While I used to think Railway was an amazing service, I had a production workload get broken because they removed a feature without any depreciation period or warning. I now struggle to recommend it for anything more than a hobby project. Vercel has the benifit of being big enough they have to do things properly. For reference https://station.railway.com/questions/smtp-connection-failur...
your company's mod in that thread said there was supposed to be no SMTP at all for any plan but it was enabled by a bug. then once you saw people were using it you decided to milk your bug via the most expensive payment plan.
but that's your internal dealings. from your paying customers perspective, company had a change in the environment where something was working and now it's not. which could be even okay if it was a legit bug that was fixed, but what makes it worse is instead you said "just pay us 4x more and you get it back". for some users it probably just broke
production, is there a more perfect time for blackmail right?
don't try to paint it as altruistic attempt to reduce spam in the internet, this is sleazy af
I would stay away from any startup for production workload.
Made the mistake. Never again.
Fly, railway, render. Avoid. All have weird show stopper bugs for any reasonable scale and you will fight against the platform compared to using big cloud.
And big cloud works better even in cases where PAAS is advertised as simpler (google cloud run and build is as easy to setup as railway but you have much more knobs to control traffic, routing, roll out etc)
> Boycotts of businesses, cutting off family and friends, etc
You'd think that, after the last decade, people would've learned that demonizing and ostracizing your political opposition is not a great way to get them to join your side.
Never understood why the yanks don't like vans? Pickups are much less popular here in the UK, many more people use vans. A crew cab van with removable seats is infinitely more flexible than a pickup, other than long stuff which you chuck on a roof rack.
Indeed. It's because of the fashion preferences of American SUV and pickup buyers.
I can attest to the fact that minivans are much more comfortable. I picked up my Pacifica hybrid minivan in early 2021 before the price hike and it was a steal compared to SUVs and pickups. When I was doing paperwork for the vehicle at the Chrysler dealership, I was chatting with some sales guys and discovered the shocking fact they had recently sold a luxuriously loaded-down pickup for over $100K. I was fortunate to easily haggle with them over my minivan because they don't make much money on minivans so they focus on pickups, Jeeps, etc.
A couple decades ago, I had started looking to replace an old hand-me-down car from my grandma, and had been mulling over whether I could ever justify spending $30K on an Infiniti at that time. My boss at work got a new pickup, and he was rather proud of it, and I innocently asked if it cost $25K because plenty of my Texan relatives had driven them over the years and I assumed they were a no-frills working man's practical vehicle. After a brief pause, he answered, "It was a little over 40 thousand." That was over 20 years ago.
Vans don't project manliness. Most people don't use pickup trucks for pickup truck things. They'd be fine with a station wagon, but they have self-confidence issues.
This is the main thing. The US is very, very weird in terms of how it genders every possible lifestyle choice, and polices those gender norms. The rise of SUVs in the US was partly driven by things like inconsistent emissions standards, but also by the need to make a more "masculine" alternative to the minivan or station wagon.
I paint my fingernails so I'm not exactly concerned with projecting masculine energy. I just don't like the roof over the cargo area. It feels limiting. Also my primary use case of hauling lawn debris would aggravate my asthma way too much.
Vans usually have a very difficult time off-road or in mountainous terrain.
Vans are commonly used in urban areas, especially by businesses, but suburbs, rural, and construction benefit from higher clearences of SUVs and trucks.
SUVs are also usually much better in hazardous driving conditions because of a more optimal weight distribution.
Having grown up in the mountains, and currently living in a hilly snowy area, no thanks I'll keep my SUV. My in laws have a mini van, and it's not great.
I deal and have dealt with enough deep snow that would eat a van.
I still might get a Sienna Hybrid for daily commuter
I can't take this comment seriously unless you are buying snow tires. If you have snow tires, and you still can't get where you want in the winter, sure get 4wd.
I had a RWD pickup with snow tires and went anywhere I wanted to through two utah winters and many vermont ones too.
