Whenever I read these kind articles and some of the comments here I always wonder:
Its it survivor bias? I grew up in a small village/city during communism. I was basically unsupervised from morning to night since I have memories about me walking around in that village.
We were doing a lot of dangerous things while playing. And there are kids that got injured for life or lost their lives: falling from trees, drawn in a river, leg lost due to a horse injury, losing an eye during a game with some pipes, jumping from high places like 1st floor or more, ... I managed to not get hurt but the examples I gave are real.
I am not even talking about any of the fights between kids verbal or physical there were happening that todays will be labeled trauma.
So I do wonder if this free range thing that we desire is really what we want and we can accept the consequences?
I am not sure in all cases, depending of course of kids age and ability to reason, for each individual child this total liberty is the right path. I do understand the benefit for the society.
I was reading the pricing page for workers and here is what it says there:
> To prevent accidental runaway bills or denial-of-wallet attacks, configure the maximum amount of CPU time that can be used per invocation by defining limits in your Worker's Wrangler file, or via the Cloudflare dashboard (Workers & Pages > Select your Worker > Settings > CPU Limits).
Limiting CPU time for a single invocation of a worker is more for catching bugs in code that is using more CPU than expected and is not whatsoever effective as a hard limit on spending...
Unless your Cloudflare worker and the DB are scheduled onto the same physical server, they are not local to one another. I don’t know much about D1, but the overwhelming majority of cloud infra makes no such guarantees, nor are they likely to want to architect it in that manner.
Cloudflare's Durable Objects puts your Worker and SQLite DB on the same physical server (and lets you easily spawn millions of these pairs around the world).
D1 is a simplified wrapper around DO, but D1 does not put your DB on the same machine. You need to use DO directly to get local DBs.
Not an economist but the petrodollar concept helps the dollar because everybody that needs oil needs to buy dollars. You see it as small thing but it is fundamental thing because oil is used in so many places that as we have seen a disruption of 20% of it would start causing real problems on almost the entire world.
QED: oil powerful, only dollar buy oil, dollar stronger.
The use of dollars to purchase any commodity is a negligible fraction of demand for dollars.
What you should be looking at is investment demand for dollars, that is, in which currency does the seller store their surplus.
Think about it:
I need to buy a barrel of oil, but I am in Argentina. So I sell my pesos for dollars, I buy the oil with the dollar. The seller now has dollars, and sells the dollars for Swiss Francs and invests the money in swiss bonds.
Now, what happened? The global demand for dollars by the buyer was exactly offset by the seller. It is the seller that decides, by choosing where to store his surplus, of what currency is boosted by oil. And it is not the currency that oil is sold for, it is the currency that the proceeds are invested in.
So oil is completely irrelevant for the value of the dollar, what is relevant is that investors want to store their funds in the US capital markets. That's what matters, and it is investor preference to store their earnings in capital markets that determines why they want to denominate oil in dollars. It just saves on an extra transaction.
But focusing on the transactions misses the picture of the dollar's strength, because denominating oil in dollars is merely a consequence of the desirability of US capital markets as a destination for foreign capital. And that desirability drives everything else. It's not oil, it's deep, liquid capital markets with established foreign investor rights. That trumps everything else.
Think about it -- would you keep your earnings in a country with weak foreign investor rights or lack of financial transparency or illiquid markets where you couldn't easily pull your money out when you wanted to? That is much more important to the seller of the oil than anything else. It will drive what oil is priced in. And it will drive the demand for dollars.
Certainly correct, but I think you’re underselling the historical exchange part of this. Dollars being everywhere causes the financial infrastructure to be built out in dollar terms.
Part of what enabled that huge capital flow you’re talking about is that it was the Americans who came in and gave [country’s] banks a counterparty to exchange dollars for oil.
A lot of that soft power is not just the ability of America to print dollars, but also the ability of America to control the financial infrastructure. To surveil, KYC, sanction, etc. that is a huge part of it.
