Tinned_Tuna

GitHub is responsible for load-testing their systems to find their breaking point, they are responsible for setting appropriate quotas and rate limits, they are responsible for forecasting growth, they are responsible for sourcing capacity to match that growth, and they are responsible for pricing access to that capacity.

If this is some sort of AI-boom related load problem, they are also partly responsible for fanning those flames. I'm skeptical of the AI-boom narrative because other forges are not falling over so frequently; it seems unlikely that all competitors are massively over-provisioned or are not getting hammered by the same claimed boom.

Something doesn't add up and I am not inclined to give GitHub management the benefit of the doubt.

One thing I'd like to see modeled is how many excess deaths they cause in, for example, London.

Driving in London is already very safe because the street design prevents people going very fast. American roads are, by comparison, unsafe. That probably means AVs in those countries had a lot of low-hanging fruit, so they could have a significant impact by staying within the speed limit, for example. Without such low hanging fruit, will there be so much benefit in London?

London has excellent and very safe public transit, far safer than even professional drivers. If AVs are cheap and convenient enough to pull people off transit, that might expose enough people to higher risk that makes them overall kill more people than if they'd stayed on the tube.

Likewise, more driving (even EVs) generates more asphalt and brake pad dust, which cause respiratory illnesses. If they cause a drop in transit ridership compared to no AVs, how does that affect the excess deaths in the city?

My gut says that, in London and other cities with safer streets, they're going to have more difficulty getting such headline-grabbing numbers. Combine that with the potential to take people off safe transit and put them on the road and the balance might slightly tip against them.

This is presented as a fact, but lacks documented real-world instances, direct measurements, or even any proxy measures that suggest it's actually happening.

One thing that's potentially different, at least for Facebook, is the network effect. It only takes a few friends to start using Facebook for event planning for people to start missing events or worrying about missing out. That extra pressure cuts against individual choice.

Instagram is different, but you can see something similar happen on platforms with a chat feature. If people start to gravitate towards a singular app for talking, coordinating, etc. then there's the potential for resisters to be socially excluded. For most people, feeling socially excluded is a strong motivator. So far, this has mostly resulted in everyone having a fairly broad set of apps with chat features, so I'm not sure the centralizing power is as strong.

I don't think the author read even the Wikipedia page on Napoleon's invasion of Russia? Napoleon _did_ have reasons for attacking Russia, he _did_ prepare logistics. His motives, rationale, and actions are well-documented and widely studied.

> watching an unchecked megalomaniac march 685,000 soldiers into a Russian winter without a fur coat in sight

Napoleon famously crossed the Neman River in *June*.

I've seen this happen to a friend. Back in the noughties they built a home NAS similar to the one in the article, using fewer (smaller) drives. It was in RAID5 configuration. It lasted until one drive died and a second followed it during the rebuild. Granted, it wasn't using ZFS, there was no regular scrubbing, 00s drive failure rates were probably different, and they didn't power it down when not using it. The point is the correlated failure, not the precise cause.

Usual disclaimers, n=1, rando on the internet, etc.

p.14:

"Because 99.999% availability provides for less than 5 minutes of downtime per year, every operation performed to the system in production will need to be automated and tested with the same level of care. With a 5 minute per year budget, human judgement and action is completely off the table for failure recovery"

Hey!

What's the layman's 2-minute definition of a time crystal?

The name makes it sound very sci-fi, like it might have the ability to travel through time (!)

I am equally suspicious of creating a government agency for tracking all citizens. However, I worry that your proposed solution has three significant caveats.

Firstly, reliability tends to change slowly. Banks might not be tracking this, so it would take a long time for this problem to surface. The article indicates that they're already unreliable, and banks continue to rely on them.

Secondly, there's too little competition. There's no realistic alternative; especially when all three seem to be roughly equivalent in terms of reliability.

Finally, any single bank dropping a credit agency will cause that credit agency problems, but will likely cause themselves more problems. Individual banks have little incentive to act on their own. Some form of banking cartel would probably be needed to put sufficient pressure on the credit reporting agencies to effect change.