Yanks never got cool vans. Vans also became synonymous with Chester the Molester. Yanks also had Chevy Astro as an option. I grew up with the family owning a full sized custom van with 2 rows of captain chairs and the third row bench folding out into a bed.
From all of the bitching in the driveway, vans were not pleasant to work on the engine. Some of them had to remove a cover from inside the van to gain access, and that cover tended to not be well insulated and was the source of a lot of heat. Not much of a firewall as a car with the engine fully separated from the passenger compartment.
There were a lot of things people did not like about vans available in the land of Yanks. The Limey vans are not the same, so do not equate your experience as being the same.
Vans had tones of popularity. They are an iconic part of 60s culture(minibus) and 80s as well(A Team van)
There are two current reasons
- Millennials grew up in minivans and its viewed as a mom mobile and they don't want that look (despite the fact that most family SUVs are basically mini vans with out the sliders
I love a van, but they're a pain to work on compared to a full size truck. Like a popular minivan that has a 5 hour book time to do a simple tuneup. Reaching the plugs between the firewall is most of that time. Same with compact PCs, it's a puzzle to get everything in your 7L case.
Anecdotally, a lot more people in the US tow. And pickup trucks are the indisputable king of towing.
There's also the fact that it's a lot harder to take the top off a van than it is to add a top to the bed of a pickup. If I sometimes moved manure and had a van... I'd probably rent a trailer.
Some "yanks" align their identity with their vehicle. There are songs about trucks but yes a van or mini-van are more flexible.
There are many that buy trucks for off road capabilities but probably 70% or more of truck owners don't go off road more than once a year. Many pick up truck models, like stock versions with crew cabs, are too long and not equipped for serious off-road use. Shallow sand/snow they can handle but so can SUVs.
The powertrain packaging for vans is much tighter than for trucks. Who amongst us remembers removing the interior to change sparkplugs 6 and 8 in a GMC Vandura?
Even if you're not going to do the knuckle-skinning work yourself, the packaging negatively influences book rates when you take it to a shop
I wouldn't want to haul 3 yards of dirt/mulch in a van, or yard refuse. I wouldn't want to try and move a full-sized fridge in a van, or a queen bed box spring, neither will fit.
I can't fit an ATV in a van, and I really don't want to put a dead deer in the back of a van after I hunt one.
I wouldn't trust a van to haul 75 8x8x16 concrete bricks (over 2000 lbs/1100kg) because the suspension wasn't designed to do that, nor was the transmission, and the van will quickly deteriorate.
How about moving a couch? Fits in the truck, not in a van.
I did all of those things in the past 12 months.
All that being said, vans are great, especially with kids. They absolutely do not replace trucks... if you use the truck and don't mind getting it dirty. Shiny trucks with 5.5ft beds are fucking stupid. My kids all laugh at "trucks with a baby bed" these days.
Or, downthread, people just assume everyone with a truck is insecure, projecting wealth, and generally ignorant. Which ironically, is a very ignorant take.
The larger vans used by tradespeople in the UK, like a full size Ford Transit, would be fine with those loads (though I agree I wouldn't stick a dead deer in one as they're harder to hose out than a pickup bed). 10ft long loadspace, 1400kg payload, plenty of room for couches, beds and things. They're quite different beasts than the smaller kind like a minivan with removable seats. Plus it rains so much here that having a roof on is generally an advantage.
There are some pickups here, having said that: more rural utilities people, or landscapers who move lots of dirt, or farmers, might have one. They tend to be smaller than an F-150, but then everything's smaller in Britain including the roads...
Most of what you said is not true, at least for a full sized van. Sure you may not want to get it dirty inside, that makes sense. But they have more space than an 8' pickup bed. You can absolutely carry 2000lbs in a 1 ton van. An ATV or a couch will fit in one better than a pickup.
Yeah yeah, and 30-50 feral hogs could burst into your yard any moment.
For moving yards of mulch, topsoil or concrete blocks, almost anyone in my country, including people in construction would just have that delivered to the site, next day, by the seller.
