> once you got to the angles where walls joins, you would be able to zip along the intersections at great speed in ways that defy conventional physics.
If you are in the US, you probably already know about Mike Patey but I'll share this here anyway. He has a track record of building something custom pretty much every year. I believe he is trying to build a community around a similar idea, but also catering for more mainstream GA too.
I was curious, so I just checked on one of our customers (I work at a small MSP in the UK) by way of comparison and we have on chugging along happily at more than double those numbers on a $288 Linode dedicated CPU instance. And we're only on that size for ease of disk space handling as the database is several hundred GB. CPU is basically at zero, it's the disk IO that actually gets you on some of these busier databases (from my experience).
RDS is extremely expensive. All managed databases are.
That said, it's a trade off of convenience and being in the AWS bubble, and weighing up the pros/cons of separating out services. Data Transfer is another thing to consider too of course. Sticking your database elsewhere might cost more in egress traffic communicating with it from your other AWS infrastructure. If you're all in on other AWS services, sometimes the RDS price is just worth it when it comes to the total price. Sound like this might be the case for your setup.
I hope you do manage to work things out. The service you have is great.
PS - Side note on RDS sizing. You might already know but sometimes it's worth increasing the storage size on gp3 type storage above 400GB (if you haven't already) as you get 12,000 IOPS baseline against 500MiB/s throughput[0] when you have that much storage. That's 4 times the below 400GB baseline performance but you only pay for the additional storage cost.
It can make a difference if you're IOPS constrained or trying to deal with bursty traffic but want to use the smallest instance size possible otherwise to save costs.
Maybe not so weird if gravity isn't the curvature of spacetime but a symptom of there being either more or less of it, and mass creates spacetime.
Replace the highly curved spacetime region close to a blackhole with the idea that huge amount of spacetime is being created by the mass of the blackhole, so there is more spacetime near the blackhole.
The more spacetime being created and 'flowing outwards' away from the mass, the faster the apparent 'velocity' of an object through that region of spacetime ner the blackhole (and have this work out that the spacial component handles the physical motion and time slows down to compensate - just like it does in highly curved spacetime), and consequently the slower it moves relative to an external observer.
Areas further from mass see much more 'dilute' spacetime (whatever the heck that means) and travel with relative slower spacial velocity but faster in time, so it appears to be travelling faster up. This would be doubly obvious at the scale of galaxies.
I think this ridiculousness would rely on the relativity of simultaneity in rather a large way!
The other interesting thing is, if mass does create spacetime then pockets of mass like galaxies should move away from each other faster and faster as they make more of it in between themselves.
(NOTE - this is just a silly thought experiment, don't take it seriously)
It’s not at all silly. There’s some nice visualisations[1] of GR in YouTube that look like space is being swallowed up by matter.
A toy model I like to use in my mind is that matter absorbs spacetime. It is literally sucked in!
A possible extension of this model is that the tension introduced in the vacuum causes it to stretch out. That could potentially explain the non-r^2 terms in galactic rotation curves.
I don't think this sounds silly at all. Virtually everywhere we look in cosmology the last decade or so, you get a sensation of things unseen. Like we're looking at one of those optical illusions that change shape when you cover your left eye, or like the McGurk Effect, when your audio perception shifts completely because you can see someone's lips.
Another element that's being discussed is, like with mass and spacetime, that the spatial dimensions themselves are emergent phenomenon arising from bulk entanglement. Sean Carrol has talked about it a fair amount, and it's been surfing around maybe harder than it would ordinarily, because it provides some edge cases that are, at least conceivably, testable without solar-system-sized accelerators or a DeLorean to the beginning of the cosmos. It's an evocative thought. In one interpretation of this, Double Slit restricts many of the spatial dimensions, resulting in a particle that might seem to be in different places, but which is, in some respects, the same particle. Another interesting notion is that singularities, in some dimensions, might be the same place.
