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“ The result of this is an Internet where all of the world's CRUD apps are hosted in Loudoun County, VA (motto: "where tradition meets innovation"), at Amazon's

“ The result of this is an Internet where all of the world's CRUD apps are hosted in Loudoun County, VA (motto: "where tradition meets innovation"), at Amazon's us-east-1 in Ashburn, a city with so many Rails apps that one of them was elected to the county Board of Supervisors.” So true it hurts

buf 3y ago
I'm at least 50 of them
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
yieldcrv 3y ago
> that one of them was elected to the county Board of Supervisors. can you explain this part of the joke?
- SonOfLilit 3y ago
  In Florida you have so many hispanic citizens that they have significant representation in local politics. In this specific county you have more cloud servers serving rails apps. However, they're not citizens and can't get elected to public service.
  - titanomachy 3y ago
    This answer, while correct, somehow feels very GPT.
    - SonOfLilit 3y ago
      Honestly the question felt very Llama in the sense that it didn't really pass my Turing test, so I couldn't really answer it in a way that didn't feel robotic.
- dswalter 3y ago
  The idea is that Rails apps are such a large portion of the population that they elected a representative from within themselves. It's not intended to be taken literally (I assume).
  - LeifCarrotson 3y ago
    EC2 instances are almost certainly a supermajority of the population. What's surprising is that there are still humans on the county board! Must be gerrymandering or something, maybe aided by voter suppression by English speakers against those in the county whose native language is x86-64.
    - jeremyjh 3y ago
      Most Rails apps just aren't engaged politically. More education and activism is necessary to mobilize them.
- afterburner 3y ago
  Maybe also related to the recent news of a small town in Delaware allowing corporations to vote in municipal elections (not a new thing for Delaware apparently).
- arandr0x 3y ago
  In a reverse Turing moment, I actually submitted this joke to a chatbot, and it got it.
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    ChatGPT doesn't know that I was hoping there was some truth to it after September 2021.
sneak 3y ago
How much of the raise is directly attributable to the fact that their early staff has at least two excellent writers on it? Their brand marketing is impeccable as a result. Every post on their blog comes through with this very clear, slightly snarky voice. If you want to be a famous hacker, you must also be a slightly (industry) famous author.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  It's great, and it shows in their docs also. Their tone of voice reminds me of early Slack before that became rote and boring.
  - TheFlyingFish 3y ago
    Oh man, early Slack was great. Back in ~2015 or so I submitted a ticket about something trivial (why I could no longer hide the menubar or something, I forget), but just for fun I did it all in stilted archaic language like you'd see in the 1600s or something. "Behold, in days of yore when the Users of the Land sought refuge from the tiresome typing that had so bedeviled their lives hitherto..." etc. Anyway, their CS team responded in kind. Hands-down the most fun I've ever had with a support ticket.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  Does VC like snarky? Snarky is passable in open source, a genius whose abrasive manner is the cost of the amazing product. In a corpo it's sleazy
- jeremy_k 3y ago
  I've thought a lot about this too. Their blog posts are consistently interesting and well written. I wonder how much of their success is related to the product marketing as well?
  - swyx 3y ago
    theyre extremely correlated. writing is thinking.
  - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
candiddevmike 3y ago
Unfortunately for fly, us-east-1 has better reliability then their product.
- tptacek 3y ago
  We're not. For a company of our age and scale? To claim competitive reliability to the world's most important data center? Risible. We're making fun of the fact that everybody deploys their apps in a random city in Virginia with like 3 restaurants in it. We're not saying they're dumb to do it, or that Ashburn isn't up to the challenge --- it self-evidently is. (The comment I'm responding to said something about people in glass houses not throwing stones, but was then edited).
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    You guys may want to rebrand once you get your issues sorted out. Fly is going to have the same problem as btrfs, where folks will have a hard time deciding if it's ready for production yet.
    - tptacek 3y ago
      It's comments like this that moved me to claim, in our infra/ops job post, the benefit "The most lovable user base in the whole technology industry, and a company culture that will keep you in touch with them directly."
      - culi 3y ago
        Fly.io was the darling of the webhosting world amongst techworkers particularly because of the honest transparent communication and blog posts explicitly admitting fuck ups Raising a bunch of money just isn't a "good" announcement to most of us. When unpopular things have happened with the company, your communication usually directly acknowledges and focuses on the concerns of the userbase. This serves two purposes: 1. It gives you a chance to show concrete steps to prevent specific concerns we have 2. Perhaps more importantly, it shows we're all on the same page and you're actually in touch with how your userbase thinks Failing on #1 is something you can fix later, but I've never seen a company rebound from losing the trust gained by #2. It loses confidence that future decisions made can also be equally out of touch. I've never seen a company rebound from losing that confidence
kkielhofner 3y ago
People forget AWS is 20 years old. When I routinely remind people of that fact they often remark (incredulously) with "WHAT? Really?" When I think about it the entire paradigm of "regions" itself seems completely antiquated in the grand scheme of things. AWS has made a few moves on this but in the end you're largely still tied to this fundamental regional concept in terms of control planes, etc and you incur the ridiculousness that is VPCs, wild billing and availability issues, all kinds of hacks, stacks, and effort all over the place to have multiple regions/AZs, etc. I suspect that later starters like Fly, Cloudflare, etc with their approaches of (more or less) compute at edge with no concept of region etc will grow more and more to dominate the cloud space with AWS region-based approaches primarily relegated to "legacy applications" that are stuck there. It may take a generation or so to get there but more and more the next crop of startups, etc are building on things like Fly instead of AWS and friends. When I think about it the region based approaches are more akin to "hosted elastic datacenter" than they are what could be described as a "true cloud" - where it's just everywhere and not even a consideration.
- kortilla 3y ago
  The realities of regions don’t go away. It’s a primitive to save you money. If a new entrant doesn’t have it they are either just operating in one region or you’re paying cross-region prices for everything.
  - kkielhofner 3y ago
    Cloudflare products and pricing (what I'm most familiar with) are in wild opposition to this view. I've never seen anything even remotely hinting at region or geography in their product line other than geo-routing for load balancing products, headers with geo info for you to do something with, etc. They include the serving "POP" in headers for diagnostic purposes but other than that you have no idea. Where do my Workers run? Don't know, don't care. They are substantially cheaper and offer better availability and response times than their region-based "cloud" competitors. Same for KV, D1, R2, and anything else they come up with as they move further and further in (out?). One would expect with them having the ability to allocate supporting hardware dynamically and globally their cost basis is substantially better than having customer facing and controlled region-based resources that still need to be built out for product support (regardless of usage) AND maintain the excess capacity local to each region to be anywhere near "elastic".
jonluca 3y ago
This is a weird coincedence - I just published a blog post on this two days ago https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/snappy-internet https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/snappy-internet
- mrkurt 3y ago
  This effect is bananas. The internet feels remarkably different in Sydney and Tokyo than it does in Chicago.
awkward 3y ago
Unfortunately, the motto is "I byde my time". Seems like he could have still made a joke without making it up.
- tptacek 3y ago
  We got this off the Loudoun County website! We do our research for these things!
  - margalabargala 3y ago
    While "where tradition meets innovation" is a set of words that the county puts on their logo, and appears to meet the definition of a motto, the parent is correct that the Official Motto is indeed "I Byde My Time". https://www.loudoun.gov/177/Coat-of-Arms https://www.loudoun.gov/177/Coat-of-Arms "Where Tradition Meets Innovation" appears to be a branding push by the county dating to 2019 rather than an official motto. https://www.loudoun.gov/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/8563 https://www.loudoun.gov/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/8563
    - tptacek 3y ago
      People wonder why I'm so addicted to this site, but I mean, it's obvious right here, isn't it?