No clue what van you're imagining, but weather alone makes many things much worse in an open bed. Moving a couch is a very common use of vans, people rent them specifically to move furniture all the time.
It’s 10 bucks for me to haul mulch and topsoil from a place down the road.
It’s hundreds of dollars to have the same literal dirt, delivered and dumped on my property. So now, instead of driving the truck full of dirt around my property and using it as desired, I now need to do it one wheelbarrow full at a time.
Fuck that.
As for weather, they make removable flat and domed “roofs” for truck beds, the weather argument is a nonstarter.
There's a pretty good video from HealthyGamerGGG (think I got his name right) on YouTube titled something like: Is ADHD A Superpower for Meditating? It sounds click-baity but I find him quite appealing. As a lifelong ADHDer, meditation has been more beneficial to me than any medicine or other practice.
FWIW I gave up trying to render SVG for our project and switched to using fabric.js (and node-canvas for server side rendering). For us it was mostly because it had far better text support.
I can't think of a SPAC, regardless of nationality, that actually succeeded other than Cellebrite. SPACs in their current usage are basically vehicles to circumvent securities fraud and generate wild amounts of money based on hyperbolic slide-decks via PIPE and NAV offerings pre-DA - the amount of EV and Quadcopter plays that were obvious vaporware getting traction in 2020-2022 was insanity.
I've been tracking SPACs as a curiosity. The only ones on my list that are above the $10 starting price are DraftKings, Hims & Hers Health, and Grindr.
In other words: gambling, erection medication, and gay hookups.
Lynk Global are merging with SLAM this year to list publicly which is the only other one I'd watch out for - decent business model, first to debut the satellite to unmodified phone tech in a commercial fashion. GENI will probably recover as well.
Lynk Global will competing against Starlink — which is already manufacturing and operating at scale, and is vertically integrated with their launch provider... which will soon be lofting _much_ larger and more capable satellites on their new launcher. I don't see what worthwhile niche will be left for Lynk to play with.
The cynic in me can't help but wonder if somebody is hoping to cash out via whatever investors haven't yet noticed the writing on the wall.
I think the lesson in the past couple of years of SPACs is that all the companies that sounded obviously important and useful turned out to be massively overvalued and built on sandcastles of hopes and dreams. Lynk does sound like one of those.
And what those few companies that were actually successful — the “gambling, erection medicine, gay hookups” of my previous post — have in common is that they operate businesses that might have some trouble raising money through the gatekeepers of a traditional IPO.
(Logical conclusion: if I ever invest in a SPAC, it’s got to be a drug-dealing furry porn site for crypto traders at minimum.)
They have an actual commercial direct to device service launched, demonstrable, and scalable. I'd also look into the architecture of Starlink versus bent-pipe and other designed-for-purpose system, rather than the retrofit we get from Starlink.
This in contrast with their SPAC competitor AST SpaceMobile, who AT&T just announced their strategic partnership with for Commercial service up to 2030 yesterday and spiked their stock 40% in premarket... to still be about $6.50 off the NAV lol
So yeah, I think the analysts and Engineers are hedging their bets. Starlink has launch capacity but that's about their edge as the incumbent at the moment. The rest have LEO satellites up and are ramping up constellations as we speak.
I think of SPACs the same way I think of Regulation Crowdfunding [1]. If the company could have reasonably IPOd, they would have; if they're opting for a reduced process method, it's likely because they wouldn't look good in the traditional process, and it's best to avoid them.
OTOH, it's not like I'm investing in individual stocks anyway, I'm on team Boglehead, and everything is in index funds, other than equity based compensation which I don't have at the moment.
I currently use Mylio. The feature I like most is that I can store a compressed version of my entire catalog on my phone so it's very quick to find something and it works offline. I can then download the full res image if I want it.
My biggest complaint about Mylio is there is still no automatic synchronisation from Android. You have to leave the app open for it to sync.
Wondering if the Memories Android app can handle both of these points?
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