Something about the look of that orange lifeboat makes me think back to my childhood, watching my share of japanese cartoons.
The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat
81–90 of 95 posts
Re: The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat
#82I guess I am biased to like the article including it's presentation, since I spent 6 years as a technical diver fixing underwater hydraulics and electrical systems, but at much shallower depths than the undersea cables. A buddy of mine is an ROV operator for pipe-laying ships. Cool stuff, big stuff, and lots of crazy stuff involved (seeing weird, unidentifiable living creatures quickly and blurrily cross in front of…
What sort of shows were these that you worked on as a technical diver? Is this a Seaworld-type of situation? But not sure why they would need underwater lifts.
The House of Dancing Water in Macau. There is O at Bellagio, LV, NV, Le Reve closed at Wynn Las Vegas, The House of Dancing Water, Macau (where I worked), and there's another one in Wuhan, China (yes, Wuhan). The lifts had 8m hydraulic actuators to allow them to go down 7m and rise above pool level +1m. There were 11 stage lifts. The high-dive act was from 24m up. 17m liters of water.
Here's a video during construction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35WJDSoA8Ag&t=13s
And you can check YouTube out for more of the motorcycle act, Russian Swings, high-dive, and other acts.
Re: The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat
#83My Dad was an ROV technician for a brief period in the early 2000s, he got made redundant in early 2002 just after 9/11, and the dot com bubble bursting. On his last of the only two trips he made, he was based in Recife in northern Brazil. The ship was just there, on call, ready to respond to any breakages. My Mum, sister, and I were lucky enough to be flown out to Brazil for Christmas 2001, and it's something I'll n…
> I believe until very recently there was so much fibre laid during the dot com boom, that we didn't really need to lay much more. My understanding is that there was a one-two punch of the dot com boom laying a huge amount of fiber followed by wave division multiplexing shortly afterwards massively increasing the capacity of existing fiber that resulted in an oversupply that lasted a decade or more.
Wave Division Multiplexing being substantially enabled by all-optical amplifiers in the late 1990's it seems, because otherwise you have to convert optical to electrical signal, amplifiy that, and reconvert that back into an optical signal in order to travel down the next length of fiber-optic.
With optical amplifiers you can amplifiy every color of the rainbow at once, without breaking the chain.
Re: The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat
#84I guess I am biased to like the article including it's presentation, since I spent 6 years as a technical diver fixing underwater hydraulics and electrical systems, but at much shallower depths than the undersea cables. A buddy of mine is an ROV operator for pipe-laying ships. Cool stuff, big stuff, and lots of crazy stuff involved (seeing weird, unidentifiable living creatures quickly and blurrily cross in front of…
> I have always had to have some physicality to my work in order to be satisfied This also describes me pretty well. I was trained as a merchant ship's deck officer but opted to not go to sea as a career. Instead, I've spent my career building embedded systems. Every so often, I build a desktop app or a web application, but it lacks the satisfaction of being able to touch the hardware and actually watch my code affec…
I am currently working on a control system from low-level, bare metal to high-level HMI/GUI for a cool, new hoist primarily for shows, but with applications in other industries. Shooting for high-integrity, safety-critical certifications above and beyond similar machines. I have been doing electromechanical stuff since the late 80s/early 90s. Hydraulic, pneumatic, electro-mechanical, air muscles, etc. I did animatronics (Christmas windows back in the day in NYC). Before Arduino, I went from purely relay logic circuits to the Parallax Basic Stamp in the 90s to Pic chips, to other 8-16-32-bit chips. I am, we are, looking for an Ada/SPARK2014 software engineer/developer for this control system. Any HN'ers with SPARK2014 experience? I've reached out to AdaCore too. I have been a CNC and manual machinist (built my own CNC router table machine in 2002), welder, technical diver, industrial rope access tech (SPRAT certified). I am currently enamored with Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) as something more than mechatronics. I have been riding motorcycles since the 80s, but now the highly integrated software on motos is next level. My current bike (2021 KTM Duke 890R) has power throughout the gears/rpms and amazing ride modes with supermoto ABS settings, and I am looking at the new Ducati 698 Hypermotard. The Ducati's software uses inputs and inertial motion sensors are integrated to allow beginner/intermediate riders to more confidently wheelie or do supermoto slide outs of the rear tire. Human-Machine Interface taking on a whole new meaning without the cyborg trope.
Re: The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I have always had to have some physicality to my work in order to be satisfied This also describes me pretty well. I was trained as a merchant ship's deck officer but opted to not go to sea as a career. Instead, I've spent my career building embedded systems. Every so often, I build a desktop app or a web application, but it lacks the satisfaction of being able to touch the hardware and actually watch my code affec…
> affect something in the physical world. This is satisfying. Especially anything electromechanical. In a similar tangent, I believe social media isn't really social since you don't have people face to face talking to each other. The physical touch and facial expressions are quite important.
Even though I started programming in 1978 (Commodore PET 2001), I avoided doing full-time IT or software work. It's always been adjacent to my work - embedded systems, CNC machines, robotics, animatronics - but I lost any appetite for going all-in after being an assistant DBA full-time for a couple of years. Computers and programming were always tools for me to use for other purposes. Troubleshooting code or wiring on a 45-ton underwater lift and then moving it just has a great payoff for me. I was a pressure junkie too. The show would have a technical fault, and it meant I was either jumping into a wetsuit and gear for a dive, or I was in the basement in front of a cabinet with thousands of wires trying to isolate and fix the fault while the audience grew understandably frustrated. Fortunately, we honed the system and these happened less frequently, but I have to admit in hindsight it really got my juices flowing.
Re: The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat
#86excellent article
Re: The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat
#87The opening section, which felt like it was trying to build tension around the 2011 tsunami, seemed a bit weird to me. I thought tsunamis were only a problem close to shore or in relatively shallow water. The boat mentioned in the beginning was in 500 feet deep water, and indeed the article said the tsunami passed imperceptibly.
Anyway, otherwise I thought this was an enjoyable read.
Re: The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Marshmallow test assumes the payoff exists and is worth it. Does it? Is it? IDK and I don't want to waste time finding out. I'm far more interested in information-dense sources that let me find out if I want to know what it's offering. That's why journal articles have abstracts.
> Does it? Is it? IDK and I don't want to waste time finding out This is what goes through the toddlers’ heads too! Gauging credibility is inextricably entangled with patience and Kahmeman’s System 2 thinking [1][2]. If this were a random article, sure, you shouldn’t trust. But it’s not. It’s on HN ’s front page. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3730121/ [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_F…
Toddlers are told they will get two marshmallows if they wait.
This is like “you can have a headache now and, if you wait, might get something later, perhaps a punch in the face, perhaps a slice of pie, perhaps nothing.”
Re: The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Does it? Is it? IDK and I don't want to waste time finding out This is what goes through the toddlers’ heads too! Gauging credibility is inextricably entangled with patience and Kahmeman’s System 2 thinking [1][2]. If this were a random article, sure, you shouldn’t trust. But it’s not. It’s on HN ’s front page. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3730121/ [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_F…
Given how many non-marshmallow articles are out there on the internet, and your apparent risk-reward ratio, I wonder if you're the one failing the test. And you haven't really justified your original claim that GP failed the marshmallow test.
I think GP just wants you to be smart enough to commend them for knowing of the marshmallow test but not smart enough to know if the reference is applicable.
Re: The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat
#90In fiction, underwater cables play an important role in Stephenson's 1999 classic Cryptonomicon [0]