Probably not as lungs are behind the rib cage and filled with air, making two sources of spurious reflections that could be dangerous with high intensity ultrasounds.
For loyaltycards there was Stocard, but it got acquired by the toxic company Klarna.
SuperCards is very very similar, and in my opinion more useful than putting everything in Apple Wallet. You get to store a pictures, and everything is in one place. Apple Wallet is already cluttered with tons of creditcards, tickets, etc
I’m so pissed off with Klarna obsoleting Stocard as the Klarna app is missing one of the best features of Stocard, that you could add loyalty cards to Apple Wallet.
To be honest though, a micro loans company engaging in this behaviour doesn’t surprise me at all.
Weird thing from the pretty ho-hum super cards privacy policy:
> The Service Provider will retain User Provided data for as long as you use the Application and for a reasonable time thereafter. If you'd like them to delete User Provided Data that you have provided via the Application, please contact them at blub@blob.com and they will respond in a reasonable time.
That looks like a placeholder address to me? Not exactly confidence inspiring if so…
Unironically - I agree. You should be outsourcing things that aren't your core competency. I think many people on this forum have a certain pride about doing this manually, but to me it wouldn't make sense in any other context.
Could you imagine accountants arguing that you shouldn't use a service like Paychex or Gusto and just run payroll manually? After all it's cheaper! Just spend a week tracking taxes, benefits and signing checks.
Self-hosting, to me, doesn't make sense unless you are 1.) doing something not offered by the cloud or a pathological use case 2.) or running a hobby project or 3.) you are in maintaince mode on the product. Otherwise your time is better spent on your core product - and if it isn't, you probably aren't busy enough. If the cost of your RDS cluster is so expensive relative to your traffic, you probably aren't charging enough or your business economics really don't make sense.
I've managed large database clusters (MySQL, Cassandra) on bare metal hardware in managed colo in the past. I'm well aware of the performance thats being left on the table and what the cost difference is. For the vast majority of businesses, optimizing for self hosting doesn't make sense, especially if you don't have PMF. For a company like 37signals, sure, product velocity probably is very high, and you have engineering cycles to spare. But if you aren't profitable, self hosting won't make you profitable, and your time is better spent elsewhere.
You can outsource everything, but outsourcing critical parts of the company may also put the existence of the company in the hand of a third-party. Is that an acceptable risk?
Control and risk management cost money, be that by self hosting or contracts. At some point it is cheaper to buy the competence and make it part of the company rather than outsource it.
I think you and I simply disagree about your database being a core/critical part of your stack. I believe RDS is good enough for most people, and the only advantage you would have in self hosting is shaving 33% off your instance bill. I'd probably go a step further and argue that Neon/CockroachDB Serverless is good enough for most people.
I'm totally with you on the core vs. context question, but you're missing the nuance here.
Postgres's operations is part of the core of the business. It's not a payroll management service where you should comparison shop once the contract comes up for renewal and haggle on price. Once Postgres is the database for your core systems of record, you are not switching away from it. The closest analog is how difficult it is/was for anybody who built a business on top of an Oracle database, to switch away from Oracle. But Postgres is free ^_^
The question at heart here is whether the host for Postgres is context or core. There are a lot of vendors for Postgres hosting: AWS RDS and CrunchyData and PlanetScale etc. And if you make a conscious choice to outsource this bit of context, you should be signing yearly-ish contracts with support agreements and re-evaluating every year and haggling on price. If your business works on top of a small database with not-intense access needs, and can handle downtime or maintenance windows sometimes, there's a really good argument for treating it that way.
But there's also an argument that your Postgres host is core to your business as well, because if your Postgres host screws up, your customers feel it, and it can affect your bottom line. If your Postgres host didn't react in time to your quick need for scaling, or tuning Postgres settings (that a Postgres host refuses to expose) could make a material impact on either customer experience or financial bottom-line, that is indeed core to your business. That simply isn't a factor when picking a payroll processor.
Ignoring the fact that the assumption that you will automatically have as good or better uptime than a cloud provider, I just feel like you just simply aren't being thoughtful enough with the comparison. Like in what world is payroll not as important as your DBMS - if you can't pay people you don't have a business!
If your payroll processor screws up and you can't pay your employees or contractors, that can also affect your bottom line. This isn't a hypothetical - this is a real thing that happened to companies that used Rippling.
If your payroll processor screws up and you end up owing tens of thousands to ex-employees because they didn't accrue vacation days correctly, that can squeeze your business. These are real things I've seen happen.
