Ephemeralization

I worked on a team that built an "ephemeral" system. Part of that was to ensure that no state was logged. They were so proud of it being built that way.

Problem was, the system failed constantly and we had no way of knowing what the issue was without ssh'ing directly into a machine and retrying the steps by hand.

I get what they were going for, but at the end of the day, their opinions on how ideal systems "should be" ended up destroying their project and ignored fundamentals.

Example: one of the main deployment hosts was constantly crashing from disk space issues for over a year. Turns out when they provisioned the host with 4GB of storage and 64GB of RAM. They never troubleshot the host and just restarted its services whenever it crashed!

The theoretical energy expended to move an object tends toward zero, without limit, as the allowed time increases. Which is almost the same thing.

(Allowing it to take 12 billion years to move an inch is rather useless, but that's the same issue with the ephemeralization argument in general: it ignores all other measures of "cost".)

such a nice fancy sounding word for something that is so great & powerful but which also is a vast anti-Enlightenment force. we used to see the world about us, could monkey with things about us. butnhugh tech goods are deeply resistant to observation & understanding. what used to be apparent & ooen for interaction has become like magic to us, and we, humans, thr toolmakers, understand & see less of our ephemeralizing infrastructure & tools.

also ephemeralizes systems are often high capable, valuable resources that only big powers in the world can afford or operate well, much less build or develop. this lends to empheralized technology being more prescriptive, typically. it is general & adaptive & highly capable but rarely do we see examples of that power being opened & expressed to random people coming into a shop off the street, or to random consumers: consumers are given a crafted experience, a set of flows carved out of the more capable generalized ephemeralizes systems.

The metaverse, NFTs, crypto, and digital goods are pointed to as the next wave.

Staunch proponents will tell you that we'll be living in VR metaverses, doing work remotely, earning crypto, buying virtual properties, etc.

I'm personally bearish on crypto/NFTs, but kids like buying digital goods in games. And VRChat is blowing up and looking more and more like a threat to Facebook.

This is the sneaky, flawed premise behind many instances of what we call optimization. I have a Law of Optimization: the closer you get to optimal on your chosen metrics, the more cost is shifted to unmeasured externalities. (I imagine someone has named this.) A stronger version would be to say that the distance to optimal is inversely proportional to the externalized cost, so that the total externalized cost goes to infinity as you squeeze out ever-smaller increments of gain with respect to your chosen metrics.

The important corollary is that you can get 80% of the way there with very little externalized cost, and that going too far will eventually reveal the oversimplification in your cost model.

You can move an object with near-zero energy, but it'll take 1000 years. You can get to net zero carbon emission by shifting it to someone else or dumping it somewhere it isn't measured or is a temporary sink that will eventually re-release. In my own area, you can reduce garbage collection overhead to zero by either never freeing anything (so the externalized cost is memory) or shifting the GCs to happen in between the timed portions of a benchmark (and this often happens accidentally, especially with a "no regressions" policy!)