I think this is a good point, insofar that how bacterial resistant the stethoscope is relevant. Stethoscopes made of stainless steel are going to beat anything 3d printed by a significant margin.
It definitely doesn’t help that prints from filament printers are very porous, 100% infill or not. Maybe sealing it with epoxy after printing would help?
This seems like another case where the hobby has discovered the 3d printer hammer and forgot that cnc tools (lathe, milling machines) are often better and faster for the job. Or if plastic is what you want injection molding is something you can do on a hobby scale and it is much better (but unlike the others this isn't something you can go from CAD to widget)
In my experience it is very rarely the case that setting up machine tools is faster than 3d printing. And even when it's faster, it's not less trouble. And you have to go and acquire materials in suitable shapes and sizes, and deal with cleaning up chips and offcuts, and deal with deburring and cleaning the part after it's finished.
The 3d printer is always ready and always has material in the right shape. It doesn't make a lot of noise, it doesn't make a lot of waste, the parts come off the machine clean and dry and ready to use. It's really hard to overstate the convenience of 3d printing.
I doubt the diaphragm which actually touches the body, or the flexible tubing of expensive scopes can be sterilized in an autoclave. This diaphragm here is cut from cheap plastic and easily replaceable, the tubing is silicone. I do not believe the flexible tubing on the expensive ones is usually silicone and replacement diaphragms probably cost as much as this whole DIY scope. Metal is resistant to heat, but porous still, so disinfecting with alcohol isn't enough, if you got nasty on it. Never in my life have I seen any doctor pulling a stethoscope from a sterile paper bag. It's likely not as clean as you want it to be.
I believe, in practice you should avoid putting it directly onto the heart, keep a layer of healthy skin in-between. Given the scope of the scope, that may be acceptable, considering the alternative may be direct skin2skin contact with your patient...
But yeah, generally, 3D printed objects are not easy to sanitize properly.Eg. their porosity makes them not safe for repeated food contact. I mean, the glass transition temperature of ABS is 105°, so you could dip it in boiling water, but that's not enough for making it sterile and consequent water inclusions are a welcoming place to start a new family a few hours later for any remaining spores. You could try fractional pasteurization and heat drying, in a pinch, at the end of times.
Something often underappreciated is that, in the possible future you're describing, you can use all of these new fangled "what's old is new again" approaches by continuing to just use Kubernetes. Kubernetes is, in a way, designed to replace itself.
I feel like you aren't really understanding what a Service-level Agreement actually is in practice. It's not a piece of paper with a specific number of nines and an associated price tag. They can be and often are very complicated documents that take multiple rounds of redlining to arrive at something both parties agree to.
If zero data-retention was non-negotiable for the customer, it's totally possible that the negotiations ended there.
I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish or unearth beyond what's already been said, which certainly suffices for me.
As both an attorney and SRE, I understand what an SLA is. And you can absolutely get an SLA when you buy cloud services from many vendors, including AWS. Some vendors provide it at all price points; others include it at higher service tiers, without complex negotiations needed at all. And, yes, if it’s not on the menu, you may need to negotiate one. But you can’t conclusively say “they don’t offer one” unless you’ve actually gone to the company and asked.
It seems like you could save a lot of time and confusion by talking about the SLA that you pay for from Anthropic instead of establishing your bona fides by posting links to various unrelated companies’ SLA pages.
Like how was your experience negotiating your SLA with Anthropic? What ballpark are you paying for the SLA with Anthropic that you have in place? How many 9s does your Anthropic SLA cover? Obviously you haven’t posted a half dozen times in this thread about how Anthropic by nature of existing offers SLAs without any knowledge of that, so some simple stuff about your SLA with Anthropic would be helpful.
I make no unqualified claims as to whether Anthropic offers an SLA. I never did. But I do know that it's unreasonable to claim they don't when you didn't even take the steps to conclusively determine it for yourself.
As I said: "I’m sure they’d love to hear from you, and they could probably deliver one to you for the right price. But it will be a high price."
