Well yeah, obviously? Why would anyone ever respect the "do not track" header? The whole point is to get people to click "accept all" out of fatigue or apathy!
There was a story on HN a while ago that I can't seem to remember the title of.
It was something along the lines of "The optimal amount of slack in an organization is not zero", or something like that.
The argument was that, since it's impossible to plan for every eventuality, you need a certain amount of slack capacity in order to retain some flexibility.
And that by always using 100% capacity, we end up dysfunctional.
I think the same is true for our personal lives.
But the endless treadmill of self-optimization, side-hustles and ever more commitments leaves us unable to cope.
I think it referred to the classic efficiency vs latency tradeoff. Like when emergency vehicles are always on standby, which is inefficient, but allows them to roll out without delay. Conversely privatised rail lines squeeze out every ounce of capacity from the infrastructure resulting in delays when something, anything goes even slightly wrong.
I use this extensively when planning activities with my children. It's a fun challenge because they're both too young to tell the time, much less read, which are constraints one does not normally encounter in their work life.
I agree efficiency vs latency, but it's also "exploit vs explore" balance, work/life balance and more, leaving time for research, exploration, shooting the sh*t, decorating the office, buying christmas gifts at lunchtime, helping out co-workers etc.
I think "slack" is a much more general concept than efficiency vs latency. The slack itself allows low-latency response to emergencies but the activities that fill the slack time can be valuable in ways that often aren't legible to the org hierarchy.
It was the same problem for JIT supply chains falling apart during COVID.
It's very hard to sell slack to management and so in "well run organizations" it ends up trending towards zero. And then everyone is surprised at the resulting catastrophes.
It's pretty simple no, the model that is reasonable and antifragile is within our grasp, a model that includes degrees of error more than it reifies hewing towards 0 carrying costs. It's more the good will and good faith across the board to use that known simple math, as sneaky monkey minds in our midst see that if they defect they can win some edge in the short term (and again, a better model shows the true utility and total harmed effect) and then it's a race to the bottom and a world of basically the prisoners dilemma. Making that thinking anathema in human culture should be the focus. I don't know that a grass roots effort could out-compete existing networks of power and influence, nor that a total reset of players is possible either.
It's aligning the incentives of top management with the slightly longer term outcomes. If stock grants are based on this quarter's performance, "slack" seems much less important.
Exactly, if you get rewarded for the 5% improvements annually but are out before the once-a-decade near death experiences.. you end up with more Intels, GMs, Boeings, etc.
I can't help you with the title, but with another paragraph from that story, should you want to find it.
Paraphrasing from memory:
> When you are in a major Chinese city you may street sweepers sitting on the side walk chitchatting. The first thing you may think of it as waste that could be eliminated. But it also acts as a buffer.
I'm kind of surprised that no one in here seems to have mentioned https://oeffi.schildbach.de/index.html so far. It does exactly what seems to be wanted here.
Funny, I just got my own GPON-capable SFP (a Zyxel pmg3000-d20b) last week.
Finally got a fiber connection from Deutsche Telekom 2 months ago, after almost 5 years of waiting and a huge amount of fear and loathing. At one point, they threatened to cancel my order, claiming a certain subcontractor was unable to reach me. Of course that subcontractor had already done it's job months ago at that point. And this is just one of the many, many shenanigans that went on during those years.
At the moment, I'm using a Fritz!Box 5530 Fiber directly hooked up to the fiber with the AVM-supplied GPON interface. But I'm planning for the Zyxel SFP to go directly into my homelab server and route from there :)
I have migrated most of my personal stuff (like local fileservers, caldav / carddav and a few others) to FreeBSD jails in 2022 and haven't looked back. When a new release comes along I run `freebsd-update` and recreate my jails from Ansible, and that's that. A lot calmer than the churn that is modern Linux + Docker. And I get an awesome ZFS experience, too. I'm really happy.
That's calmer? You know what I do when a new Fedora release comes out? Nothing. My containers just work.
Sometimes a new network driver comes along, sometimes an old network driver is taken out, rarely affects me.
You rebuild your entire jail with Ansible every single release? You freebsd people are hilarious to me. I used to be one of you, from 2000 to 2009 I used FreeBSD for everything. I also used Perl for all scripting. I look back and am glad I moved on from that. For my mental health I'm glad.
Well, I'm managing a whole fleet of Docker (and, not too long ago, LXD) containers at work. So I definitely know that ecosystem.
Of course you can take any old Docker image and just run it as-is.
Just as I can simply run old FreeBSD releases in jails.
But that's not the whole story, is it? 3rd party dependency updates and whatnot.
And yes, I feel simply deleting my jails and letting my scripts recreate them feels calm to me. I haven't had anything break or require too much attention so far. Can't say that for all the Docker stuff.
And I always have the peace of mind that should my server hardware give up the ghost, I can always take a new computer, run my scripts, and have everything configured and running in no time because the procedures are exercised regularly.
What's the churn with docker? You don't have to update your docker files if you don't want to. I mean it's probably a bad idea to not update long term (security issues, etc), but that's also true for freebsd. Y
Because it's easy, because I like to stay up to date, because it's a good way to exercise the scripts that create them every now and then to make sure they still work as expected :)
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