Web Excursions 2021-10-17
Metaverse! Metaverse? Metaverse!! — Benedict Evans by ben-evans.com
VR today seems to be at risk of stalling out as no more than a subset of hardcore games
Now people wonder if some combination of the ideas behind Roblox and Fortnite,
with their open worlds, open creativity and cross-over with other kinds pop culture,
might lead to a fundamental change
‘Metaverse’ today is again a label for a bunch of words on a whiteboard,
some of which are more real than others,
and which might well all end up combined,
but not necessarily like that.
It can also mean whatever you want it to mean
Worst Case
“us-east-1” (N. Virginia) is generally thought to be the biggest region, by a huge margin.
There have been estimates that 30% of all Internet traffic flows through it.
If us-east-1 went off the air, it would be Really Bad. How could that happen?
Terrestrial disaster
This is the first one anybody thinks of.
This one worries me less than a lot of the other scenarios here.
it’d be really unlikely for that to happen in all the AZ’s.
the hurricane scenario is so utterly predictable
that I bet anyone with a significant data-center presence in the region has been planning and wargaming around this one for at least a decade.
[N. Va. is] not a seismically active zone.
If an event of this scale occurs, you’re not going to be the only operation who’s off the air
Extraterrestrial disaster ·
What about devastation raining down from space?
The Carrington Event,
a major solar storm (“Coronal Mass Ejection” they say) that happened in 1859,
and severely disrupted the world’s telegraph system for about eight hours
Your personal pain may not matter that much.
After all, “A recent study … which analyzed the risks posed by a Carrington-scale event to the US power grid today found
that [during a Carrington-level incident,] 20 - 40 million people could be without power for up to 2 years,
and the total economic cost will be 0.6 - 2.6 trillion USD.”
Labor unrest
How much should you worry? · Not at all. This will never happen.
[If that ever happens, it will only be guaranteed that] Amazon [would] cave[] instantly and does whatever it takes to come to a settlement with the workers.
[That’s because] [t]he company is always talking customer obsession and that’s no BS, they really mean it.
AWS software or operational failure
I’m talking about something like what happened to Facebook this month
AWS has a powerful and consciously-constructed culture of operational excellence based on extreme paranoia
War
How much should you worry? Probably not very much.
Like the hurricane or solar storm, your problems are going to vanish in the static.
Enemy action
In this scenario, the Bad Guys figure out some combination of poison pills and DDOS and Linux kernel zero-days to knock over us-east-1 and keep it that way.
How much should you worry? Not all; I just can’t see this happening.
I remember an AWS meeting with a customer looking at moving to the cloud,
who asked “What about DDOS attacks?”
The Amazon executive in the room said “Yeah, there’s probably three or four of those going on right now, they’re a cost of doing business for us.”
There’s nobody in the world with more experience than AWS in dealing with this kind of crap.
So it’s in their interest to go after softer targets; big companies with juicy customer lists and password files and so on who aren’t minding their perimeters.
Public legal risk
How much should you worry? · I would.
But in a more general way;
the existential peril to the USA following on the exercise of power by the Trumpist faction seems to me very severe,
not something that can be ignored
Surviving
The best thing you could possibly do is, don’t wait:
Run “active-active”, which is to say have your application live in both regions all the time.
Netflix kind of wrote the book on this, for example consider this 2013 write-up
If it were me in my ideal world, I’d have copies of everything stored in S3 because of its exceptional durability;
I sincerely believe there is no safer place on the planet to save data.
Then I’d have a series of scripts that would rehydrate all my databases and config from S3, reconfigure all my code, and fire up my applications
S3 has had region-to-region replication built in for a long time, and clearly people at AWS have been thinking about this;
consider Introducing Multi-Region Asynchronous Object Replication Solution.
After 100 Years, a Royal Wedding in Russia Evokes Days of the Czars by Valerie Hopkins
The Romanovs have had no official legal standing in Russia since the dynasty was overthrown in 1917,
and they don’t seek to return to the throne.
