Investments can never be identical for everyone, but in my case I switched my assets from an MSCI World to an MSCI World ex USA.
For the U.S. market portion I adopted a more complex strategy based on factor / smart-beta investing (making sure that none of the top holdings include AI-related companies).
This isn’t just a problem specific to German academia, it extends across the entire European academic landscape.
I've always wondered why professors and supervisors, after experiencing these abuses themselves, continue to perpetuate them.
The only explanation I've come up with is that the system naturally weeds out those who resist or speak up by stalling their careers. As a result, it selects for individuals who don’t make trouble, those who passively obey and endure even the worst forms of dysfunction.
In the end, this leads to the normalization of abuse, with people rationalizing it as "if I went through it, others should too", a way to protect their own ego.
The only thing even worse is when the abuse turns passive-aggressive: denying opportunities without ever saying it outright, hostility disguised as kindness, ambiguous and demoralizing feedback, delaying responses, making people miss crucial deadlines, assigning pointless or overwhelming tasks. They excel at this too.
If I ever had children, I would never let them attend a European university.
This exists in the US as well. I've personally experienced and witnessed it happen within labs at an R1 University. The accountability structures are woefully insufficient to protect students and junior researchers, and the incentives are perverse as to actually reinforce the practice.
I've seen frequently that talented technical contributors are academically handicapped because they bring too much value to the lab for them to graduate quickly. I've personally had my own funding threatened if I didn't work "at least 60 hours each week" on my ex-advisors work (which was in no way related to my degree or research interests). I was fortunate to find another advisor and funding source quickly, but most advisors are absolutely profiting in their career off the backs of their students; leveraging both carrot and stick to fuel their ambition. It's a problem of modern academia and I'm not sure how to fix it.
> I've always wondered why professors and supervisors, after experiencing these abuses themselves, continue to perpetuate them.
From their perspective, it's simply about the ends justifying the means.
You've learnt that relentless pressure and extreme demands, to an extent that elsewhere in society we would call highly abusive, produce results - they did for you, or you wouldn't be there.
This goes as far as rationalizing offensive personal insults as helpful tools - negative feedback can be very motivating to a driven person.
(That's not something I made up, I heard that point made nearly verbatim from a famous Max Planck director.)
Unfortunately, this is not just applicable to Europe, this is applicable in a lot of places in the world. Imagine this in a hierarchical, subversive, "elders are always right" societies in Asia (or South Asia).
> their interface is not nearly as bad as GCP / AWS
Underrated.
Until recently, all the features were grouped in a very clear manner within the dashboard. Now, even Cloudflare is complicating its management interface, but they still have a long way to go before reaching the level of confusion of AWS and GCP.
I managed to get R2 with their cdn in front of it up and working in under an hour. The same experience with s3 fronted by cloudfront was 2 very long days. Due to my misunderstanding, yes, but aws provided (1) incomprehensible docs, (2) an extremely complex UI; (3) stale help all over the internet; and (4) incredibly unclear error messages.
Honestly, I feel like Cloudflares interface is quite complicated for the number of features they have. All their stuff seems to be only slightly integrated.
I appreciate the fact its just connected enough to work. AWS does what feels like everything in their power to entrench you. I avoid AWS as much as possible but one example that comes to mind is the fact you basically need to use SQS for SES
> But the current structure of defense funding makes this nearly impossible. VC-backed defense startups aren't the answer either. They're making the same mistakes - small compute, off-the-shelf models, requiring relocation from experienced 40+ year old scientists who won't move. They're essentially just spending the money the government can't, without solving the fundamental issues.
Have you tried to express your perplexities to one of the DARPA PMs?
Theoretically, a significant part of their work should precisely consist of receiving feedback on the mistakes made in order to iterate more quickly toward effective solutions.
Yes. The problem is darpa PMs only have a 4 year window. They also have a limited budget of about 80 million. They also have to pitch a program to get hired into darpa and then further have to get buy in from darpa brass to move ahead with thier portfolio.
Moreover, darpa is not the airforce, army, navy, ect. Just because darpa makes the widget doesn't mean anyone has to use it. Also working for darpa is a difficult as they micromanage thier PIs and you have to constantly show progress (even bi weekly) which isn't conducive to research.