Despite these real issues that have jammed up businesses before rarely do people suggest moving payroll in-house. Many companies treat Payroll like cloud, with no need for multi-year contracts, Gusto lets you sign up monthly with a credit card and you can easily switch to rippling or paychex.
What I imagine is you are innately aware of how a DBMS can screw up, but not how complex payroll can get. So in your world view payroll is a solved problem to be outsourced, but DBMS is not.
To me, the question isn't whether or not my cloud provider is going to have perfect uptime. The assumption that you will achieve better uptime and operations than cloud is pure hubris; it's certainly possible, but there is nothing inherent about self-hosting that makes it more resilient. The question is your use case differentiated enough where something like RDS doesn't make sense. If it's not, your time is better spent focused on your business - not setting up dead man switches to ensure your database backup cron is running.
> Like in what world is payroll not as important as your DBMS - if you can't pay people you don't have a business!
Most employees, contractors, and vendors are surprisingly forgiving of one-time screw-ups. Hell, even the employees who are most likely to care the most about a safe, reliable paycheck - those who work for the US federal government - weren't paid during the recent shutdown, and not for the first time, and still there wasn't some massive wave of resignations across the civil service. If your payroll processor screws up that badly, you fire them and switch processors.
If your DBMS isn't working, your SaaS isn't working. Your SLA starts getting fucked and your largest customers are using that SLA as reason to stop payments. Your revenue is fucked.
Don't get me wrong, having working payroll is pretty important. But it's not actually critical the way the DBMS is, and if it was, then yeah you'd see more companies run it in-house.
>Most employees, contractors, and vendors are surprisingly forgiving of one-time screw-ups.
If you are a new business that isn't true. Your comparison to the US federal government is not apt at all - the USG is one of the longest running, stable organizations in the country, people will have plenty of patience for the USG, but they wont have it for your incorporated-last-month business.
Secondly I could make the same argument for AWS. AWS has plenty of downtime - way more than the USG has shutdowns, and there are never been a massive wave of customers off of AWS.
Finally, as a small business, if your payroll gets fucked, your largest assets will use that to walk out the door! The second you miss payroll is the second your employees start seeing the writing on the wall, its very hard to recover moral after that. Imagine being Uber and not paying drivers on time, they will simply drive more often with a competitor.
That said, I still see the parallels with the hypothetical "Accountant forums". The subject matter experts believe their shiny toy is the most critical to the business and the other parts aren't. Replace "US federal government" with "Amazon Web Services", and you will have your "Accountant forums" poster arguing why payroll should be done in house and SLA doesn't matter.
That’s pretty reductive. By that logic the opposite extreme is just as true: if using managed services is just as bad as outsourcing everything else, then a business shouldn’t rent real estate either—every business should build and own their own facility. They should also never contract out janitorial work, nor should they retain outside law firms—they should hire and staff those departments internally, every time, no nuance allowed.
You see the issue?
Like, I’m all for not procuring things that it makes more sense to own/build (and I know most businesses have piss-poor instincts on which is which—hell, I work for the government! I can see firsthand the consequences of outsourcing decision making to contractors, rather than just outsourcing implementation).
But it’s very case-by-case. There’s no general rule like “always prefer self hosting” or “always rent real estate, never buy” that applies broadly enough to be useful.
I'll be reductive in conversations like this just to help push the pendulum back a little. The prevailing attitude seems (to me) like people find self-hosting mystical and occult, yet there's never been a better time to do it.
> But it’s very case-by-case. There’s no general rule like “always prefer self hosting” or “always rent real estate, never buy” that applies broadly enough to be useful.
I don't know if anyone remembers that irritating "geek code" thing we were doing a while back, but coming up with some kind of shorthand for whatever context we're talking about would be useful.
No argument here, that’s a fair and thoughtful response, and you’re not wrong regarding the prejudice against self-hosting (and for what it’s worth I absolutely come from the era where that was the default approach, have done it extensively, like it, and still do it/recommend it when it makes sense).
> The Geek Code, developed in 1993, is a series of letters and symbols used by self-described "geeks" to inform fellow geeks about their personality, appearance, interests, skills, and opinions. The idea is that everything that makes a geek individual can be encoded in a compact format which only other geeks can read. This is deemed to be efficient in some sufficiently geeky manner.
The space isn't discarded except in monospaced fonts. All the main computer layout engines (web browser, word processor) will add additional spacing there. It's also where line-width and inter-word padding are corrected first so often ends up being at least as big a space as you'd get double-spacing anyway.