But the wedding represents the pinnacle of their attempts to re-establish themselves in the country’s public life since the fall of communism 30 years ago,
and perhaps return a sense of imperial glory to Russia
The groom was Grand Duke George Mikhailovich Romanov, 40, a descendant of the Russian imperial throne, and his Italian partner was Rebecca Bettarini, 39.
He is the great-grandson of the cousin of the last Russian emperor, Nicholas II, Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich Romanov.
Raised in both Spain and France, Mr. Romanov was educated at Oxford and
worked for several European Union institutions
as well as Russian mining giant Norilsk Nickel group before starting his own consultancy.
According to his official biography, he is related to every royal family in Europe.
since the 1990s, the family’s legacy has been embraced by the powerful Russian Orthodox Church,
which canonized Nicholas II, Alexandra and their five children in 2000.
“Putin doesn’t plan to congratulate the newlyweds,” said President Vladimir V. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, whose daughter attended the celebration. “This wedding has nothing to do with our agenda.”
The Death and Birth of Technological Revolutions by stratechery.com
Perez’s argument was that the four technological revolutions that proceeded the Age of Information and Telecommunications followed a similar cycle:
[But] in real life, the trajectory of a technological revolution is not as smooth and continuous as the stylized curve
[A tech revolution] begins with a battle against the power of the old,
which is ingrained in the established production structure and embedded in the socio-cultural environment and in the institutional framework.
Only when that battle has been practically won
can the paradigm really diffuse across the whole economy of the core nations
and later across the world
In very broad terms, each surge goes through two periods of a very different nature, each lasting about three decades
the first half can be termed the installation period
The second half is the deployment period,
when the fabric of the whole economy is rewoven and reshaped by the modernizing power of the triumphant paradigm,
which then becomes normal best practice,
enabling the full unfolding of its wealth generating potential.
At the beginning of that period, the revolution is a small fact and a big promise;
at the end, the new paradigm is a significant force,
having overcome the resistance of the old paradigm
and being ready to serve as propeller of widespread growth.
This financial frenzy is a powerful force in propagating the technological revolution,
in particular its infrastructure, and
enhancing – even exaggerating – the superiority of the new products, industries and generic technologies
The economy also becomes unsustainable, due to the appearance of two growing imbalances.
One is the mismatch between the profile of demand and that of potential supply.
The other is the rift between paper values and real values
With the collapse comes recession – sometimes depression – bringing financial capital back to reality.
This, together with mounting social pressure, creates the conditions for institutional restructuring
Perez now thinks we are still waiting for the Golden Age —
and that there may be another crash in the future
every Golden Age has had to do with social-political choices made by governments,
because capitalism really only becomes legitimate when the greed of some is for the benefit of the many.
But you also have something else which is very important,
which is that there is an enormous technological potential which is not being used.
Not enough investment is going in the possible innovations
because there is not enough demand,
and demand is normally created by some policies.
at the end of the war, governments did something very important: they created a set of policies that favored suburbanization
The same thing is happening to us now.
In order to get the technologies to go in the right direction,
you’ve got to tilt the playing field,
and I hold that the most effective way of doing that today is tilting it towards ‘Green’.
Fortunately, the Nazis failed to conquer Europe and lost the war;
otherwise, National Socialist Germany might have been the center of a longer-lasting fascist world.
At that same time, the Soviet economy too was developing very fast with another mode of growth that was also capable of intensively deploying mass production.
This wide range of options for the deployment of that particular paradigm — including the Keynesian democracies that will have the USA as their core —
is an indication of how much is at stake
The implication of this observation is that the “Synergy” phase is amoral
the U.S. and Europe were on different timelines
The China Model
new technological revolutions create the conditions for newcomers to “leapfrog”:
China has entered the Synergy phase in which government has aligned with technology to profoundly impact China’s citizens.
That this entails mass surveillance, censorship, and propaganda doesn’t undo Perez’s thesis;
it perhaps punctures her optimism.
