Hi. Millennial here. Elder millennial, actually. And uh. We need to talk, Gen Z.

I know this may shock you, but we had a computer with internet access starting when I (ALMOST GEN X) was 8.

You are NOT the first to grow up online. 1/ pic.twitter.com/RtckiEM7hb

— Aunt Hortense (@AuntHortense) October 4, 2021

I love how she lays the smack down on this utter daft moron. This is the same type of idiot who thinks women should be minors until they are 35+. And many women are for this because it’s a way of having rights without the concomitant responsibility. And yeah, the internet used to be so much worse than it is now. The sights I saw….the things I read….

Today, after I looked at problem for a total of about five seconds and told a junior member of my team how to fix it, she asked me, “How could you possibly know what it was that fast?”

My answer boiled down to “long, painful experience.” I told her not to worry, she’d eventually get that fast or nearly so. She has all the tools but just not enough of it has jelled yet. Lately, because I am still training her but am trying to make her more independent, I’ve given her more leeway and told her fewer of the answers. I know she feels lost in the woods sometimes now and I try not to let her stray too far and get too frustrated, but I think it’s overall been good. She is learning quickly and is already a better troubleshooter than most.

But yes, I understand it can be very annoying when some hotshot comes and solves a problem in five seconds you’ve been stuck on for two hours. I understand, because people used to do that to me in math all the time, so I truly do get it.

The vax is too dangerous to play around with, so instead I'm going to fly a small, single engine plane with little to no experience with my friends https://t.co/LSXyfqH7tc

— Will Menaker (@willmenaker) October 4, 2021

This is a rather extreme version of lack of risk assessment capabilities, but still fits the mold.

By the way, chance of mortality in small scale civil aviation has (order of magnitude estimate) somewhere around a 200 billion times the chance of death as compared to vaccination. For just males (the vaccines seem to have a few more problems for women), it’s something like 3-4 trillion times.

People’s risk assessment capabilities are so very very fucked.

Is this the billion dollar version of locking your keys in the car? pic.twitter.com/CTgFn8mtbz

— Misha Gurevich. Angel Investor, Photographer. (@drethelin) October 5, 2021

Ahahaha! This is not normal. This tells me that Facebook does not have any out-of-band management set up. That’s a way only “smart” people fail. “Out of band management” is some other method of getting into your vital systems that doesn’t depend directly on those systems themselves. Every good-for-anything networking expert sets such things up because you never know when something like the above will happen. For instance, I’d have a completely separate IP KVM connected to a console port on Cisco switches that in no way depended on those switches.

But of course because they are the soi-disant “smartest people in the room” I am sure they thought they’d never need any form of OOB and thus never bothered. That’s how people like that always fail.

If they’d had OOB, it could’ve been a 15 minute problem instead of a 15 hour problem. Or at least a whole hell of a lot shorter.

(By they way, if you don’t have OOB, something else you can do is write the commands in script form, and put a two minute timer at the end that reverses all the changes unless you kill the script. That way if whatever you’re doing kicks you out of the system and brings it all down, your clever little script automatically reverts back to the original after two minutes, letting you back in. I have done this before too and it has absolutely saved my ass.)

The first ten on today’s playlist:

Understanding How Facebook Disappeared from the Internet.

I didn’t post about it because I don’t really give a crap what happens to Facebook, but I knew it was a BGP problem in like five minutes. 🙂

Really shows how the Hacker News/developer “Why do we need these infrastructure people, I’m a networking expert now because I know how to find my IP address at the command line!” is just utter bullshit. As useful as it is, BGP is difficult to configure and easy to screw up. This was probably just a single line that was wrong in a BGP config and look what happened. (I’ve nearly made this same mistake myself, but at a lesser scale.)

The problem — at least the main problem — I have with the liberal “completely safe” prudery is that it’s just fundamentally anti-fun. There’s a surprisingly good and underrated movie called In Time where a main premise is that the rich are essentially immortal medically but can still die of injuries. The result is that they hardly do anything at all for fear of risking their immortality: they don’t swim, they don’t play and they mostly stay inside hiding from the world. They are the lockdown lifers in cinema form and though they have everything, their lives consist of nearly nothing.

This film is a perfect portrayal of modern liberals. Animated by fear, which is no animation at all, and driven by misapprehension of risk. This is paralysis and slow death. In reality there is no “completely safe,” of course. Inaction is action. Avoidance is merely attracting other dangers. Risk is not something that can be eliminated; life always ends the same way.

I’m ready to dance on liberalism’s grave. I just need the right tune.