@chamath don’t think all SaaS is dead. slow moving SaaS is
slow companies won’t be able to execute on the the AI "software opportunity trident":
1. using it internally
2. adding AI to your product
3. agent experience beyond dev products
more on my latest article
A rare and touching incident was captured during flash floods in Sumatra. The video shows a Sumatran elephant attempting to rescue a tiger swept away by the strong current. This rare moment immediately went viral on Indonesian social media.
He saw a few posters in Srinagar and insisted on finding out who put them up. This is an example of excellent police work saving many many lives
Respect to the hero Sundeep Chakravarthy from Andhra Pradesh
1/ The Indian Ocean fostered the first advanced human civilisations.
During the Ice Age, when ice covered the northern latitudes & sea levels were 120m lower, its temperate, monsoon climates birthed the first seafaring cultures from the Indian subcontinent to SE Asia.
Thread🧵
📑Some articles/ reports in the media have raised concerns about the potential negative impact of 20% ethanol blending (E20) in petrol, particularly with regard to older vehicles and customer experience. These concerns, however, are largely unfounded and not supported by scientific evidence or expert analysis.
▶️International studies on the effect of using Ethanol-Petrol Blends on Mechanical, Energy and Environmental Performance of Vehicles through testing of carbureted and fuel-injected vehicles every 10,000 km during their first 100,000 km showed statistically no significant differences in power and torque generated and fuel consumption. Material compatibility and drivability tests by Automotive Research Association of India (ARAI), Indian Institute of Petroleum (IIP) and Indian Oil Corporation (R&D) have confirmed that legacy vehicles also showed no significant variations, performance issues or abnormal wear-and-tear when operated with E20. Moreover, E20 fuel passed hot and cold startability tests without any engine damage.
▶️Multiple concerns have been addressed as below:
🔹Fuel efficiency:- Ethanol, being lower in energy density than petrol, results in a marginal decrease in mileage, estimated at 1–2% for four-wheelers designed for #E10 and calibrated for #E20, and around 3–6% in others. This marginal drop in efficiency can be further minimized through improved engine tuning and use of E20-compatible materials, which leading automobile manufacturers have already adopted. In fact, the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) has confirmed that E20-compliant vehicles with upgraded components began rolling out from April 2023. Thus, the allegation that E20 leads to drastic drop in fuel efficiency is factually incorrect.
🔹Material corrosion:- Safety standards for E20, including corrosion inhibitors and compatible fuel system materials, are well established through BIS specifications and Automotive Industry Standards. Replacement of some rubber parts/ gaskets could be advised in certain older vehicles after prolonged use of say 20,000 to 30,000 kms. This replacement is inexpensive and easily done during regular servicing of the vehicle
🔹Environmental concerns:- Ethanol replaces petrol, a fossil fuel and reduces CO2 emissions. India’s ethanol blending programme is through feedstock diversification. Ethanol is increasingly being produced from not only sugarcane but also from surplus rice, maize, damaged foodgrains, and agricultural residues, especially under the push for second-generation (2G) biofuels. This makes ethanol blending not only technically viable, but environmentally sustainable as well. A study on life cycle emissions of ethanol done by Niti Aayog has assessed that GHG emissions in case of sugarcane and maize based ethanol use is less by 65% and 50%, respectively, than that of petrol.
🔹Benefits:
🔸Ride quality and vehicle performance: Ethanol has a higher octane number than Petrol (~108.5 vs. 84.4) which implies that ethanol-petrol blends have a higher octane number than traditional petrol. Therefore, the use of ethanol becomes a partial alternative for providing high-octane fuels (~95), required for modern high compression ratio engines providing a better ride quality. Vehicles tuned for E20 (having increased RON) deliver even higher performance. Ethanol is also characterized by having a higher heat of vaporization than petrol. This aspect makes the temperature of the intake manifold lower, which increases air-fuel mixture density, therefore increasing the engine’s volumetric efficiency.
🔸E20 blending significantly strengthens India’s energy security by reducing dependence on crude oil imports. In fact, since 2014-15 India has already saved more than Rs. 1.40 lakh crore in foreign exchange through petrol substitution. Ethanol blending supports the rural economy, with expeditious payment of over Rs. 1.20 lakh crore to farmers, thereby creating income and employment opportunities in the agricultural and biofuel sectors. #E20 blending has helped India reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 700 lakh tonnes, contributing to climate change goals.
