Not necessarily. Say you apply to a job advert and use an email address from your personal email domain as your contact. Say email exchanges between you and your potential future employer are silently dropped because their email provider deems your domain non-kosher. Your application is ultimately dropped as a result. Does this classify as "ruin my life"?
Before this scenario is brushed off as hypothetical, this happened to me on a couple of occasions albeit by using a not-so-popular email provider (i.e., not Gmail).
I have two of these. One caveat I'd mention is that the power buttons are flimsy. On one of them I have to push kinda hard to get it to do anything, so I dread it if they ever lose power.
Is this similar to what Sidney Dekker says in Drift Into Failure. That any "root cause" is more likely a narrative tool than a reflection of objective reality in a sufficiently complex system.
Im ex AWS and the internal tools _try_ to get away from the myth of human error and root cause. But its difficult when humans read and understand in a linear post hoc fashion.
Amazon culture was still really rather root cause oriented when I left. The COE process they followed to do post-incident analysis was flawed and based on discredited approaches like the "5 whys". I don't know if it has changed since I left, I rather hope it has.
I genuinely believe there is no such thing as a root cause. The reason I believe that is both grounded in personal experience, and in the 40+ years of academic research that demonstrates in far greater detail that no failure comes about as a result of a single thing. Failure is always complex, and that approaches to incident analysis and remediation that are grounded in it are largely ineffectual. You have to consider all contributing factors if you want to make actual progress. The tech industry tends to trail really far behind on this subject.
A couple of quick up-front reading suggestion, if I may:
* https://how.complexsystems.fail/ - An excellent, and short, read. It's not really written from the perspective of tech, but every single point is easily applicable to technological systems. I encourage engineers to think about the systems that they're responsible for at work, their code, incidents they've been involved in, as they read it.
Everything we deal with is fundamentally complex. Even a basic application that runs on a single server is complex, because of all the layers of the operating system below it, let alone the wider environment of the network and beyond.
* If you're willing to go deeper: "Behind Human Error" ISBN-10: 9780754678342. It's a very approachable book, written by Dr Woods and several other prominent names in the academic research side in to failures.
My favourite example to use when talking about why there's no such thing as a root cause has been the 737-MAX situation. Which has only become more apt over time, as we've learned just how bad that plane was.
With the original 737-MAX situation, we had two planes crash in the space of 5 months.
If we follow a root cause analysis approach, you'll end up looking at the fact that the planes were reliant on a single sensor to tell them their angle of attack (AoA). So replace the single sensor with multiple, something that was already possible to do, and the planes stop crashing. Job done. Resilience achieved!
That doesn't really address a lot of important things, like, how did we end up in a situation where the plane was ever sold with a single AoA sensor (especially one with a track record of inaccuracy)?
Why did the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) keep overriding pilot input on the controls, which it didn't do on previous implementations of MCAS systems?
Why was the existence of the MCAS system not in the manuals?
Why could MCAS repeatedly activate?
If the MCAS hadn't behaved in such a bizarre fashion, where it kept overriding input, it's arguable that the pilots would have been able to correct its erroneous dropping of the nose. If you're sticking with a "root cause" model, there's a pretty strong argument that the MCAS system was the actual root cause of the incident.
Given the fairly fundamental changes to the controls, and the introduction of the MCAS, why were pilots not required to be trained on the new model of plane? Is Boeings attempts to avoid pilots needing retraining the actual root cause?
Why was an MCAS system necessary in the first place? It's because of the engine changes they'd made, and how they'd had to position them in relation to the wings that tended to result in the planes nose wanting to go up and induce a stall. The MCAS system was introduced to help with counteracting that new behaviour. Was the new engine choice the root cause of failure?
and so on and so forth..
If you look at the NTSB accident report for the 737-MAX flights, it goes way deeper, and broader in to the incident. It takes a holistic view of the situation, because even the answers to those questions I pose above are multi-faceted. As a result it had a long list of recommendations for Boeing, the FAA, and all involved parties.
