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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 6th, 2023
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1·2 years agoFor the small office, AWS, i.e “cloud” is definitely easy and economical, however the promised economies of scale are not easily realized in larger organizations. There are a number of reasons for this, but two of the main ones are that the provider’s interests are aligned with the subscriber spending as much as possible on compute, storage and I/O - and most subscribers, especially the larger ones, are notoriously bad at properly measuring, managing and optimizing these resources. Additionally, the promises of manpower reductions are overblown in the glossy slides that the C suite sees. Sticking your computer in somebody else’s data center saves a bit of upfront grunt work, but you still need everybody else from the sysadmin up to deliver the service.
The transition is inevitable of course, as organizations globally of all size rush to concentrate their compute and storage infrastructure into 3 major providers and get data centers and bare metal off their balance sheets. The premise that these providers will jack up prices once they have enough control of the market seems reasonable based on where we are today. AWS now charging for public addresses and increasing the cost of their Email Service may just be the beginning of what they can get away with. If there is a way to squeeze out smaller providers completely they will definitely find it.
Yes, you’re right. Headline probably translated because it’s not a clear way to say this. Also was surprised that gold bars are only 2K each, but I see the common size is 1 oz and they aren’t very big…
“Gifted” is a bit of a stretch. They were found in a package addressed to the Red Cross. Rightfully delivered, perhaps.
6·2 years agoDon’t look down.
6·2 years agoTemperatures in cells are well over 100 degrees and go as high as 140 degrees. Staying hydrated is sometimes impossible, because the tap water can be so disgusting that incarcerated people refuse to drink it.
“It smells.” “It is brown like it came from a dirty lake.” “I cut up my sheet and make a filter and tie it to the faucet. The crud that accumulates is scary.” These are the comments families and friends are getting from those inside.
Most Texas prisoners have no money in their commissary account. If no one can help them, they are out of luck. Reason? Texas prisoners earn not even one cent an hour, even though they are forced to work.
Matthew Chapter 25
41 Then he will say also to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels; 42 for I was hungry, and you didn’t give me food to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink; 43 I was a stranger, and you didn’t take me in; naked, and you didn’t clothe me; sick, and in prison, and you didn’t visit me.’ 44 “Then they will also answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and didn’t help you?’ 45 “Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Most certainly I tell you, because you didn’t do it to one of the least of these, you didn’t do it to me.’ 46 These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
81·2 years agoKill your television.
poor J
71·2 years agoEspecially if you were indigenous.
1·2 years agoSome mailing lists are membership and/or opt-in only. There are legitimate needs for bulk mailing.
He said "I know you run the show down here, but give the devil his due…
I’ll bet a toilet of gold against your soul that I can intimidate you"
With respect to pricing, I’ve been using SES for maybe 10 years, possibly more - this month is the first time I think I’ve ever been charged. The free tier used to include a very large number - I think it was 30,000 or or more emails a day that I never exceeded. Now it’s 0.10 USD per thousand messages. Which is a pretty big change from free, even though the overall costs are small - and it’s still a bargain. As with everything in “the cloud” though, the big players will squeeze the competition out then increase prices. I fully expect SES prices to keep increasing now they’ve figured out they can extract a few extra dollars from users and how relatively cheap SES is compared to the other overpriced crap. It won’t surprise me if they jack this up significantly in the coming years.
Referencing sending quotas - Amazon is very lenient - I was talking about the big providers like gmail. It might be different now that my accounts have a long reputation as trustworthy senders, but when I first started using SES way back when, gmail and yahoo would start rejecting mail if more than something like 200 or so messages were submitted in a single batch, so I had to check the recipient domains and limit the numbers for each hourly iteration to stop them rejecting. I keep the email batches pretty small since I’m only sending out about 5-10K at a time and I stagger the send over several hours.
It’s a bit of a minefield but overall pretty happy with SES, mainly because the mail gets delivered. You don’t need to originate sending from an EC2 hosts (the pricing is the same, even though they make a distinction in the price list:
Outbound email from EC2 $0.10/1000 emails $0.12 for each GB of attachments you send*
Outbound email from non-EC2 $0.10/1000 emails $0.12 for each GB of attachments you send
*You might incur additional data transfer charges for using EC2 (it seems very likely they will increase the non EC2 price to drive you to a place where they are getting your compute and storage $ as well).
2·2 years agomaybe not the healthiest, but these are some of my favorites https://quex.cc/c/recipes
SES is indeed the best option if you want reliable delivery for a reasonable cost. The pricing changed just last month so it’s no longer effectively free for small users but it’s relatively cheap (for now). I looked at the prices you quoted for other services and they seem ridiculously high, but it’s fair to say that sending legitimate (non spam) bulk email is not so easy if you do everything yourself - getting your mail accepted is very challenging. For example, even using SES, if you attempt to originate too many emails to one provider in a single call, they may start rejecting everything - I had to put counters into the code to limit how many gmail addresses would be sent with each iteration. SES also rate limits so you need to manage that somehow. It sounds like you’re planning to send a LOT of email. You’ll also need to be mindful of the bounce rate and complaints (spam / abuse reports from recipients) because SES will shut you down if they go over a certain threshold, which you can see in the dashboard. It sounds like you’ve already figured a lot of this stuff out though - it’s not rocket science but it can be frustrating to work with bulk email delivery for a number of reasons.
2·2 years agoI don’t blame you re the third party - I wouldn’t either. I generally download a transaction file periodically and import it locally using the app. I think you’re going to find it difficult to find an API that will allow little people access, even though they are obviously happy to offer that to the big companies. Some of the brokerages have checking accounts and it might be possible to pull the transaction data via the brokers API (maybe), but whichever way you look at it, I suspect the most pragmatic solution is probably going to be a download/import of some kind.
what are you looking to do? I don’t know of any consumer bank APIs but most equity and exchange brokerages will let you check account balances and make trades with an API key and credentials. Probably not initiate payments or transfers though. There are too many security risks involved for allowing that via a consumer-level API. There are also tools like Mint that store your credentials and can presumably access your data because they have corporate level agreements with the Financial institutions - I haven’t used that and would not normally recommend a corporate-based solution like that personally, but it might work for your needs.
Yes you understand the suggested approach. I don’t know about the mariadb tool and if it looks good, by all means use it, but I would offer that the fastest, simplest way to restore a reasonably small database that I can think of is with a sql dump. Any additional complexity just seems like it’s adding potential failure points. You don’t want to be messing around with borg or any other tools to replay transactions when all you want to do is get your database rebuilt. Also, if you have an encrypted local copy of the dump, then restoring from borg is the last resort, because most of the time you’ll just need the latest backup. I would bring the data local and back it up there if feasible. Then you only need a remote connection to grab the encrypted file and you’ll always have a recent local copy if your server goes kaput. Borg will back it up incrementally.
Don’t look East.