The object permanence of not having to reinvent the world every time a model gets sunsetted has value.

Seems bad.

I work in several labs where I have to give this advice, which some labs are smart enough to make an ersatz backup that we store somewhere (PI's house) as a cheap offsite. Even a partial recovery is great in the face of fire/flood/explosion, or the most common error: IT fucks it up and then says "oh well".

Hope someone has some copies and they can rebuild, what a nightmare.

Bonne chance fired senior!

I have depicted you as the 100 line a day weakling, and myself as the 20k+ line chad.

The systems at bigcos are too ruthless to risk gambling your career on this kind of reasoning which you have no recourse to. Best to start small teams and destroy them from the outside.

Thanks for sharing, I'll def put it on.

Last time I was at a corporate gig, I got a 2+ year old base model MacBook Pro to do a data science. 16gb of ram is fun and all, but when you're using R you're going to have a bad time.

During my hired gun period I worked with two organizations that used gitlab, and they're doing just fine. One place I had no problem using their cloud for bigger runs, the other had a permission system that was pissing me off so I solved my own problem and billed them enough it didn't matter anyhow. Like I said, having extra cpus for big R runs you don't have to ask anyone for has a value all its own.

Happy computing!

If you're riding it every day, every little speed up counts. I don't wait on GitHub actions or external systems for my crunching. For that I have my local slurm cluster of mini PCs, 64 cpus and counting!

I assure you there is a better world outside of the fence, I am unlikely to return.

Sorry if this sounds really grim / cynical, I've simply seen enough of these kinds of migrations to know that it is fundamentally opposite of my perception of engineering philosophy. It often becomes more of a question of business rather than correctness. (Can we simply fire the smaller customers? -> yes.)

I see why it can reduce costs in a runaway cartel based system, but how does it prevent the two wolf scenario? (It's the same wolf in this scheme.)

Feels like two wolves negotiating on how much of the sheep (the sheep is you) they get to eat.

Dare I ask, who is for the "consumer"? If we should even use those words in this system, which in my mind should be for a nation keeping its citizens alive and well both of their own sake and the state's sake.

It doesn't matter what happens 6m-2y down the road, your odds of being laid off or job hopping are high in the current regime so this all makes sense. You pay some amount of your budget to make your life "easier" in the now.

The trouble comes 2-5y down the line when the service is bought out by , and you have to scramble to replace it or hold your nose and pay up.

(tbh, migration is not that hard, but the org will act like it is)

The matrix of authentications, compliances, and intranets will only go up as your company grows and often are enforced by people who do not suffer them daily.

This is ignoring at least these benefits: surgery, development, genetic studies, grafts, anesthesia, and many MANY more. Some non-drug related, some drug adjacent, and they definitely have downstream benefits to humans.

Here's a survey paper with myriad examples: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9247923/

I really don't like when bioscience articles land here in HN because they are always commented on with:"in mice", as if to say nothing we see from mouse work works. Well, not everything is software and this kind of work takes years, if not decades. It is real science unfortunately which means that most of it doesn't work! Science, and bioscience specifically, are not efficient systems. In general, the things you do are hard and probably won't work. That doesn't mean you give up.

Animal models are not great, but they are the best progression we can do right now from cell models. And as for being disposable, there are controls on how animals are used in labs in the US: every institution that has animal experimentation has an IACUC (institutional animal care and use committee) that every research proposal must go through, and they do not a rubber stamp your proposal. They want to know why you can't use cell models, and why you can't do it with less or even no animals.

It would be nice if people were a bit more even handed when these types of articles come by. I think HN can do better.

An adage from the lab: "If what we did always worked it would be business, not science."

If your crowning achievement is: "I can 100% all leetcode hards" I have bad news for you.

I was an obsessively good kid, my parents took me everywhere with them and treated me like a peer, within reason. I was well behaved for my age. At the end of the day in kindergarten class, if you didn't cause problems, you received a stamp on your hand. The stamp was everything. A brand that I had ACCOMPLISHED that day.

Nap time was a post lunch, thirty minute time when we turned the lights out and laid down. Some kid near to me was making faces and making weird noises behind the teacher's back during nap time. Of course, he's five, maybe six, so this is not going undetected by our teacher. She storms over and asks "who is making all this noise?". I, being a total narc at 5 simply point. Assuming of course, this means I will receive a daily stamp, maybe even more, for my quick and wonderful detective work.

Then the unthinkable happens. His name goes on the board. MY name goes on the board. A wave of confusion sweeps over me. This is a massive blow to my tiny ego, only bad kids get their name on the board, surely there is a mistake!

It's nap time. I cannot make any noise, else I will risk A CHECKMARK NEXT TO MY NAME, which will only escalate the punishment in 198x to TIME OUT. Bad kids are always in time out. I am NOT a bad kid.

I am crushed. My small brain cannot process the enormity of what has happened. My name is on the board. I am smart enough to know what's not coming.

2pm comes, we're sitting on the square rug, and we're all putting our hands on our heads to receive our daily benediction: the stamp. I desperately keep my hand on my head, hoping I might trick our assistant teacher into giving me what I know is very far away.

She passes right by. I look left and right and realize, there is no mistake.

I held immediately held back a flood of tears, feeling deep failure. I stood up, and slowly gathered my things. I slogged my way to the bus and remember staring out the window thinking, what if the same thing happens tomorrow? I will never receive another stamp under this system, how could they do this to me?! The stamp continued the next day, but a different mark was made.

I had a short villain era after this, realizing a true injustice of the world: no matter how good you are sometimes things will not go your way.