There are signs a weaker, yet in some ways similar, form of synergy has happened in the U.S. as well;
soon after the Dotcom Bubble came the Patriot Act,
It’s all a bit dystopian, to be sure,
but revolutions by their nature are unpredictable;
it wasn’t a certainty that liberal democracy would triumph in the fourth revolution,
much less the current one.
there may be more evidence of synergy between the government and tech than it seems
Crypto, though, is about the introduction of scarcity;
its payoff is decentralization, at the cost, at least for now, of convenience and speed.
crypto, the most obvious candidate for the next technological revolution is not — contra Perez — an obvious extension of the current era
Products that break through reach saturation in record time (see TikTok reaching a billion users in three years, or DTC companies that seem to max out in only a couple of years),
while the future of established companies seems to be quagmire in legislators and the courts,
even as profits continue to pile up without obvious places to invest.
My suspicion is that the current Installation period for crypto — if that is indeed where we are —
has a long ways to run,
which is another way of saying most of the economy will remain in the current paradigm for a while longer.
It’s one thing to see the future coming; it’s something else entirely to know the timing
To be sure this framework does imply that crypto is full of scams and on its way to inflating a spectacular bubble,
the aftermath of which will be painful for many,
but that is both expected and increasingly borne out by the facts as well.
What will matter for the future is how much infrastructure — particularly wallet installation — can be built-out in the meantime.
Productivity and Velocity by danluu.com
It's true that the gains from picking the right problem can be greater than the gains from having better tactical execution
because the gains from picking the right problem can be unbounded,
but it's also much easier to improve tactical execution and doing so also helps with picking the right problem
because having faster execution lets you experiment more quickly,
which helps you find the right problem.
For a long time, many athletes didn't seriously train,
and then once people started trying to train,
the training was often misguided by modern standards.
If I was doing things at a speed that people thought was normal, I suspect it would've taken long enough to find a feasible solution
that I would've dropped the problem after spending maybe one or two quarters on it.
The next major objection is that speed at a particular task doesn't matter
because time spent on that task is limited.
Getting faster at X can actually increase time spent on X
due to a sort of virtuous cycle feedback loop of where it makes sense to spend time.
when I look at where my time goes, a lot of it is spent typing.
I spend roughly half my writing time typing.
If I typed at what some people say median typing speed is (40 WPM)
instead of the rate some random typing test clocked me at (110 WPM),
this would be a 0.5 + 0.5 * 110/40 = 1.875x slowdown,
putting me at nearly 40 days of writing before a longshot doc lands, which would make that a sketchier proposition.
If I hadn't optimized the non-typing part of my writing workflow as well,
I think I would be, on net, maybe 10x slower,
which would put me at more like ~200 days per high impact longshot doc,
which is enough that I think that I probably wouldn't write longshot docs.
I spend time on things that are high ROI,
but those things are generally only high ROI because I've spent time improving my velocity,
which reduces the "I" in ROI.
The last major argument I see against working on velocity assigns negative moral weight to the idea of thinking about productivity and working on velocity at all.
I find this argument to be backwards. If someone thinks it's important to spend time with friends and family, an easy way to do that is to be more productive at work and spend less time working.
Another common reason for working on productivity is that mastery and/or generally being good at something seems satisfying for a lot of people.
[Ex.: To what extent should you optimize typing]
There are often many ways to make the same edit.
A Vim beginner might type "hhhhxxxxxxxx" when "bdw" is more efficient.
An advanced Vim user might use "bdw", not realizing that it's slower than "diw" despite having the same number of keystrokes.
(In QWERTY keyboard layout, the former is all on the left hand,
whereas the latter alternates left-right-left hands.
At 140 WPM, you're typing around 14 keystrokes per second,
so each finger only has 70 ms to get into position and press the key.
Alternating hands leaves more time for the next finger to get into position while the previous finger is mid-keypress.)
[Therefore you should be able to use
bdw
but not necessarily force yourself to usediw
.]