> Warranted Product is intended for consumer end user purposes only, and is not intended for datacenter use and/or GPU cluster commercial deployments ("Enterprise Use"). Any use of Warranted Product for Enterprise Use shall void this warranty.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/support/warranty/
This is going to be a random comment, but the thing that struck me most was how close this person's Github username is to my own! github.com/chrxr vs github.com/chrxh. Feels bizarre. And seeing their actual name it appears there username has the same relationship to their real name as my own username.
I recently moved my personal website (https://chrxr.com) to a static site in a rather complicated fashion.
I use Wagtail as my CMS, so I dockerized it and put it on an ECS cluster. I then use Wagtail Bakery to publish the pages to S3. I then change the task count on the ECS service to 0. For a DB I use sqlite in EFS, so it's persistent and backed up.
I was previously running on an EC2, and cut the cost from about $15 per month to ~$1-2 per month. All I'm paying for is <1mb S3 storage, a single route 53 hosted zone, and one image in an ECR repo.
If I want to add content, I spin up the ECS task again and work away. Note that part of the reason for such a low cost is my website get VERY little traffic :)
Apart from the cost, I also have the advantage that it's lightning quick most of the time, with caching provided by CloudFront.
I think this is catering to a specific audience who is not me :) I actually find that the complexity of self hosting is the interesting part.
I did this to learn stuff. Seeing as I have little to say, my blog site is more of a technical playground than a valuable store of content.
I omitted that between the EC2 version and this current version, I built a really convoluted version with an ALB, Aurora, always-on ECS etc. That came to $80 a month. So then that motivated me to go the other way with the super cheap option.
TTS is great for 40k, although moving a large amount of pieces can be a pain. There are a huge amount of model scans available, and the community has put an immense amount of effort into building battlefields. I have mixed feelings about the morality of getting this stuff for free. I say mixed because the price of actual GW models is criminal. However, I don't think this takes much profit from GW. It certainly hasn't prevented me from wanting to paint models and play in person. But with that currently being impossible, TTS and Warhammer Total War are my only outlets.
But how many applications of soldiers overseas are there other than in the advancement of imperial aims? Dubious peace keeping claims? I understand this is a very subjective topic, but its at least understandable that someone should make this connection.
I read the article as arguing that the USA is an empire, and as such its soldiers are overseas furthering those imperial aims. So in that sense it is the imperial ventures that are creating the vets who need to be managed at home.
If the learning experience is simplified to listening to a lecture, either live or recorded, and all grading is done algorithmically, then yes, there is no scaling limitation. This would be considered a very poor learning experience though. Even in the School of Engineering at Harvard, even for the CS classes, very few use autograding. Students expect individual feedback on their work. They expect the ability to personally interact with teaching staff. They expect group work, labs, office hours, reading groups, and some level of supervision over these activities.
I work at Harvard, and I can tell you there is a real push to create a quality experience in remote learning, and a lot of resources are being directed towards this. It is not just the same classes via Zoom. Of course these enhanced learning environments could be replicated on campus as well, there's nothing particularly special about the remote learning environment.
But as you suggest, it is the residential experience that most folks are paying for. Harvard considers the residential experience as one of their primary value propositions. That is why Harvard and other schools are working very hard to get students back to campus. It's a difficult balancing act between this and maintaining the health of the campus. A major outbreak amongst undergrads would be a serious blow to everybody involved, so health is always going to come first.
Also worth noting that 20% of Harvard students pay 0 tuition, and more than 50% get needs-based scholarships. https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid. So if you're smart enough, and/or fit into the financial aid brackets, why not go to Harvard? What's the risk there?
>Also worth noting that 20% of Harvard students pay 0 tuition, and more than 50% get needs-based scholarships. https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid. So if you're smart enough, and/or fit into the financial aid brackets, why not go to Harvard?
Are you seriously suggesting that 50% the most talented students in the country have $313,000 for tuition?
If financial aid and scholarships worked as advertised, Ivy League schools would be filled to the brim with talented people. There would be no space left for stupid kids with rich parents. Yet those kids get in, reliably. There were many scandals related to that recently. Heck, just look at the children of major US politician and media elites.
1. Legacy: If your parents went to Harvard, you're much more likely to get in. This allows the meritocratic wheel to keep turning, in theory, but in practice allows Harvard to let in many rich/privileged individuals who will not cost them and who may bring in big $$ donations over time.
2. Harvard brags about its myriad sports programs...WHY? If it's the best school in the world, why are they giving away 100's of seats to people who manipulate spherical objects adeptly? Their ability to manipulate objects or move their bodies skillfully has VERY LITTLE to do with progressing our civilization. Shouldn't those seats go to the next generation of brilliant minds, not brilliant bodies?
To be fair for your second point, speaking as someone attended an Ivy but is from a low income household and terrible at sports, many of the people who manipulated spherical objects adeptly also had brilliant minds.
I was always impressed with my friends who had the mental fortitude to wake up at 6 every day, practice for 3-4 hours, go to class, practice after class, and still take the courses/do the research necessary for elite graduate schools. Meanwhile, I woke up at 11 AM on a good day and only started going to the gym regularly my senior year. I honestly can't say the proportion of "regular" athletes to "smart" athletes was any different from that of students in the general population.
That sucks if that's true for your insurance provider. Here in the US it is not always true. For example, Blue Cross Blue Shield in MA are covering expenses for testing and waiving co-payments for medically necessary treatments. https://home.bluecrossma.com/coronavirus
I suspect they have also run numbers and concluded that this is probably within parameters for a normal bad year. We know 80% of those who get it will have mild symptoms, and we also know not everybody will get it (they probably have good numbers). As such the goodwill from accepting a bad year is worth more long term than the savings from not covering it. They may have also factored in future bailouts which they expect to get if things get bad enough.
Insurance companies are all about numbers and are very good at running them. they are not always right, but they are right often enough for their purposes.
That may be the case, but I would guess other insurance companies will buckle under similar pressure. Perhaps I'm being naive, but it seems like the worst kind of PR nightmare to financially cripple a group as big as those who will eventually be infected.
Relevant precedent: Harvard recently settled with National Association of the Deaf, resulting in all videos made publically available after Dec 2019 requiring captions, and a required 5 day turnaround for captioning of older videos.
https://dredf.org/2019/11/27/landmark-settlement-with-harvar...
That sounds positive. In contrast, a similar situation at Berkeley had a disastrous outcome -- all Berkeley's historical non-captioned videos of lectures were taken down.
> That sounds positive. In contrast, a similar situation at Berkeley had a disastrous outcome -- all Berkeley's historical non-captioned videos of lectures were taken down.
It's worth re-iterating that it didn't have to happen this way: Berkeley could have captioned the videos; but there's no indication that they seriously considered this option. In fact, I cannot find any indication that Berkeley tried to find any sort of compromise with the DOJ - despite the letter from the DOJ strongly urging Berkeley to work with the department towards a solution.
The DOJ letter is also worth a read, in that they find the management of UC Berkeley did not seriously attempt to enforce any sort of compliance with accessibility standards.
It would have been expensive, sure. But it's wise to keep in mind that the UC system operates with a yearly budget exceeding nine billion dollars - and as much as we want to worry about the cost of transcribing those old courses, at the end of the day it is a drop in the bucket of their overall expenditures.
