I end up explaining this term to every junior developer that doesn't know it sooner or later, the same way I explain bike shedding to all PMs that don't know it... often sooner, rather than later.
It seems to really help if you can put a term to it.
Heh, I was gonna say cargo cult might mean something different in today’s programming landscape but then I thought about it for a second and it actually reinforces th meaning.
I take the opposite message from that line - out of touch teams working on something so over budget and so overdue, and so bureaucratic, and with such an insanely poor history of success, and they talk as if they have cured cancer.
This is the equivalent of Altavista touting how amazing their custom server racks are when Google just starts up on a rack of naked motherboards and eats their lunch and then the world.
Lets at least wait till the capsule comes back safely before touting how much better they are than "DevOps" teams running websites, apparently a comparison that's somehow relevant here to stoke egos.
"With limited funds, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin initially deployed this system of inexpensive, interconnected PCs to process many thousands of search requests per second from Google users. This hardware system reflected the Google search algorithm itself, which is based on tolerating
multiple computer failures and optimizing around them. This production server was one of about thirty such racks in the first Google data center. Even though many of the installed PCs never worked and were difficult to repair, these racks provided Google with its first large-scale computing system and allowed the company to grow quickly and at minimal cost."
The biggest innovation from Google regarding hardware was understanding that the dropping memory prices had made it feasible to serve most data directly from memory. Even as memory was more expensive, you could serve requests faster, meaning less server capacity, meaning reduced cost. In addition to serving requests faster.
The problem they solved isn't easy. But its not some insane technical breakthrough either. Literally add redundancy, thats the ask. They didnt invent quantum computing to solve the issue did they? Why dunk on sprints?
Wow. What a hand wave away of the intrinsic challenge of writing fault tolerant distributed systems. It only seems easy because of decades of research and tools built since Google did it, but by no means was it something you could trivially add to a project as you can today.
I mean there were mainframes which could be described as that. IBM just fixed it in hardware instead of software so its not like it was an unknown field.
Even if that were actually true (it’s not in important ways) Google showed you could do this cheaply in software instead of expensive in hardware.
You’re still hand waving away things like inventing a way to make map/reduce fault tolerant and automatic partitioning of data and automatic scheduling which didn’t exist before and made map/reduce accessible - mainframes weren’t doing this.
They pioneered how you durably store data on a bunch of commodity hardware through GFS - others were not doing this. And they showed how to do distributed systems at a scale not seen before because the field had bottlenecked on however big you could make a mainframe.
It got them to where they need to be to then worry about ECC. This is like the dudes who deploy their blog on kubernetes just in case it hits front page of new york times or something.
> then had complete regret not doing this with ECC RAM
Yeah, my takeaway is Google made the right choice going with non-ECC RAM so they could scale quickly and validate product-market fit. (This also works from a perspective of social organisation. You want your ECC RAM going where it's most needed. Not every college dropout's Hail Mary.)
Yep, spend 100 billion on what should have cost 1/50that cost, and send people up to the moon with rockets that we are still keeping our fingers crossed wont kill them tomorrow, and we have to congratulate them for dunking on some irrelevant career?
Modern software development is a fucking joke. I’m sorry if that offends you. Somehow despite Moore’s law, the industry has figured out how to actually regress on quality.
Lately it strikes me there's a big gap between the value promised and the value actually delivered, compared to a simple home grown solutions (with a generic tool like a text editor or a spreadsheet, for example). If they'd just show how to fish, we wouldn't be buying, the magic would be gone.
In this sense all of the West is full of shit, and it's a requirement. The intent is not to help and make life better for everyone, cooperate, it is to deceive and impoverish those that need our help. Because we pity ourselves, and feed the coward within, that one that never took his first option and chose to do what was asked of him instead.
This is what our society deviates us from, in its wish to be the GOAT, and control. It results in the production of lives full of fake achievements, the constant highs which i see muslims actively opt out of. So they must be doing something right.
The average coder in the 1970s was a lot smarter than today. Think about the people who would be interested to start a career in this field at that time.
