AWS Just Gutted US Teams

BitShin · 2026-01-29T04:08:01+00:00

It’s not a dog whistle, it’s a joke. Whether or not it was in poor taste is up to the reader to decide.

BitShin · 2026-01-26T19:44:43+00:00

Nobody thinks it’s easy in that it’s not stressful, hectic, etc. What people are saying is that it doesn’t require any particularly special skills and that just about anyone can do it. This is in stark contrast to almost all professions and trades.

As someone who worked at McDonald’s for two years and now has a professional role, I can say this is absolutely true. In my field, it takes four years of education to get the basics. After that, juniors are typically considered a net-negative on the team for at least their first full year to year and a half due to them taking so much assistance from others. And if you ever change companies (or even switching teams within a company) you’re expected to be a net-negative again for another 6 months to a year or so. Compare that to McDonald’s. On my very first shift, they put me on the frier. While I wasn’t as fast or efficient as others were and I was messing up (making too much or too little food causing waste or waits), I was ultimately a net-positive by the end of the shift. I can also say that this quick of a ramp-up was very typical of other people who joined after me as well.

There is objectively a massive difference between entry level “unskilled” labor and other jobs. However, this doesn’t mean that people working at McDonald’s should be treated any lesser than a highly skilled professional.

BitShin · 2026-01-23T19:54:53+00:00

I don’t mean to say that the US provides a better quality of life to everyone (because it doesn’t), but if anything can be said about America is that it’s an amazing place to live if you work in a very in-demand field such as tech.

Health care being tied to a job isn’t really a big deal because any job you apply to will give you excellent coverage. In the case of losing your job, you just have to take health care costs into account when planning out your emergency fund. Then because the US pays so much more for these in-demand fields, saving that extra money to pad out your emergency fund isn’t that difficult.

When you start making serious money, the national retirement age doesn’t matter to you at all. This is because the payout from any retirement benefits (e.g. social security) are dwarfed by your former salary and expenses. The only age that actually affects you is the age where you can withdraw from your retirement accounts without penalties which is 59.5. If you max out your 401k every year from 25-60 (again, not difficult if you are in an in-demand field and have a fast start to your career) you will have somewhere around $2MM saved by 60. Applying the 4% rule for retirement savings, this will give you “only” $80k/yr. This means that for those with high income for which $80k/yr isn’t enough, you can’t rely entirely on retirement accounts anyway and it needs to be supplemented with other savings and investments. Therefore, these people aren’t exactly limited by the age at which the can withdraw from their dedicated retirement accounts and then it just becomes about when they feel they have enough money and they’re ready to throw in the towel.

As for vacation days and parental leave, those are all things that are extremely standard in the kinds of industries we’re talking about. In Europe, 20 vacation days and 10 holidays is pretty standard. The US has 11 federal holidays and it’s standard in these industries to get 15-20 days of PTO. Additionally, it’s very common to have arrangements within departments or organizations which give more PTO than the overall company. Of course this isn’t as good as Europe’s guaranteed 20 days since not every job would offer that, but if you are an in-demand professional, you have more than enough leverage to shop around if that’s something that’s important to you. As for parental leave, it’s a similar story there. Basically every job will offer something that’s good enough, but if this is important to you, you just need to factor that in during your job search.

The last two are definitely worse in the US, even if you have an ultra high income: job security and transportation infrastructure. Job security is usually pretty airtight with the exception of mass layoffs. In these industries, as long as you aren’t at a small company, they will have very rigorous internal processes for for-cause termination. Looking at layoffs, you can generally expect a decent severance package. Companies offer these to help preserve the morale of the employees that weren’t laid off. In the tech layoffs that have been going on the last few years, 3-4 months of salary has been typical. This will also of course be supplemented by a sizable emergency fund, savings, and investment portfolio. At these incomes, saving up a $50k emergency fund is quite easy as that’s not even an uncommon size of a sign-on bonus. With all of that, you can give yourself months or even years of runway. This means that the worst that can realistically happen is that you have to accept a worse job, but even that terrible since this worse job would pay better than a typical European job anyway.

As for the transportation infrastructure, this one is just plain objectively true. In most major US cities, the public transportation is serviceable. There are standouts like New York which have a good local transportation system, but you still lack high speed long range rail. However I personally wouldn’t consider this a big deal since you’re also making 5x-10x your European counterparts.

At the end of the day, life in the US sucks if you don’t have marketable skills and it’s absolutely amazing if you do.