Oh, well in that case, if posting URLs counts as proof of… something, there doesn’t appear to be any SLA page anywhere in their sitemap.
https://www.anthropic.com/sitemap.xml
Maybe it is just common for enterprise SaaS businesses to offer SLAs without having a page about it though. Something like that could possibly be unjustifiably burdensome as well because it’s not like they could just type “make a page about how we offer SLAs” and have it magically appear
That’s a good point. Having an SLA page is an indicator that a business offers SLAs, not having an SLA page is also an indicator that they offer SLAs, just secretly. If you think about it all of the people constantly complaining about uptime and saying stuff like “I would pay money for an SLA from Anthropic if I could” probably means that they are killing it with all those secret SLAs.
I mean obviously they have to offer them, because they exist, as otherwise you’d have to believe something crazy like “they don’t currently offer them” for reasons “that they haven’t disclosed”
Again, many companies will do things they don’t ordinarily offer for the right price. I’ve seen it happen myself (on both the buyer and seller side) on many occasions.
It goes to the extent of the company itself! Very few businesses publicize that they’re for sale or put their company’s purchase price on their website. But acquisitions happen all the time.
Anyway, I don’t appreciate your sarcasm coupled with what seems to be willful ignorance about how the world works, so I won’t be participating in this discussion with you anymore.
I don’t get it. If you wanted to convince everybody about a vast universe of secret business and your expertise in it, why would you start with telling people that weren’t able to get an SLA from Anthropic that Anthropic offers SLAs? And then admit that you don’t actually know and then double down?
Like if I wanted to convince people that In’N’Out has a secret menu (they do) I wouldn’t start by saying “They have the ingredients to make onion rings, therefore they sell onion rings” (they do not). They offer burgers with lettuce instead of a bun (“protein style”) though. That’s a fact that you can verify by going there or calling them and asking about it. I didn’t rely on my assumptions based on other fast food restaurants, I relied on my knowledge of the topic!
Edit: It seems like bad faith to admit that you’re using “probably” interchangeably with “I don’t know” and then editing in “for a billion dollars” several posts into a conversation.
I guess enjoy posting about entirely unrelated conversations in other threads though. (otterley’s post about my having previously had a short amicable exchange with dang in a different thread was deleted, but I’ll leave this part up. I think digging through people’s post histories to find unrelated grievances is icky, for lack of a better word, and wildly unhelpful for any type of discussion)
Even with the “for a billion dollars” addition, admitting “I don’t know” and “probably” are interchangeable doesn’t really change anything from a logical standpoint. Nobody argued against you not knowing, so I don’t understand the purpose of the repetition.
> why would you start with telling people that weren’t able to get an SLA
That hasn’t been established. There’s no evidence that they went to Anthropic and tried to negotiate one.
> that Anthropic offers SLAs
I didn’t. I said “they probably will for the right price.” There are two modifiers in that statement. And the price is unspecified. Their first offer could be a billion dollars. Too expensive? Negotiate down.
I would invite you to notice your interlocutor's assumptions, especially as revealed in his prior comment. Look at how he misunderstands the situation:
> If you wanted to convince everybody about a vast universe of secret business and your expertise in it...
> Like if I wanted to convince people that In’N’Out has a secret menu...
You are discussing business. He is understanding you to be attempting to "mog" him, because he cannot adopt a perspective wherein the conversation represents anything other than a vacuous social challenge or "brodown."
I looked up “mogging” and I’d think “my assumptions about stuff are valid because I’m a lawyer and don’t know what you do” would count more as mogging than “that doesn’t quite sound right, this is a conversation about something specific and not your general cleverness” but I’ve got a Benny Hill archive to get through
Those are not assumptions on your interlocutor's part. You've embarrassed yourself quite badly, I'm afraid. I know you don't understand how, but that doesn't change the fact of it.
