This is a venting post, not an actual comparison

For people looking to spin up a VM that can be used outside of their home networks, there’s several free offers out there, including major names like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Alibaba. Personally I’d rank them like this:

1. Great tier: Google Cloud Platform, $300 trial credit for 12 months, reasonable pricing. Realistically you’ll probably get around 10 months out of your trial if you provision your VM correctly). UI is a bit confusing but overall usable.
   Very transparent about pricing, even has a toast message showing your remaining fund and trial period. Doesn’t charge you a cent after your trial period ends, it just turns off your VM(s).
2. Meh tier: Microsoft Azure, $200 trial credit for 12 months, worse pricing. While 200 doesn’t seem to be that much worse than Google’s offering, in reality it is a LOT less due to the higher pricing of VM provisioning. I burned through that $200 in around 3 months. The UI is more intuitive than GCP though.
   Less transparent about your trial period than GCP, but still doesn’t charge you a cent after your trial period ends, it just turns off your VM(s).
   Alibaba cloud is somewhat similar, I haven’t used it that much to have a solid opinion, but on paper it should be on par with Azure. Will update later.
3. Trash tier: Amazon Web Service. Shitty UI, took me longer than all other services when it come to spinning up a VM, and even when it’s up and running, configuring networking to connect to it was challenging. I gave up after a few days of trying, and then kind of forgot about it. When I come back after a year, I was surprised to see my account suspended for ‘unpaid bills’. And check this out:

No surprise there, having dealt with Amazon before as a student, I am positive this is a government sanctioned scam organization. Avoid Amazon at all cost!

In case you’ve been living under a rock, you must’ve heard about Parasite, the critically acclaimed movie from Korean director Bong Joon-ho, who just took home the highest honor at the Oscar last night. The first foreign movie to ever take home that gold statue.

As an Asian, this news made me profoundly proud, but from an academic point of view, I am somewhat disappointed that Parasite won. Don’t get me wrong there, it’s a fantastic movie, and it deserves this title more than any of the Best Picture winners in the last 10 years.

But this year? I don’t know.

I’ve always thought the first foreign movie to take home the golden statue for Best Picture would be something along the line of Forrest Gump, or Inception, something that blows everyone’s mind everytime time you rewatch it, something that you remember forever as one of the greatest movie ever made. Parasite, while being an exceptional movie, is definitely not something that you’d remember in a few years time.

And you can’t use the ‘but there’s no better movie released this year’ to justify its win either.

Competing against Parasite this year is 1917, the one-take movie that would probably go down in history as one of the greatest masterpieces ever made. Literally everyone who was lucky enough to experience it in the theater confirmed that it is the greatest cinematic experience they have ever had in their entire lives, and that is to put it lightly.

Having access to all Google Fonts is crucial for any designer these days, so this script is pretty much essential whenever you make a fresh install of your OS.

Credit to Quinton Pike on Github

Install

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/qrpike/Web-Font-Load/master/install.sh | bash

Uninstall

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/qrpike/Web-Font-Load/master/uninstall.sh | bash