What happens with debris or micro debris? They say it's stronger than steel, but steel doesn't really on the entire piece being critical to the structure, so holes won't necessarily lead to catastrophic failures. Or what am I missing?
"Inflatable" doesn't have to mean "tightly stretched rubber like a balloon" or "lowest bidder plastic heat-bonded together with a picture of a flamingo in it". You can build strong materials that will still inflate, especially with .5-1 atmospheres of pressure, no problem.
This is very well thought out advice. That said you do need to be focused on the right areas of tax code, and understand that some things can be changed later and some things cannot (at least, not easily or without significant expense).
For example, I relocated to Puerto Rico several years ago and am taking advantage of a 50% transferrable R&D tax credit. Because it's transferrable I can sell the tax credit to people that have a tax liability even if I don't.
After fees, this means I get roughly 40% cash back on my R&D expense. This is a big deal to me and my company.
If you don't do your home work you can potentially miss out on some great opportunities. That said, you do still need to build a good business, or the best tax structure in the world won't save you.
Cleaning out my attic last month, I just found a stash of punch cards left over from the 1980's. Some paper-tape that has my phd dissertation. And a fortran manual from my high school's IBM-1620. Oh my...
I read your book for the first time a few months ago after someone here recommended it. I was hooked. It took me back to my beginnings (99/00) when the internet was different, when we had dial up and there was still discovery.
I appreciate the time you put into writing it — and the nostalgic enjoyment it brought me.
What are you up to these days? Were you able to predict or see the advent of modern AI and LLMs coming from earlier in your career? Thoughts on the future of computing?
All truth is one. In this light may science and religion labor here together for the steady evolution of mankind from darkness to light; from prejudice to tolerance; from narrowness to broadmindedness.
We have been using bullmq in production for just over a year. It is a piece of technology that our team doesn't have to think about, which is pretty much all I could ask for.
We did end up adding some additional generics which allows us to get strong typing between producers and consumers. That I think has been a key piece of making it easy to use and avoiding dumb mistakes.
One step we have taken is to build an auth system that requires you as the developer to explicitly specify the security of an endpoint using a decorator. If no decorator is provided, then the endpoint is completely locked down even to admins (effectively disabled).
If an endpoint is decorated with something that is considered dangerous (i.e. public access), that triggers additional review steps. In addition, the authentication forbids certain combinations of decorators and access patterns.
It's not perfect, but it has saved us a few times from securing endpoints incorrectly in code.
.NET web apps / APIs have an option where you can require authorization on all controllers (and their actions) by default. If you need an anonymous controller/action, you can use the `[AllowAnonymous]` attribute on it.
A reasonable scenario to me seems to be: An automatic "upgrade to the enterprise plan" requirement was triggered, and then in the process of the sales calls to make that happen, Cloudflare got serious eyes on the customer for the first time (whereas at a paltry $250/month previously they wouldn't have), and realized exactly what line of business the customer was involved in, and decided to fire them.
I was rushing to judgment until I heard this... pretty plausible.
In support of your theory particular is I don't think enterprise sales "ragequits" a conversation when the customer is mid-evaluation based simply on the idea that they are considering multiple options.
Why would they walk away at this point, let alone ban the customer.
From the write-up I bet CloudFlare had it as a "60% to close" in their CRM at this moment. It doesn't make sense for them to drop the ban hammer in this moment.
PS: explanation or not, this is deeply shady behaviour from CloudFlare. Just perhaps a little less so.
> In support of your theory particular is I don't think enterprise sales "ragequits" a conversation when the customer is mid-evaluation based simply on the idea that they are considering multiple options.
> Why would they walk away at this point, let alone ban the customer.
It wasn't just that they were considering multiple options. Looking at the timeline, this was about a month after their initial soft gloves approach/enforcement action and they drug their feet the entire way through it.
Once CF got to the top of the leadership chain at their company and it was clear that all the relevant decision makers were involved in the conversation but were unwilling to pay, they just folded their cards, resumed the initial enforcement action, and moved on with their day.
If this was a small account they probably wouldn't have even blinked twice with just striking down the user for causing reputation harm and violating TOS but since they were a large account CF clearly went out of their way to meet with them multiple times and try to find a solution. But after a month of little to no progress while the account continues causing reputational harm and is unwilling to budge, they just called it quits and moved on.
It seems like the sales team went out of their way to try and land a $10k/mo deal. Then when they heard there was a second potential suitor in the mix they got upset and said “well we never wanted your $10k anyways!” and destroyed any chance of reconciliation. Very sour grapes/ no second date on tinder type of reaction.
