Studio711.com – Ben Martens

I distinctly remember sitting in a Computer Science class at Purdue around the turn of the century (I might as well own it, I’m getting older) where a professor was trying to convince us that the model of paying once for software was going away. He certainly was right. Everything is a subscription now, and those subscriptions can be a huge drag on your financial future. I feel like we are pretty careful about any recurring subscriptions, but let’s review them and see how we’re doing:

• Amazon – At $139/year, this isn’t cheap, but we use it a lot. I know there are various feelings about shopping at Amazon, but I love all the extra family/hobby time it gives me because I can just have stuff show up instead of driving around in traffic trying to find some random item.
• Monarch Money – After Mint closed, I was looking for new personal finance software and I’m happy that I landed on Monarch. It’s $100/year well-spent. It’s what I’m using to write this post because I can easily find recurring bills. If you only do one thing for your financial future, spend time every month categorizing your transactions and keep a solid understanding of where all your money is going. If you want 50% off your first year, consider using my referral link.
• Comcast Internet – I keep costs low here by buying my own modem, getting the cheapest plan I can find, and setting an annual reminder to sign up for a new one year contract at a lower price. We currently pay $56/year for 500/30 service. That’s way more download speed than we need (I lived fine with 100Mbps until very recently) but this was the best deal when it was time to renew. Pro-tip: don’t let them upsell you on speed. You will almost never notice the difference between 100Mbps and 500Mbps. This is coming from someone who works fully remotely and has over 50+ devices on the network.
• Xfinity Mobile – Our total household cell phone bill each month is $25. No that’s not a typo. Xfinity Mobile operates on the same network as Verizon and I can’t tell any difference from when we were paying $80/month for Verizon. That $25 includes two lines with 1GB of shared data. Yes that’s ridiculously small but since I work from home, I rarely need cell data, and, more importantly, knowing that we have almost no data available means that we do not spend any time surfing around on our phones when we’re out and about. If we need to bump up to unlimited data for a month, it’s only $65 total. If you don’t want Xfinity Mobile, there are plenty of other similar companies like Mint Mobile, Boost Mobile, Straight Talk, etc. I don’t understand how the big companies still exist.
• Spotify – Tyla and I both listen to music for much of the day and so we have a the $15/month family plan. It’s integrated into our Tesla too so we get access to our playlists and the full library anywhere we go. And since we have the family plan, it was easy to add Elijah and keep his musical tastes out of our recommendations.
• YouTube – We pay the $15/month to have no ads on YouTube. I’m allergic to ads. Unless there’s no other option, I’d rather not watch something than watch something with ads. This YouTube subscription is permanent. We carefully manage our other streaming TV services, but YouTube is a constant. For now we just share my account, but when Elijah is old enough to get out of his kids account, we’ll upgrade to the family plan. This does include YouTube Music which theoretically should be as good as Spotify but my attempts in the past to switch over have fizzled out. If you love YouTube Music, I’d love to learn more about why you love it.
• Prime Video – I was very frustrated when Amazon nickel-and-dimed us by making it an extra $3/month to get rid of ads on Prime Video even with a Prime account. It still feels very cheap to me, but we’re currently playing it. This is one of the temporary subscriptions. We’ll drop it and move on to something else soon.
• Disney+/Hulu – Again, I pay for the no-ads version at around $21/month. We’ve had this for about the last six month while Elijah and I are plowing through tons of Star Wars content. I’ve canceled our subscription though and starting in December I think we’ll switch over to Netflix for a while.
• Trakt – This $60/year service that helps us keep track of the TV and movies that we watch. It’s especially helpful since we hop around services. When we come back to a service, I can easily see what episode we were on in each show. It’s also a good way for me to remember shows that I want to watch with just Tyla or as a family. There are a lot of different front-ends to Trakt but I just use the standard app.
• Duolingo – I’m almost up to 1900 days on my Duolingo streak. I pay $80/year for this and I’m most of the way through the Spanish program. Once I complete it, I think I might drop Duolingo and switch to another language app that is a little less gamified.
• Tesla Premium Connectivity – This is another splurge that costs us $100/year but it means that our Tesla has a lot of additional features such as streaming music (Spotify!), live traffic, satellite-view maps, live sentry mode cameras, and when we are parked, we can watch video streaming services (with separate subscription) like Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube.