My experience has been that Darpa has a romanticized role outside of those who have actually worked for darpa.
As a researcher you are not incentived to tell darpa the truth because if they are not happy with it, they won't give you any money which is already hard to come by.
Darpa PMs are often young, have few publications and are new to the government and have romanticized ideas about what they think they can accomplish.
> The CFAA[1][2] is an arcane and ancient piece of legislation that could use an overhaul, especially with some of the vague language it contains.
I imagine that this is the reason why the charge is "unlawful transfer of confidential phone records", which is something much more specific.
From PACER, it's also stated that he filled out the CJA23 financial affidavit to demonstrate his inability to afford a lawyer (it's quite something to get caught like this and not even manage to earn enough to pay for a lawyer).
Additionally, "the defendant waives the rights provided by Rule 5 and/or Rule 32.1 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure" means that he is choosing to streamline the initial procedures and is waiving supervised release or probation, suggesting that the prosecution's case is strong and that he is opting for an expedited process.
One fun thing is personal recording isn't a protected right in the military and has to be stated if you're recording in an office for personal reasons. (official recording is usually stated as a usage agreement), or literally put on the device as a sticker.
He's also a low level enlisted so its not surprising he was unable to afford a lawyer.
> Cloudflare does mostly use the browser's properties to determine if a manual check should be done
Cloudflare uses the threat score of each IP address as a signal to determine whether additional checks are necessary. A shared IP address is more likely to be associated with "issues", such as a compromised IoT device being used for DDoS attacks, one of your neighbours spamming a forum, ...
How is it not a GDPR violation? Before I've even connected to the site I intended and had the opportunity to consent, an IP address that potentially uniquely identifies me (plus whatever else) is shared with a third-party data processor?
There is generally exceptions for anti-abuse/spam to some of the provisions of GDPR and the like.
That said, is there really any 3rd party here? You are connecting to cloudflare and they are the ones that have seen this IP before and judging its behavior.
It's a good point (made by sibling comment to yours too) but I do think it's a bit of a break-down in the intent of GDPR, or even 'not possible to satisfy requirement'?
Because from a user's perspective, my relationship is with news.ycombinator.com or whatever - I don't (have to) know or care if the site uses Cloudflare, that's some other company, maybe I haven't even heard of it or have any other relationship with it. But now it is a company that the one I knowingly have a relationship with is causing to be made aware of information which uniquely identifies me.
I didn't know there were anti-abuse/spam exceptions though, so I suppose that's it.
The term “native” refers to adopting the vendor’s technology stack, which typically includes managed data stores, containerized microservices, serverless functions, and immutable infrastructure.
I work for a very large org, and cloud benefits are not obvious to me ( ie we’re large enough to absorb the cost of a team managing k8s for everyone, another team managing our own data centers around the world etc ).
I view cloud as mutualizing costs and expertise with other people ( engineers and infra), but adding a very hefty margin on top of it, along with vendor lockin.
If you’re big enough to mutualize internally, or don’t need some of the specific ultra scale cloud products, it’s not an obvious fit to me ( in particular , you don’t want to pay the margin )
I understand that for a significant chunk of people it’s useful provided that they use as many mutualizing levers as possible which is what going native is about.
Yes, the profit margin for cloud providers is very real—and quite costly.
I think one point that’s often overlooked is the knowledge gap between the engineers at cloud providers (such as systems, platform, or site reliability engineers) and those that an individual company, even a large one, is able to hire.
This gap is a key reason why some companies are willing—or even forced—to pay the premium.
If average or mediocre management skills and a moderately complex tech stack are sufficient, then on-premise can still be the most cost-effective choice today.
I agree with the gap, and I understand why people would like to pay for the premium.
Where I work currently, wherever we don’t have the right people ( and usually because we can’t find them ), our cloud-like on-premise offering doesn’t work which ends up causing significant extra costs further down the chain.
Americans would need to send over engineers, architects, and builders who follow the "bigger is better" philosophy.
I'm waiting for the moment when we'll tease someone who can't manoeuvre their truck when it simply doesn't fit.