That limitation (spinning up an instance) only exists if you don't put a payment card in. If you put a payment card in, it goes away immediately. You don't have to actually pay anything, you can provision the always free resources, but obviously in this regard you have to ensure that you don't accidentally provision something with cost. I used terraform to make my little kube cluster on there and have not had a cost event at all in over 1.5 years. I think at one point I accidentally provisioned a volume or something and it cost me like one cent.
I think that's if you are literally on their free tier, vs. having a billable account which doesn't accumulate enough charges to be billed.
Similar to the sibling comment - you add a credit card and set yourself up to be billed (which removes you from the "free tier"), but you are still granted the resources monthly for free. If you exceed your allocation, they bill the difference.
A credit card is required for sign up but it won't be set up as a billing card until you add it. One curious thing they do is though, the free trial is the only entry way to create a new cloud account. You can't become a nonfree customer from the get go. This is weird because their free trial signup is horrible. The free trial is in very high demand so understandably they refuse a lot of accounts which they would probably like as nonfree customers.
They also, like many other cloud providers, need a real physical payment card. No privacy.com stuff. No virtual cards. Of course they don’t tell you this outright, because obscurity fraud blah blah blah, but if you try to use any type of virtual card it’s gonna get rejected. And if your naïve ass thought you could pay with the virtual card you’ll get a nice lesson in how cloud providers deal with fraud. They’ll never tell you that virtual cards aren’t allowed, because something something fraud, your payment will just mysteriously fail and you’ll get no guidance as to what went wrong and you have to basically guess it out.
This is basically any cloud provider by the way, not specific to Oracle. Ran into this with GCP recently. Insane experience. Pay with card. Get payment rejected by fraud team after several months of successful same amount payments on the same card and they won’t tell what the problem is. They ask for verification. Provide all sorts of verification. On the sixth attempt, send a picture of a physical card and all holds removed immediately
It’s such a perfect microcosm capturing of dealing with megacorps today. During that whole ordeal it was painfully obvious that the fraud team on the other side were telling me to recite the correct incantation to pass their filters, but they weren’t allowed to tell me what the incantation was. Only the signals they sent me and some educated guesswork were able to get me over the hurdle
Unironically yes. The (real) physical card I provided was a very cheap looking one. They didn’t seem to care much about its look but rather the physicality of it
Using AWS with virtual debit cards all right. Revolut cards work fine for me. What may also be a differentiator: Phone number used for registration is registered also for an account already having an established track record, and has a physical card for payments. (just guessing)
I used a privacy.com Mastercard linked to my bank account for Oracle's payment method to upgrade to PAYG. It may have changed, this was a few months ago. Set limit to 100, they charged and reverted $100.
yes I really hope a lot of these ML startups check out the history of ML tech a bit more because so many accessibility tools are built via ML but theyve been abandoned
will we ever see local, open source models? they are very important for accessibility reasons which this product can fit into, but wont because of it being cloud based (and proprietary).
When I was in fourth grade, I'd take the half a mile walk to the library almost daily which always made my parents happy because they assumed I was going to read, but instead I was hopping onto their computers, going to http://minecraft.net, and playing minecraft on IE :)
The longevity of Minecraft blows my mind. I was always aware of its existence but never looked into it. Now my kid is getting into it. So many generations of kids! It's incredible really.
That said, it has been a little sad digging into the current state of Java vs Bedrock, Bedrock iPad vs Bedrock Switch. The platform ubiquity is wonderful and the tradeoffs are what they are. But if folks were able to create a touch-capable web-powered Java Minecraft that would be a great fit for the iPad.
An interesting fact about Minecraft is that when it came out, storing the block IDs for the loaded area used up a big chunk of your computer's RAM and had to be optimized as much as possible. So it was 8 bits per block space, and when they expanded to 12 bits, they added on another array with 8 bits per 2 spaces.
Now, it doesn't even use block IDs any more. It uses one whole object per block type, one pointer to one of those objects per block space, and has a lot more block types. The on-disk format stores the entire string name of the block, once per 16x16x16 region it occurs in.
My source is the code itself, but you could also use the wiki's documentation about the on-disk data format.
It's fundamentally just a big array of one entry per block space. It was never too big for an average computer to handle - otherwise Minecraft wouldn't have been able to exist yet (maybe that's why it didn't exist until the time that it did) but they've gotten a lot less efficient since then, in the name of flexibility.
Before Minecraft existed I played Cube 2 on "coop edit" mode. Its world structure is an optimization you might be interested in: it represents the whole game world (of fixed size) as an octree. So the map starts as a node with 8 child slots (one for each corner of a cube); each is either completely solid, completely empty, or another node, recursively down to some maximum depth. Therefore Large empty areas and large solid areas are stored in about the same amount of space as small empty areas and small solid areas.
I set up two old computers to play some Minecraft with my youngest kid. Unfortunately it turns out recent versions are much slower than old ones. I have not bothered to bisect it to figure out exactly what version(s) killed performance. My weakest old computer can run the latest version with 1-2 fps. It can run 1.12 with at least around 30-40 fps, which is more than enough for me to be able to enjoy the game (being old enough to have grown up in an era when we were happily playing flight sims at 5-10 fps). Anyway it is nice that the launcher makes it possible and easy to go back and play older versions. I much prefer drm-free games, but at least supporting old versions like this is better than 99% of games.
Older versions of Minecraft are better; they've added too much junk to newer versions. I stick to 1.6.3, 1.7.10, 1.12.2. Heard they added a bunch of telemetry and ban capabilities in 1.18+, for which mods are needed.
DRM-free Minecraft launchers exist, mostly forks of MultiMC5. Now if only offline installers existed...
i play a lot of destiny 2, and I find a lot of the sites for showcasing destiny builds are absurdly information dense and waste so much time on explaining basic gameplay, and theyre also laid out badly where its hard to put it onto a 2nd monitor to quickly copy, so im working on a site to remedy this for myself
I'm about to graduate and can say professors who did this always had the most engaged students (after half dropped the class from <50% quiz grades). I personally found it annoying as it felt like I was in high school again, but if I was a professor I'd do it too.