I’m pretty quick to drop services that I don’t think are worth the money, and I know what I would drop if we needed to find a little more room in the budget. If you’re curious to learn any more about these services, I’m happy to share why we like them!

If you’re curious about what I’m thinking about at work, three recent videos will help give you a taste.

The first one is a presentation by my manager at the Open Compute Project Global Summit. He talked about how AI training data centers cause massive and rapid power fluctuations which are problematic for electrical grids and introduced the shared approach taken by Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI to solve this.

The second one is Satya. He talks about the development of the Fairwater 2 data center and the path to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). While his scope is obviously way bigger than my team’s, we are closely involved in the projects he discusses.

Satya says that this AI revolution might just be the biggest thing since the industrial revolution. It’s an amazing time to be in this industry and I’m super thankful to have a behind-the-scenes seat for it!

Mark Russinovich is the CTO of Azure. He’s one of the smartest people around and when he gives talks, it’s usually worth a listen. At the recent Ignite conference, he talked about recent Azure innovations architecture and a lot of these (especially the ones dealing with compute resources) are in my part of the company. This one is definitely the most technical of the three videos that I’ve shared here.

In 2020, I built a PC right before COVID hit and all the prices went sky high. This year I built a PC and… prices are going sky high (but thankfully no global pandemic yet.) The PC that I built in September was right around $1500 but now those same parts would cost me over $2500! I knew I was getting a great deal on the video card, but the real shocker is how much memory prices have increased. I paid $240 for two sticks of 32 GB DDR5-6000 memory. That same purchase now would cost $880! RAM prices started increasing almost immediately after my purchase and haven’t stopped.

Prices are climbing because the memory and storage market has been hit with a perfect storm. Manufacturers have cut back on consumer production while shifting more of their supply toward enterprise customers who are trying to meet the massive AI demand spike. At the same time, consumers started increasing demand for new parts.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for this issue to get resolved, but I’m thankful to be writing this on a brand new machine that was bought literally days before the price increases started!

It has been just over 10 years since I was first introduced to a team process called “Golazo”. It as developed inside the company and there wasn’t much information available on it publicly… until recently. I’ve been spending time gathering various documents and recordings about it, attempting to remove any internal jargon, and then publishing it on GitHub. Today I also made a blog post on the official Azure Compute blog.

It’s a bit difficult to get people excited about a team process, but this one has had such an enormous impact on my job trajectory and satisfaction that I’m happy to get to share it externally. I won’t go into the full sales pitch, but here are three of my favorite parts:

• I’m limited to working on two things at once. Context switching and multi-tasking is not only proven to be inefficient, but personally it also adds a lot of mental weight. Focusing deeply on only one or two tasks at a time keeps me from feeling like I’m getting buried and also lets me do better work because I’m not having to reload all the context.
• It’s hard to get people to write documentation, but writing down what I’m doing, how I’m doing it, and why I’m doing it does amazing things for not only helping me sort out my own thoughts but also for getting feedback from others, teaching newer team members, and keeping a written history of our decisions. We do this for every task (where a task is something that takes between 1 day and 2 weeks.) It has made the code reviews at the end much more enjoyable because we’re not having architecture arguments after someone spent a bunch of time writing code. Plus, we have a huge knowledge base of information that has just grown organically. I don’t have to waste brain space trying to remember it all because I know I can look it up at any point (and increasingly, I can ask AI questions about it.)
• We succeed and fail as a team. Generally this is fun. Sometimes it is awkward. But forcing yourself to take shared responsibility for everything on the team improves design discussions up front and encourages more ideas about how to make improvements to avoid problems in the future.

