MrAwesome

Author here - a few months after the time of this story, we reoriented around a single purpose for the team, "Automate ourselves out of existence". It took a few months to remove all of the dependencies, tag all the alarms, train up all the team-specific oncalls, but we managed to do it, and I had the great honor of taking the very last SRO oncall on March 31, 2014 :)

In my time in SRO at FB, we actually had an alarm that would fire whenever enough #facebookisdown posts were made on Twitter!

Yeah! By the end of my time on the team, checking the news when I saw a rapid change in traffic was second nature. And later on in my career becoming interested in markets, even more so. Forex in particular - markets with trillions in daily liquidity don't take huge leaps unless something huge happened.

Author here, and that's exactly right! I think it was in my second or third month on the job.

And I really agree with your second point too! Without that in-person transfer of tribal knowledge, it would have taken me ages to learn the ropes well enough to take such a high-pressure high-stakes oncall.

OP of that thread here. Wanted to say that the first paragraph of your reply is the perfect encapsulation of what I wanted to get across in that post. It's not about the disaster scenarios, it's about the fact that these scenarios every web-scale company faces every day become a hell of a lot scarier when you just lost >50% of the company without an orderly transition

Pardon my ignorance here, but do you need to pay gas fees or buy tokens to transfer/mint?

A currency is generally intended mainly for commercial purposes, isn't it? I think the word commercialized isn't quite right for what I mean then.

So more specifically, I mean: "not for the purpose of creating or transferring monetary value, and not requiring the expenditure of money to create/send the amount of data necessary to host a simple plaintext/html page"

I am not aware of any non-commercialized crypto anything (from my understanding, this is sorta by definition, but maybe I'm missing something). Do you have any examples?

Yeah, as other commenters have said - the curtains are for bright city lights I can't turn off.

Personally, I have a simple electrical timer set to turn on a bright sunlight bulb at 6:30am, and I open the curtains during the day.

You're right on the money about camping and how it affects the body, in my experience. Light obviously isn't the only factor in camping feeling good - but I've also been reading lately that light exposure (and possibly direct sun exposure?) during the day is quite good for you.

Traditionally, the second one is viewed as terrifying because an alien race may see us as a potential future threat. In a lot of science fiction, they see some violent/awful news from Earth indicating that we're monsters, and decide that it would be better to go ahead and exterminate us before we can do unto others as we do unto ourselves.

So the thinking is less that we're a threat to them now (if they can get here, we certainly are not), but some intelligent beings may look at how we have treated one another over the last few centuries/millennia and decide that they don't want us (or any self-replicating machines we happen to plop out) roaming/colonizing/populating/enslaving/murdering/reeducating the galaxy.