:( you are right. This isn’t the first time I’ve lost an argument because hours into a discussion somebody introduced “what if a billion dollars” or “magic amulet” or “ブルマの母” etc
I appreciate your kindness. While I’ve got you, did you know that the Benny Hill show started in 1955 and a good chunk of what aired from then to 1969 was lost? There are a lot of fans that don’t even realize that what is sometimes labeled as season 1 is season 15! Crazy stuff!
I had not known that! In a similar vein, there exists an Alice in Wonderland-themed Muppet Show episode, starring Brooke Shields, which has had to be left out of home video releases due to so far unresolvable music licensing issues. Not quite totally lost, but somewhat hard to find!
A billion dollars is just an example. I could have said a million. When someone says "a high price" that's unspecified, you can use your imagination to hazard a guess at what that might be. Such a figure might seem unreasonable or unrealistic to you, but deals are done between companies under terms most individuals wouldn't come close to considering.
The only reason I mentioned being an attorney was because someone in the thread above accused me of not understanding SLAs. I don't ordinarily bring it up unless we're talking about law or contracts and I feel the need to defend myself or correct misunderstandings. I don't try to use it to browbeat anyone into submission, although I do believe that respect for others' lived experiences and education is relatively uncommon here on HN.
I also don't care for my words to be misconstrued to mean something I didn't say. I rarely speak in absolutes because I've learned over time that there are very few absolutes in the world. Thus, I include qualifying language in nearly everything I write. So when someone accuses me of making claims of certainty that I didn't make, I can get pretty defensive about that.
You know, I had come away with the impression of you as someone able to take embarrassment with good grace, to "walk it off" without either crumpling under the weight of unhandled insecurities, or letting your ego insist on turning it into an escalation dominance (0) contest. There is always something to learn from the experience of having made a fool of oneself (1), and you struck me as someone prepared, imperfectly perhaps but plainly in earnest, to do so. That is a rare and always welcome capacity to encounter in anyone.
Disappointing me shouldn't make much nevermind to you; you don't know me from Adam. But think of the people in your life who care for you and vice versa, or of the kind of folks you would like to be there. Wouldn't you rather behave so they may regard you in the way I just described?
It's hard to acknowledge a situation like this one, especially in its moment, especially when you're young. Being able to do hard things, well and gracefully, is another skill we do very well to cultivate. You were putting in some good practice, and the other gentleman (esq.) has offered some good advice in consequence.
In short, up to now you were doing a pretty solid job of ameliorating your embarrassment by recovering your mistake - a little awkwardly, sure, but that improves rapidly with practice. It'd be a shame to ruin all that here at the very last moment, don't you think?
(0) This phrase seems to have been made to mean something new of late, which doesn't actually make a lick of sense. I use it in its original or "RAND Corporation" meaning, describing a readiness always to retain the initiative in a conflict by threatening to escalate its severity, a tactic which relies for its chance of success on the opponent being unwilling or unable to match it through further escalation. In that sense the foreign policy of North Korea in the early 21st century is a good example of how a successful strategy may be built around escalation dominance as a core tactic.
(1) Ever shit yourself in public, right there in front of God and everybody? I did that once, about ten years ago - there was a time in this town before the health code had teeth, when eating at the wrong place or on the wrong day could just about put your life in your hands. Let me tell you, after that day - complete with an hour cleaning yourself up with paper towels and tap water in a sandwich shop's toilet, followed by the train ride home - discovering you have inadvertently said something a little dumb on the Internet falls naturally into something much more like the perspective it is due.
It is okay that I stopped engaging with the poster that got so worked up by my saying that there is no indication that Anthropic generally offers SLAs that they went digging through my post history.
> Ever shit yourself in public, right there in front of God and everybody? I did that once, about ten years ago
No but
> an hour cleaning yourself up
Do you have a blog? I would read a long form version of this story
That is, indeed and of course, okay. I feel myself bound to note that such behavior as his is very much par for the course here on the "orange website," whose culture is strange even among its cohort. It's part of why the design makes all comments public. But it's just a website and no one can reasonably dictate how someone else feels about it. (Not that that would stop many here from trying! But it also isn't quite perfectly true to say you stopped engaging, is it? Posting a meme isn't the same as posting nothing, and acknowledging when someone else is due the last word is also a skill I find worth having.)