▶️The claim that this transition is abrupt or poorly communicated does not align with the detailed rollout plans outlined in the Government of India’s Roadmap for Ethanol Blending in India 2020–25, available on the websites of #MoPNG and @NitiAayog since 2021. The implementation of E20 in India has followed a phased and widely consulted approach, involving coordination between ministries, vehicle manufacturers, fuel retailers, standards agencies etc.
▶️Thus, the narrative that #EthanolBlending in Petrol is harming vehicles or causing undue hardship to consumers is not based on real facts and lacks technical foundation. Ethanol blending is a forward-looking, scientifically supported, and environmentally responsible measure that brings multi-dimensional benefits to the nation.
@PMOIndia@HardeepSPuri@IndianOilcl@BPCLimited@HPCL@DDNewslive@PIB_India
‘If we displaced half of the electricity demand that India added to its grid in 20 years by supplying nat gas. Instead of their coal, we would reduce global emissions by 2.5 billion tonnes, 3X the emissions of all of 🇨🇦
By exporting Gas we could do more for global emissions if we disappeared from earth’.
professor: 'it's physically impossible
chatGPT: 'it violates fundamental laws
r/physics: 'literally cannot be done'
guy with a 3D printer and willpower:
“watch me balance this inverted pendulum with magnets while your theorems cry'"
moral of the story: sometimes you just need
to ignore smart people and fail 40 times
Cloudflare serves around 20% of the web with 46 million requests a second.
Surely they must have a lot of data.
Where do they store it?
Plain old PostgreSQL. 🐘
Around 15-20 clusters of them.
Each cluster consists of 3 servers split into two regions.
The primary region is where the writes go, and the secondary is the region which replicates this data asynchronously and serves reads.
Within those servers exist many databases owned by different people - they essentially offer multi tenancy. And as you know, multi-tenancy comes with a lot of challenges:
🤨 How do you decide which physical cluster a new tenant goes into?
As they say in CloudFlare - it’s more of an art than a science! 🎨👨🎨
Think twice. Deploy once. 👌
But it depends on a lot of questions that get asked, like:
• Is your data the source of truth, or can it be repopulated from elsewhere?
• How sensitive is the data? (PII, etc)
• What’s the expected traffic pattern - read heavy or write heavy?
• How long do you need to store the data for?
• How are your apps opening connections? (connection hungry apps can take a lot out of postgresql)
• What is the growth projected to be?
🐙 Well-Connected DB
Each connection in PostgreSQL is a new OS process.
This makes connections expensive!
As such, Cloudflare has to gatekeep the number of connections - and it does so, via PgBouncer. 🛡
🐬 PgBouncer pools a maximum server-side connections which it then allocates across tenants.
From there, it forwards queries to HAProxy, which load balances across Postgres’ primary and read replicas.
🆙 High Availability
The latency of an offline database is infinite.
To keep high availability, CloudFlare uses the Stolon cluster manager to replicate data across Postgres instances and elect leaders/failover under high load scenarios.
Health is tracked via a local health check on each node that periodically heartbeats to a distributed store like etcd.
🦏 Thundering Herd
When apps get redeployed, they re-initialize all their state and connect to the database at once. This can be costly, as they compete with other tenants for the same shared underlying physical resources.
Cloudflare implemented a way to handle this in their own fork of PgBouncer - it supports granular load shedding by either throttling or outright killing existing user connections.
🌞 No Clouds
CloudFlare does NOT run on the cloud. They deploy on bare metal instances in their own data centres without any virtualisation whatsoever.
As such, they hit some unique challenges here too:
• 🔥 natural disasters / cooling issues
e.g if your data centre in Portland overheats due to hot weather, your performance slows down.
You can say your “db is running hot”, but bad puns aside - your data infrastructure should be resilient to that.
• ⚡️ network partitions
It’s a lot of work to get to the bottom of diagnosing a network partition. You have to test connectivity between a lot of components.
Instead of being reactive, CloudFlare is proactive and runs chaos tests to test their distributed system’s behaviour in the presence of such partitions. 👌
Of course, the sheep too participated wholeheartedly in the 'revolution' right alongside the wolves, not realizing that they were the 'main course' for the 'revolutionaries'!
Par for the course, I'd say.
Sadly, they are paying for it with their blood now.
https://t.co/DfMiU1ciKx
Nicholas Winton helped 669 Jewish children escape the Nazis and his efforts went unrecognised for 50 years.
Then, in 1988, while sitting as a member of a TV audience, he suddenly found himself surrounded by the kids he had rescued, who were now adults.