What makes anyone start a new project and think “I know, I’ll use Azure!”? I really don’t get it. Do they have a great sales org? Is it because a phb thinks “well they made Office so it must be good”?
I interviewed with a Dutch energy company migrating infra from AWS -to- Azure and I have no idea what would make them do that (aside from inertia, but then why use Azure in the first place?)
And for some reason Azure usage is rampant in Europe.
In some places the purchasing decisions are not made by technical people. The infrastructure team gets azure budget and that's what they have to work with.
At my work the sales people regularly come to us with some azure discount they got offered on linkedin or some event. Luckily I have the power to tell them to fuck off.
The one place I worked that used it
- got a bunch of free credits for signing up
- had some license agreement for some Microsoft service (Teams Oath App or something similar) where a certain percentage of the infra had to be hosted on Azure
Don't remember the details of #2, just that they were a "Microsoft partner" of some sort which was beneficial to integrating with the Microsoft apps the product depended on and appearing as an app in the marketplace. The company built software that ingested IM/chat data from corporations (Teams and I think something older)
A lot of enterprise orgs are completely helpless without Microsofts' identity solutions. That's what makes it easy to just adopt more and more Microsoft products.
I work for a 300+B company that spends nearly $1b a year on AWS.
Microsoft engaged in a relentless romance campaign with our loser EVP and one of his reports for months giving him the cool LinkedIn post opportunities that weak executives crave.
Eventually he started pushing engineering to move to Azure.
We have not yet (many bullets dodged so far) but it’s there and a periodic major time sink entirely due to manipulation and flattery.
The entire “multicloud” push was a marketing effort by Microsoft to try and undermine exec faith in their “what? No, that’s a shit ton of work with zero return on investment” engineering teams.
It's CYA. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, the old saying went. And it was true. Perhaps they should have, but they weren't. Nowadays, Oracle and MS have taken that position. They have the "share of mind," a PR concept that unfortunately succinctly expresses the problem. Someone proposes MS or Oracle, and everybody nods because they've heard about it. If that causes problems, other people will have to solve them anyway.
I have literally never met a competent person who takes MS or Oracle seriously.
I confess, I'm a little salty. It's just insane how widespread Azure is when there's no obvious reason to prefer it. Of course, having the whole market be dominated by 3 giant American companies (even in Europe) is annoying in its own right.
At the startup I worked at in 2023, Azure was considered the only “safe” way to use OpenAI APIs in prod (eg agreements that the data couldn’t be used for training).
Working with Azure was one of the worst parts of that job.
I do worry that autonomous vehicles will result in rules that further hinder walking and cycling because it makes it harder for AV’s to drive unimpeded
And generally just tear through native populations of birds and small mammals. I honestly think it's irresponsible to have outdoor cats in places where they're not native (which is effectively everywhere).
My indoor-outdoor cat only catches small animals if they run between her paws. But she did chase a rather large raccoon around the house once, as I did.
In my suburban neighborhood, we occasionally have coyotes. They are known to prey on fat cats (the feline kind).
My feeling is that predation by domesticated outdoor cats is overblown.
I also feel that small wild cats were likely native everywhere. Birds were probably not their primary prey; small reptiles and mammals, i.e. animals that don't fly, nest in trees, or live in flocks.
> My feeling is that predation by domesticated outdoor cats is overblown.
It’s just something we’ve all been told all our lives, with the people doing the telling never point to any evidence to back it up.
Even when cats are wild and native, their hunts aren’t particularly successful, except the desert sand cat[1] which is so small it would perish if its hunts were low rate success.
And if you watch videos of collar cameras on cats, they seem to spent all their time doing a perimeter check, having a quick social interaction with other cats doing the same, and maybe brushing up against a frigidly neighbour human.
The idea that a house cat that has warmth, food, water, bedding, would bother to waste time killing small birds and mammals that have hardly any meat on them anyway is fairly unbelievable.
Feral cats are a different story. But don’t blame responsible cat owners for that problem.
