standards means you shouldn't need a ton of comments, but you should still have some. Plus, using structured function content blocks gives you intellisense in some languages and IDEs, which is important for code reuse in teams.

However, when I was doing scientific programming I'd have comments for almost every line at times where I put the mathematical formula and operations the line represents. Implementing a convolution neutral network with parameters to dynamically scale the layers or MPI stochastic simulations is much different than writing CRUD functions or basic business logic.