If there is a TOS issue I’m not listening to a sales pitch on it. You better tell me what the issue is upfront in the first email instead of dicking around with the commission based workers. Like very low level stuff here imo
If it's legal but burdensome (somehow) to host a particular industry, requiring more money to deal with the increased burden seems reasonable. For instance, if their legal department needs to deal with complaints from various countries, that probably costs more than $250/month.
That being said, I doubt that's the core issue in this case.
If you think something your client wants could explode into a liability, you can turn them away or you can just make sure their bill covers your exposure.
If it's a legally questionable service, there's likely to be plenty of abuse contact, or they're going to be a big target of crime, they're going to end up paying more. This is the same reason why some industries (eg porn sites) have always paid more for card processing.
It's not just 10k a month. it's 10k a month for the plan that allows you to BYOIP (Bring your own IP addresses). That was cloudflare's issue.
Their business was causing IP reputation damage and all plans but the enterprise BYOIP plans share the same IP pool.
Essentially it was "use your own IP pool and pay us for the cost of maintaining that pool for you or GTFO".
This wasn't just a normal sales rep hitting them up. This was trust and safety (i.e. the moderation team) coming to them with a compromise that would allow them to stay on the platform. They chose against that and were dragging their feet.
The timeline of the article also really makes this clear. This wasn't over the course of 24 hours. This started a full 4 weeks prior with sustained back and forth. They only included a few images of emails from the discussions but the article makes clear that there was more discussion happening.
And to quote the article. After receiving the ultimatum, they got an entire extra week to deliberate.
> We managed to buy a week of time by letting it escalate to our CEO and CTO and having them talk directly with Cloudflare.
Then finally when they told CF that they were just buying time while looking to move elsewhere, CF dropped their act of goodwill and the moderation team resumed the moderation action they would have taken in the first place had this been a smaller account.
----
So yeah it sounds bad from the snippets but this was basically "hey you are a big customer and you are breaking rules we would normally ban anyone else for but if you can compensate us we'll spend the labor hours and infra to let you keep operating in your own little quarantine box.". So this really should be seen as an act of goodwill rather than malice.
You can't start the timeline from the first email, because clearly Cloudflare didn't communicate the actual issue to the customer. (Yes, the customer could be lying about what was said in that meeting, and they could have been told what the problem was rather than it being just Cloudflare trying to upsell them the enterprise plan without telling why. But then the "omg, we just discovered a problem with your site during a routine inspection!" email sent two weeks later wouldn't make sense.)
They also were clearly lying in those email messages: The second email says that domain rotation is strictly forbidden, but a few days later in the third email they're explicitly selling features for rotating domains more effectively.
And sorry, but a company selling "we'll override the Trust and Safety team if you pay us $$$" is absolutely unacceptable. There are only two options, both bad. Either they're not running a real TnS operation, but just pretend-staff one in order to run these kinds of shakedown operations. Or they're running a real TnS team that found a real problem but are letting sales people override the TnS team's honest judgement.
I can reason my way into it, I think objectively. To protect their IP reputation, CF required BYOIP. This costs them something, and de-jure requires an Enterprise plan. Which for the customers usage costs $X. Is it right? Ehhhhhh. Does it follow corporate logic? Yeah. (Sales logic? YES)
I'm not defending Cloudflare's exact actions in this scenario, but it seems reasonable that there are cases where yes, for $10k Cloudflare is okay.
Risk can be mitigated, especially if you take care to know what the risk is, but risk mitigation and the salaries of the risk mitigation teams are not free.
The answer of "no, we will not host you unless you pay us enough money to hire people to make sure we're not breaking laws by hosting you" makes plenty of sense, and an online casino that is likely dubiously legal in many countries is definitely a place where you might use that answer.
I'd also expect there are cases where Cloudflare enter into enterprise agreements with customers, get a good hard look at exactly what's happening, and then tear up the agreement and walk away.
And all of that is fine when communicated properly. Even if OP is an unreliably narrator are we to believe they also left out some of CF's emails?
To me it looks like https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... is entirely the wrong email to send in the situation and if you are as old as I am and come from where I come from, you will have flashbacks to "reading between the lines" of the party daily in the 1980s. The real content is at the bottom:
> As we have a very short window to report back to Trust & Safety team, please let me know if you can make time tomorrow
Big red flashing lights: the right questions are 1) why is T&S involved at all 2) What are their concerns which forces such a hurried deadline? 3) What are the consequences of missing this deadline.
