10 ms·

We are barbarians occupying a city built by an advanced civilization, marveling at the hot baths but know nothing about how their builders keep them running. On

We are barbarians occupying a city built by an advanced civilization, marveling at the hot baths but know nothing about how their builders keep them running. One day, the baths will drain and anyone who remembers how to fill them up will have died.

tibbar 5y ago
The remarkable thing is that today no one knows how to “fill up the baths”, or to do more than a small part of the job. Teams exist with extremely narrow expertise. But if anything, there are more options today for DIY infrastructure - way easier to be more advanced than “run the Apache on the server box.”
nic_wilson 5y ago
Is this a fifth season reference?
bawolff 5y ago
On-prem is much more rare, but its hardly non-existent. Plenty of people know how to do this sort of thing.
- vidarh 5y ago
  On-prem, maybe, but if you include co-located equipment and managed hosting I don't even think it's more rare in absolute terms. Just smaller as a percentage of overall hosting.
- starfallg 5y ago
  There's (still?) a lot of on-prem and managed hosting. It's probably the majority of hosted services. Otherwise VMWare wouldn't be doing as well as it is.
Waterluvian 5y ago
This has been true for a long time and it is not a bad thing. It’s an easy target to romanticize but realistically, any alternative is basically a way of saying: “let’s stop evolving.”
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tata71 5y ago
  Disagree. Wanting to evolve differently doesn't mean halting. It's a call not to devolve.
  - Waterluvian 5y ago
    I certainly think this is a subjective, “no one right answer” discussion topic. From my perspective, we require abstractions in order to free our intellectual capacity up for the next layer of complexity.
- tata71 5y ago
  P.S. That Paw Patrol shit hit me right in the emotions. Awesome site.
41209 5y ago
I wouldn't be that negative, as long as certain things need to be on prem, we'll always have some people who can get the internet running again. Most of these people just happen to be employed at AWS or azure right now.
pfortuny 5y ago
So long as you live in a city you are probably forgetting most of the ways to survive. I could not even try to discover which berries are edible without killing myself. However, I can teach advanced maths to a largish group of students without much trouble.
- maxwell 5y ago
  > I could not even try to discover which berries are edible without killing myself. Cluster berries, from raspberries to pineapples, are never poisonous. Avoid berries that resemble blueberries or currants unless you're able to identify the plant: we grew up with blueberries and know the leaves, but we avoid anything currant-like because we'd have no idea if they're actually, say, chokeberries. Avoid anything that looks like baneberries. Here in Maine, we forage for raspberries, blackberries, wild strawberries, and (mostly low bush) blueberries, but don't risk others.
  - kiklion 5y ago
    > Cluster berries, from raspberries to pineapples, are never poisonous. I know nothing but that still seems too generalized that it doesn’t have an exception somewhere in the world.
    - willcipriano 5y ago
      You won't find enough berries, never mind edibles berries if everyone in your area suddenly shifted to foraging. Game animals would be exhausted quickly or they would migrate further out from human settlements. Even if you had the skills hunting or foraging isn't all that useful anywhere around a city, especially if everyone else is doing it.
      - maxwell 5y ago
        True, fruit and nut-based food forests, like those in the Pacific Northwest [1], seem to provide a significant, sustainable food source. Berries make a nice dessert + vitamins a few times a year. Historically here in Maine, the core diet seems to have been seafood, freshwater fish, maize, Capreolinae, game birds, eggs, honey, roots, and greens. While only a tiny fraction of fish/seafood remain, deer are over-populated and make a fine sustainable food source, the limitation mostly being the contemporary appetite for venison. 1. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/indigenous-peoples-british-columbia-tended-forest-gardens-180977617/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/indigenous-peoples...
lordnacho 5y ago
Surely we are way past the point where someone knows how the whole thing works, all the way down. I doubt even a very skilled engineer would know how his own machine works all the way down. What I think happens mostly is the skilled dev can use his experience to know where to investigate and where to look for solutions. The question is organisational. Might it be that certain orgs have gotten so convoluted that they cannot do this investigation on an org level? Essentially, letting the right people look in the right places, unhindered by politics, legitimate security concerns, and practicality? You'd think there'd be a limit to scale at some point. A bit of redundancy makes sense. There's probably a lot of people with multicloud setups patting themselves on the back at the moment.
- gitfan86 5y ago
  I do contracting dev work and my specialty is being able to drill down into any part of the engineering assets, ops, sec, dev. People think someone like me is slow and expensive until they have a problem that no one else wants to touch.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    > Surely we are way past the point where someone knows how the whole thing works, all the way down. So you are disagreeing with this statement and saying that, in fact, you are the person who knows how the whole thing works? I knew tech work produced some large egos, but sheesh.
    - rch 5y ago
      This type of person exists, and while rare, not as rare as some seem to assume.
      - whimsicalism 5y ago
        There is nobody who exists who would be able to recreate a modern computer from scratch.
tzs 5y ago
Many years ago I stood at the window of my comfortable apartment, watching wind and cold rain rage outside. I thought about my cave men ancestors who during such a storm if they needed water would have to go out and get it, getting themselves soaked. If I wanted water, the tap in the kitchen would give it to me, in a nice controlled fashion. If I did feel like having water rain down upon me, my shower would do that, again in a controlled fashion, and I could select the water temperature. If they wanted the cave to be warmer, they had to burn something and deal with the smoke. And they might have to work hard to obtain whatever it is they burn. If I wanted my apartment warmer, I just had to turn the knob on the thermostat. They were at the mercy of their environment. My environment is mine to command. I was feeling pretty superior to my cave man ancestors. Then I realized that I don't know how to build the systems that I was relying on for my supposed superiority, or even how some of them work. I'm really just a cave man that found a nicer cave.
