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As long as we're airing pet peeves, mine is about over-literal misunderstandings: > Kafka cannot scale infinitely. Nothing can. It is very common that when a
by wpietri 5y ago
As long as we're airing pet peeves, mine is about over-literal misunderstandings:
> Kafka cannot scale infinitely. Nothing can.
It is very common that when a phrase can't be literally true, it signals a metaphorical meaning. E.g., if a teen tells you their new teacher is a million years old, it's not a literal statement of age. Similarly, nobody expects "scale infinitely" to mean that, as in Universal Paperclips, that we'll be converting whole galaxies into Kestra clusters. It means that any bottlenecks are external to the system.
- RussianCow 5y ago> Similarly, nobody expects "scale infinitely" to mean that, as in Universal Paperclips, that we'll be converting whole galaxies into Kestra clusters. I disagree. I've worked with plenty of people that would probably take this statement at face value and assume you could scale to a completely arbitrary amount of load with no marginal effort. Plus, there's a difference in context here: we're talking about a technical product. It doesn't hurt to be precise and technical in your description of it, does it? This is the most likely setting in which someone might interpret something literally.
- wpietri 5y agoAren't those the same people who would assume that of many technologies whether or not the word "infinite" was used? I do agree there's a difference in context, but for me it goes the other way. I'd expect pretty much anybody in a technical audience to know technical basics. For me that's a big part of the fun in writing on HN, in that it's not obligatory to dumb my points down just to coddle the clueless.
- nullrouten 5y agobut is it web scale? like mongodb? :)
- tchiotludo 5y agoReally thanks wpietri to have understand the hidden sense behind :+1: