What worked for me was handing them a credit card and transitioning myself out of the free tier. (I'd use the free credits they offer prior to doing this - they give you something like $300 immediately on signup.)
The always-free infra remains free, you just have the chance of incurring a bill if you make selections that aren't free or exceed block storage/egress (200GB/10TB) limits of the always-free tier. Leaving the free/trial tier gives you access to a much larger pool of instances. I never successfully deployed an A1 instance prior to becoming a "paying" customer - now I've done it hundreds of times without ever having an issue.
I've been running a small k0s cluster and a standalone webserver for months while incurring about $2.50 - $3 in spending each month, primarily from being slow to remove instance snapshots sitting in block storage.
Even things that are oddly expensive on AWS - like NAT - are free on Oracle. There are zero gotchas.
I hit the same roadblock as the above user and it never occurred to me to just cross the barrier with cash and then scale back to free. Thanks for this.
It doesn't actually charge you anything. You just have to put a card down to be considered a priority because now you potentially can spend money & therefore are more important then the other free-tier losers. /s It's still free tier & still free.
The free tier is also based on capcity usage, and not instances. If you want 3 cores on 1 machine & 1 on another, they're cool with that. I personally run Pangolin on a 1 core & self-hosted github runners on a 3 core.
Apple quietly introduced a native container runtime in macOS 26—and it doesn’t look like Docker/Podman under the hood. Instead of running all containers inside a single Linux host VM, Apple’s CLI (“container”) spins up a lightweight VM per container via Virtualization.framework. That means each container gets its own kernel, IP, ext4 block storage, and explicit CPU/memory limits. On M3+ Macs, you can even expose nested virtualization (I put a VM in your Container!) It’s OCI‑compatible (your existing Docker/Podman/Kubernetes images work), and Rosetta 2 even lets you run amd64 images on Apple Silicon.
I benchmarked Apple’s runtime (v0.5.0) against Docker/Colima on an M1 Pro (32 GB, macOS 26.0.1). I measured image pulls, cold/warm starts, lifecycle ops, parallel starts, file churn, plus stress‑ng, fio, and 7zip.
A few takeaways:
Startup: sub‑second starts as advertised; “container system start” returns instantly (no host VM spin‑up).
CPU/Memory: competitive or slightly favorable to Apple in stress‑ng and 7zip; memory tests consistently leaned Apple.
I/O: Fio (the flexible I/O tester!) flipped the story—Docker performed substantially better on randomized reads and mixed RW.
Clickthrough to the post to find exact commands, scripts, and full outputs, plus charts comparing Apple vs Docker/Colima.
My understanding is that the firmware has some sort of DRM and it’s being sold - not freely distributed. (Admittedly, the comment I saw mentioning cost pegged it at 1k, not 20k for a license.)
My experience with more traditional (non-Whisper-based) diarization & transcription is that it's heavily dependent on how well the audio is isolated. In a perfect scenario (one speaker per audio channel, well-placed mics) you'll potentially see some value from it. If you potentially have scenarios where the speaker's audio is being mixed with other sounds or music, they'll often be flagged as an additional speaker (so, speaker 1 might also be speaker 7 and 9) - which can make for a less useful summary.
You're saying that diarization quality is dependent on speaker isolation? I should have clarified, to my knowledge whisper does not perform that step, and whether I need to do diarization is what I'm trying to figure out. (Probably I do.) Pyannote.audio has been suggested, but I ran into some weird dependency thing I didn't feel like troubleshooting late last night, so I have not been successful in using it yet.
They've been seeing more and more sponsors and presenters pull out in recent days. Better to cancel it and seem like you're doing the right thing than hold a poorly attended convention, get bad PR for doing so, and still risk infecting a large number of people.
The academic job market was very different in 2006 than even a couple of years later. With the downturn came a flood of people staying on for grad school instead of looking for jobs - and with them came a flood of free labor for the universities.
She probably assumed with her Columbia degree she'd have no trouble landing something quickly, even with her artificial constraints.
> There are 346 Division I schools. Of them, 123 are classified as members of the Football Bowl Subdivision, the top tier of sports competition. These are colleges and universities that are eligible to compete in bowl games and have average attendance of at least 15,000 at their home games. [...] "A total of 20 athletics programs in the FBS reported positive net revenues for the 2013 fiscal year."
Most restaurants don't even list their good timeslots on OpenTable, as they're capable of filling those on their own.
It's mostly used to list the less busy "collar hours" (the hours adjacent to any rush) in the hopes that an alternate means to advertising might flip an empty table to a populated table.
I'll avoid talking to a human to make a reservation if possible, but I've had dozens of occasions where OpenTable shows no available reservations at say, 7pm and a quick phone call is all it takes to land the time I'd like.
I had a similar issue after moving from Illinois to Wisconsin and getting new plates - but forgetting to update the plates within I-Pass. (So, I had a valid I-Pass, it was just on the same old car with new plates.)
A few years later I received a collections notice for $1,400 for ~$30 worth of tolls. (This was the first notice they'd sent me. No one could explain why.)
After spending hours on the phone with I-Pass the best they could do was reduce the fine to $300 while making the snarky offer that I could go to court if I didn't like it.
This was effectively a customer service issue (I was a valid customer in good standing), and I still wound up paying 10x the actual cost just to avoid missing work and traveling.
As an Illinois resident, I had a different experience dealing with I-Pass issues. Apparently my card on file expired, so they couldn't refill my account. By the time I realized a week or so after noticing that I was getting the yellow light and not blue, I updated the card, paid the outstanding tolls. A month later, I get a fine notice for like $500. I called customer service. Took about 90 minutes on hold, but once I got a hold of someone, the gal was very pleasant, took a look at my account, said something along the lines of "Your accounts in good standing, I'll cancel the fines." Never heard another peep about it. Also one of the few times I asked to speak with her manager to let the manager how happy I was with the service (rare for a government employee).
Worth mentioning the ipass (and tollway) phone lines are actually handled by a group that helps people who are blind, visually impaired, disabled and Veterans. I have never had a bad experience with calling in.
On iOS the “Unobstruct” app ($0.99 - no connection to me) removes the popover nicely. It’s also great for removing dickbars that block a horizontal slice of the page.
The always-free infra remains free, you just have the chance of incurring a bill if you make selections that aren't free or exceed block storage/egress (200GB/10TB) limits of the always-free tier. Leaving the free/trial tier gives you access to a much larger pool of instances. I never successfully deployed an A1 instance prior to becoming a "paying" customer - now I've done it hundreds of times without ever having an issue.
I've been running a small k0s cluster and a standalone webserver for months while incurring about $2.50 - $3 in spending each month, primarily from being slow to remove instance snapshots sitting in block storage.
Even things that are oddly expensive on AWS - like NAT - are free on Oracle. There are zero gotchas.