> Just adding another service is easy, but making them work seamlessly together is much harder.
This argument in favor of PaaS makes a lot of sense to me. A PaaS vendor might say, "sure, you could set up your own observability layer, configure storage for it, troubleshoot that one service that can't connect to the API's endpoint, etc. Or you could just check the "observability" box on our dashboard and boom, there it is."
I'm currently at a company that really likes setting everything up from scratch. And the amount of time my team has spent building out a platform, as opposed to providing business value, is really sobering.
Yeah that same experience at our previous startup was one of the main reasons why we started Modelence. We got to a point where we had a dedicated 3-4 cloud platform engineers (out of the 20 engineers total) working full time only on things like observability, alerts, performance, cloud deployments, etc, none of which was specific to our product.
And when you take a step back and think for a moment, it just doesn't make sense that you have to run a whole separate team for something that's pretty much reusable across products.
I often wonder: if there were more parties in America, how many of these independents would register with one of them?
In other words, if there's a record-high number of independents, how much of it is "market failure" where people want more options than the usual 2 parties?
At least in Bulgaria, 60% of people don't vote. Granted that we aren't that socially active as a country, I think that any amount of parties wouldn't bring much difference. Until the system starts working again, as in convicting criminals, preventing policymakers from benefiting from "timely" investments and overall bringing the wealth gap down, I don't think that you'd be able to reach all of the people
Totally agree. But I mean: supposing that we had a voting system where minor parties were more viable and didn't play spoiler. What % of independents would register as Greens, or Libertarians, etc, in that system?
I just want to highlight Undue Medical Debt[0], the NGO that helped implement this.
They have a fascinating model -- they can buy the right to collect medical debts for pennies on the dollar. That debt would normally be bought by debt-collection companies. But once Undue Medical Debt buys a person's debt, they just... forgive it.
This means they can retire someone's $5,000 debt for a cost in the low hundreds. That might be life-changing for a poor family.
> We need to go back to a system where there are apprentices and masters
Apprenticeships are still around in the modern day -- including for white-collar jobs! Kelly Vedi writes a lot about this in her Substack: https://kellyvedi.substack.com/
They don’t make good profits. TSMC has fairly mediocre numbers by the standard of the tech industry. Intel has really bad numbers for the last several decades. AMD was having so much trouble with foundries that they spun it off.
Bean counters/“profesional execs” have been in charge for a long time (as is usually the case when founder CEOs leave/die), middle managers are box checkers that can’t differentiate good employees from bad employees and nobody cares as long as salary&stocks are deposited in their account. All of this gets lost in the cogs of the 100k employee machine.
Interesting link: a company called Fractyl Health is studying a surgical procedure they call "Revita," that they hope can keep weight off for patients after they discontinue GLP-1s.[0]
The premise, IIUC, is that obesity is driven partly by mucosal overgrowth on the duodenum. This thicker-than-expected layer of mucus is less porous, which leads your digestive system to underestimate the number of calories you've consumed. Revita basically re-surfaces the duodenum.
So, the idea is that you get to a lower weight with the GLP-1 drugs, and then Revita can hopefully reset your set point there.
Their first clinical trial is still in progress, but I think it's interesting to watch.
Fascinatingly, the body already has a mechanism for this: fasting. One of the many beneficial side effects is rapid mucosal atrophy, decreasing villus height and crypt depth.
You can find evidence of this in the literature, but it’s absurdly understudied, because big pharma would rather sell you a subscription to life.
Fortunately there are many good people in the world, especially in the field of medicine, who want to help their patients unconditionally. So there are glimmers of hope, like some of the top cardiologists in the world going against status quo and treating patients with fasting regimes instead of surgery.
Surprised this is still in first trial. I can recall reading about something like it in 2017. Apparently clearing the duodenal mucosa is a preparatory step for a gastric band fitting, but they found patients were making improvements before the bands were being fitted so a study was started to see if this less invasive procedure might be enough by itself.
My impression (and I'm not a scientist) is that the mucosal overgrowth comes from eating an obesogenic diet. (Some combination of too much sugar / salt / wrong types of fat?)
If you get the procedure and don't go back to an obesogenic diet, then it should be permanent.
This argument in favor of PaaS makes a lot of sense to me. A PaaS vendor might say, "sure, you could set up your own observability layer, configure storage for it, troubleshoot that one service that can't connect to the API's endpoint, etc. Or you could just check the "observability" box on our dashboard and boom, there it is."
I'm currently at a company that really likes setting everything up from scratch. And the amount of time my team has spent building out a platform, as opposed to providing business value, is really sobering.
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