- hotpotamus 5y ago
  Not to mention that when the power goes out, the illusion fades fairly quickly. Learned that lesson myself in the Texas snowstorm early this year.
  - 2143 5y ago
    Third world country here. Commit and push often.
  - aNoob7000 5y ago
    I lived in Miami during hurricane Wilma and spent like a week without electricity. You realize how quickly things go south without electricity flowing.
  - pier25 5y ago
    Absolutely. My wife and I lived for a year in an off-the-grid cabin in some mountains in Mexico. We had solar panels and a generator we used only when absolutely necessary. We were never without power, but we lived with the constant anxiety of optimizing our energy consumption. Some stuff we could only do during the day and at night we only used devices with batteries. For a couple of weeks we didn't have running water in the cabin because we were rebuilding our water deposit tower. We used buckets for everything. That was almost a decade ago and I still feel grateful at having unlimited energy or running water on demand. I also feel guilty at times when doing power hungry stuff like playing video games, knowing electricity production is by far the biggest driver of climate change.
anderspitman 5y ago
Anyone who finds this concept interesting to think about and hasn't seen this video may enjoy it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko See also Foundation by Asimov.
Iv 5y ago
More like, they will fill with blood and locusts.
- giardini 5y ago
  At least you'll have something to eat.
willob33 5y ago
Fear. The Greek philosophers wrote of their fear some day the people might climb Olympus and find there are no Gods. Economic uncertainty versus certainty of a paycheck. No one asked any of us to build specifically these things. We get paid to.
rhacker 5y ago
I don't buy this. I've written some pretty complicated codebases at previous companies that no one knew how to operate except for me. After I left those companies they didn't fold or lose all their customers. They adapted and everything is fine. For whatever reason humans find simplicity through complex processes.
selfhoster11 5y ago
That's a very dramatic interpretation. In reality, as long as Unix greybeards are around, we are safe enough on the "can we rebuild it" question.
dznodes 5y ago
Well said,... but why is the water slowing getting hotter?
meitros 5y ago
There's this classic article on someone's quest to make a toaster from scratch https://gizmodo.com/one-mans-nearly-impossible-quest-to-make-a-toaster-from-5794368 https://gizmodo.com/one-mans-nearly-impossible-quest-to-make....
- giardini 5y ago
  He was working too hard: https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=toasting+bread+over+campfire&form=HDRSC2&first=1&tsc=ImageBasicHover https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=toasting+bread+over+cam...
sriram_sun 5y ago
For the past couple of weeks, I've been a beginner-intermediate mechanic trying to breathe life into an aging car. Sometime in the next few months, I've to troubleshoot and fix the broken 2 yr. old refrigerator. Someone came and fixed it once, now it's out of warranty and fixing it would cost about 50% of its cost. Meanwhile I'm glad I didn't throw away the 10 yr old refrigerator and just moved it to the garage. We just have to keep going to the garage. I also have to play the accountant for my consulting business pretty soon. This is a task I had outsourced for years and have now started doing myself. As stuff gets more specialized, I've started noticing that I'm able to do moderately complicated things better than professionals paid at the 50th - 70th percentile. If I want to get a really good job done, my rule of thumb is to be ready to shell out money in the 90th percentile range and look for references. In case of AWS, I guess the Greasemonkey scripts are getting too complicated ;)?
schnevets 5y ago
And a bunch of barbarians will just accept being smelly. And a few barbarians will figure out a different way to fill a bath tub. And life will go on.
sebringj 5y ago
I liked that. It might be ever weirder though for us in the new age. We'll have robots (AI) running everything and why things are happening will degrade into unknown unknowns. Engineering and critical thinking may be a lost art.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
xwdv 5y ago
Or worse, we will be sitting in the hot baths and the hot spring where the water comes from will get hotter and hotter and we won’t notice until suddenly a rapid change in temperature boils the water and burns us to death.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
This simply isn't true. There are lots of full stack devs out here, we will rebuild from the AWShes :P
yongjik 5y ago
We are the advanced civilization that has built those hot baths. Being an advanced civilization, it's safe to assume that no single person knows all the knowledge necessary to build another hot bath, because it has long surpassed how much one person can learn in a lifetime. But somehow there are multiple organizations that "know" how to build another hot bath, and newer and bigger baths are continuously being built all across the Empire. And occasionally one of them stops working and thousands of citizens are angry, because they feel, being honest citizens of the Empire, they are entitled to enjoy these hot baths. Sometimes their very livelihood depends on the baths running. Then the bath is fixed, and all is well again.
LambdaTrain 5y ago
That sounds like the setup of Asimov's Foundation series
JKCalhoun 5y ago
I'm reminded instead of the supply chain issue our economy has gotten itself into. As more people pile on AWS it becomes the weak link.... Maybe we need more baskets to distribute our eggs amongst?
JadoJodo 5y ago
Tangentially related: If you enjoy this sort of idea in fiction-form, I can't recommend Josiah Bancroft's The Tower of Babel series (beginning with Senlin Ascends) enough.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
It's ok, we can just rebuild everything from scratch if we need to. We know we can cos we already do it every five years anyway without needing to