Combined with your notion, it almost re-frames mass as - forgive me for getting poetic here - a measure of fate. How much does this resist doing that?
There are many variables. Visual acuity, how well your eyes can adapt to low light, colour sensitivity, light pollution and cloud cover are just a few. Even standing next to each other two people can have different experiences thanks to those variables.
I am very fortunate to have excellent visual acuity, low light sensitivity and am extremely sensitive to colour/different shades or tones. There are test you can do online for this if you have a well calibrated screen. I also used to be a photographer and worked for years in low light settings documenting events. So I have put that good fortune in the genetic lottery to good use!
So for me, I absolutely saw the full colour display very strongly. I could see variations in colour throughout the height of the column and i could easily make out the striations between the different filaments. I could also easily see the curve of the bands across the northern sky. The colours to me were as obvious as the orange of light pollution you might see from a nearby town. I could see the low level patches of cloud silhouetted against the green and the huge bands of red/pinky red towering up into space.
What I will say though is that even looking at my phone was enough to dull the experience. And minimally strong light in the eye instantly desaturated the colours of the aurora and took a minute or two to recover. So you really do need dark places, dark skies and to really let your eyes full adjust to their maximum possible sensitivity.
My thoughts exactly. If feature X is important enough to do all the silly workarounds they did then why would you in the first place choose a provider that didn’t support feature X?
The choice of IPV4 + shenanigans vs IPV6 seems pretty straightforward.
This seems like the perfect opportunity to introduce those unfamiliar to Robert Elder. He makes cool YouTube[0] and blog content[1] and has a series on regular expressions[2] and does some quite deep dives into the differing behaviour of the different tools that implement the various versions.
It’s a shame this study appears to have been conducted so poorly, the topic is very interesting.
The study had people click on photos of where their interest would be if they were walking. They were not eye-tracked when actually walking. This is a significant difference. Particularly because at night your peripheral vision is much more acute at detecting shape/silhouette/tonal variation and in my experience also motion. The latter is very relevant for detecting threats.
I was poor growing up had to walk a lot, including at night. A lot of time was spent walking in not the best areas! Most of my teenage life seemed to be spent in the dark too, if I ever wanted to see friends! And then military service with endless night exercises. Add to that living in the UK with 17+ hours of darkness in the winter. I can definitely say that after decades of walking at night and many many thousands of miles (I have a nearly 200 already this year already) you learn there’s a certain way of ‘seeing’ without looking at something directly. So I very much question the claims of the study in so much as it states where your eyes actually look when walking in real world circumstances.
What I don’t doubt is that in general women have more to worry about and fear in public spaces, that their attention is drawn to different things than men in some circumstances and that there likely is a difference in scene scanning behaviour.
A proper study on this would be very interesting to see and might actually help better inform the design of public spaces for night time use.
I hope they make a follow up study with some kind of VR contraption. It would be also great to get a read of things like heart rate, blood pressure and things like adrenaline.
Former military here…I only ever did this a few times in very specific circumstances. I wasn’t infantry but when exercising that role I did do this a couple of times when on sentry for a long time or when in an OP (observation post). This was rare and only on exercise, I never needed to do it ‘for real’.
The reason I did it is whilst lying down or in very confined/concealed area it’s easier to turn your wrist to see the time, which passes amazingly slowly in these situations. If you imagine you arm outstretched in front of you it’s a lot easier to see the watch face if it’s on the inside of the wrist as you have to turn your arm much less.
I’m not sure I am explaining it adequately, but it these circumstances it’s definitely easier.
At all other times and in my normal role I never did this.
Regarding light discipline, many brands make military versions that are much harder to accidentally press the backlight or in modern tomes allow you to turn off the heartrate monitor lights. Also, we would generally wear long sleeves which would cover a watch in most situations anyway, even in hot climates. There was a gradual mover to 3/4 length or turned up sleeves during my time, when watches would then often then get covered by tactical gloves or sometimes even dedicated covers made to conceal a watch.
Hyperspace lanes!