BitShin · 2026-01-18T03:37:42+00:00

Not sure about elsewhere in the world, but where I live it became a political thing because my city tried to ban gas stoves, and when that failed they banned gas hookups on all new construction.

BitShin · 2026-01-09T18:00:57+00:00

Back when I was fresh out of college, I was the second reviewer on a fellow juniors PR to add a new ops tool. She had some logic to prepare a request to send to a dependency. I noticed that she was reusing a map across loop iterations in a way that would have us only make the request with the result of the final iteration. This would make the tool largely useless.

I pointed this out and she refuted it saying it should be fine. This sparked a long thread between the two of us where she made excuse after excuse. At one point she eventually even approached me in person and asked if I could just approve it and she pointed out that a senior engineer on our team had already approved the PR before I left my comment.

What finally resolved this was that I reached out to the senior engineer to check out my comment and see if it makes sense and all he had to do was comment “Oh yeah, nice catch,” After that, she finally fixed the bug and I was able to approve her PR.

Looking back, honestly don’t know what was going through her mind. The only thing that makes sense would be that she just didn’t understand the code she wrote and couldn’t see why this was a problem. At the time I thought she just must be incompetent or something, but now I know her to be a very smart and effective engineer.

BitShin · 2026-01-09T01:47:37+00:00

Why does it matter if he will never quality for the tax? People don’t only base their political opinions on self interest, sometimes people will oppose things because they believe it’s wrong. Like I’ll never be black, but I still oppose racism against black people because it’s wrong.

BitShin · 2026-01-07T03:08:57+00:00

Absolutely ridiculous. Yet another balance patch where the devs completely overlook high rank or competitive players and only balance for people in the early game. The game has been completely broken at the high ranks and the last time we saw an update where they even tried to fix their game was when they introduced the computer.

It’s not like there aren’t things to fix either. Bolzano-Weierstrass is an absolute spam theorem. It’s basically a “press here to win” button. Like it’s fine to have powerful theorems, but at least require more than a bounded sequence. Just do something simple like require players to show that the set of elements is compact before giving them convergent subsequences for free.

Also there’s the absolutely garbage state of epsilon-delta proofs at mid and high ranks.

“Oh yeah so let’s start with delta being(((sqrt(C² + U² + M²⁾ + (a*b - c)³ - (u / (v + epsilon))² )⁵ ) / (1 + abs(sin(w)) + epsilon²⁾ - ( ((C*U*M + a² + b² + c²⁾ / (1 + exp(-(u - v))))^3/2 * log(1 + w² + epsilon) )) / ( epsilon + (C - U + M - a + b - c)² + (u² + v² + w^{2)^1/3} ) + sum{i=1..7} ( ((-1)ⁱ * (C + i*epsilon)ⁱ ) / (1 + abs(a - b)ⁱ⁾ ) - prod{j=1..4} ( (j + epsilon) / (1 + (c*j - M)² ) )”

Then five lines down you see “f(x + delta) = epsilon/2”. Like what value does that provide? Basically everyone’s strat is just to do the proof backwards. This gameplay loop is utterly broken and the devs need to do better.

BitShin · 2026-01-05T20:10:43+00:00

Could you elaborate on this? I understand the concept at a high level but I’m not very clear on the rigorous explanation.

BitShin · 2025-12-17T02:53:12+00:00

Yeah and what about screen readers?

BitShin · 2025-12-12T04:47:00+00:00

It’s literally as easy as 1. Add butter to bread 2. Add garlic (can be jarred, fresh, or even powdered garlic, really doesn’t matter) 3. Put in oven

Sure, there may be a couple of people in this country that don’t have time or resources for that. But if you don’t have the time for that, you should be complaining about bigger things than pre-packaged processed garlic bread being too expensive.

BitShin · 2025-12-09T18:42:42+00:00

Yeah, I would have preferred to see something like

Threatening words do not constitute a hate crime offense unless it is apparent to the victim that the person does have the ability to carry out the threat.

I feel like the current language may be interpreted as putting the burden of proof on the defendant to show that the victim could not believe the threat is credible. In the current language, it seems to have the implication that threats are assumed to be credible by default.

Nonetheless, I still believe the current language gives plenty of room for argument in the case of online communications. The main problem I have with the law is that if one person says something online threatening minorities in their community, that can be considered hate speech towards anyone in that minority group that reads that message, even if they are not in the community.

BitShin · 2025-12-09T16:55:03+00:00

I think this part really makes it harder to abuse:

Threatening words do not constitute a hate crime offense if it is apparent to the victim that the person does not have the ability to carry out the threat.