This is a strange website even among websites. At different times here I have been accused, quite in earnest, of being a paid influence agent of FSB and of MSS - that is, of the Russian and Chinese foreign intelligence services, respectively. That was a pair of positively comedic conversations! I've been told that I'm insane, that I'm evil, that I'm a criminal for working, that I'm a criminal for talking critically about my work, that I don't deserve a livelihood, that I shouldn't talk about my childhood abuse, and oh, good grief, I'm sure I'm forgetting far more than I am likely to recall before coffee.
In spite of all that, and often enough in spite of itself, I have found this place more or less worth the effort. Among other things, it has been a splendid arena for the bareknuckle practice of that ancient and worthy science called rhetoric. But, contra Mr. Gackle, who I think suffers the verderer's easy failure to notice the borders of his forest shrinking over years, this place really isn't what it was thirteen years ago, or even five. (No blame; it's an accurate reflection of the industry. And feel free to review my comment history, of course. I think it is a reasonably good illustration of what it looks like when someone spends ten years 'learning in public;' what I no longer agree with I now know better than, and - even though I say so myself - there are lots of good parts.)
I do not at present have a blog. My previous one [1] is now of beloved memory, but do feel free to check out what was there. Where I stood to take that cover photo, it was even more beautiful than my camera made it look. In that place now stands a self-storage unit, full of garbage some American consumer pays to store who does not want it and fears to lose it. So it goes. Maybe in fifty years we'll make tires there again.
As to whether I will have a blog, I'm sort of in two minds at the moment about Internet publishing - which is a hell of a thing for someone to have to say who built his first website, and took his first paycheck for that work, in 1995.
Frankly, I'm no longer sure I see the point, or at least not as a primary medium. That isn't primarily a statement about AI, either. It's just...well, it's kind of hollow, isn't it? Messages in bottles, constructs of light and shadow, ships failing even to pass in the night. Nothing human, nothing even evidence that humans were here, because what is here? Where is there a here to be?
I'm not talking about AI, but I am talking about why AI is so much more fluent here than humans, I think. John Perry Barlow was an idiot and a madman, a liar and a mountebank: there is no place here. Nothing but words, 'full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' That soliloquy is the obituary of a cowardly man for his own soul. To quote it here, in this no-place where nothing is ever more real than a word, feels condign.
I'm happier writing in my diary, which as of last night is 3150 pages long. (It takes up a shelf!) I'm happier taking snapshots with a shitty Samsung phone camera whose only destination is on paper: I literally print them at 4x6 on an Epson Ecotank and put them in cheap little plastic albums, just the same as you would get from your local one-hour photo in 1993. I'm happier making things, I find, than frowning at flickering lights and fantasizing.
I would much rather spend a day every month making paper booklet newsletters on my guillotine cutter and saddle stapler, and send them around in physical correspondence among we who enjoy writing and reading such, than spend one more mortal hour fucking around with CSS in order to make something that doesn't even properly exist, you know? Or not more than a thought unrecorded.
Oh sure, I'll put shit on the Internet eventually, maybe. But it's not going to live and die there.
Anecdotally I helped a client entirely eliminate their chargeback rate by creating a new subsidiary named directly after their product, so that the billing line item was obviously the product. They also saw a slight increase in inbound sales, which surprised me.
That's a great idea, but it's only helpful above a certain sales volume, which I don't really have. It's just disappointing when the charge back happens, but the economics of the business don't really warrant doing anything about it.
Were you dealing with some other payment processor or bank that didn't allow custom statement descriptors? Stripe and PayPal let me write whatever I want there.
Anecdotally I was on a streak and the dealer was actively concentrating and focusing to get my number again. She managed to get it 4 out of 5 spins. Now she would obviously never admit to this, but I'm positive that she was able to, on this specific wheel, land on the number she wanted.