tibbar 5y ago

The remarkable thing is that today no one knows how to “fill up the baths”, or to do more than a small part of the job. Teams exist with extremely narrow expertise. But if anything, there are more options today for DIY infrastructure - way easier to be more advanced than “run the Apache on the server box.”

nic_wilson 5y ago

Is this a fifth season reference?

bawolff 5y ago

On-prem is much more rare, but its hardly non-existent. Plenty of people know how to do this sort of thing.

vidarh 5y ago
On-prem, maybe, but if you include co-located equipment and managed hosting I don't even think it's more rare in absolute terms. Just smaller as a percentage of overall hosting.
starfallg 5y ago
There's (still?) a lot of on-prem and managed hosting. It's probably the majority of hosted services. Otherwise VMWare wouldn't be doing as well as it is.

Waterluvian 5y ago

This has been true for a long time and it is not a bad thing. It’s an easy target to romanticize but realistically, any alternative is basically a way of saying: “let’s stop evolving.”

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tata71 5y ago
Disagree. Wanting to evolve differently doesn't mean halting. It's a call not to devolve.
- Waterluvian 5y ago
  I certainly think this is a subjective, “no one right answer” discussion topic. From my perspective, we require abstractions in order to free our intellectual capacity up for the next layer of complexity.
tata71 5y ago
P.S. That Paw Patrol shit hit me right in the emotions. Awesome site.

