The parent comment explained why they dismissed this in clear language. Yours is a random weird comparison to Dropbox (how is it related to this post? Which side is Dropbox, TikTok or Loops?)
I believe GP is referencing this classic comment from 2007 on Drew's original Show HN post for Dropbox:
> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
I think this is a reference to when Dropbox was first introduced. I recall posts dismissing it as “just something that could be done as well with a bash script”.
> Yeah I can make a dropbox clone in a one-liner bash command too
Jesus, is this the only argument you people have now? Some decade old comment of a non-business guy?
Parent is right, loops removes precisely what makes TikTok addicting. It’s like removing heroin high for addicts – what’s the point of the injection, then?
This is being entirely disingenuous and is completely different to what goes on in Dubai.
I have lived there and can rattle off plenty of criticisms about the country but complaining about migrant workers who clamour to work in SG is not one of them.
The vast majority of Singapore migrant workforce are Malaysian citizens who live over the border in JB, you can rent a 2 bed apartment there for $300 a month and eat out in a restaurant for $2 while commuting each day to a developed country and earn those level of wages.
To pretend these people have a rough deal compared to back home is absurd and I'd challenge anyone to actually talk to them first before getting on your high horse. Ask them if they would prefer to work in their home country.
I said nothing of the kind you imply. I know skilled workers who were based in Dubai but who expected to leave immediately their work (court transcription) ended and the same with expat Australians and Britons working in Singapore.
The point is not if they get a rough deal or not compared to their home income. The point is that the welfare state costs on the tax base won't be spent to their material benefit, so they are not a cost on the state after working lifetime. Forced saving schemes be they state pension, annuity or superannuation are savings which act as investment capital and i am sure sematek and other bodies leverage this, and then in income phase return to the holder but they are not equal to the lifetime cost of care for the elderly, or provision of housing.
Dubai has much more extreme exploitation of low wage migrant labour, not that none of the workforce in Singapore is remittance labour, filipina nannies and the like but I'm not actually talking about construction site labour or the Dubai passport hijack thing.
Dubai has a 90 day visa grace period for job loss. Plenty of foreign labour self sponsor their own visas and there is the golden visa and retirement visa for people aging out.
Woodlands is the busiest immigration checkpoint on the planet and it's only 1 of 2 crossings. It's fairly seamless for regulars apart from Friday afternoons when it gets clogged up by escaping Singaporeans keen for the weekend and the quality/value offered by their poorer neighbour.
They’ve introduced facial recognition at this border, starting with motorcyclists. You just scan a QR code to get in. If that’s not an option, the gates are automated – you scan your passport and you can walk straight through.
Singapore has the smoothest border controls I’ve ever experienced; it takes me less than half an hour between stepping off a plane at Changi to stepping into my apartment.
Where are you located? Lots of such crossings used to happen, anyway, many years ago via Nexus or similar. Get the pass, just drive right on through over the bridge at Windsor/Detroit. Also similar things in Vancouver, I believe.
I reentered the US from Windsor a few months ago and the Nexus line was backed up but could just sail through the regular line once they inched enough past the tunnel.
TBH, I’ve gotten a lot more shit over the years from Canadian authorities at the border. The Canadians are tough about foreigners with convictions entering the country, and if you share a name with someone with a DUI, sometimes you get flagged. All border police do random tit for tit enforcement or look for specific things for reasons.
There's people who live in Tijuana, Mexico and work in San Diego, California and that's way worse than Canada/USA in terms of time and hassle. Not something I'd want to do, but then I wouldn't want to live in Connecticut and work in NYC, which many people do either.
Oddly enough, not until very very recently (~2024). Traffic jams of several hours are still quite normal for vehicular traffic, and it is the busiest crossing on the entire planet, with up to half a million crossings a day.
I'm north of the line... most of my troubles have been on the way back up except for one random search on the way down. On the way back they always give me the third degree for some reason, often searching, despite zero record and always declaring stuff. I must inspire contempt in the CBSA heart
I had an unplanned short stop in Singapore in December after missing a connecting flight. I just filled in an arrival form online (no Visa), went through the electronic gates, an officer glanced at me and let me through without a word. Whole process took about ten minutes, and it would have been quicker if I’d filed the paperwork beforehand.
There are actually a fair number of folks that commute from Canada to the US for work. They will generally have TN Visas, it is certainly not "unthinkable" - it really does happen, although I will confess that the only folks I have ever met that did it were not recommending it to anyone else!
> You can manage and reason about ~2000+ servers without Kubernetes, even with a relatively small team, say about 100 - 150
Oh wow, so uh... I'm managing around 1000 nodes over 6 clusters, alone. There's others able to handle things when I'm not around or on leave and meticulously updated docs for them to do so but in general am the only one touching our infra.
I also do dev work the other half of the week for our company.
At one job I was the only IT person and we had ~250 plain boring VMs on some bare metal Linux/KVM hosts. No config management. No Kubernetes. I fixed that quickly. There was one other guy capable of taking a look at most of it.
I was also doing the software builds and client releases, client support, writing the documentation for the software, and fixing that software.
I suspect we would have had no problem scaling up with some better tooling. Imagine a team of 150? When people tell me things like that, it sounds more like the solution isn't much of a solution at all.
Managed k8s (GKE/EKS) or self admin k8s? If the former, no problem. If you're building your own clusters on raw cloud or bare metal compute I'm skeptical if doing it solo. Kudos either way!
Hehe, you lack skill in empire building. You know "leading a team of highly motivated team of 50+ devops engineers". The kind of talent that postpones patching until you are back from vacation. Or deploying config change that needs at least two rollbacks before finally going in.
That is actually very impressive :-) We have a small team to just handle the databases, but that's ~200 MariaDB and Oracle instances, and another to do networking.
How many different applications/services are you running?
In any case, absolutely amazing what one person can manage with modern infrastructure.
Can people please not listen to this terrible advice that gets repeated so oft, especially in Australian IT circles somehow by young naive folks.
You really need to talk to your accountant here.
It's probably under 25% in deduction at double the median wage, little bit over @ triple, and that's *only* if you are using the device entirely for work, as in it sits in an office and nowhere else, if you are using it personally you open yourself up to all sorts of drama if and when the ATO ever decides to audit you for making a $6k AUD claim for a computing device beyond what you normally to use to do your job.
My work is entirely from home. I happen to also be an ex lawyer, quite familiar with deduction rules and not altogether young. Can you explain why you think it's not 45% off? Ive deducted thousands in AI related work expenses over the years.
Even if what you are saying is correct, the discount is just lower. This is compared to no discount on compute/GPU rental unless your company purchases it.
I see Australia in the article and pardon my rampant scepticism, simply don't believe it.
Lo and behold:
>A six-month trial of driverless trucks on public Victorian roads has been put on hold just hours before it was meant to begin after the transport union labelled it “shambolic” and “sneaky”
> "the futures of our truck drivers are jeopardised due to this poorly executed plan."
> “It’s unacceptable that these trials are being pushed by corporations that continue to disadvantage our hard-working mums and dads that work day in, day out to carry Victorians.”
Now this sounds far more like the Australia I know.
Looks like the entire trial was scrapped due to union pressure and never resumed. Same reason we can't even have Driver-Only Operation on NSW trains, despite specifically purchasing DOO trains that operate safely worldwide.
The Pentagon, much like everyone else, will only want to use the best model available though.