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Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

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Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#51

Post by AtlasBarfed »

nemosaltat wrote: post #38
staunch wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And pilots will even callout that their action had the desired effect: "Flaps up selected" "Flaps are indicating up" There's a lot to learn from the way airplanes are engineered and operated.

Prior Navy Nuke here. We called it PRO (Point, Read, Operate)- we’d point at the thing we were going to manipulate, state what we were manipulating, and announce the completed action. For certain procedures we had a second party (“reader”) observing and acknowledging each part of each step. Operator (Gesturing anti-clockwise while pointing at valve XYZ) Operator: Opening valve XYZ. Reader: Opening valve XYZ, aye. Ope…

I've noticed from pair programming that the person navigating with a mouse is far less able to read and interpret their surroundings or pick up typos while typing, than an observer that simply has to watch what the other person is doing.

Like when clicking on a file in a directory you just entered and looking for the file, the observer can literally locate and point to the file for the mouse user 5-10x faster than the mouse operator.

The observer seems to interpret the information that results from the directory listing faster than the person who just did the double-click to enter the directory because they don't have the muscle coordination context switch and can immediately move to interpreting the results.

It's probably because mouse manipulation uses brain infrastructure that is more recently evolved, but observe-react is a lot earlier in the brain processing pipeline evolutionarily, and a lot more refined/involved.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#52

Post by chrisseaton »

shuntress wrote: post #50
chrisseaton wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood this idea. If you believe we should never use nuclear weapons, then don't have them at all. If you believe there is a case where it may be moral and rational to use nuclear weapons, why would you want to put a potential barrier in the way of their use? You could have a situation where everyone was agreed to use them but the president was physically unable to harm the aide to use them. You can kn…

>You can know that something is the right thing to do but not have the courage to physically harm someone to do it. In this specific case the "thing to do" is literally to harm hundreds of thousands of people. The reasoning behind this proposed interlock is that any logic which concludes that it is moral and rational to harm hundreds of thousands of people must also conclude that it is moral and rational to harm the…

> The reasoning behind this proposed interlock is that any logic which concludes that it is moral and rational to harm hundreds of thousands of people must also conclude that it is moral and rational to harm the "interlock" individual.

Yes, but you can know it's the right thing to do, but not be able to physically do it.

The president's ability to physically cut someone open is not relevant to whether it's a good idea to use nuclear weapons or not. Him being unable to do it tells you nothing about whether they should be launching the weapons.

If the president fails the test that tells you nothing about whether the launch is the right thing to do. Doesn't that fundamentally make the test bad?

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#53

Post by Ayesh »

I have an old laptop with a dead battery, and for a BIOS upgrade, it prevents me from updating without 50% battery.

I have to type "danger" to bypass this restriction, and I thought it was pretty cool.

Another good UI pattern is in Firefox, that it disables the Run button on downloads for a few seconds.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#54

Post by raverbashing »

nemo1618 wrote: post #32

Notably, Discord does something like this when you @everyone in a large channel: "You're about to push a notification to 12,000 people, are you sure you want to do that...?"

Slack should take a note of this. Especially for rogue @here notifications

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#55

Post by bo1024 »

dheera wrote: post #40
csmattryder wrote: post #8

I've seen this called "pointing and calling" [1], Japan's train drivers use the technique to force themselves to perform actions and take notice of the current environment. I personally took it to heart, it's a good system for forcing a cache miss in the brain - make sure you're on "database production" or "database localhost" etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling

> I've seen this called "pointing and calling" [1], Japan's train drivers use the technique to force themselves to perform actions and take notice of the current environment. The concept makes sense, though I don't quite fully get how to translate it to other contexts besides train driving where unexpected and unpredictable events come up all the time. Let's say you're driving a car and the traffic light turns red. D…

Your example is a reactive event. Something happened in your environment.

This idea is more useful for situations that you are initiating, and where feedback is not immediately obvious.

An example could be turning your car’s lights on at night. Before starting the car, you force yourself to point to the switch, say “lights on”, and do it.

I use this with keys. When leaving my office, house, or car, I hold up the key in my hand and establish sight (I don’t say anything out loud). Then I lock the door.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#56

Post by mikewarot »

gumby wrote: post #37
chrisseaton wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood this idea. If you believe we should never use nuclear weapons, then don't have them at all. If you believe there is a case where it may be moral and rational to use nuclear weapons, why would you want to put a potential barrier in the way of their use? You could have a situation where everyone was agreed to use them but the president was physically unable to harm the aide to use them. You can kn…

> I've never understood this idea. It's an attempt to make an abstraction concrete. Think of it as the trolley problem in real life. Stalin is famously supposed to have said, "one death is a tragedy, 100,000 is a statistic". Cynical or not it is how humans think. > If you believe we should never use nuclear weapons, then don't have them at all. Strategic game theory and Mutual Assured Destruction depend on the possib…

Trolley Problems are themselves a bad idea... the Kobayashi Maru is a similar exercise. I, like Kirk, don't believe that there are situations that can't be worked around if there is time to think, and resources to act.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#57

Post by apozem »

dheera wrote: post #40
csmattryder wrote: post #8

I've seen this called "pointing and calling" [1], Japan's train drivers use the technique to force themselves to perform actions and take notice of the current environment. I personally took it to heart, it's a good system for forcing a cache miss in the brain - make sure you're on "database production" or "database localhost" etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling

> I've seen this called "pointing and calling" [1], Japan's train drivers use the technique to force themselves to perform actions and take notice of the current environment. The concept makes sense, though I don't quite fully get how to translate it to other contexts besides train driving where unexpected and unpredictable events come up all the time. Let's say you're driving a car and the traffic light turns red. D…

In high school, I drove a 1993 Toyota Tercel. It was a functional, reliable car, but it had no keyfob to lock the doors remotely.

Getting out of your car, pressing the lock button on the inside of the driver's side door, and shutting the door are all routine, boring actions that make it easy to forget your keys inside the car. The keys can go in all kinds of places as you climb out of the car - jacket pocket, pants pocket, center console. It is very easy to lock your keys in your car.

I quickly learned to hold my keys in one hand, say out loud, "Keys in hand," and then lock the door with the other hand.

This technique is perfect for any repetitive action that could go wrong with non-trivial consequences, and there's lots of that in everyday life.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#58

Post by kube-system »

notacoward wrote: post #36
jaclaz wrote: post #25

Side question. How many/which companies have more than one million Linux machines?

At least Facebook (where OP worked), Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Probably Netflix, maybe Apple. There might be a couple more, but no more than that because we've already accounted for a pretty high percentage of worldwide shipments for servers, disks, etc. Fun fact: when you're that big, your demand creates its own inflation and you have to consider that in projections.

If by "machine" we also mean things outside of a 19" rack, I would wager that large telecoms probably have way more devices running Linux than FAANG. Imagine the network of cable modems that Comcast alone must operate. What percentage of their 28+ million broadband customers rent Comcast owned/managed modems? Almost all of them except the tech-savvy crowd? And that's just one device type.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#59

Post by illumin8 »

This is a great idea, and I'd like to point out that having such a system in place would have prevented one of the largest Internet outages in recent memory - the Amazon S3 outage in 2017: https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/

> At 9:37AM PST, an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process. Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended.

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