> For milk chocolate to be classified as such, UK regulations say it should be made up of about 20% cocoa solids

20% is a very low bar. Even in the 70s Penguin bars where being marketed as full of "chocolate flavour":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI0Fa66h6Qo

>US-East-1 is more than just a normal region. It also provides the backbone for other services, including those in other regions

I thought that if us-east-1 goes down you might not be able to administer (or bring up new services) in other zones, but if you have services running that can take over from us-east-1, you can maintain your app/website etc.

I haven’t had to do this for several years but that was my experience a few years ago on an outage - obviously it depends on the services you’re using.

You can’t start cloning things to other zones after us-east-1 is down - you’ve left it too late

It depends on the outage. There was one a year or two ago (I think? They run together) that impacted EC2 such that as long as you weren’t trying to scale, or issue any commands, your service would continue to operate. The EKS clusters at my job at the time kept chugging along, but had Karptenter tried to schedule more nodes, we’d have had a bad time.

Static stability is a very valuable infra attribute. You should definitely consider how statically stable your services are in architecting them

Meanwhile, AWS has always marketed itself as "elastic". Not being able to start new VMs in the morning to handle the daytime load will wreck many sites.

Well that sounds like exactly the sort of thing that shouldn’t happen when there’s an issue given the usual response is to spin things up elsewhere, especially on lower priority services where instant failover isn’t needed.

> The incident underscores the risks associated with the heavy reliance on a few major cloud service providers.

Perhaps for the internet as a whole, but for each individual service it underscores the risk of not hosting your service in multiple zones or having a backup

The footprints were covered in 4-5 metres of limestone rock though, that would have been a very committed hoaxer.

> 100M growth in two months suggests literally every single human being on Earth would benefit from using this all the time, and it’s just a matter of enabling them to.

For OpenAI I think the problem is that if eventually browsers, operating systems, phones, word processors [some other system people already use and/or pay for] integrate some form of generative AI that is good enough - and an integrated AI can be a lot less capable than the cutting edge to win, what will be the market for a stand alone AI for the general public.

There will always be a market for professional products, cutting edge research and coding tools, but I don’t think that makes a trillion dollar company.

> Share buybacks allow companies to reward executives directly as their compensation is tied to stock price.

To be fair share owners also like the stock price to go higher, they also like dividends (and higher dividends would tend to drive the stock price higher too), but an X% increase in share price caused by buybacks is favoured over an X% dividend because it isn’t immediately taxed.

My understanding is that executives prefer buybacks because they mostly are compensated with stock options, which don't pay dividends (until exercised) but which appreciate disproportionately from buybacks.

Dividends actually directly lower the stock price. Keep an eye on your portfolio when your holdings go ex-div -- the price falls because it no longer includes that cashflow.

It does not lower it in any long-term sense, because, unless it's a one-time dividend, there's another dividend next quarter, and generally assumed to be continuing payments for the foreseeable future if the company is healthy.

This doesn't sound correct. Giving out an expected dividend lowers a stock price since otherwise one could arbitrage it, but this is evidence that the dividend raised the price when it got priced in

Also, I believe in the US ordinary dividends are taxed at the income tax rate which is much higher than the capital gains rate.

No, most dividends are "qualified" and taxed at the long term capital gains rate, assuming you've held the underlying for a decent amount of time.

Still, they're taxed, whereas buybacks allow the shareholders to control exactly when they take income.

Also buybacks will tend to select for frequently traded shares with high cost basis, further reducing total taxes and selecting for longer term shareholders. They really are just better than dividends in every way.

It doesn’t make sense to compare ordinary dividends to capital gains - either compare ordinary to short term gains or qualified to long term gains.

Why? These are just rules in a made-up game. They can be anything we want.

with everything at record highs we'll see if we continue to prefer inflated share price over reinvestment in the business or increased dividends.

I heard (I'm ex Lehman) a group of senior managers did make an approach to the UK government to do a 'management/employment buyout' but it was rejected as too risky.