Monospace fonts aren't considered generally more readable by people who make or work with fonts. Their particular strength is in reducing character ambiguity and preserving vertical alignment. But "readability" is subjective and depends on particulars of the specific font and of course personal expectation and preference. I find them almost always less readable than a good proportional serif font, except for code.
In monospace the dot is wider than in proportional fonts, thereby adding more space by itself. In addition, the space character itself is wider in monospace than in proportional fonts, relative to the average letter width. In combination, this balances out the difference from proportional typesetting, in my opinion. A dot plus two spaces is jarringly wide in monospace.
I do agree that monospace doesn’t make for readable prose either way.
In the meantime, people who are actually working with it only become more bullish, and see a world where most people are first willing, and later basically required to pay 20-200 per month
Someone "actually working with it" checking in, if that matters at all to this conversation. I'm very bearish on the industry even if I think the tech is going to stick around.
If we separate the tech from the industry, it's clear one has some value (albeit very hard to say just how much) and the other is a lot of smoke and mirrors. This is not a healthy space.
One might point out that this is the story of AI since at least the 1930's. Impressive technology demo's ... wild investment, crash, bankruptcy ... but the tech remains and in fact has useful applications all around.
AI Winters. I finished school in 2008 and have seen it happen twice.
Vocoders, (voice encoder-decoder, they effectively compress voice) which were going to enable computers (the analog kind) to respond to human speech in callcenters (because editing/generating the compressed stream is hard, but actually doable)
Of course it was a joke.
But ... it was used. What they were used for a little bit is voice encryption, in military communication. Vocoder -> encrypt -> transmit -> decrypt -> Vocoder and you can "talk", if you don't mind the extreme voice distortion.
Oh and the talking clock on the telephone network. That, they got working.
> who are actually working with it only become more bullish
I have a feeling the word "actually" is doing a lot of work with this. I shipped AI facing user products a few years ago, then worked in more research focused AI work for awhile (spending a lot of time working with internals of these models). Then seeing where this was all headed (hype was more important than real work) decided to go back to good ol' statistical modeling.
Needless to say, while I think AI is absolutely useful, I'm bearish on the industry because current promises and expectations are completely out of touch with reality.
But I have a feeling because I'm not currently deploying a fleet of what people are calling "agents" (real agents are still quite cool imho), you would describe me as not "actually" using AI.
This really doesn't make sense to me. I see no world where Ai is so useful that the common man is willing to pay 100+ a month for it, but it's also a world where the common man has a job. There's too many people for everyone to have some niche job the Ai can't do.
Then they would be paid for 5-10 hours and have to ask the government for benefits.
In what world would a corporation pay a full yearly salary for 1/8th to 1/4 the labor hours? The current world already looks to labor as the juiciest place to cut cost for the profit margin.
That's not really how it worked out so far, the productivity is simply pocketed by the elite and never translates to shorter work week, salary increase or earlier retirement
Someone is working 20 hours a month and paying for a 100$ subscription on top of bills? And this isn't a isolated case, this is the expectation for the normal person? Is the job supposed to be real or is the government just giving out universal basic income while being petulant about people not working at all
With OpenAI, the most bullish analysts calculate that 40% of the world's population will be users in three years time, and they would still lose money on every sale. That's a bold bet.
would you bet $10,000 that the super majority (80% or greater) of current users of free APIs will be using a paid (20-200) one per month? if so let's set something up. we can set the time limit at January 1st, 2028.
Well the problem is that even at $200 a month they're bleeding MONEY. FYI for every well intentioned skilled engineer using llms you have 100 lazy code monkeys shipping mountains of tech debt faster than ever before, 1000 people generating bullshit emails/tickets that could have been summed up in 5 bullet points, 1000 people role-playing with virtual friends/partners, &c.
You're in your own little bubble and completely oblivious to the thousands of man hour wasted every day to unfuck AI slop
And as it turns out 80% of users aren't willing to pay a cent and will abandon ship as soon as there is an alternative
Imagine throwing orders of magnitude more of compute at things - we may have things like a monte carlo tree search for LLM outputs using an LLMJudge that prunes the tree.
+ we can continuously let a LLM monitor our log files and alert/propose/fix issues 24/7. If intelligence becomes cheap enough this would be an enormous market.
Having a LLM run as "fact checker" /coach for everything that you write also would be a great addition.
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