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You don't throw away dams, bridges, factories, submarines, planes. There is a lot of man made stuff you just cannot easily replace. Instead, we maintain it. R

You don't throw away dams, bridges, factories, submarines, planes. There is a lot of man made stuff you just cannot easily replace. Instead, we maintain it. Remember, _this is not about you_. The post is about qemu. I would argue that qemu is analogous to one of these pieces of infrastructure. There is only a handful of powerful virtual machines. These are _not_ easily replaceable commodities.

TeMPOraL 1y ago
> You don't throw away dams, bridges, factories, submarines, planes. You don't fix their parts either, unless you absolutely have no other options. Maintenance involves replacing parts that are broken or are approaching the end of their service period. (Infrastructure in some places is also special because it's so badly funded it's not maintained at all, but that's out of scope of this analogy). > Remember, _this is not about you_. The post is about qemu. The post is about qemu. The comment, as well as most of the comment thread, is talking about coding in general. Sure, many things still get repaired - usually when they're expensive enough to dwarf marginal cost of repair labor. But if you dig into it, repair often involves treating parts as disposables, and tools as consumables.
- alganet 1y ago
  > You don't fix their parts either, unless you absolutely have no other options. You don't build these parts in assembly lines. They're often not cheap commodities. Satellites, for example, are full of parts made by hand because no assembly line can handle the requirements. These, require specialized troubleshooting (debugging). If you're talking exclusively about the cheap stuff (trivial programs), you're in the wrong thread (arguibly, the wrong website). We gave you a little space, but that's a courtesy that other environments might not extend.
  - fc417fc802 1y ago
    Satellites are the most extreme of edge cases. The equivalent might be a binary that gets burned into a ROM chip installed in an impossible to access location. QEMU is not that. Granted I don't think something as specialized as QEMU is well suited to a component replacement model. But large parts of the codebases of the vast majority of software out there is.
    - TeMPOraL 1y ago
      > Satellites are the most extreme of edge cases. Were the most extreme of edge cases. That was entirely because of space economics being stuck in a death spiral. SpaceX near single-handedly[0] turned this around, by focusing on slashing launch costs and increasing launch cadence. Both of that lead to more missions, meaning less risk, so satellites can be smaller and made of cheap COTS parts because now you can do 10 for price of 1, which enables economies of scale, blah blah. A feedback loop. Or rather, the feedback loop. It's the same one that enabled mass production and commodities in every aspect of our lives. Satellites aren't an exception to my argument - space industry is just late to the party, but it's going through a commoditization process right now, in front of our very eyes. 10+ years from now, you won't find a hand-made part in any satellite outside obscure prototype edge cases. -- [0] - Of course it was possible thanks to NASA COTS programs which funded it, and accumulation of knowledge, etc. SpaceX was the "operating end" of this transformation.
      - alganet 1y ago
        I see the evidence to the contrary. SpaceX took years to develop and debug their own engine, from scratch. Highly specialized work. They proud themselves of not relying on external supply chains, and doing everything in house. The refurbishment of boosters is very much what I described earlier "you don't throw away good stuff, you maintain it". So, in a sense, you went around your own argument without noticing and proved my point.
        TeMPOraL 1y ago
        I think you need to look closer on what SpaceX does, how it does it, and why. The degree of vertical integration lets them optimize production of the boosters. They're not throwaway things, but they're not pets either. They streamline production of parts as much as possible - but the point of reusability is to cut costs by orders of magnitude, and increase launch cadence, all of which created conditions for the rest of the space industry to scale up production. In short: SpaceX not throwing away boosters enables everyone else to throw away satellites. SpaceX, too - consider the size of the Starlink constellations. These are not hand-made "pets". Also consider their entire philosophy that led to reusable F9s: just keep launching, let shit explode, because throwing away more means making more gets cheaper, and learning gets faster. Even as they're an actual, well-tested product, reusability is still a book-keeping thing. They don't worry much about losing a booster or three, they can just make more - it's just more flights per booster on average -> lower costs for everyone. And then also look at where they're heading: Starship is basically a steel can with some engines on top. The reasoning is similar: they need to be cheap to make at scale.

