5 ms·

> It's basically a lost day of productivity even if GH goes down for only 30 minutes. Are we entering an era where if we don't have hundreds of thousands of se

> It's basically a lost day of productivity even if GH goes down for only 30 minutes. Are we entering an era where if we don't have hundreds of thousands of servers running 24/7 to host our services, with all the resource consumption and environmental implications that result, that we will no longer be able to remain productive as a society? Is this gradually becoming a new baseline for humanity from which we cannot reasonably downsize?

bob1029 5y ago
> Are we entering an era We've been in this era for about 4 decades now. There are mainframes which do payment processing that, if they were to fail, would cause substantial harm to the global economy almost instantly.
sudhirj 5y ago
Utility technology become foundational very quickly. Despite it being very new, humanity is already fundamentally reliant on global supply chains, oil, electricity, networks, satellites and many other technologies that we cannot downsize. We could collectively plan and execute decades long exit plans, like we do for oil, but outages will bring daily life to a halt.
jrochkind1 5y ago
Yes. You're just noticing?
ygjb 5y ago
Yes. It's worth noting that you can take almost any software from before the late 90s to early 2000s, depending on the vendor, that is still available, and with a layer of emulation get it running in minutes. The vast majority of software that is being built today for end users simply will not function in a short time frame because of aggressively built in dependencies on cloud based services, often with those dependencies designed to encourage customer lock-in and prevent piracy by forcing users to have active accounts and shift core logic from endpoints to cloud services. Even moving past licensing servers and account capabilities, tools like Grammarly ship much of their analysis to the cloud, same for most translation services. Many modern text to speech services are cloud based as well (just look at how useless a modern cell phone becomes when you are without a data connection, for example). I don't know what the statistics would look like, but I shudder to think how much of the world economy would grind to a halt if Amazon or another significant cloud provider had a sustained, multi-region outage (say 24-48 hours). It's a god-damn mess, and we did it to ourselves.
- bob1029 5y ago
  > I shudder to think how much of the world economy would grind to a halt if Amazon or another significant cloud provider had a sustained, multi-region outage (say 24-48 hours). You can rest at ease. Nothing that is mission-critical for the world's financial infrastructure is hosted within one of these sorts of facilities. Facebook and Netflix might go down for days, but your Amex will still work at any merchant with a functioning internet connection. I have been inside of [financial services organization]'s datacenter in [some midwestern state] which was purpose-built for the IT load. The strategy is "failure is not an option". It's essentially 1 gigantic, redundant life-support system for the one of the more sensitive computers on the planet. Amazon and Microsoft cannot afford to go to these lengths for the market they serve.
  - ygjb 5y ago
    I wish I had your confidence in the financial system, but it's not the financial services I am concerned about. Financial services are important for moving money around, and processing electronic payments, but it doesn't matter how effectively you can process a wire if there are significant supply chain disruptions, and systems failures that take down the platforms that major retailers and distributors use for logistics. Even if ATMs and bank networks remain up, what about the encashment and physical security services that those institutions rely on to move around actual physical money? The economy is more than just financial services, and all of those financial services are just proxies for the real world goods that people need to survive for more than a few days in most urban centres.
lmm 5y ago
This is like being shocked that so many companies now rely on having an electricity supply and can't work during power outages.

bob1029 5y ago

> Are we entering an era We've been in this era for about 4 decades now. There are mainframes which do payment processing that, if they were to fail, would cause substantial harm to the global economy almost instantly.

sudhirj 5y ago

Utility technology become foundational very quickly. Despite it being very new, humanity is already fundamentally reliant on global supply chains, oil, electricity, networks, satellites and many other technologies that we cannot downsize. We could collectively plan and execute decades long exit plans, like we do for oil, but outages will bring daily life to a halt.

jrochkind1 5y ago

Yes. You're just noticing?

ygjb 5y ago

Yes. It's worth noting that you can take almost any software from before the late 90s to early 2000s, depending on the vendor, that is still available, and with a layer of emulation get it running in minutes. The vast majority of software that is being built today for end users simply will not function in a short time frame because of aggressively built in dependencies on cloud based services, often with those dependencies designed to encourage customer lock-in and prevent piracy by forcing users to have active accounts and shift core logic from endpoints to cloud services. Even moving past licensing servers and account capabilities, tools like Grammarly ship much of their analysis to the cloud, same for most translation services. Many modern text to speech services are cloud based as well (just look at how useless a modern cell phone becomes when you are without a data connection, for example). I don't know what the statistics would look like, but I shudder to think how much of the world economy would grind to a halt if Amazon or another significant cloud provider had a sustained, multi-region outage (say 24-48 hours). It's a god-damn mess, and we did it to ourselves.

bob1029 5y ago
> I shudder to think how much of the world economy would grind to a halt if Amazon or another significant cloud provider had a sustained, multi-region outage (say 24-48 hours). You can rest at ease. Nothing that is mission-critical for the world's financial infrastructure is hosted within one of these sorts of facilities. Facebook and Netflix might go down for days, but your Amex will still work at any merchant with a functioning internet connection. I have been inside of [financial services organization]'s datacenter in [some midwestern state] which was purpose-built for the IT load. The strategy is "failure is not an option". It's essentially 1 gigantic, redundant life-support system for the one of the more sensitive computers on the planet. Amazon and Microsoft cannot afford to go to these lengths for the market they serve.
- ygjb 5y ago
  I wish I had your confidence in the financial system, but it's not the financial services I am concerned about. Financial services are important for moving money around, and processing electronic payments, but it doesn't matter how effectively you can process a wire if there are significant supply chain disruptions, and systems failures that take down the platforms that major retailers and distributors use for logistics. Even if ATMs and bank networks remain up, what about the encashment and physical security services that those institutions rely on to move around actual physical money? The economy is more than just financial services, and all of those financial services are just proxies for the real world goods that people need to survive for more than a few days in most urban centres.

lmm 5y ago

This is like being shocked that so many companies now rely on having an electricity supply and can't work during power outages.