buf 3y ago

I'm at least 50 of them

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

yieldcrv 3y ago

> that one of them was elected to the county Board of Supervisors. can you explain this part of the joke?

SonOfLilit 3y ago
In Florida you have so many hispanic citizens that they have significant representation in local politics. In this specific county you have more cloud servers serving rails apps. However, they're not citizens and can't get elected to public service.
- titanomachy 3y ago
  This answer, while correct, somehow feels very GPT.
  - SonOfLilit 3y ago
    Honestly the question felt very Llama in the sense that it didn't really pass my Turing test, so I couldn't really answer it in a way that didn't feel robotic.
dswalter 3y ago
The idea is that Rails apps are such a large portion of the population that they elected a representative from within themselves. It's not intended to be taken literally (I assume).
- LeifCarrotson 3y ago
  EC2 instances are almost certainly a supermajority of the population. What's surprising is that there are still humans on the county board! Must be gerrymandering or something, maybe aided by voter suppression by English speakers against those in the county whose native language is x86-64.
  - jeremyjh 3y ago
    Most Rails apps just aren't engaged politically. More education and activism is necessary to mobilize them.
afterburner 3y ago
Maybe also related to the recent news of a small town in Delaware allowing corporations to vote in municipal elections (not a new thing for Delaware apparently).
arandr0x 3y ago
In a reverse Turing moment, I actually submitted this joke to a chatbot, and it got it.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  ChatGPT doesn't know that I was hoping there was some truth to it after September 2021.

sneak 3y ago

How much of the raise is directly attributable to the fact that their early staff has at least two excellent writers on it? Their brand marketing is impeccable as a result. Every post on their blog comes through with this very clear, slightly snarky voice. If you want to be a famous hacker, you must also be a slightly (industry) famous author.