TeMPOraL 1y ago

> You don't throw away dams, bridges, factories, submarines, planes. You don't fix their parts either, unless you absolutely have no other options. Maintenance involves replacing parts that are broken or are approaching the end of their service period. (Infrastructure in some places is also special because it's so badly funded it's not maintained at all, but that's out of scope of this analogy). > Remember, _this is not about you_. The post is about qemu. The post is about qemu. The comment, as well as most of the comment thread, is talking about coding in general. Sure, many things still get repaired - usually when they're expensive enough to dwarf marginal cost of repair labor. But if you dig into it, repair often involves treating parts as disposables, and tools as consumables.

alganet 1y ago
> You don't fix their parts either, unless you absolutely have no other options. You don't build these parts in assembly lines. They're often not cheap commodities. Satellites, for example, are full of parts made by hand because no assembly line can handle the requirements. These, require specialized troubleshooting (debugging). If you're talking exclusively about the cheap stuff (trivial programs), you're in the wrong thread (arguibly, the wrong website). We gave you a little space, but that's a courtesy that other environments might not extend.
- fc417fc802 1y ago
  Satellites are the most extreme of edge cases. The equivalent might be a binary that gets burned into a ROM chip installed in an impossible to access location. QEMU is not that. Granted I don't think something as specialized as QEMU is well suited to a component replacement model. But large parts of the codebases of the vast majority of software out there is.
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    > Satellites are the most extreme of edge cases. Were the most extreme of edge cases. That was entirely because of space economics being stuck in a death spiral. SpaceX near single-handedly[0] turned this around, by focusing on slashing launch costs and increasing launch cadence. Both of that lead to more missions, meaning less risk, so satellites can be smaller and made of cheap COTS parts because now you can do 10 for price of 1, which enables economies of scale, blah blah. A feedback loop. Or rather, the feedback loop. It's the same one that enabled mass production and commodities in every aspect of our lives. Satellites aren't an exception to my argument - space industry is just late to the party, but it's going through a commoditization process right now, in front of our very eyes. 10+ years from now, you won't find a hand-made part in any satellite outside obscure prototype edge cases. -- [0] - Of course it was possible thanks to NASA COTS programs which funded it, and accumulation of knowledge, etc. SpaceX was the "operating end" of this transformation.
    - alganet 1y ago
      I see the evidence to the contrary. SpaceX took years to develop and debug their own engine, from scratch. Highly specialized work. They proud themselves of not relying on external supply chains, and doing everything in house. The refurbishment of boosters is very much what I described earlier "you don't throw away good stuff, you maintain it". So, in a sense, you went around your own argument without noticing and proved my point.
      - TeMPOraL 1y ago
        I think you need to look closer on what SpaceX does, how it does it, and why. The degree of vertical integration lets them optimize production of the boosters. They're not throwaway things, but they're not pets either. They streamline production of parts as much as possible - but the point of reusability is to cut costs by orders of magnitude, and increase launch cadence, all of which created conditions for the rest of the space industry to scale up production. In short: SpaceX not throwing away boosters enables everyone else to throw away satellites. SpaceX, too - consider the size of the Starlink constellations. These are not hand-made "pets". Also consider their entire philosophy that led to reusable F9s: just keep launching, let shit explode, because throwing away more means making more gets cheaper, and learning gets faster. Even as they're an actual, well-tested product, reusability is still a book-keeping thing. They don't worry much about losing a booster or three, they can just make more - it's just more flights per booster on average -> lower costs for everyone. And then also look at where they're heading: Starship is basically a steel can with some engines on top. The reasoning is similar: they need to be cheap to make at scale.