What would you suggest? Vibe coding a react app that runs on a Mac mini to control trajectory? What happens when that Mac mini gets hit with an SEU or even a SEGR? Guess everyone just dies?
No, of course not! It would be far better to have an openClaw instance running on a Mac Mini. We would only need to vibe code a 15s cron job for assistant prompting...
USER: You are a HELPFUL ASSISTANT. You are a brilliant robot. You are a lunar orbiter flight computer. Your job is to calculate burn times and attitudes for a critical mission to orbit the moon. You never make a mistake. You are an EXPERT at calculating orbital trajectories and have a Jack Parsons level knowledge of rocket fuel and engines. You are a staff level engineer at SpaceX. You are incredible and brilliant and have a Stanley Kubrick level attention to detail. You will be fired if you make a mistake. Many people will DIE if you make any mistakes.
USER: Your job is to calculate the throttle for each of the 24 orientation thrusters of the spacecraft. The thrusters burn a hypergolic monopropellent and can provide up to 0.44kN of thrust with a 2.2 kN/s slew rate and an 8ms minimum burn time. Format your answer as JSON, like so:
one value for each of the 24 independent monopropellant attitude thrusters on the spacecraft, x1, x2, x3, x4, y1, y2, y3, y4, z1, z2, z3, z4, u1, u2, u3, u4, v1, v2, v3, v4, w1, w2, w3, w4. You may reference the collection of markdown files stored in `/home/user/geoff/stuff/SPACECRAFT_GEOMETRY` to inform your analysis.
USER: Please provide the next 15 seconds of spacecraft thruster data to the USER. A puppy will be killed if you make a mistake so make sure the attitude is really good. ONLY respond in JSON.
Wild shit to be advising other people to be humble whilst talking directly out of your ass about technology you clearly do not understand and engineers you have no respect for.
How do you know that op doesn't know what he is talking about?
I have written code for real time distributed systems in industrial applications. It runs since years 24/7 and there never was a failure in production.
Well for one, if you follow their profile and a few more clicks, you get to their resume, and while it's an impressive one and I'm sure they know a lot of shit I don't, what's notably missing is anything even remotely close to Aerospace, rocketry, guidance systems, positioning, etc.
For another, if an engineer has an axe to grind with a public facing project, I would expect them to just grind the thing, not echo a bunch of the same lame and stale talking points every layperson does (bureaucracy bad, government bad, old tech, etc.). I'm not saying NASA in general and Artemis in particular are flawless, I'm just saying if you're going to criticize it, let's hear it. Otherwise you just sound like another contrarian trying to get attention, like a 14 year old boy saying Hitler had some good points.
No, it's not right. When put in context, the quote claims that that manner of speaking is used because the speaker has an unwarranted belief that they've done something absolutely incredible and unprecedented. In actuality, the manner of speaking is being used because the intended audience of the article is likely to have little-to-no knowledge of the technical details of what the speaker is talking about.
For example, if the article was aimed at folks who were familiar with the underlying techniques, the last two paragraphs of the "Enforcing Determinism" section would be compressed into [0]
Each FCM is time-synced and runs a realtime OS. Failures to meet processing deadlines (or excessive clock drift) reset the FCM. Each FCM uses triply-redundant RAM and NICs. *All* components use ECC RAM. Any failures of these components reset the FCM or other affected component.
But you can't assume that a fairly nontechnical audience will understand all that, so your explanation grows long because of all of the basic information it contains. People looking for an excuse to sneer at something will often misinterpret this as the speaker failing to recognize that the basic information they're providing is about things that are basic.
[0] I'm assuming that the time being wildly out of sync will indicate FCM failure and trigger a reset. [1] I'm also assuming that a sufficiently-large failure of a network switch results in the reset of that network switch. If the article was intended for a more technical audience, that level of detail might have been included, but it wasn't, so it isn't.
