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The August 17 outage

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Re: The August 17 outage

#701

Post by user43928 »

croes wrote: post #687
user43928 wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, with the projected doubling by 2030 we're looking at 3% of global electricity consumption or 3.4 EJ, less than 1% of final energy consumption. That is moderate. Energy-intensive industry is around 130 EJ, and global final energy consumption > 450 EJ. Existing documented applications of today's AI have the potential to decrease energy consumption by >13 EJ/year by 2035. Now that was about operational energ…

"Global data centers consumed around 415 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity—about 1.5% of the world's total electricity—with AI acting as a primary accelerator for new power demand." https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from... That is today where we already consume too much. If by 2030 AI's consumption doubles it gets worse. While training large models draws major initial power, everyday AI usage…

Well, at least we could establish that the environmental impact is moderate rather than extreme.

And if the potential of >13 EJ/year is actually realized, it would seem like the net impact of the data centers is not just "moderately more CO2" but possibly "moderately less".

Please avoid low quality analogies on HN.

Re: The August 17 outage

#702

Post by inigyou »

wat10000 wrote: post #213
ACCount37 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You can't seriously tell me that the unhappy leg of the code path has no test coverage." Sometimes I forget how ignorant HN can be of real world software development and the bar of corporate code quality, and then bangers like this remind me of it.

Test coverage varies a lot, but error paths seem almost universally untested.

SQLite is the exception. But they still test with fake errors, not real errors. For example they intercept malloc and make the first malloc call fail, run the tests, change it to second call, run the tests, ... and with two modes: only one call fails, or all calls fail after that.

They can afford to do this exhaustively because the test criterion is universal: they are testing ACIDity - the database is either in the new state or the old state. Never in between or corrupted.

Any other kind of system wouldn't be so easy to test for malloc failure, since you couldn't check for things like a successful response.

Re: The August 17 outage

#703

Post by centuryfall »

fsloth wrote: post #520
yread wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other projects get unmaintained with maintainers burnt out by a torrent of vulberability reports

This I don't understand. If it's not your job, then just ignore the reports. If it's actually critical, someone will put money on the table and then it's a business. And then it's about scheduling and resourcing - also should not burn anyone out. Just because many people have false sense of entitlement as soon as they get a free offering, it does not mean anyone needs to accommodate them.

https://xkcd.com/2347/

A great majority of business applications do run on open source projects, and in turn, are affected by them if things go awry. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma in this case.

Re: The August 17 outage

#704

Post by 27183 »

grim_io wrote: post #662
Dylan16807 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"exponential" and "slightly longer" are very different backoff patterns.

The typical ceiling for these is around a minute.

This can either be a relatively short time or an eternity, depending on the upstream consequences. If that means holding a connection open for 60000 milliseconds while waiting for some downstream rpc to go through its backoff ritual, that's an eternity, and under load that connection pool will get exhausted quickly. So now a problem which should only affect maybe 1% of users has completely hosed everyone.

I've seen this happen multiple times. Someone designs some clever backoff strategy without considering how it fits in the context of the rest of the system. Hilarity ensues.

If you have something taking an entire minute on a computer, please ensure you implement it in such a way that no connections are actually held open for that entire minute.

Re: The August 17 outage

#705

Post by inigyou »

hirvi74 wrote: post #394
999900000999 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is very much not FAANG. They’ve been trying to eliminate dedicated QA for years and underpay contractors. Microsoft can afford to do a lot of things, but why when you can squeeze a bit more profit out.

I have never heard anyone ever utter the words, "Microsoft makes great products and services." They basically built an empire on brand recognition and vendor lock-in. Of course, a lot of their success was due to catching lightning in a bottle a few times at the right moments. It is miraculous how they continue to fail upwards somehow. I suppose it's because they just vampirically sustain themselves by acquiring other…

It's because they understand capitalism better than they understand software. The former is how you win capitalism, the latter is just a cost center.

Same with Oracle. Both of them are good at getting contracts and then executing them not poorly enough that it's breach of contract but not well enough that the customer stops paying. That's their business, not software.

Re: The August 17 outage

#706

Post by inigyou »

dadadad100 wrote: post #220
Aachen wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always add some jitter but never actually had a problem where it would have been relevant. Recently I added it to a project where others also see it (not just a hobby thingy but something at work) and I was wondering if it would look silly, like premature optimisation. I looked on Wikipedia for how established the practice is and it barely gets a sentence... with no reference. Do you know of a documented instance w…

It’s a fundamental property of Ethernet[1]. Does that count? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_backoff#Example

Of Ethernet in the 1980s*

If you have a switch in your network, or a speed faster than 100Mbps, you aren't using this model.

However, WiFi uses it.

Re: The August 17 outage

#707

Post by 27183 »

inigyou wrote: post #693
27183 wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK I'll pick C and A! https://web.archive.org/web/20250128235041/https://codahale....

The problem is that P is actually part of A. It should be called the CA theorem.

It's all about what you choose in the face of P. Do you choose C or do you choose A?

Re: The August 17 outage

#708

Post by centuryfall »

peab wrote: post #414
ethagnawl wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bonkers is right. Where in those ~12 billion commits is the software, products and "innovations" which are supposed to be making our lives better? Software and apps in particular are getting worse, normies hate AI more than ever because they're even less likely to get their desired outcome when calling their doctor or trying to get their online order refunded when chatting with a cutely named chatbot, wages for (most…

This comment comes up over and over again and it's incredibly ignorant. To give just a single example, ai code dev has enabled people to make tools for themselves that they didn't have before. I've made a language learning app for myself. Its working better than Duolingo so far, for me. Its not really public

It’s really not ignorant at all when a large majority of these changes go untested.

Re: The August 17 outage

#709

Post by inigyou »

altcognito wrote: post #265

Distributing across different services wouldn't be a bad idea.... I still can't help but feel a little grateful for what they do across the free side of things. I know it isn't altruism, and I know nobody needs to defend a billion dollar corporation but... Name another service that does what they do for FREE (and no ads) at this scale. It isn't easy. Wikipedia has probably more usage, but is a simpler endeavor. (exce…

It's been bad because it's crowded out better things. When you put something shit on the market for free you destroy most of the will for customers to pay for a thing, even if it's good, because they can just use the shit free version. This can be an intentional business strategy.

Re: The August 17 outage

#710

Post by nimonian »

fragmede wrote: post #663
gilrain wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've made a language learning app for myself. Its working better than Duolingo so far, for me. Its not really public On the other hand, famine is coming. Come back and read this next year. Was your dalliance worth these food shortages?

Hang on! What's the proposed causal chain from AI to famine here? Inference -> energy prices -> fertilizer/food prices? Or are you referring to the war?

Climate change, most likely.
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