I think we would've kept going but she rotated off and I cashed out.
Edit: Thorp and Shannon! What a duo. Great articles, thanks for sharing.
The house wants you to think that anyway. If it is possible or not..
The house wants people to win money and tell their friends, and every "winning" strategy is good for them - so long as in the end the house makes money.
I mean, yes, but also no. The house wants you to lose money, but win just enough to think you have a chance. There's a reason those zeroes are on the board.
There's no deep strategy in Roulette, really. I play for fun, and the money I put on the table is already spent.
The anecdote was: I wouldn't have seriously believed that you could reliably manipulate the spin outcome, and as an observer, that's true. I didn't believe the dealer could either, but after seeing this dealer pull it off I definitely see the potential for manipulation. It was almost like she was showing off that she could. And besides, she earned a hefty tip.
> The house wants you to lose money, but win just enough to think you have a chance
The house wants to make money overall. They know that individuals who make money tend to tell more friends than those who lose money - free advertising - so they want some people to make money. The total needs to be the average person loses money, but they need some individuals to make money.
On the small stakes systems they may even like it when they lose money like that - the dealer makes a big tip, and it encourages people (or their friends) to move to a higher stakes bet where they will lose more. They have to be careful about the law (which probably doesn't allow that manipulation if possible, even if it isn't in their favor), but again individuals with a story to tell are worth a lot more than than the money they lose on that story.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. If you're trying to suggest that the casinos train or encourage croupiers to cheat so that patrons get winning streaks, then what you're describing is a fantasy. Casinos are plenty successful without those sort of shenanigans.
If anything it's the opposite: pit bosses actively police croupiers who are spinning too consistently, and croupiers are encouraged to vary their spin throughout their session to avoid bias.
That's not strictly true. Mark and sweep is tunable in ways ARC is not. You can increase frequency, reducing memory at the cost of increased compute, for example.
M&S also doesn't necessitate having a moving and compacting GC. That's the thing that actually makes the JVM's heap greedy.
Go also does M&S and yet uses less memory. Why? Because go isn't compacting, it's instead calling malloc and free based on the results of each GC. This means that go has slower allocation and a bigger risk of memory fragmentation, but also it keeps the go memory usage reduced compared to the JVM.
Compacting reduces memory usage - that's why it's called compacting.
The JVM uses a lot of memory a) because it's tuned for servers and not for low memory usage and b) because Java is a poorly designed language without value types.
No, it reduces memory fragmentation, which is why it's called compacting and not compression.
I do agree that the lack of value types is a big contributor to why Java uses so much memory. But it's not a server tuning thing that makes the JVM lean memory heavy.
The JVM uses moving collectors and that is the big reason why it prefers having so much memory available. Requesting and freeing memory blocks from the OS is an expensive operation which the JVM avoids by grabbing very large blocks of memory all at once. If you have a JVM with 75% old gen and 25% new gen, half that new gen will always be empty because the JVM during collection moves live data from one side of the new gen to the next. And while it does that, it slowly fills up old gen with data.
Even more modern collectors like G1 prefer a large set of empty space because it's moving portions of old gen to empty regions while it does young collection.
As I mentioned, the difference here between the JVM and python or go is that python and go do no moving. They rely heavily on the malloc implementation to handle grabbing right sized blocks from the OS and combating memory fragmentation. But, because they aren't doing any sort of moving, they can get away with having more "right sized" heaps.
This doesn't seem particularly interesting. Spinning up environments via PRs is nothing new. This just has a fresh coat of paint. Is it neat to pack everything up into a single unit like this? I don't know, maybe.
The most concerning thing here is that you absolutely should not use GitHub fucking Actions as your control plane. Have you ever debugged actions? It's terrible. Old runs magically disappear. The queue sometimes decides to go for a lunch break. Not to mention GitHub's uptime is atrocious.
I'm sorry (not sorry) but I can't take this seriously at all.
reply