5 ms·

Yeah I think the whole “need to reboot to get to a clean state” is maybe a bug not a feature. It is certainly possible to build systems that can run for years

Yeah I think the whole “need to reboot to get to a clean state” is maybe a bug not a feature. It is certainly possible to build systems that can run for years or decades. I’m guessing that persistent memory will require us to think about changes to state in memory are more like ACID in databases. We should think about rollback instead of reboot.

hinkley 6y ago
> is maybe a bug not a feature. Once you start thinking of safety as a feature you've ruined your ability to think responsibly about anything else. A reset is a safety mechanism. You shouldn't need it, but only a sociopath would try to get rid of it. Almost all of the software we write is now affecting people's lives. That your bug may eat someone's term paper has been a problem for decades, and nobody ever internalizes how that affects that person's life. The avalanche of cause and effect may never settle down. Now we can get people fired. Ostracized. We are trying to take the power but not the responsibility, and it's bullshit. No, hypocritical bullshit, because we spend a lot of time here complaining about others doing the same thing.
- klodolph 6y ago
  > You shouldn't need it, but only a sociopath would try to get rid of it. > Almost all of the software we write is now affecting people's lives. Don’t twist a technical disagreement into some kind moral outrage. We both have the same goal of providing reliable software to people. The problem is that for the past decades, resetting the machine has deleted countless term papers. Nowadays, people generally put their term papers in cloud services that are always on. This is a huge step forward. We can bring this kind of reliability to offline usage. I think this requires taking lessons learned from cloud/server farm/mainframe world (always-on) and figuring out ways to apply them to personal computers.
  - sizt 6y ago
    ... a new OS and let's call it QAnon !
    - klodolph 6y ago
      If you’re just commenting in order to stir up trouble, please leave.
  - physicles 6y ago
    The main lesson we can take is to design our software with the assumption that the machine can be turned off (or crash) at any time. That is obvious when you’re in a browser or running in a VM, but it was very far from engineers’ minds 20-30 years ago. Most note taking software I’ve used doesn’t even have a save command. That’s a huge step forward.
- thewakalix 6y ago
  I think that there are non-sociopathic reasons to explore interesting areas of designspace. It might turn out to be safer in the long run, and until it is, nobody's forced to use experimental software.
simonh 6y ago
The problem isn't so much about the correctness of a record, or being able to recover from changes in state, it's more about ensuring the consistency of the states of multiple different parts of the overall system. How do you recover consistency? Even our brains have not entirely solved this problem. Sometimes when you hear a stimulus such as a phone ringing different parts of your brain will receive and process the stimulus at different times, so it can seem as though you become conscious that the phone has rung before you become consciously aware of hearing the sound of it ringing. In a computer system you might have some parts working based on derived values from a record in the source of truth. This can lead to other parts working based on other derived values based on a different value when it has changed, so they disagree.
physicles 6y ago
It is possible to build such reliable systems, but it is not economical for the vast majority of software that gets written — at least with current tools. If getting something production-ready takes X time, making sure that thing doesn’t ever need to be restarted takes many times X, not to mention the huge investment in testing to ferret out those rare edge cases that cause hangs or inconsistent state. Someday when software engineering comes into its own as an actual profession, maybe our tools will also achieve a higher level of consciousness, as it were. But nothing mainstream today comes close to enabling this.

hinkley 6y ago

> is maybe a bug not a feature. Once you start thinking of safety as a feature you've ruined your ability to think responsibly about anything else. A reset is a safety mechanism. You shouldn't need it, but only a sociopath would try to get rid of it. Almost all of the software we write is now affecting people's lives. That your bug may eat someone's term paper has been a problem for decades, and nobody ever internalizes how that affects that person's life. The avalanche of cause and effect may never settle down. Now we can get people fired. Ostracized. We are trying to take the power but not the responsibility, and it's bullshit. No, hypocritical bullshit, because we spend a lot of time here complaining about others doing the same thing.

klodolph 6y ago
> You shouldn't need it, but only a sociopath would try to get rid of it. > Almost all of the software we write is now affecting people's lives. Don’t twist a technical disagreement into some kind moral outrage. We both have the same goal of providing reliable software to people. The problem is that for the past decades, resetting the machine has deleted countless term papers. Nowadays, people generally put their term papers in cloud services that are always on. This is a huge step forward. We can bring this kind of reliability to offline usage. I think this requires taking lessons learned from cloud/server farm/mainframe world (always-on) and figuring out ways to apply them to personal computers.
- sizt 6y ago
  ... a new OS and let's call it QAnon !
  - klodolph 6y ago
    If you’re just commenting in order to stir up trouble, please leave.
- physicles 6y ago
  The main lesson we can take is to design our software with the assumption that the machine can be turned off (or crash) at any time. That is obvious when you’re in a browser or running in a VM, but it was very far from engineers’ minds 20-30 years ago. Most note taking software I’ve used doesn’t even have a save command. That’s a huge step forward.
thewakalix 6y ago
I think that there are non-sociopathic reasons to explore interesting areas of designspace. It might turn out to be safer in the long run, and until it is, nobody's forced to use experimental software.

simonh 6y ago

The problem isn't so much about the correctness of a record, or being able to recover from changes in state, it's more about ensuring the consistency of the states of multiple different parts of the overall system. How do you recover consistency? Even our brains have not entirely solved this problem. Sometimes when you hear a stimulus such as a phone ringing different parts of your brain will receive and process the stimulus at different times, so it can seem as though you become conscious that the phone has rung before you become consciously aware of hearing the sound of it ringing. In a computer system you might have some parts working based on derived values from a record in the source of truth. This can lead to other parts working based on other derived values based on a different value when it has changed, so they disagree.

physicles 6y ago

It is possible to build such reliable systems, but it is not economical for the vast majority of software that gets written — at least with current tools. If getting something production-ready takes X time, making sure that thing doesn’t ever need to be restarted takes many times X, not to mention the huge investment in testing to ferret out those rare edge cases that cause hangs or inconsistent state. Someday when software engineering comes into its own as an actual profession, maybe our tools will also achieve a higher level of consciousness, as it were. But nothing mainstream today comes close to enabling this.