This is by no means the most common method of working inside the company, but it’s the best one I’ve seen. There have been a few points in my career where I’ve had the unique experience of starting up a new team or working by myself for a while, and even when I’m working on my own, I still follow this process. It helps me visualize the work that needs to happen, stay focused, and keep a log of my past decisions.

While I tried to organize the GitHub docs into something consumable, I know that it can be intimidating to try to make sense of it all so please feel free to contact me directly for more information!

February of 2020 was the last time I built a PC. I had decided to build something that would do a better job handling video editing because I was just starting to teach myself Davinci Resolve. A month later, COVID hit, prices skyrocketed, and I was spending 5-10 hours a week editing video for our online church services. It was a huge blessing to have that new PC to speed up my work.

Fast forward to today and we’re nearing the end of Windows 10 support. The old PC that I use for a file server, cloud backup client, and security camera server is not able to upgrade to Windows 10 and I’m ready to replace it anyway. But instead of just building a simple PC for that, I decided to replace it with my 2020 PC and that leaves me “needing” to build a new main PC. Yay!

As usual, I spent a long time researching all my options. I recently bought the full license to Davinci Resolve Studio so I was targeting its requirements. I don’t game much on my PC but the video editing is nearly as taxing in many areas. Ken had just had a great experience buying a PC from Skytech Gaming and they had a pre-configured option that was almost exactly what I was planning to build anyway. I ended up building myself anyway because I could save money on the Windows license (with my company discount) and get double the RAM while saving myself a couple hundred bucks. Here’s what I chose:

• AMD Ryzen 7 7800 X3D 4.2 GHz 8-Core Processor
• Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE 66.17 CFM CPU Cooler
• MSI MAG B650 TOMAHAWK WIFI ATX AM5 Motherboard
• Corsair Vengeance RGB 64 GB (2 x 32 GB)
• Samsung 990 Pro 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive
• Asus PRIME GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB Video Card
• Fractal Design Meshify C ATX Mid Tower Case
• MSI MAG A850GL PCIE5 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply

It was really interesting designing this using AI to help me. It was able to pull in a lot of reference material about my specific use case and compare multiple options so I felt like I was making a pretty educated choice.

All the parts finally arrived and I carved out some time on a Saturday to start the build. Pretty soon, I was very much regretting not buying the pre-built system. The first problem I hit was that I could not get it to POST. The motherboard just showed lights indicating it couldn’t find the CPU and RAM. I hadn’t done a partial test before putting it all in the case so eventually I gave in and completely undid the build, tearing it down to its bare components. It still didn’t work. So I pulled the CPU cooler off, cleaned off the thermal paste, carefully reseated the CPU and… it still didn’t work. I exhausted long checklists and after hours of work, I was nowhere. At this point I was looking up return policies to see if I could just get most of my money back and go with the pre-built system.

But then I finally noticed a line in a response from AI that pointed me to a video where a guy commented that he’s noticed that with recent AMD CPUs, you sometimes have to wait 5-10 minutes after it boots for the BIOS to figure everything out. Huh? It seemed crazy but what else was I going to try. I set a timer and walked away to cool down.

I came back to a glorious green light on the motherboard! I plugged in a monitor and could see the BIOS. Victory!

Almost. You maybe have noticed I started this part of the story with “the first problem”. That’s because when I plugged in my fancy video card, I couldn’t even get to the BIOS. I eventually got to a state where I couldn’t even boot to the BIOS with the video card removed! I had to reset the CMOS by using a screwdriver to jump two pins on the motherboard. I’m not sure if I changed something in the BIOS to get it working or if just reseating the card was what fixed it, but voila, it worked. I was then able to install Windows, add all the drivers, and that was pretty much the end of the build.

Oh and I should also mention that when I took the build apart, I broke the USB header on the motherboard. The specific connector used by Fractal for the front USB ports on the case is pretty much impossible to remove. Numerous other people have apparently had the same problem. I tried to repair it but eventually gave up and just bought a USB hub to sit on top of the case instead. It’s a frustrating reminder of the difficulties I hit, but in the end, it’s not that big of a deal.