Those 2 crashes were the emergent property of a complex system. It's a symptom. A side effect. It required failures in the way things were communicated within Boeing, failures in FAA certification, failures in engineering, failures in management decision making, the works.
No one at Boeing deliberately set out to make a plane that crashes. A lot of the decisions about how they do things are reasonable, and make some sense, in isolation. But they all contributed together to make for a system to which it became a question of "when" and not "if" a major disaster would occur.
If resilience and incident analysis just focuses on a singular root cause, the systems that produced the bad outcome, will continue, and will inevitably make more bad decisions. The only thing that would improve is that they would probably never make a decision to sell a plane with a single AoA sensor.
As we've seen over time, the whole broken system has resulted in a lot of issues with the MAX, beyond that sensor situation.
I stopped watching and reading the news, in general. I have some friends who balked at the idea when I mentioned it. They'd say, "Oh, but how do you keep up on important news?"
I don't.
My life is better for letting it go. If something is genuinely important, and I really need to know - I always end up finding out somehow.
I think a reasonable barometer for a lot of news is: will this be important or relevant in 1 month? If the answer is "no", then it's probably more entertainment than anything else.
However if I were to try and steelman the opposition for your position, I'd probably explore the argument that you could be living a very privileged life which might be part of the reason for why you're able to ignore the news. For certain vulnerable groups, keeping up to date with politics and the news might have a tangible impact in their everyday life.
With that being said, I generally don't keep up with the news either.
> However if I were to try and steelman the opposition for your position, I'd probably explore the argument that you could be living a very privileged life which might be part of the reason for why you're able to ignore the news.
Well, the other issue is that people pay too much attention to national news and waaaay to little attention to local news.
That fracking site that just opened up next to your farm should probably occupy your attention. The four slobs trying to bring fiber to your town need your support. The fact that your local sheriff's office is swinging around with military gear might be a bit of a concern. etc.
Sure, you want to make sure you are paying attention to whether the fascists are trying to take over nationally, however, those same people can do a lot more direct damage to you by taking over local control.
Yes! And you can do a lot more about those local issues. The small-scale but impactful to _you_ actions are a more satisfying way to exercise democracy and a good way to build that muscle.
Slicing economically (oversimplifying here and ignoring other certain types of vulnerable or feeling-under-attack groups) the people at the bottom and the people at the top don't generally need to worry about the news. The ones at the top will be fine either way. The ones at the bottom will continue to have to scrap along either way. It's the people in the middle who's level of comfort day-to-day could be most affected by political changes, for whom a change in tax rate or inflation or social subsidies could shift comfort into precariousness or vice versa.
It is usually better to read about stuff like months later when the dust have settled. Watching CNN lazer focus on some "developing story" with almost nothing to talk about but gossip makes my head hurt.
If the local bridge is closed due to X people tell you.
Have you found a good place to read about slightly less current events? I feel like most articles are little salami slices of events as they occur, without context.
On paper there are some semimonthly environmentalist magazines my wife subscribe to, and the news coverage in those is quite settled and nice in that way. I guess magazines would be the place to look, but those seem to be dying off or are losing quality...
Real news has always traveled by word-of-mouth very rapidly. I am also trying to give it up— it’s definitely a difficult battle missing out on that dopamine fix (or whatever it is )— but I continue to struggle!
I don't read articles about autocrats or mass shootings or whatever because I don't enjoy them, and me reading them doesn't make the world a better place.
This is past the NPRM stage, if I am reading correctly, so final rule is getting published in the federal register. That is as baked as regulations get.
I think its pretty clearly a ploy by the biden regime. It follows the same playbook as the student debt cancelation plot.
Use gray areas in the law to do things that it was obviously not intended for, then advertise how you did the thing, and then when it inevitably gets shut down because its not legal you blame the other side for killing it.
The only drawback I can think of is some sites not recognizing the TLD like you already suggested.
What cost do you consider enormous?
Yes, they're not the cheapest, but they're still cheaper than many other types.
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