• I once set an S3 lifecycle setting that accidentally affected 3 years worth of logs to Glacier. The next morning I woke up to a billing alert and an AWS bill with an extra $250k in charges (our normal run rate was $30k/month at the time). Basically I spent my entire add annual cloud budget for the year overnight.

    Thankfully after an email to our account rep and a bunch of back and forth I was able to get the charges reduced to $4,300.

      • The problem is having a competent team to manage your infrastructure. You can do a lot with a handful of people - but you need competences spanning a lot of areas, and finding that is pretty hard.

        If you can get a competent team the only advantage cloud still has is the ability to quickly scale up and down - but if there might be a need for that it’d still be better to go hybrid, most on your own hardware, and just the prepared ability to quickly bring up cloud workers if needed. The cost savings of properly doing it yourself are so huge that it still might be cheaper to just have some pre-provisioned standby hardware for that, though.

  •  eezeebee   ( @eezeebee@lemmy.ca ) 
    link
    fedilink
    English
    381 year ago

    Never let the car run out of gas. I was on the highway and the destination gas station was in sight. Well, even after putting more gas in from a Jerry can it wouldn’t start because debris clogged the fuel filter. Getting it towed + repaired was like $1000 when I could have just stopped at a gas station earlier.

  • Not all landscapers can “landscape”. Hired a guy to build a pad for a shed which included a small retaining wall. The guy doesn’t own a level, and the end result is visibly not level. I showed him with my laser level what was going on, and he didn’t believe me. He started adding MORE material to the high spot.

    He was aggressive about needing to be paid. Very aggressive. I paid him since he knows where we live. Unless we sue him and win, we’re out $4800, and to have it done correctly (with a fancier wall) will be $6500.

    TLDR: Don’t hire a lawn service company to build anything.

    • That sucks, I’m sorry that happened. But landscapers are not concrete people. I will say that any of either profession I’ve dealt with were aggressive about payment. I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy tried to give you a change order for additional money?

    • thats when you take a fraction of the money you would have paid him, and buy security cameras for your house. High quality security cameras, with night vision.

      Then contact a lawyer for damages to undo what he did.

  • That starting the work is half the work. I wasted a lot of time procrastinating, it took me shamefully long to realize that if I could just start an activity for 5 minutes, taking it to completion is then relatively easy

  • I wanted a newer car, so I rolled my existing auto loan into the newer vehicles loan. So easy right?

    I was upside down on it for years and years. It’s so disheartening to drive a vehicle that’s falling apart and stranding you everywhere but still owe $10k on it. It was an awful decision that took years of pain but that was my lesson on buying things I can afford.

  • Art school isn’t worth it, period. I got a far better art education through my local community college by far, from instructors who weren’t incrediblely stuck up and full of themselves.

    That was an 80k expense that I’m still paying off almost 20 years later, and I didn’t even finish my degree.

    I went back to get my AS at a CC and took some art classes there. 10/10, far better instruction for a fraction of the price.

  • As Eisenhower said,

    beware the engagement-wedding-genderreveal-kids-mortgage-divorce-childsupport-legal-industrial complex.

    I may be mis-remembering exactly what he said. but I think that was the gist.

  • Not me personally, but one of my career mentor’s friend’s took down the entirety of Google Ads as an intern for like 10 minutes. Apparently it was a multi-million dollar mistake, but they fixed the issue so it couldn’t happen again and all was well afterward.

  • College only makes sense economically if you have a plan.

    If you’re a naive, idealistic, scatterbrained, autistic, traumatized, brainiac redneck raised into terrible character by a spineless single parent who drove off the good one, like I was, then your best bet after high school is some entry level job, heath insurance, and therapy for a few years.

    I had an emotional system the equivalent of a broken pair of legs. I basically signed up for a walking journey with broken legs, because (a) I had no conception of what the “legs” were that carry a person through college successfully, and (b) I had no idea they could be broken, and © I had no idea mine were broken.

    I was like “sweet! big journey!” and the kids from healthier backgrounds and I got along fine, and they got their shit done and I mostly tore my hair out and cried and took super long walks and experimented with drugs. I had been led to believe that the journey through life was like driving through a country. I didn’t realize that traveling in this journey meant transforming the self. I had no conception of self transformation as an aspect of life, of directed growth, of evolving consciously. All I had was this feeling that life was like a river and I was kayaking down it seeing new stuff.

    I don’t really know how to say what the lesson was. It was the most expensive lesson I ever learned, because not only did it cost me a huge amount of money, it also cost me about twenty years of my life.

    • I have similar experience with you, and boy do I waste so much money on that. Wish I could afford therapy, because managing myself emotionally was a long, expensive and heartbreaking experience I wish I could skip over.