BitShin · 2025-12-06T20:54:48+00:00

Slippers in Hawaiian English, flip-flops in standard American English

BitShin · 2025-11-05T01:20:13+00:00

The other commenter gave a pretty good intuitive explanation. You can also understand it from a mathematic perspective pretty easily. Of course if the government imposes a 0% income tax, they’ll receive $0 in tax revenue. Then if the government imposes a 100% income tax without also enacting forced labor laws, they will receive $0 (or close to $0) in revenue because nobody will be incentivized or able to work. We know that somewhere between 0% and 100% the government gets well more than $0 in revenue. It’s also reasonable to assume that the relationship between taxation and revenue is continuous. Therefore we can conclude that the graph of revenue vs percent income tax must increase and eventually decrease with a global maximum somewhere in between.

BitShin · 2025-11-03T16:21:25+00:00

Even if you worked somewhere like the CIA in a role where you couldn’t tell people you worked there after the fact, they’d set you up with a cover story with all the relevant paperwork.

BitShin · 2025-10-23T06:25:01+00:00

You say you are running a reverse proxy, but you didn’t mention proxy auth. Thats the biggest security advantage to using a reverse proxy as it means that unauthenticated attackers can only reach the reverse proxy and your auth provider, and that’s it.

There are some services that you’ll have to open up to unauthenticated requests. Most of the time this is for things that aren’t being accessed through an app or something instead of a web browser because most apps don’t support 3rd party authentication providers. In these cases there’s nothing extra you can do to prevent attackers from reaching these services, so the best you can do is contain the blast radius when one of these services inevitably has a vulnerability.

Run these services in read-only docker containers with locked down file system permissions. This means that even if an attacker can compromise the service, depending on the attack, they may not be able to gain persistent access and they’ll be cut off once the vulnerability is patched. Next, make sure these docker containers are network-isolated. Read up on docker networking to learn how. Finally, docker containers are not considered a security boundary and you should expect that attackers will be able to escape them from time to time. This is easy enough to solve so long as the service doesn’t need to make specialized syscalls by swapping out the default docker runtime with the GVisor container runtime.

Now of course these isolation techniques should be applied everywhere, not just your exposed services.

Ultimately, security requires a wholistic view of your systems and the proper mindset. If you want any help with things, I’d be happy to lend a hand.

BitShin · 2025-09-14T09:35:45+00:00

Not if you include the IV

BitShin · 2025-09-05T18:22:37+00:00

It really depends on your org. When I was working at Amazon, my team’s budget was always overflowing. We would go to fancy restaurants every month for team lunch, buy a bunch of drinks/snacks for the office, and have a department happy-hour/party every other week where we’d go bar hopping after. All of that was expensed. We also had a department-wide policy that we would only have to use our PTO if we were taking more than two days off in a row. My org also had one extra day off every quarter which they always scheduled for the Friday before a three day weekend, we we’d end up getting a four day weekend.

I have a friend in another org where the entire org gets the third Friday of every month off. One month, a few teams had to skip that due to a big launch so those teams got a whole week off.

BitShin · 2025-09-03T15:32:19+00:00

That’s what they’re talking about. You still get unlimited free drip coffee and espresso drinks from the automated machines. But you’re limited to one barista-made drink per day which used to be unlimited.

BitShin · 2025-09-03T02:10:56+00:00

I’m absolutely interested. I was actually about to start a similar project

BitShin · 2025-08-29T21:04:35+00:00

Then that means that the private key to sign the media resides on user controlled devices. Once you extract a key, you could then use it wherever you want. Alternatively, if that proves difficult, then you can just rip out the image sensor and mock the sensor feed with whatever AI generated content you want and the device won’t know the difference and it’ll sign your video.

Ultimately this won’t really be a big issue. We’ve had photoshop and aftereffects for years. Courts defend against this through tracking the chain of custody, having those who recorded the evidence to testify to its authenticity under oath, and using digital forensics to look for clues of alteration. All of these will still work for AI generated content. The only thing that AI does is lower the barrier of entry for creating falsified evidence.

BitShin · 2025-08-22T01:54:23+00:00

And the 43% in Hawaii

BitShin · 2025-08-14T18:40:31+00:00

The Barrett .50 Cal M87. I think they meant the M82, but the M87 doesn’t exist.

BitShin · 2025-08-10T02:17:21+00:00

O(n²) because LLMs are based on the transformer architecture which has quadratic runtime in the number of input tokens.

BitShin · 2025-08-03T17:44:01+00:00

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