There are those that will stay on Discord because the benefits of the first three outweigh the degradation of privacy. Then there are those that will leave because the first three aren't important enough to outweigh the privacy loss. There will be all sorts of people in between.

HN has a rather amplified showing of folks who won't trust anything unless it's completely decentralized using E2EE clients verifiably compiled from source that they'be personally audited running on hardware made from self-mined rare metals. The reality is that there is a spectrum of folks out there all with different preferences and while some folks will leave (in this case) Discord, others will remain because thats where the folks they want to chat/game/voice with.

Even if one got the the economics of launching/connecting GPU racks into space into negligable territory and made great use of the abundent solar energy, the heat generated (and in space retained) by this equipment would prevent running it at 100% utilization as it does in terrestrial facilities.

In addition to each rack worth of equipment you'd need to achieve enough heat sink surface area to match the heat dissipation capabilities of water-cooled systems via radiation alone.

A hypothetical court order saying something like "kill internet access" would likely cause an IP transit service to stop working (implemented by said provider no longer announcing global IP routing tables to that service) but a leased line between two locations would likely remain untouched since that isn't an "internet" service. So they might not need to come knocking if they're reasonably confident that all such edge cases like leased lines end up at dead-ends because any internet-capable product they might be enabling access to is sufficiently disabled.

I do imagine though that if they get as far as "kill the internet" that obtaining a subsequent court order to go after some suspicious leased line would be trivial.

As a side note, I find that IP transit is typically the cheapest aspect of providing an internet service since a cross-connect at a well connected DC will cost well under $1/Mbps/month unmetered. Plus the cost is very well amortized when residential users are the target. This has tended to hold when one takes into account the co-lo costs as well since network gear doing relatively basic packet forwarding/internet table routing doesn't take up that much space or power.

Even if you were to roll your own cable in the ground to your own ONT/OLT/BNG at some point you will need to acquire IP transit or peering from other commercial entities.

This isn’t to say the heat problem couldn’t be managed, but one of the biggest issues with race cars generally is heat management so starting from a platform with a unique and significant heat problem isn’t ideal. Then the weight and overall longevity of the battery pack comes into play.

To tout the acceleration without discussing the drawbacks involved in delivering it or the practicalities of leveraging it suggests that it’s such a great feature that the drawbacks either don’t exist or don’t matter.

No, they aren't. I attend a significant amount of track events as a driver and I will see maybe 1 electic car every few events. Besides the lack of charging infrastrucutre at most race tracks, the one positive of instant torque/power is significantly outweighed by their overall mass and significant heat generation.

The latter tends to result in a Tesla S being unable to last more than 20 minutes at Laguna Seca or Sonoma before the battery pack overheats and reduces power output requiring the car to exit the track.

If they have a search warrant then a judge has, from a legal perspective, determined that the request/search is reasonable. So while you have the right to secure against unreasonable cases I think it is a reasonable trade off that those security mechanisms/processes/etc should either be removed by yourself or you should expect them to be removed for you.

Reminds me of https://youtu.be/9pOiOhxujsE?si=GG6X16c8efr0I3Ey&t=213

To say we shouldn't do X because it doesn't perfectly eliminate/solve Y is akin to saying we should do nothing because by that standard, we'll never do anything about Y.

Also don't underestimate the benefit of simplification - why bill for 2 things separately when one of them is the primary driver of the cost, the comparative cost to supply the other is negligible and is probably more effort to bill for than it's worth.

I'm not dismissing the vendor lock-in aspect, but I don't think it is the only reason at play.

- Let’s first dispense with the idea that egress has to be provided without profit/margin in a capitalistic society. There will be profit in it sure and I don’t dismiss the idea that egress pricing is used to keep activities on-platform, not that I’ve been part of the decisions to set the price that way.

- Typically the more basic a network is, the easier it is to provision, manage and scale. Having a single DC with a couple of local transit providers and BGP routing brings with it a wildly lower cost base compared with a global network with piles of different POPs.

- Many providers, by charging only by usage, are effectively saying that the network is infinite in capacity and “just works”. You would be surprised how many engineers believe this to be true as well. To that end, as the complexity of the network grows you need to charge in a way that allows you to keep capacity ahead of demand for every path you manage. And then you need geographic redundancy for every such egress path and systems/people to manage said failover.

- In the case of GCP Premium tier, Google is hauling your traffic as far as it can on its private network towards its destination before exiting via a POP. Usage forecasting and pricing as a result needs to effectively assume any VM wants to send any amount of traffic to anywhere in the world. Even then the premium tier pricing separates kit China and Australia as special cases.

- In the hyperscaler case and even many of the larger VM/bare metal hosts you’ll find software defined networks which can often have a non-zero per-byte CPU processing cost involved. AFAIK this is essentially written off when traffic is in the same zone or region but escalates for various reasons (say rate limiting, egress path calculations, NAT, DoS prevention) when going inter-region or to the internet.

- Many of the hyperscalers do allow you spin up private interconnects but often charge for usage across it. This shifts away from being raw cross-connect cost to being more enterprise-y where the value of having dedicated, private capacity becomes the price. There is also the cost of managing said interconnect since it most certainly doesn’t get handled the same way as other egress paths (thus is more of an exception and exceptions cost money/time/effort).

Do all of these things add up to the “high” egress costs plus a decent margin for that evil profit? That is mostly up to the reader and what they value. Many others will say they don’t need all these features/management, but the reality is the hyperscalers don’t build for you, they build to cater to everyone that might become or is a customer. And it turns out to build a network capable of handling what “everyone” could potentially do with it is expensive.

I'll go one further - I've yet to finish writing a postmortem on one incident before the next one happens. I also have my doubts that folks wanting a PM in O(hours) actually care about its contents/findings/remediations - its just a tick box in the process of day-to-day ops.

Being an SRE at a FAANG and generally spending a lot of my life dealing with reliability, I am consistently in awe of the aviation industry. I can only hope (and do my small contribution) that the software/tech industry can one day be an equal in this regard.

And finally, the biggest of kudos to the Kyra Dempsey the writer. What an approachable article despite being (necessarily) heavy on the engineering content.