3 ms·

I find that technology is a lot like magic - delightful and baffling when you're uninitiated, and mundane and boring once you learn the grubby details of how it

I find that technology is a lot like magic - delightful and baffling when you're uninitiated, and mundane and boring once you learn the grubby details of how it's done. I believe it was Arthur C. Clarke who said that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, so my insight is hardly a new one. As far as I can tell, what Docker did was to create a universal software packaging system within the Linux world. Thinking of them as a lightweight VM can be useful, but it's not the full picture.

adamgordonbell 4y ago
> As far as I can tell, what Docker did was to create a universal software packaging system within the Linux world. Yeah, for sure and containers are great. Namespaces, cgroups v2, runC, overlayfs, the OCI image format, and everything else in this space is impressive engineering. It’s incredible forward progress we can all take advantage of. But it's fun to peal back the layers and see it’s a long series of progressive refinements.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  If you ever watch "Connections" by James Burke (and everyone should), you'll see that basically anything we see as a breakthrough technology is really just a long series of progressive refinements - it's evolution all the way down. And nearly all the physical laws/effects/discoveries named after one person (for instance the Kuiper belt around our solar system) were actually discovered by groups of people working over time.