The right email would start with something like this:
> Providing services to your business constitutes serious legal risk to Cloudflare. We are happy to work with you in the future if you are buying an Enterprise plan. As we need to commit significant resources to accommodate you, we need an annual commitment. Otherwise, with much regret we need to terminate our services provided to you as it is our right per Terms on date/time. ("We may at our sole discretion terminate your user account or Suspend or terminate your use or access to the Service at any time, with or without notice for any reason or no reason at all.")
T&S departments generally exist for one reason: to manage reputational risk. This sometimes involves legal risk, but it usually just means preventing relentless hit pieces about your company enabling something portrayed as horrible. This can result in customers and even employees leaving if the media is relentless enough.
Companies take risks if the reward is considered good enough. In this case, that reward is income from the customer (who can still be dropped if the hit pieces start getting published).
That's not true at all. That line of argument gets close to "if this product is free for open source, why is it not free for me? either it costs something to operate or it doesn't." You don't get to price the service.
The point is more that the author is an unreliable narrator and you need to apply a little salt to the rest of the story. Cloudflare absolutely shouldn't be taking bribes to permit regulatory evasion. But if they are, I want more evidence than a substack post.
Do you have a suggestion to make that not possible? It doesn't seem fair to punish them so aggressively because that might happen. The "may" there isn't a statement of intent.
It also seems strange they dont know their Traffic Numbers.
>Note that 80TB is the number they tried to sell us, I don’t know if it is accurate since they removed all our access to historical analytics.
I mean you dont need accurate Data but surely most would know by heart their traffic in rough figures? Or am I the old dog where every new Web Dev are so used to Cloud and Serverless they have no idea what they are using?
Over 90% of our traffic is cached, since it is static assets. I can look up how much traffic reaches our origin, but the main factor is the number of static files hit. We used Cloudflare Analytics (part of the business plan) to track this, and since it didn't really impact our tech much until now I don't have an exact overview. I mainly know which (uncached) endpoints are hit how much. Fastly is currently saying 15TB per week which seems roughly the same range as Cloudflare's 80TB / month number.
People seem to have a very laissez faire take on egress which I’ve never understood given the really impressive markups the cloud providers charge on it. But yeah, it seems like the attitude is that as long as you’re using “cloud-native” services (AKA locked-in proprietary offerings) then cost is low and doesn’t matter anyway because it’s opex, not capex.
I spend a lot of time wondering if the Emperor is wearing any clothes.
Depends on your scale. I would probably know the traffic for the project I looked at last, but the whole account? No way. Half of it I've never touched and would have to talk to different teams. I'd only look at that when discussing the contract again. Or if their TAM flags us crossing some threshold.
It would be completely different for a small project of course, but once you're counting in TBs... it's less important.
Eh, your traffic is a total cost you pay per month. That's how I would look at it. The one figure I know best of all is annual revenue, and how our annual revenue this year is on track to do compared to last year's.
As far as exact volume of QPS or TB/month or whatever, I really couldn't say.
I actually know someone at radia and asked them this exact question last year. Apparently the blades are also extremely fragile and couldn't withstand the forces of being mounted on an aircraft. The problem with lighter than air is that the wind farms tend to be in places with, well, a lot of wind. Not ideal places for lighter than air vehicles.
Helicopters just aren't efficient enough, would have the same issues with wind (especially when carrying a giant airfoil), and would damage the blade if they came out even a bit out of formation.
You're right it doesn't make intuitive sense, but the people doing this are pretty damn smart and actually did think of these things!
I really don't think they did, the problems that need to be solved to retrofit existing airframes to carry a lightweight 300' load pale in comparison to what's needed to design a whole new jumbo sized airframe. Especially since once they've designed an airframe that's only good for carrying large low density loads to rough fields, then that will be the only thing it's good for.
A large wide body airliner with a big-ass shell and gravel kit retrofitted is still a large widebody airliner. Just one that happens to have a decent amount of headroom.
> The problem with lighter than air is that the wind farms tend to be in places with, well, a lot of wind.
On the other hand, an airship doubles as a crane, so there would be no need to truck it from the airfield and then crane it into place. You can deliver it directly to the rotor hub.
Countering the wind with computer-controlled thrusters would seem to be the way to go. Also, there is a large tower already there that you could use as a stabilising mast.
I am not an accountant or attorney, so you should do all of your own research. However any discussion or information about RSUs that doesn't mention an 83b election is at best incomplete.
You can't make an 83b election for RSUs. RSAs yes. Option grants for sure. RSU taxation is very straightforward compared to those. They count as W-2 income when they fully vest and turn into shares. There isn't anything to elect as 83b because they don't get any special tax treatment after that vesting date.