With this rocky start, I keep nervously waiting for something to go wrong, but the machine has performed great! I had debated about liquid or air cooling, but the setup I have seems to be keeping everything cool and it’s much quieter than my last machine.

Even better, it runs Davinci Resolve Studio incredibly well! The last video I made for our trip to Yellowstone took 3:50 minutes to render on my old machine but this new one did it in 1:25! And when I’m editing the video and moving around in the timeline, it’s buttery smooth.

I’ll let the old machine sit for a bit before I pave it and turn it into my file server and security camera server. Hopefully this new machine continues to serve me well for many years… and next time I’ll buy a pre-built one.

AI is transforming every aspect of life, but one very important area that I think we’re just starting to explore is how AI can speed up physical research. Specifically, you’ll hear the term “agentic AI” which basically means that the AI does more than just answer questions. It can, for example, execute some code to run an experiment or click buttons for you in various apps. All of that can sound vague, but a recent presentation about the new “Microsoft Discovery” platform is a solid example of this.

Before we get into that, have you heard of “PFAS” or maybe “forever chemicals”? Derek from Veritasium did a comprehensive overview of the problem recently.

My area of the company was exploring some extremely promising fluids that would revolutionize the way we cool datacenter computers, and while they were different enough to be safe from PFAS concerns, we stopped using them anyway.

But the problem still exists. How can we meet the ever-increasing demands for data center cooling? Enter the Microsoft Discovery platform. Using this AI tool, researchers were able to identify a new environmentally friendly coolant in just 200 hours instead of the years that it would normally have taken. Watch this 5 minute demo to see how it all worked:

It’s difficult to wrap our minds around the scale of progress here, but try to imagine this level of capability increase across ALL AREAS OF SCIENCE. These initially discoveries are just the first hints of the flood that is coming.

There are companies that have a seemingly permanent reputation for bad customer service. After the last 1+ years that I’ve spent battling with Century Link, I think they deserve a spot on the podium…

Our church was built in the late 1950s and only has telephone lines running to it. There weren’t any lines from the cable company so our only option for internet was DSL. We got 20 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up and that was all we could get. I’ve been responsible for our contracts at church for the last 10 years and Century Link was always a royal pain to deal with, but it started to escalate in October 2023.

October 30, 2023
Century Link said they could upgrade our service to 80 down, 10 up. That would be a big improvement for us so we decided to go for it.

November 22, 2023
Our appointment day finally arrived… and we were immediately stuck. The tech they sent said he wasn’t allowed to work on the ticket because we were installing internet for the church address but the service address on the account was for the house on the property where our pastor lives. The two addresses are different but it’s all one property.

November 27, 2023
Every time I called Century Link it took 30-60 minutes. Later in this process I started measuring the duration, but for now, just keep that in mind. The person I spoke to on the phone eventually said that they could not give us internet service at the church address even though it was fine at the address where the house is. So we were stuck. We had working internet that was apparently “illegal” according to their rules and depending on which tech showed up, we may or may not be able to get any service at all. It was time for a change.

December 2024
Over the next couple months we were able to switch to Comcast Business and the experience was glorious. They were excellent at communicating, the speeds were fantastic (100 down, 100 up), they ran a line to our property for free, and the bill was less than the old DSL line we had before.

February 12, 2024
I called to cancel our internet service with Century Link. We had to keep our two phone lines because fire code required that our fire alarm have two physical phone lines hooked up to it. So the new bill for two physical phone lines that we never use was going to be $117.33/month. Great.

March 19, 2024
I thought our service was canceled but we kept getting voicemails saying they needed to come out an shut off our internet service. These voicemails were extremely frustrating because they didn’t leave any number to call them back and when I’d call their customer support line, they didn’t know anything about it.

March 21, 2024
Our bill never went down to the new price and they still hadn’t been out to actually shut off the internet, but I was able to get them to prorate the bill so we wouldn’t pay for that service for the previous month.

May 7, 2024
I opened a case to report that we had no dialtone on our phone lines. We found out about this because our alarm system was unable to communicate and the problem started April 25.

