And click on the link from the top comment, you can search for the article using the DOI code which is: 10.1016/j.cell.2024.08.006

Same goes for having your domain with the compute provider.

It's pretty clear they basically prohibit everything related to cryptocurrencies, even content, as you can see in their T&C.

Over the past years there have been numerous people online which have claimed that Hetzner closes accounts without giving a reason. I'm sure most of those claims intentionally omit some details to make it look like they didn't infringe the T&C.

However as a Hetzner customer (a small one, to be fair), I'd still like to know that those complaints are baseless, and that I can still trust your company.

2.7. Furthermore, we reserve the right to terminate the contractual relationship without notice for good cause.

Given one of their goals on their homepage is "access to internet ... [due to] ... outright censorship" (which is legally required in some countries), likely they are in violation of

"8.1. The Customer is obligated to check and comply with the legal provisions arising from the use of the contractually agreed services"

and

"8.4. If we become aware of illegal activities, we are obligated under Art. 6 Abs. 1 DSA (Digital Services Act) to request that the Customer immediately removes the offending content and we are entitled to lock the Customer’s access to their Hetzner services or account."

Furthermore, we reserve the right to terminate the contractual relationship without notice for good cause. Such good cause is deemed to exist, among other reasons, if the Customer fails to meet its payment obligations or violates other important customer obligations. A further important reason which may result in us locking or terminating the Customer’s services or account without notice is if the Customer uses content that impairs the regular operating behavior or the security of our infrastructure or our product, or violates paragraphs 8.1. - 8.3. of these Terms and Conditions.

It's kind of overwhelming when you stop and really think about it.

You can't say it's a niche part when the item is being manufactured in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. Car companies reuse components between models and sometimes even between brands.

And that's without mentioning that the average 7-8" screen or CPU in a car's entertainment system isn't a custom made part, they are bought at bulk from other manufacturers that produce (tens of) millions of units per year.

You can find entertainment system replacements for most cars that cost a fraction of what the car manufacturer charges consumers.

I struggle to see how a mass-produced, way more expensive (for the customer), lower-quality product isn't simply a rip-off.

Although to be fair, most hobbyists only need basic services like cloud servers/VMs, and hyperscalers like AWS are an awful deal compared to other options if you only need compute + storage + bandwidth. You don't need to use S3, Lambdas and Cloudfront to host a personal blog, a simple VPS will be more than enough.

It feels like most devs nowadays prefer using services that abstract away the infrastructure, at the cost of not developing SysOps skills, so I don't see a future where the Cloud is going to lose relevance.

But I think the argument is - do they need to be? How much of the services of AWS (Google/azure/etc) are really needed by the majority of customers?

For companies that need hyperscaling services, I get it. There are definite benefits to the cloud when operating at extremes (auto scaling up and down). But for the majority of workloads, I think you could be well served by a more barebones offering.

Very many. And none of them are EC2 (or its equivalent). Any service that comes with the consumption based charging (i.e. no 24x7 running costs whether it is used or not) and offers a clearly defined functional feature, has plenty of appeal to cloud customers. Another part of the appeal is the mix and match nature of mature cloud platforms: the customers get substantial freedom to choose from services they can instantly start using, or roll (and maintain) their own albeir at a higher cost.

I.e. if the customer wants a queue, they get a queue, and nothing else. The cloud platform abstracts away and takes care of the underlying platform that «runs» the queue and eliminates the operational overhead that comes with having to look after the message broker that provides the said queue. There are other many examples.

Some companies want the space to grow into it. At my job, we just started getting into video decoding. AWS has elastic video processing services. Where as DO would cost way more to setup those services on our own.

While there are valid use-case where you get value from the extra services the hyperscaller are providing, most of the time people go for AWS “because everybody does it” or because the choice was made by a consulting company that doesn't pay the final cloud bill and is optimizing their own added value at the expenses of the customer's one.

I've been doing freelance work for 7 years now for roughly two dozens if companies of various size, and I can't tell you how many massively underused AWS / Azure VPS I've seen, but it's more than half the cloud bills of the said companies (or division for big companies since I obviously only had the vision on the division I worked for and not the whole company).

I think it was mentioned in the article what AWS offers. Lock-in.

As the article says, around 2 billion people have washing machines. That leaves around 6 billion having to wash their clothes by hand. What would the solution be? Would giving a washing machine to every household in the world solve the problem?

It's hard to imagine that it would, since there is still a ton of infrastructure needed to run the washing machine. How many of those 6 billion people live in places with functional water and electricity networks?

In my opinion what many AI companies are doing is basically that, trying to provide everyone (in the Western world at least), with a metaphorical washing machine. But the infrastructure, resources and knowledge to effectively use generative AI aren't available to most of the population or small and medium enterprises.

This will further the gap between rich and poor, and the gap between countries that use AI and countries that refuse or can't afford to use it.

AI (and computer technology) is more like electricity in this case. A raw technology that per se does not solve any specific problem, but only if/when applied within a specific infrastructure around it.

They usually give between $1000 and $5000 worth of credits, and they may have other requirements like being enrolled in college, but you should check each of their respective programs to find out more.