Absent a societal collapse, I never thought I’d live in an era of computing where I’d observe everything getting worse and backsliding into brokenness.
Guess it was inevitable with corporate dominance and many low-knowledge, low-intelligence users. But damn is it ever disappointing.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is Singlehandedly Shifting the Overton Window.
Yup. All the stuff that Democrats have said is impossible for a decade, one woman is doing almost all by herself. And it’s not even that AOC is so great (though she is pretty remarkable), but rather that the Democrats have been so very terrible for so long.
Every time I touch Firefox or something Firefox-related, I am enraged by the vast stupidity of Mozilla and all the terrible decisions that allowed that once-great browser and its extension ecosystem to become a festering vitiated wasteland of marketing and withered utility.
The miscalculations and poor data analysis that led here should be taught in schools everywhere as a glaring example of how greater intelligence can just result in more catastrophic failure.
Large Layer-2 Domains Strike Again.
Supposedly it was a problem with the management network used by their optical gear, but it looks a lot like a layer-2 network spanning 15 data centers and no control-plane policing on the managed devices… proving yet again that large-scale layer-2 networks are a really bad idea.
Yes! I had to argue against a stretched L2 at a previous job and almost lost that one. What happens when you stretch layer 2 all over the place? Congratulations, you’ve just created one big broadcast domain and that means when one datacenter goes down, in many cases, they all go down.
“But having one big stretched Layer 2 network makes management so easy!” you cry. It sure does. And that’s part of the problem! It virtually virtualizes (my usage is very deliberate here) what in reality is complex and discrete — so you can no longer monitor and police what in truth are real-world boundaries that actually matter a great deal.
Stretched L2 does have its uses. Sure it does. But it shouldn’t be used to thoughtlessly abstract away complexity when the complexity should be completely visible.
One of the unrecognized reasons growth and productivity has slowed down is that our appetite for risk has decreased. I am not citing this as a bad thing, necessarily, just observing.
I don’t have the time nor the skill (at least not without a whole lot more work) to make a good model for this, but I’d guess this knocks about half a percent of GDP off per year. The tradeoff is that a lot fewer people die or are injured than otherwise would be. This is primarily a good thing. Heck, it might all be a good thing because about 95%+ of productivity gains go to the ultra-rich now, so giving them less money is probably a big net win.
Here I am not referring to worksite OSHA violations, more so unproven, potentially-dangerous non-online/internet technologies that in previous eras we would’ve just run with but now either get squelched or not built at all.
Again, this isn’t normative-leaning, just an observation of the world.
Hey, I finally found one of the games that I played constantly during the 1980s. It’s Sub Battle Simulator!
I loved that game so much. Here’s what some of the screens looked like. Today, it doesn’t seem that great but for the time it was pretty advanced in its commitment to giving you some sense of realism.
Now if I could just find that game that I used to play on the Apple where you both played on the same keyboard, and you fired through walls and such to eventually try to have a clear shot to the other player. I think it had bows and arrows for the weapons? I have no interest in playing any of these games again, am more just curious about what they were.