madeofpalk 3y ago
It's great, and it shows in their docs also. Their tone of voice reminds me of early Slack before that became rote and boring.
- TheFlyingFish 3y ago
  Oh man, early Slack was great. Back in ~2015 or so I submitted a ticket about something trivial (why I could no longer hide the menubar or something, I forget), but just for fun I did it all in stilted archaic language like you'd see in the 1600s or something. "Behold, in days of yore when the Users of the Land sought refuge from the tiresome typing that had so bedeviled their lives hitherto..." etc. Anyway, their CS team responded in kind. Hands-down the most fun I've ever had with a support ticket.
hgsgm 3y ago
Does VC like snarky? Snarky is passable in open source, a genius whose abrasive manner is the cost of the amazing product. In a corpo it's sleazy
jeremy_k 3y ago
I've thought a lot about this too. Their blog posts are consistently interesting and well written. I wonder how much of their success is related to the product marketing as well?
- swyx 3y ago
  theyre extremely correlated. writing is thinking.
- 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

candiddevmike 3y ago

Unfortunately for fly, us-east-1 has better reliability then their product.

tptacek 3y ago
We're not. For a company of our age and scale? To claim competitive reliability to the world's most important data center? Risible. We're making fun of the fact that everybody deploys their apps in a random city in Virginia with like 3 restaurants in it. We're not saying they're dumb to do it, or that Ashburn isn't up to the challenge --- it self-evidently is. (The comment I'm responding to said something about people in glass houses not throwing stones, but was then edited).
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  You guys may want to rebrand once you get your issues sorted out. Fly is going to have the same problem as btrfs, where folks will have a hard time deciding if it's ready for production yet.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    It's comments like this that moved me to claim, in our infra/ops job post, the benefit "The most lovable user base in the whole technology industry, and a company culture that will keep you in touch with them directly."
    - culi 3y ago
      Fly.io was the darling of the webhosting world amongst techworkers particularly because of the honest transparent communication and blog posts explicitly admitting fuck ups Raising a bunch of money just isn't a "good" announcement to most of us. When unpopular things have happened with the company, your communication usually directly acknowledges and focuses on the concerns of the userbase. This serves two purposes: 1. It gives you a chance to show concrete steps to prevent specific concerns we have 2. Perhaps more importantly, it shows we're all on the same page and you're actually in touch with how your userbase thinks Failing on #1 is something you can fix later, but I've never seen a company rebound from losing the trust gained by #2. It loses confidence that future decisions made can also be equally out of touch. I've never seen a company rebound from losing that confidence

kkielhofner 3y ago

People forget AWS is 20 years old. When I routinely remind people of that fact they often remark (incredulously) with "WHAT? Really?" When I think about it the entire paradigm of "regions" itself seems completely antiquated in the grand scheme of things. AWS has made a few moves on this but in the end you're largely still tied to this fundamental regional concept in terms of control planes, etc and you incur the ridiculousness that is VPCs, wild billing and availability issues, all kinds of hacks, stacks, and effort all over the place to have multiple regions/AZs, etc. I suspect that later starters like Fly, Cloudflare, etc with their approaches of (more or less) compute at edge with no concept of region etc will grow more and more to dominate the cloud space with AWS region-based approaches primarily relegated to "legacy applications" that are stuck there. It may take a generation or so to get there but more and more the next crop of startups, etc are building on things like Fly instead of AWS and friends. When I think about it the region based approaches are more akin to "hosted elastic datacenter" than they are what could be described as a "true cloud" - where it's just everywhere and not even a consideration.

kortilla 3y ago
The realities of regions don’t go away. It’s a primitive to save you money. If a new entrant doesn’t have it they are either just operating in one region or you’re paying cross-region prices for everything.
- kkielhofner 3y ago
  Cloudflare products and pricing (what I'm most familiar with) are in wild opposition to this view. I've never seen anything even remotely hinting at region or geography in their product line other than geo-routing for load balancing products, headers with geo info for you to do something with, etc. They include the serving "POP" in headers for diagnostic purposes but other than that you have no idea. Where do my Workers run? Don't know, don't care. They are substantially cheaper and offer better availability and response times than their region-based "cloud" competitors. Same for KV, D1, R2, and anything else they come up with as they move further and further in (out?). One would expect with them having the ability to allocate supporting hardware dynamically and globally their cost basis is substantially better than having customer facing and controlled region-based resources that still need to be built out for product support (regardless of usage) AND maintain the excess capacity local to each region to be anywhere near "elastic".

jonluca 3y ago

This is a weird coincedence - I just published a blog post on this two days ago https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/snappy-internet https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/snappy-internet

mrkurt 3y ago
This effect is bananas. The internet feels remarkably different in Sydney and Tokyo than it does in Chicago.

awkward 3y ago

Unfortunately, the motto is "I byde my time". Seems like he could have still made a joke without making it up.

tptacek 3y ago
We got this off the Loudoun County website! We do our research for these things!
- margalabargala 3y ago
  While "where tradition meets innovation" is a set of words that the county puts on their logo, and appears to meet the definition of a motto, the parent is correct that the Official Motto is indeed "I Byde My Time". https://www.loudoun.gov/177/Coat-of-Arms https://www.loudoun.gov/177/Coat-of-Arms "Where Tradition Meets Innovation" appears to be a branding push by the county dating to 2019 rather than an official motto. https://www.loudoun.gov/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/8563 https://www.loudoun.gov/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/8563
  - tptacek 3y ago
    People wonder why I'm so addicted to this site, but I mean, it's obvious right here, isn't it?