Actually it looks like RSAs. I didn't even apparently know that RSUs were different as I've always received RSAs and thought they were the same thing (and in fact they had been called RSUs, but the structure looks like RSAs as defined here)
I don't know anything about MRI machines, but couldn't they be built with high temperature superconductors and use liquid nitrogen? If anything this feels like a cost issue not a pure technology issue...
> If anything this feels like a cost issue not a pure technology issue...
It IS a technology issue. High-TC superconductors are basically ceramics, meaning that they are brittle. And a good simulation of MRI experience is being inside a trash can that other people hit with baseball bats.
We are only now starting to get high-TC superconductors in the form of tape, but it's not yet ready to replace low-TC superconductors.
BTW, it's also the reason we're hearing about so many new fusion startups trying to utilize it. It _should_ provide an order of magnitude cost decreases compared to liquid-helium. But it's still something that only startups are using.
The largest NMR spectrometer you can buy today uses high-temperature superconductors and classical ones, but it still cools everything down with liquid helium. As far as I understand you can push more current through the high temperature superconductors when you cool them down more.
NMR spectrometers work on essentially the same mechanism as MRIs, just in a very different form factor. It might even work for MRIs without helium because they have a much lower field (~3-6T) compared to the ~28T of the highest field NMR spectrometer.
The high-temperature superconductors are still pretty new for this field, it took a while to figure out manufacturing them on a scale and quality that could be used for these large magnets.
It's good enough for _startups_ working on fusion reactors, they can tolerate a bit of risk. But not for established companies making safety-critical equipment.
And modern MRI machines are not that expensive either, mass production made them surprisingly affordable. A top-of-the-line machine is around $700k, and mid-range devices are $300-$400k (and now I want one in my backyard...).
So the savings on high-TC supeconductors would not be that impressive overall.
I don't know if this is the only reason, but superconuctors have a critical magnetic field that is also related to temperature (higher temp = lower magnetic field). So even if a material is superconducting at liquid nitrogen temperature, that doesn't mean it can produce a strong enough magnetic field for an MRI at that high a temp.
The simpler thing to do seems to regulate helium use in birthday balloons.. not a hard choice between life saving diagnostics and large numerically shaped balloons..
I have 3 foil party balloons still inflated after 2 months and 3 days. I left them by the window as heat from the sun provides kinetic energy to the helium atoms to improve the balloons longevity. These three balloons have provided me with enough joy to keep me inside staring at them all day not outside at risk of injury which ultimately leads to an unnecessary MRI.
My father turned 80 and they kept his mylar balloon around in the living room for at least 18 months. It's one of the few things that survived the cat.
Gas pressure is the atoms/molecules bouncing off something else. If the atoms have more energy, then they impart more energy into whatever they bounce off (inside of the balloon), which essentially means higher pressure i.e. the balloon appears inflated again. Until the sun goes away and the OP's party dies for a time. :)
> "Balloon Grade" Helium represents a slightly impure Helium. While there is no scientific definition of this quality, it is often accepted that the purity of "Balloon Grade" Helium is around 99%
Sounds high, but not pure enough for MRI applications, and it isn't currently economical to reliquefy without shipping it to a processor.
> Manufacturers have stated that this wasted helium is considered a ‘recycled product’ as it would have been lost to the environment had it not been captured and re-purposed. If the balloon market demand declined, manufacturers would have to re-evaluate other markets and consider the possibilities of re-liquefying it. Re-liquefying is currently considered uneconomical from the locations of where the filling application take place.
why don't you fund the life-saving diagnostics enough that they can outbid birthday party planners? i'm not convinced birthday party planners are rich enough anywhere in the world that this is an actual problem
In fact, helium is such a mundane resource the US has been getting rid of its national helium reserves[1].
And before anyone says "god damn conservatives", this has been going on across the aisle and is ongoing as we speak. Getting rid of helium is a truly bipartisan agenda.
All of this to say: The claims of helium's value have been greatly exaggerated.
> Fortunately for us, helium also gets into the natural gas that oil and gas drillers extract from the ground for use as fuel [source: University of Pittsburgh]. That gives us a supply that we can use for blowing up balloons, as well as for a wide variety of other industrial processes, ranging from arc welding to MRIs to manufacturing silicon chips for computers. There has to be a certain amount of helium in the natural gas — at least 0.3 percent by volume – to justify all the trouble of separating it from natural gas.
https://www.sierraspace.com/commercial-space-stations/life-s...
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