41209 5y ago

I wouldn't be that negative, as long as certain things need to be on prem, we'll always have some people who can get the internet running again. Most of these people just happen to be employed at AWS or azure right now.

pfortuny 5y ago

So long as you live in a city you are probably forgetting most of the ways to survive. I could not even try to discover which berries are edible without killing myself. However, I can teach advanced maths to a largish group of students without much trouble.

maxwell 5y ago
> I could not even try to discover which berries are edible without killing myself. Cluster berries, from raspberries to pineapples, are never poisonous. Avoid berries that resemble blueberries or currants unless you're able to identify the plant: we grew up with blueberries and know the leaves, but we avoid anything currant-like because we'd have no idea if they're actually, say, chokeberries. Avoid anything that looks like baneberries. Here in Maine, we forage for raspberries, blackberries, wild strawberries, and (mostly low bush) blueberries, but don't risk others.
- kiklion 5y ago
  > Cluster berries, from raspberries to pineapples, are never poisonous. I know nothing but that still seems too generalized that it doesn’t have an exception somewhere in the world.
  - willcipriano 5y ago
    You won't find enough berries, never mind edibles berries if everyone in your area suddenly shifted to foraging. Game animals would be exhausted quickly or they would migrate further out from human settlements. Even if you had the skills hunting or foraging isn't all that useful anywhere around a city, especially if everyone else is doing it.
    - maxwell 5y ago
      True, fruit and nut-based food forests, like those in the Pacific Northwest [1], seem to provide a significant, sustainable food source. Berries make a nice dessert + vitamins a few times a year. Historically here in Maine, the core diet seems to have been seafood, freshwater fish, maize, Capreolinae, game birds, eggs, honey, roots, and greens. While only a tiny fraction of fish/seafood remain, deer are over-populated and make a fine sustainable food source, the limitation mostly being the contemporary appetite for venison. 1. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/indigenous-peoples-british-columbia-tended-forest-gardens-180977617/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/indigenous-peoples...

lordnacho 5y ago

Surely we are way past the point where someone knows how the whole thing works, all the way down. I doubt even a very skilled engineer would know how his own machine works all the way down. What I think happens mostly is the skilled dev can use his experience to know where to investigate and where to look for solutions. The question is organisational. Might it be that certain orgs have gotten so convoluted that they cannot do this investigation on an org level? Essentially, letting the right people look in the right places, unhindered by politics, legitimate security concerns, and practicality? You'd think there'd be a limit to scale at some point. A bit of redundancy makes sense. There's probably a lot of people with multicloud setups patting themselves on the back at the moment.

gitfan86 5y ago
I do contracting dev work and my specialty is being able to drill down into any part of the engineering assets, ops, sec, dev. People think someone like me is slow and expensive until they have a problem that no one else wants to touch.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  > Surely we are way past the point where someone knows how the whole thing works, all the way down. So you are disagreeing with this statement and saying that, in fact, you are the person who knows how the whole thing works? I knew tech work produced some large egos, but sheesh.
  - rch 5y ago
    This type of person exists, and while rare, not as rare as some seem to assume.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      There is nobody who exists who would be able to recreate a modern computer from scratch.

tzs 5y ago

Many years ago I stood at the window of my comfortable apartment, watching wind and cold rain rage outside. I thought about my cave men ancestors who during such a storm if they needed water would have to go out and get it, getting themselves soaked. If I wanted water, the tap in the kitchen would give it to me, in a nice controlled fashion. If I did feel like having water rain down upon me, my shower would do that, again in a controlled fashion, and I could select the water temperature. If they wanted the cave to be warmer, they had to burn something and deal with the smoke. And they might have to work hard to obtain whatever it is they burn. If I wanted my apartment warmer, I just had to turn the knob on the thermostat. They were at the mercy of their environment. My environment is mine to command. I was feeling pretty superior to my cave man ancestors. Then I realized that I don't know how to build the systems that I was relying on for my supposed superiority, or even how some of them work. I'm really just a cave man that found a nicer cave.

hotpotamus 5y ago
Not to mention that when the power goes out, the illusion fades fairly quickly. Learned that lesson myself in the Texas snowstorm early this year.
- 2143 5y ago
  Third world country here. Commit and push often.
- aNoob7000 5y ago
  I lived in Miami during hurricane Wilma and spent like a week without electricity. You realize how quickly things go south without electricity flowing.
- pier25 5y ago
  Absolutely. My wife and I lived for a year in an off-the-grid cabin in some mountains in Mexico. We had solar panels and a generator we used only when absolutely necessary. We were never without power, but we lived with the constant anxiety of optimizing our energy consumption. Some stuff we could only do during the day and at night we only used devices with batteries. For a couple of weeks we didn't have running water in the cabin because we were rebuilding our water deposit tower. We used buckets for everything. That was almost a decade ago and I still feel grateful at having unlimited energy or running water on demand. I also feel guilty at times when doing power hungry stuff like playing video games, knowing electricity production is by far the biggest driver of climate change.

anderspitman 5y ago

Anyone who finds this concept interesting to think about and hasn't seen this video may enjoy it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko See also Foundation by Asimov.

