I prefer to read on screen if it can set to “night mode” (white-on-black), large font, and full screen. For one, I find it’s more ergonomic to look at a well-positioned monitor than bending my neck to read a book.

Non-techies don’t. Here’s how CNN answered, what is AWS?

“Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon’s internet based cloud service connecting businesses to people using their apps or online platforms.”

Uh.. yeah.

Kudos to the Globe/AP for getting it right:

> An Amazon Web Services outage is causing major disruptions around the world. The service provides remote computing services to many governments, universities and companies, including The Boston Globe.

> On DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages, users reported issues with Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite online broker Robinhood, the McDonald’s app and many other services.

That's actually a fairly decent description for the non-tech crowd and I am going to adopt it, as my company is in the cloud native services space and I often have a problem explaining the technical and business model to my non-technical relatives and family - I get bogged down in trying to explain software defined hardware and similar concepts...

I asked ChatGPT for a succinct definition, and I thought it was pretty good:

“Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform that provides on-demand access to computing power, storage, databases, and other IT resources over the internet, allowing businesses to scale and pay only for what they use.”

For us techies yes, but to the regular folks that is just as good as our usual technical gobbledy-gook - most people don´t differentiate between a database and a hard-drive.

You make a good point.

This part:

    > access to computing power, storage, databases, and other IT resources

could be simplified to: access to computer servers

Most people who know little about computers can still imagine a giant mainframe they saw in a movie with a bunch of blinking lights. Not so different, visually, from a modern data center.

Ah, yes, servers. I have seen those at Chili's and TGI Fridays!

It's the difference between connecting your home to the grid to get electricity vs having your own generator.

It's the same as having a computer room but in someone else's datacentre.

This one's great too, thanks.

And if you live a rural, mostly wooded area like I do, fallen trees are constantly taking out the fiber services for days at a time.

They aren’t buried? Or do the roots tear the fibre?

A lot of countries still uses poles for cables, and fiber. It's always super weird to see when you're from an area that buries everything except high voltage powerlines.

For areas with frequent earthquakes I think poles are preferred because it's easier to fix broken cables.

From the part of the Europe where I am from power lines are rarely buried, however fiber is universally buried so I haven’t even considered it could not be.

They’re not buried around here for the most part. I think the population density is just too low to justify the cost.

> sometimes it rains ash

When the sky turned orange in 2020, my wife and I were just done. Also, there's something to be said for living in a place with four seasons, and a sense of time passing by.

That was my thought. More keystrokes with less certain results.

I also think that the keystrokes are strictly less and the loop feedback is faster and more robust, but I'm curious to read different points of view.

I was carrying a pager as late as 2009 because a customer's data center was two stories underground in one of the older tower blocks in downtown Toronto.

Yes it is amazing how good the coverage was.

I had one and I've only been outside the coverage area once, when I went on cave trip. I noticed my pager said OUTRANGE which was something I had never seen any other time. The coverage really was phenomenal due to the low frequency (159Mhz).

Having had to recently deal with a prosecuting attorney in a small rural county, even hallucinating AI would be a significant improvement.

I suspect it’s more about cost savings than environmental concerns, but the grocery store we frequent doesn’t provide bags at all. However, you can take boxes from the pile they have set aside that usually contained produce originally. So, the boxes are used at least twice, and then we drop them into recycling. On top of that, I find the boxes more convenient to load and unload since it only takes 2 or 3 versus handling dozens of bags. Obviously this won’t work if you don’t have a car, or perhaps a cart, when you go grocery shopping.

I've found that quail is often available frozen in many Asian grocery stores.

They seem to be popular with retirees who don't need to do much more than use Facebook, email, and watch YouTube videos.