The petrodollar is less mechanically important today but back in the day it was huge to have “everyone who needs oil” be the counterparty to a currency exchange. It is what injected all that liquidity, which set the whole thing off.
I think what people are realizing and considering now is with the computerization of everything, capital can flow more freely. That is what is dangerous (for the US) about today’s moment; our political leaders are taking it all for granted.
I do think history is also important, but again it boils down "where is a safe place to store my money?". That really controls everything else.
Now, in the past we had a gold standard, so you could literally move your money from one country to another. Now during both WW1 and especially the runup to WW2, the wealthy moved much of their money to the United States as a safe harbor, since we were the only advanced economy with deep liquid bond markets, rule of law, and foreign investment rights (sorry, Canada, but it's true).
This was the greatest wealth transfer in history. By 1940, the US held 80% of the world's global gold reserves. 80%! And this was in the era when international trade was settled in gold.
So it all happened in single decade between 1930 and 1940, and the US instantly became the world's global reserve leader, an extremely dominant position, merely because people were afraid of war and wanted a safe place to park their money.
After the devastation after WW2, the flood of European money into the US continued and more than offset the Marshall plan.
So already at the end of WW2, the majority of the world's liquid savings was tucked away in America.
Now, people like to tell stories of American soldiers spending dollars somehow making the dollar a reserve currency, and those are the types of things that seem plausible to people who don't monitor global capital flows, but that's honestly a ridiculous story. That was chump change.
Bottom line, there are no special technical reasons beyond "I want a safe place to store my money". That controls everything else.
There is an adage in the world of money markets: "It does not matter what currency you trade in, what matters is what currency you store the proceeds in".
And the moment that some other nation opens its doors to foreign capital inflow, establishes rule of law (which takes decades to develop a reputation for stability and not confiscating assets), is safe, stable, and secure, establishes financial transparency, and has deep, liquid capital markets -- then the world's wealthy will flood that nation with money also. But unlike declaring that "I will sell my oil for euros", doing the above takes decades of building trust and reputation. Gimmicks aren't going to do it when you are looking for a safe place to store your money.
First in some cases it is more than $1000/dev/month.
Those companies spending 1000+/developer are doing it with the same hope that at some point those $1000/month will replace the developer salary per month. Or because by doing so more investors will put more money into them.
Take away the promise of AI replacing developers and see how much a company is willing to pay for LLMs. It is not zero as there are very good cases for coding assisted by LLM or agentic engineering.
Is is the need for static types or the need for better testing that is not focused on coverage of line of code?
Because if the domain logic is getting more complex then more types will not catch the bugs unless you are willing for codify business rules within types so then you have to test the types.
ha! I used to work there until 2020. They have almost no meetings because they have all those employee monitoring tools: mouse/keyboard activity tracking, browser URLs tracking, screenshots every X minutes, etc.
While personally this excites me: the idea that I can build a custom software that fits that specific problem is quite amazing.
But on company level I see it as a risk: suddently you might have 50 new small apps created by people who might not even work at the company who are not constantly tested for security/privacy ... but more important who once done are not pushing the frontier of how a much better solution might be in that area cause nobody is putting time into them. So as time passes by this has the risk to become legacy software used to run your business. yes of course you can point an AI to all of them and prompt it to make them better but that means focus on that instead of your core business.
Maybe we will see solutions appearing to manage this kind of tech debt.
Its it survivor bias? I grew up in a small village/city during communism. I was basically unsupervised from morning to night since I have memories about me walking around in that village.
We were doing a lot of dangerous things while playing. And there are kids that got injured for life or lost their lives: falling from trees, drawn in a river, leg lost due to a horse injury, losing an eye during a game with some pipes, jumping from high places like 1st floor or more, ... I managed to not get hurt but the examples I gave are real.
I am not even talking about any of the fights between kids verbal or physical there were happening that todays will be labeled trauma.
So I do wonder if this free range thing that we desire is really what we want and we can accept the consequences?
I am not sure in all cases, depending of course of kids age and ability to reason, for each individual child this total liberty is the right path. I do understand the benefit for the society.
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