Iv 5y ago

More like, they will fill with blood and locusts.

giardini 5y ago
At least you'll have something to eat.

willob33 5y ago

Fear. The Greek philosophers wrote of their fear some day the people might climb Olympus and find there are no Gods. Economic uncertainty versus certainty of a paycheck. No one asked any of us to build specifically these things. We get paid to.

rhacker 5y ago

I don't buy this. I've written some pretty complicated codebases at previous companies that no one knew how to operate except for me. After I left those companies they didn't fold or lose all their customers. They adapted and everything is fine. For whatever reason humans find simplicity through complex processes.

selfhoster11 5y ago

That's a very dramatic interpretation. In reality, as long as Unix greybeards are around, we are safe enough on the "can we rebuild it" question.

dznodes 5y ago

Well said,... but why is the water slowing getting hotter?

meitros 5y ago

There's this classic article on someone's quest to make a toaster from scratch https://gizmodo.com/one-mans-nearly-impossible-quest-to-make-a-toaster-from-5794368 https://gizmodo.com/one-mans-nearly-impossible-quest-to-make....

giardini 5y ago
He was working too hard: https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=toasting+bread+over+campfire&form=HDRSC2&first=1&tsc=ImageBasicHover https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=toasting+bread+over+cam...

sriram_sun 5y ago

For the past couple of weeks, I've been a beginner-intermediate mechanic trying to breathe life into an aging car. Sometime in the next few months, I've to troubleshoot and fix the broken 2 yr. old refrigerator. Someone came and fixed it once, now it's out of warranty and fixing it would cost about 50% of its cost. Meanwhile I'm glad I didn't throw away the 10 yr old refrigerator and just moved it to the garage. We just have to keep going to the garage. I also have to play the accountant for my consulting business pretty soon. This is a task I had outsourced for years and have now started doing myself. As stuff gets more specialized, I've started noticing that I'm able to do moderately complicated things better than professionals paid at the 50th - 70th percentile. If I want to get a really good job done, my rule of thumb is to be ready to shell out money in the 90th percentile range and look for references. In case of AWS, I guess the Greasemonkey scripts are getting too complicated ;)?

schnevets 5y ago

And a bunch of barbarians will just accept being smelly. And a few barbarians will figure out a different way to fill a bath tub. And life will go on.

sebringj 5y ago

I liked that. It might be ever weirder though for us in the new age. We'll have robots (AI) running everything and why things are happening will degrade into unknown unknowns. Engineering and critical thinking may be a lost art.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

xwdv 5y ago

Or worse, we will be sitting in the hot baths and the hot spring where the water comes from will get hotter and hotter and we won’t notice until suddenly a rapid change in temperature boils the water and burns us to death.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

This simply isn't true. There are lots of full stack devs out here, we will rebuild from the AWShes :P

yongjik 5y ago

We are the advanced civilization that has built those hot baths. Being an advanced civilization, it's safe to assume that no single person knows all the knowledge necessary to build another hot bath, because it has long surpassed how much one person can learn in a lifetime. But somehow there are multiple organizations that "know" how to build another hot bath, and newer and bigger baths are continuously being built all across the Empire. And occasionally one of them stops working and thousands of citizens are angry, because they feel, being honest citizens of the Empire, they are entitled to enjoy these hot baths. Sometimes their very livelihood depends on the baths running. Then the bath is fixed, and all is well again.

LambdaTrain 5y ago

That sounds like the setup of Asimov's Foundation series

JKCalhoun 5y ago

I'm reminded instead of the supply chain issue our economy has gotten itself into. As more people pile on AWS it becomes the weak link.... Maybe we need more baskets to distribute our eggs amongst?

JadoJodo 5y ago

Tangentially related: If you enjoy this sort of idea in fiction-form, I can't recommend Josiah Bancroft's The Tower of Babel series (beginning with Senlin Ascends) enough.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

It's ok, we can just rebuild everything from scratch if we need to. We know we can cos we already do it every five years anyway without needing to