Thanks for sharing. I did a bit of work for a NOC and know exactly what you mean about letting real work slip through your hands. I wasn’t directly responsible for managing the alarms, but it felt strange to be writing software streamlining the workflow. All the time I spent I felt like I could have just helped the technicians actually solving problems they faced in their day to day - to stop the alarms going off in the first place!
6 months seems like a long time. When my friend's family moved from the UK to Australia back in ~2005 their dog was in quarantine for 1 month. I wonder what the differences are and/or what changes have occurred since then.
Here's a slightly different story: I run OpenBSD on 2 bare-metal
machines in 2 different physical locations. I used k8s at work for a
bit until I steered my career more towards programming. Having k8s
knowledge handy doesn't really help me so much now.
On OpenBSD there is no Kubernetes. Because I've got just two hosts,
I've managed them with plain SSH and the default init system for 5+
years without any problems.
Instead they're bitching about investments in science.
Agreed. To be fair, I can also see where the frustration comes from. We see "deals with the devil" being made, but the (disappointing?) reality is tech progress often looks like that. Flashy stories with pie-in-the-sky ideas get headlines and funding. Meanwhile the boring, difficult work continues on in the background. From the outside it seems non-sensical and inefficient: why couldn't they just invest money directly into GPS research without all the military stuff? But, fortunately, some amazing stuff does come out of it too.
I see where you're coming from. Battery electric vehicles I think are a good example of trickle-down. It seems the R&D for electric cars affordable to wealthy people leads to new infra and tech for a changing power grid, buses, trains and bicycles.
But two examples you raised:
corrective lenses
refrigeration
have clear quality-of-life and health benefits. Supersonic passenger flights feel more like a luxury and convenience compared to food preservation.
Hopefully in the development of reduced flight times between other sides of the world we perform research with impact beyond flight. Things like improved materials, fuel, aerodynamics that could be used for trains and trucks. I'm not an engineer but I hope it works like that!
Interesting thought; I'd hope so. Maybe some material physics/chemistry research that makes some stuff cheaper for trains (I'm not an engineer so totally out of my depth here).
Great points. It’s the proprietary nature and lack of interoperability of “the cloud” that causes problems. My email is hosted on a remote server but I have control over my data. There’s no algorithm controlling what order I see my mail in or who I can forward stuff to. There are many different tools and clients available to me and to everyone else to work with their data.
Imagine if publishing a photo from my phone to Instagram meant copying a file from one folder to another. Or if I want to create an automatically translated voiceover from the captions of all my old Facebook photos in a video editor. Right now these operations require complex software. But the technology is all there and has been for a long time.
But maybe you personally don’t have to write the docs or packaging stuff; if you publish it as open source, others can have a go themselves! :)