Droplets on digital ocean running docker containers. That’s as portable as it gets, but it’s also very DIY. A lot of the reasons you might use a cloud provider is the wide host of services that are meant to make your life easier.
Honestly it’s been my experience with Ruby that it’s Rails that can potentially be slow. Ruby is quite fast and even has a JIT option. Rails is by design opinionated, and for some cases I’ve found that I’ve had to work extra hard to ensure performance. That means refactoring code in slightly non traditional ways and having a deeper understanding of how Rails works under the hood (esp in the ORM). So if you think you can just use Ruby+Rails out of the box in its simplest form without experience and depth of understanding: yes it might be slow. But like with all things, you can go quite far with care and experience.
It’s not even that rails is necessarily slow, it’s more the way you use it that is slow. If you tie all your businesses logic to the database and commit complicated changes in transactions, sure it will be terribly slow.
What’s wrong with complicated (I’m not sure what that means - large numbers of rows updated? Disparate rows updated?) transactions? Depending on your RDBMS (and what it’s running on, config options, etc) this may or may not be slow.
The best advice I been given: “when your problems seem overwhelming, get busy solving other people’s problems. Not only will you feel good about helping others and get that feeling of productivity, seeing what others are dealing with will also give you perspective on your own problems and a renewed sense of hope and energy”. Volunteer somewhere. Help a friend out. But try to do it in person where you can get more of that human connection.
> The best advice I been given: “when your problems seem overwhelming, get busy solving other people’s problems. …”
As someone in the midst of trying this I can tell you personally it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. I think I’m starting to realize that this person is beyond my capability to help and all the time I’ve wasted helping them could have been spent improving my own situation
I think there's something to be said about the difference between "solving other people's problems" and "solving someone's problems". If the whole idea is to not be so invested into one life and get perspective, volunteering somewhere ought to be on a different league then trying to sort one specific person's life.
> I think I’m starting to realize that this person is beyond my capability to help and all the time I’ve wasted helping them could have been spent improving my own situation
From my personal environment: there are many people that are beyond my capability to help.
Came here to recommend doing good deeds for others. I find when I'm doing things for the benefit others I feel a lot better (as long as I'm resourced enough to do it). A therapist used to tell me that gratitude and doing good things for others were the most effective evidence-based behavioral interventions for depression.
That said, depression, fear, and lack of confidence are multi-faceted things with many different mitigating and exacerbating causes. Even diet and digestive ability can play a role! I find light exercise to mitigate the effects, too. But a sense of warm-heartedness toward yourself and others will be helpful no matter what.
That’s very much a talk to your CPA question - because it speaks to audit risk. The IRS wants to see you pay yourself a fair salary so you are paying the appropriate payroll taxes, social security, medicare, etc. The problem is “fair” is somewhat subjective and depends on the profitability of the business as well. I’m sorry this isn’t a clear answer, but it’s just not a clear matter. Seek advice and ask “how would you defend this stance in an audit”.
This case seems to largely center around this one point: "the ISP believes that it shouldn’t have to terminate Internet access so easily. This view was supported by several telecom industry groups, who all object to disconnecting subscribers’ internet access based on copyright claims."
and they lost the case. I'm not even sure where to start!
Wonderful write up, thank you! One question I’ve been trying to answer: I’ve been seeing more QR codes in the wild using dots instead of squares, and rounded edges instead of hard corners.
All my research suggests these are reader implementation specific and not guaranteed to work per the official spec.
But I find it hard to believe these codes are becoming more prevalent if they aren’t guaranteed to read.
You'd be surprised how incompetent most adults are at what they do. I'm sure some less technical person assumed QR reading works the same way everywhere, tested it with their device and went "Yess it works! Ship it!"
I also sometimes see QR codes that are inverted. Not all readers detect them but many enough do that they end up in print.
That being said, the QR code readers most people have in their pockets already have to be able to deal with all sorts of problems (blurry pictures, dust on lens, and many more scenarios) that rounded corners are unlikely to have an affect on any of them.
Rounded corners is handled similarly to blurry images, one of the main ideas is readers to be forgiving in what they accept, and rely on the error detection bits to tell if it is way off.
With error correction you can tolerate stylistic mangling.
The qr code scanning algorithm works based on contrast and is designed to work with poor cameras under poor light conditions. Whatever shapes, colors and shades are used are interpreted as either black or white squares.
The process starts by scanning for the 3 markers on the corners. That give you the square containing the qr content and it's orientation. The next jobs are figuring out the resolution of the square and the version of the qr code used. Eventually you end up knowing the grid dimensions. And then you simply scan the grid as the article outlines by simply averaging the pixels in each grid square to be "white" or "black". As long as you have enough contrast, most grid squares will scan correctly.
You can abuse this quite a bit before it starts breaking. There are some interesting QR codes out there that are barely recognizable as QR codes for people. But if you open them in an image editor and play with the levels and contrast a bit, they are obviously qr codes. And there's error correction too so it's OK if some of the qr code is scanned incorrectly.
