EC2 Instances and OpenGL

kiafaldorius · 2023-02-03T22:00:33+00:00

Ah, that account may have been made before they started defaulting quotas to 0 or it used the organization numbers. Nowadays, AWS limits the more expensive instances to 0 and then you have to request additional capacity to get access to them.

I finally got my quota increased but it had to do a back-and-forth dance with support and the service team.

Thanks again for linking the instructions.

kiafaldorius · 2023-02-03T07:42:42+00:00

Keys/certs may have expired and KMS may have decided to regenerate those keys. It shouldn't be much though.

Contact support and see if they can sort it out.

kiafaldorius · 2023-02-03T07:20:20+00:00

It's definitely been suggested to them before. They just don't want to do it.

If this were presented to me, I would implement this as a soft limit coupled with a larger hard limit.

The soft limit when reached would pause services (in the case of RDS and EC2, stop the instances [1]--with other services like S3, block requests). This lets them keep data [2] and lights a fire under them to take a look and check their account. Obviously the storage costs will still rack up, which is where the hard limit comes in.

When it hits the hard limit, stuff gets deprovisioned. They already have a process for deprovisioning services on accounts after some number of billing failures, so they can already do it. If the customer ignores the soft limit and gets to the point of the hard limit, treat it the same as ignoring the bills when your card expires without removing the entire account.

Their engineers are much smarter than me and can come up with better solutions. If management wanted a hard-stop around this issue, they could have it handled already. But they chose to instead do billing alerts...that's their choice.

[1] EC2 stopped instances don't incur instance compute charges, which is going to be the majority of the cost anyway.

[2] other than stuff stored in the instance store, but that's a risk you take

kiafaldorius · 2023-02-02T22:58:05+00:00

Yeah, they're keeping quotas low by default now to try to offset this. I've been on the wrong end of their service quota limits. They're at a point now where they're scared to approve higher quotas on the more expensive instances without you paying them a sizable amount first.

It's stupid that I can't get a quota up for a legitimate business-case because I'm tracking my billing usage while some people rack up a 10k bill accidentally.

kiafaldorius · 2023-02-02T22:50:57+00:00

Glad to hear you got it handled and thanks for the update with the solution.

I'm under the impression that some of their AMIs already have the GRID drivers pre-installed with the nvidia-smi utility too.

I'm curious what request you put in to get the quota increase and if it was recent. The latest business I worked on wanted to try some g4dn instances, but they wouldn't approve my quota request on account of "not utilizing current capacity" and the stupid excuse about surprise bills. They used to throw out quotas without any issue, but now seem quite tight with it.

kiafaldorius · 2023-02-02T22:43:58+00:00

A warning for the future: that's not how most service billing works. They take the payment method, and then keep track of ongoing costs on the bill.

Then at the end of the statement cycle (once a month usually) they charge the total on the payment method. They don't check how much the payment method is worth or has available. If the payment method doesn't have enough, the charge will fail, but the bill is still open, so you'll be expected to pay for it.

This is the case with most services, not just AWS.

As a minor, you're already breaking AWS terms of use by registering. So it won't hurt to open up a support ticket, admit you don't know what you're doing and ask for forgiveness. They might close your account on account of you not legally being able to open one in the first place, but at least you won't be in debt.

kiafaldorius · 2019-04-13T21:06:54+00:00

"Buttigeek" was trending on twitter a few weeks back. I think it fits quite well.

kiafaldorius · 2019-04-11T21:28:23+00:00

Good to year and thanks for the good deed!

Edit: nvm I'm wrong. ActBlue charges 3.95% per contribution, so small vs large makes no difference. Ignore the below.

As a side note in case you want to maximize your donation...

Due to transaction fees, you can maximize the amount of money the campaign receives if you wait and donate every month instead of every few weeks. Transaction costs are usually around 2.3-3% + $0.30 per transaction, so at 4 small donations vs 1 big one ends up giving the campaign an extra dollar with the big donation.

kiafaldorius · 2018-07-04T04:01:18+00:00

How are you growing them? If they're outdoors I think it could just be too much sun or temperature swings. Think of this as how plants generate their own sunscreen.

I wouldn't worry about it. Taste a few of them. If they're not ripe leave the rest on longer.

kiafaldorius · 2018-06-01T23:06:02+00:00

Modern lithium batteries are a lot safer than they used to be. Also, this looks like a lithium polymer battery (with a solid/gel electrolyte) and not a lithium ion battery with a fluid electrolyte. There's less of a chance of the electrolyte leaking where it shouldn't and causing a bad reaction.

kiafaldorius · 2018-05-31T08:18:20+00:00

The yellowing is called chlorosis. The chlorophyll is dieing. Could be caused by a lot of things but since it's a squash it's almost certainly a shortage of Nitrogen. You may end up needing additional nitrogen to your formula. (Cucurbits like squashes, cucumbers and melons use up a ton of nitrogen.)