I had a neighbor once that had 2 cats. The only thing they seemed to care about was catching birds and chasing squirrels. They only caught birds but they did catch them often. Many cats are exceptionally good at catching mice and bringing them back home. Some seem to enjoy torturing them. Also in some countries like Australia they absolutely decimate the native population if left unchecked, and that’s according to actual data about the presence of cats and the level of wild animals.
I was at a wildlife sanctuary in Tasmania, about 50 minutes drive from where I live.
The tour guide said something like: every year 250,000 native animals are killed every year on Tasmanian roads.
And I just blurted out: and they just keep coming.
Because, obviously, if it was a problem then that number wouldn’t be sustained. It’s kind of self evident that the deceased animals free up resources and territory for the living animals, who then go on to have more offspring.
I feel the same about cats: if they were a problem for the native fauna, we’d expect that problem to have auto-resolved by now, as in the cats would have killed all the native fauna.
But, like all environmental problems, it’s perennial: the problem always needs more funding, more restrictions on human activity, increased red tape for developers, and home owners who want to manage their land. Like you can cut a tree down until after it falls on your house and kills your infant.
Again, I don’t believe it’s well fed house cats that are allowed outside that are the problem, it’s the ferals that need to kill to survive.
And there are ways to solve that problem, or at least greatly curtail it.
That tracks for sika deer. Those are the "sacred deer" that used to be venerated in Nara, and are still protected under Japanese national treasure laws. They are allowed to roam free throughout Nara, and you face big penalties for hurting or messing with them. You are allowed to feed them special deer crackers which local shopkeepers sell, but woe betide you if a deer sees or smells deer crackers on your person! You will be followed or chased, and may be at risk of being gored on a buck's antlers, until you give up the goods. They're attitude on four cloven hooves, those deer.
That's an Iberian lynx. They were nearly extinct around the year 2000, but since then they've been reintroduced and relocated and nurtured with rabbits until the population grew 20 times bigger. Cuteness is not irrelevant to that in my opinion, but anyway it exists because humans decided it should, because it fits our idea of what nature would have done if we hadn't already interfered. Therefore ... it's OK that we arranged for it to be there torturing a rat, I guess. But it takes the edge off the guilt about domestic cats somewhat. The whole thing ends up being a battle about taste and aesthetics in the giant wildlife park we've inadvertantly created.
Sure, but now we've strayed far from the starting point which was that cats are bad because they torture small animals. In fact most animals are bad. The question becomes which animals do we want around the place.
Cats have completely deleted the rabbit populations in a lot of suburbia. I feel like it got worse around 2020 for some reason. I had to move to the middle of the woods to start seeing them again.
Got lots of rabbits in my town, on a tiny nature reserve beside a footpath that goes from some office complexes to an industrial estate. It's ten minutes walk from the houses where people keep cats. I guess all those fluffy neutered cats have dedicated their attention to actual cat food and to the sport of infringing on the territories of other cats, and just aren't very rabbit-centric. If the cats were feral and breeding the rabbits might be in trouble.
Toll roads are profitable. They are basically money-printers in fact. More/all of our expressways should be toll roads IMO. Then the people who use them will pay for them, and there will be money to keep them in good repair without needing appropriations from the general fund.
Small thing - I generally haven't seen tolled motorways called Freeways - but I haven't lived in the US in a long time. I'm familiar with turnpikes of course, and a tolled motorway in Orange County, CA.
Many many years ago I took the train from San Luis Obispo to Sacramento and enjoyed a meal in the dining car, with set times and seating assignments. It was a really interesting conversation with my randomly chosen tablemates. Sadly I don't think they do that anymore.
For what it's worth, I love trains, and the romance of them, but I ALSO love taking it from Oakland or Richmond to Sacramento and sipping a beer while I look through the window at all the poor saps stuck on I-80. I've had that drive take 4+ hours before on a Friday, especially when people are headed to Tahoe.
It would be on the top of banned books in Texas schools.
That being said, the first few pages of "The Ministry for the future" will make a great first episode for an HBO show, someday... (or whatever network is not own by an oil company, eventually.)
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