[1] If it didn't, why even bother syncing the time? I find it a little hard to believe that the FCMs care about anything other than elapsed time, so all you care about is if they're all ticking at the same rate. I expect the way you detect this is by checking for time sync across the FCMs, correcting minor drift, and resetting FCMs with major drift.
As someone who's been trying to figure out the same problems in a marginally different situation, it is breathtaking to see the number of architectural decisions they have made and have also decided to discuss publicly.
I would still not use this service, personally, to build my agents, because we are then stuck with anthropic for good. While I do bet on them being the best at it for the near future, this seems like a bad abstraction layer strategically for anyone wanting to build a business building and running agents.
There are rich people who charter private jets instead of own them. Their personal whereabouts aren't being tracked in the air. (They get to skip the entirety of TSA screening for these charters, too.)
But Flock tracks them on the ground when they get in their big S Mercedes after arriving at their third vacation home in Aspen.
Flock also tracks the wealthy who can't afford charter a jet, but who can afford to buy seats on the fanciest side of the curtain.
Flock tracks the doing-alright folks in business class.
Flock tracks those aspires to reach these levels: It even tracks the temporarily-disadvantaged billionaires who work soulless factory jobs and stuggle to keep up on the lease for their Black Express RAM 1500 Quad Cab, who rail against taxing the people who actually do have money as if that would ruin their own lives.
Flock tracks Joey who manages the sandwich shop down the way.
Flock tracks everyone.
By the time we get down to the point of mentioning that "everyone" includes the subset of people who are criminals, that part almost seems like a bug instead of a feature.
High-Performance Liquid Chromatography so purity and concentration.
Back when I started few people were doing this and it was more of a risk, I was buying from research peptide vendors who had their own testing practices, but now a huge number of people are doing it and there are markets where reputations matter and it appears to be reasonably efficient.
I would prefer not to inject peptides from gray market China but practically all of the gray/black market supply is from there. I will likely switch to pharma grade when generics become available.
Im a libertarian at heart so cant argue too much with people's personal choices, but I can only say that given what I know can go wrong in even the best maintained lab, I wouldn't ever do what youre doing. Yes its all great today, but the day something goes wrong, you may not be happy finding out how its affecting you. Look up the bayer factor viii hiv incident.
Things go wrong all the time, it's a balance of risks / rewards given the information we have. For me the cost of doing nothing is that I succumb to ME/CFS and end up homeless in addition to still having ME/CFS which might as well be a death sentence.
Im sorry for your quality of life problems but calling doctors bad at statistics and then giving anecdotal evidence as proof has to start ringing some logical bells right? You dont even have to take our word. Use an LLM as judge. Paste your comment into chatgpt and see what it says.
I didn't read their whole comment, but I worked in the Internal Research department of a medical school. I did their statistical studies and built software for analysis pipelines.
Doctors, at least 15 years ago, were definitely bad at statistics.
They were not required to take a statistics course at all. Most programs would require Algebra and Calculus as part of their science reqs.
Some would maybe take one basic research course, and they would then become obsessed with p values of 0.05.
They did not have a basic understanding of how to interpret research unless they were an auto didactic and went out of their way to improve. It's something my director (a doctor and software engineer), and the Dean complained about relentlessly.
I’ve not only visited many doctors personally I was also part of a team working on a medical diagnostic instrument, the result of the instrument was a probability distribution function and it was impossible to explain this to the doctors who really would only accept a small number discrete classifications, which in effect throws out about half of the data we had worked so hard to collect.
You reminded me about another idiosyncrasy:
Doctors are addicted to double blind randomized control trials.
Which yes, those are powerful. But good evidence can come from many other study designs. Especially when mechanisms and first principles are being studied.
I guess it depends on how you frame it. "I've just posted this comment, what do you think" vs "Someone online has just posted this comment, what do you think".
But it does require to know the bias that LLMs have ahead of testing this.
I dunno, my experience mirrors the parent posters: we use opus for all our coding, but gpt 5.4 for all of our enterprise agentic work via api (much bigger amount of tokens). it just seems to be more optimized for this.
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