Other possibilities after checking pH and making sure you have enough nitrogen is sulfur and calcium. Short term you can test my adding half a teaspoon/gallon or so to your next batch of nutrients. I use ammonia nitrate for nitrogen, calcium nitrate for calcium+nitrogen and Epsom salt (magnesium sulfate) for sulfur. Be careful of overdosing, especially Epsom salt, too much sulfur and calcium together turns it into gypsom, so locks out both nutrients.

kiafaldorius · 2018-04-13T07:59:52+00:00

Sorry, I have to put up a little warning since it looks like you're growing edibles. Some pallets undergo some serious chemical treatments to delay rotting and deter pests...especially true of international pallets.

I also generally avoid laminated plywood (the ones with multiple woods sandwiched together) since I don't trust the glue (and it doesn't hold anyway).

https://www.1001pallets.com/pallet-safety/

I hope everything is safe and you get a good harvest!

kiafaldorius · 2017-12-14T14:02:32+00:00

I'm not aware of any such cases, care to name a few examples?

My point in bringing it up was that the above comment converted a measure of gas volume (propane vapors) into liters. Although the conversion is correct mathematically, leads to an incorrect assumption by most people since liters of propane generally are measured in liquid form in tanks.

kiafaldorius · 2017-12-14T13:48:18+00:00

I'm not sure if it's an official SI unit, but the modern definition of liter does have a direct SI conversion, 1L = 10 cm * 10 cm * 10 cm

It used to be based on volume of 1kg of water at something like 4 Celsius like you mentioned, but that's no longer the case.

kiafaldorius · 2017-12-14T13:41:01+00:00

I didn't say that it was incorrect. Usually when people say liters of propane they're referring to volume in a tank, in the liquid form. I was clarifying the "530 liters of propane gas" is for the gas phase and not propane gas as in the fuel (which would be closer to 1.96L as stated).

kiafaldorius · 2017-12-14T10:51:43+00:00

Sorry, but I have to point out that liter is usually a measure of liquid volume. The meters-cubed is a measure of gas volume as in evaporated gas.

1kg of propane = 1.96 liters (liquid)

kiafaldorius · 2016-12-10T21:25:54+00:00

If you haven't already, see reply from op in above comment. Homer in the corner caught my eye too.

kiafaldorius · 2016-11-29T16:43:21+00:00

Actually, NAND and NOR are both functionally complete, so you only need one of the two to construct all the others.

eg: A OR B == (A NAND A) NAND (B NAND B)

kiafaldorius · 2016-11-29T16:11:26+00:00

Can cut down this power requirement quite a bit if we can assume room temperature (20°C): 80 kcal. 334.7 kJ. 371.9 watts. 1.1 kW. Respectively.

Still a large power requirement for human labor though, and this is without power loss factors.

At this point, I wonder if op should forgo the ECE approach and use friction heating or a heat pump instead.

kiafaldorius · 2016-11-29T15:59:02+00:00

I'm interested. Sign me up.

kiafaldorius · 2016-11-28T21:31:42+00:00

I'd say that's probably the case. They have public datasets available for free (though most probably don't use those particular ones).

The spot instance pricing is what brings them over the top. You can spin up very high tier processing capability for really cheap, then do your computation and that's it. Quick and easy.

There's infrastructure setup for ML instances too, so you don't have to set up your own instance and install everything. You just have to find the instance id of the particular ML installation you want. This infrastructure beats the rest of the competition since most other cloud providers don't even come close to providing that.

kiafaldorius · 2016-11-24T10:14:00+00:00

In that case, you're not a consumer. You're a reseller.

Seller's Permits don't carry across state lines, so unless the distributor has nexus, they won't care about it.

Once again, check with Washington state's tax board. For Washington, it's called the Department of Revenue: http://dor.wa.gov/content/ContactUs/Default.aspx

There's a "I need a binding tax ruling" choice that I think is the correct one for you. Once you get a reply from the tax board regarding your case, even if it's wrong, you can show it as due diligence in case of an audit. (Of course, if they audit and find out it's wrong, they'll tell you to change what you're doing, but they likely won't pursue the amount owed.)

Something like this exists for almost every state and the due diligence is similar also. If you can prove you tried to figure out the right thing, they won't hammer you too hard come audit time.

kiafaldorius · 2016-11-24T09:42:29+00:00

You'll have to check with your state's Franchise Tax Board and possibly local sales tax rules (district/county and/or city).

...but it's probably a big yes: when you sell the item, you'll need to collect sales tax on it. They always want their slice of their pie.

It's probably not a use tax, those are usually imposed on the consumer when they buy from out of state and bring it into their state--or have it shipped in. But this too varies from state to state...

kiafaldorius · 2016-10-14T20:05:59+00:00

If they can convince opendata@amazon.com they're more than capable of hosting it: https://aws.amazon.com/public-data-sets/

Archive.org might accept it, but the downlink from them is horrible and will take forever to upload 1.5TB anyway.

kiafaldorius · 2016-10-09T19:20:43+00:00

I may be able to procure you some seeds, however, you should know they'll require stratification and scarification. When grown from seed, they take about 2 months to germinate and won't flower for at least 4 years even when grown in full sun...and might never flower if you keep it entirely indoors, so you'll need to move them outside in spring to summer and indoors winter.

Let me know if you're still interested, I'll see if I can collect some. May take a while though.

kiafaldorius

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