Giant Conversations

GC - #17 Happy 10th Birthday Giant Swarm

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It's Giant Swarm's 10th (and Oli had a birthday recently too). Tune in to the musings of your hosts who discuss Microsoft's Project Natick, the trick to a cleaner Google search, Rakuten Viber, and AI in all directions.
Giant Conversations Episode #17

Hosted by:

  • Oliver Thylmann
  • Tommy Hobin
    • Main topic: Happy Birthday Giant Swarm
    • Happy birthday to Oliver Thylmann and Giant Swarm!
      • Swarmalicious News
      • Microsoft waves goodbye to underwater data centers: Microsoft's Project Natick was deemed a successful trial for it's testing grounds but has no plans on submersing any more data centers. Underwater data centers saw one-eighth of the failure rate compared to on-land counterparts:

        • Pros of underwater data centers:

        • Low cooling costs
        • Abundant real estate
        • Potentially sustainable energy sourcing (eg. electricity from wave)

          • Cons

          • Higher hardware maintenance and upgrade costs

          • Higher network costs (1 cable = single point of failure)

          • Physical security (eg. sabotage)

          • On Twitter, Ken Shirriff took it upon himself to open up a subway paper ticket.

            • The goal was to find out how the RFID works and how could it be manufactured cheaply enough to mass produce.
            You can buy an 8-inch silicon wafer with these chips for $9000. That sounds expensive, but a wafer holds an amazing 100,587 tiny chips. That yields a price of nine cents per chip, making them cheap enough to use in disposable tickets.

          • Perses, a Grafana alternative is currently in the process of becoming a sandbox CNCF project.

            • Marian mentioned this about the project "My first impression: It works. It appears familiar (for a Grafana user). The look and feel isn’t as polished as Grafana’s." Other comments focused on GitOps as Code and

            AI in the News
            • OpenAI Selects Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to Extend Microsoft Azure AI Platform
            • The Trick to a Cleaner Google Search. The search added AI overviews on top of older extras, but you can get rid of all that. Once the trick is used, there is no surfacing metadata like address or link info or no knowledge panels, but also, no ads. Tommy couldn't handle the parameters of basic URL so wen to https://udm14.com/ to get AI Fee search.
            • Rakuten Viber’s New AI-powered Feature Summarizes Group Chats in an Instant. Viber has over 1.17 Billion users globally. Used commonly in Southeast Asia, or Central and Eastern Europe.
              • News to me

              Is 2024 the year for robots in hotels? In short, the answer is "No" but Co-Bots are being experimented with since the opening of the Henn na Hotel in Tokyo 9 years ago, which is staffed by robots and humans..

              The Beauty and Challenges of AI-Generated Artistic Gymnastics. SPOILER: It doesn't look real at all!

              ...more
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              Giant ConversationsBy Giant Swarm GmbH