May 10, 2024
I waited at church all day for a tech to show up. He never did. I spent the whole day at church waiting.

May 11, 2024
I called the number to reschedule the appointment. Apparently a tech was never assigned to my appointment on May 10 but I wasn’t notified.

May 13, 2024
I called to complain that we’re still paying for internet even though we asked for it to be cancelled three months ago. She said they couldn’t stop charging us for it until they sent out a tech out to shut it off but they couldn’t shut it off until the phone line issue was fixed.

May 14, 2024
A tech showed up at church to work on our phones so I dropped everything and drove over there. He determined that our lines were out because of vandalism. Someone had cut some of the main lines and the ticket would have to be transferred to another team that handles the main lines.

May 15, 2024 – 20 minutes
I called to see when the lines would be fixed. I got a new ticket number and was told that someone would come out on May 24. So yes, our business was going to be without phones for 9 more days.

May 24, 2024 – 15 minutes
I arrived at church at 7:45am for our “8am-5pm” service window and then got a text saying the window was now 12:30-4:30. Around 11:45am I got a text saying they were rescheduling and the website said the new date was June 3. I called again to complain but didn’t get much more information other than they were probably working on repairing the cut cable, but there was no way for me or the person I called to actually communicate with the team that does these repairs.

June 3, 2024
I sat at church from 8am to 12pm waiting for someone to show up. Nobody came. I called around noon to get more info and was told the new date was June 11.

June 11, 2024
They missed another appointment.

June 12, 2024
I called to get more info. The new date for my repair was June 14 and I would get a text message when it was fixed.

June 24, 2024 – 40 minutes
I called again and asked to be escalated to a supervisor. She didn’t have any additional information and said she would give me a call back on a regular basis to update me on the situation.

July 8, 2024 – 30 minutes
I hadn’t received any calls from that supervisor so I asked to be transferred to her. She wasn’t available so I left a message and she did call me back but there was no new information. She was going to look for more and call me back.

July 29, 2024
I called back and asked for the manager but he couldn’t find anybody by that name. The tech I spoke to was very friendly and said he feels bad because he gets a lot of calls like this from our area, but there wasn’t anything more he could do.

October 18, 2024
Every week or so, I’d get a text message saying that our service would definitely be repaired by a new date about a week in the future. All this time we were paying over $100/month for no service. We finally shut off autopay. Earlier we had found a new alarm company that new the fire codes better and was able to set us up with a cellular connection instead of the physical lines so we were finally free of Century Link.

October 29, 2024 – 74 minutes
Looking at all the money we had paid since we first reported the issue, I believed we were owed $529.97. I went through multiple people trying to cancel our service and get our money back and I eventually got transferred to a black hole after 32 minutes. So I called back and started over again. His math worked out to $512.09 and I figured that was close enough. He said I would get a billing statement showing the credit and then a few weeks later we’ll get the check.

December 3, 2024
Our November bill showed a credit of $297.47 with no mention of what happened to the original $512.09 number or the $529.97 that we had actually paid. The website does show that our account is finally closed but we still have not received the check.

January 9, 2025 – 8 minutes
I’m saving time on these calls by recording my path through the phone tree. It normally takes about 6 minutes to get to a human but I’m able to save a lot of time by knowing which numbers to press. The person said our credit hadn’t been released yet. She put in another request and I should wait another 60 days to get the check.

March 17, 2025
Still no check. I called again and was told the check should arrive within 30 days.

April 5, 2025
The check finally arrived.

How does a company like this even stay in business? Throughout the whole thing, the only time I ever spoke to the same person twice was when I had a couple calls in a row with the same supervisor. Every person that answered the phone would infuriatingly say “I’m going to do my best to own your experience today.” That clearly wasn’t true. They just wanted a good survey result at the end. I lost so much time and sleep over this experience and sometimes I wonder if the lines are still broken even today.

Ultimately I’m very thankful that we moved to Comcast internet right before the problems started with a lack of dialtone and I’m also super thankful that we were able to move our alarm system to the cellular monitoring.