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NaNo 2021: Upgrade Path (working title)
Oct. 4th, 2021 10:53 pmThis year I told myself that I was probably not doing NaNo because I didn't have the energy and didn't have any inspiration.
Belovedest's been watching the TAB 2020 Olympics and the Paralympics, and there's a particular ad that includes a smart car that's a member of the team. And that got me wondering, what with the usual headaches that go along with something "simple" like upgrading a phone ... what happens when you have to upgrade a complicated piece of equipment like a car? (This also may have been in the immediate wake of a notable Tesla incident, probably the one where the guy's car bricked itself in the middle of a lane and couldn't be pushed to the shoulder. Having had a car die on me in the middle of a not-shoulder lane, this is viscerally TERRIFYING.)
Today's Facebook DNS shenanigans underlined that.
When the internet said "DNS", I got the metaphorical popcorn, as well as sparing a moment of empathy for the poor sap who had managed to save the zone file without the A or AAA records in it, wondering what the TTL was.
At that point I did not also realize that because Facebook is so arrogant, short-sighted, and incorrectly paranoid that they use strictly in-house technology for everything, that they were boned in a way that I have not personally seen anything approaching since Virtual Hammer accidentally ended my contract on my birthday with an internal conference in the next week. I couldn't open doors. I couldn't log in to my computer. I couldn't even call the fucking help desk because my desk phone was tied to my login. (They later did something similar to a fellow with a scarily low employee ID number, and when I say "fellow" I mean "Fellow", as in he had one of the extremely rare company fellowship positions. He tried going through the system in the usual way before pulling rank, and had some really scathing reports about the experience, which I'm assuming he dropped into some relevant ears.)
Facebook basically did that to everyone internally, all at once. There was a report of needing to use an angle grinder to get into the correct part of the data center, which detail is so poetically perfect that I intentionally reject all fact-checking. https://twitter.com/pettazz/status/1445200895554228224
So I'll have to remember to bring all my experience of being caught in a bureaucratic web where nobody really checks to see what cracks there are and what/who has fallen through them. The more things are automated, the easier it is for a human to say "That's Not My Responsibility" even if it should be theirs, and the more they are forced to extreme metrics, the less they can be bothered to care about the actual people being harmed.
Belovedest's been watching the TAB 2020 Olympics and the Paralympics, and there's a particular ad that includes a smart car that's a member of the team. And that got me wondering, what with the usual headaches that go along with something "simple" like upgrading a phone ... what happens when you have to upgrade a complicated piece of equipment like a car? (This also may have been in the immediate wake of a notable Tesla incident, probably the one where the guy's car bricked itself in the middle of a lane and couldn't be pushed to the shoulder. Having had a car die on me in the middle of a not-shoulder lane, this is viscerally TERRIFYING.)
Today's Facebook DNS shenanigans underlined that.
When the internet said "DNS", I got the metaphorical popcorn, as well as sparing a moment of empathy for the poor sap who had managed to save the zone file without the A or AAA records in it, wondering what the TTL was.
At that point I did not also realize that because Facebook is so arrogant, short-sighted, and incorrectly paranoid that they use strictly in-house technology for everything, that they were boned in a way that I have not personally seen anything approaching since Virtual Hammer accidentally ended my contract on my birthday with an internal conference in the next week. I couldn't open doors. I couldn't log in to my computer. I couldn't even call the fucking help desk because my desk phone was tied to my login. (They later did something similar to a fellow with a scarily low employee ID number, and when I say "fellow" I mean "Fellow", as in he had one of the extremely rare company fellowship positions. He tried going through the system in the usual way before pulling rank, and had some really scathing reports about the experience, which I'm assuming he dropped into some relevant ears.)
Facebook basically did that to everyone internally, all at once. There was a report of needing to use an angle grinder to get into the correct part of the data center, which detail is so poetically perfect that I intentionally reject all fact-checking. https://twitter.com/pettazz/status/1445200895554228224
So I'll have to remember to bring all my experience of being caught in a bureaucratic web where nobody really checks to see what cracks there are and what/who has fallen through them. The more things are automated, the easier it is for a human to say "That's Not My Responsibility" even if it should be theirs, and the more they are forced to extreme metrics, the less they can be bothered to care about the actual people being harmed.
