>Supporting something is infinitely times easier than building it
No it isn't. That is patently untrue. I've had to deal with in-house solutions many times in my careers. Inevitably what happens is the original author leaves the company or just doesn't want to support it and whatever tool they built atrophies and we end up moving to an off-the-shelf product with a lot of pain.
I'm dealing with a homegrown project management tool like that now. Originally built 10-15 years ago - it now has a feature request list a mile long. Finance is annoyed they can't pull the kinds of reports they want, and that it doesn't integrate into our CRM. IT is annoyed it doesn't support SAML and they have to manage backups. The tool is running on whatever the hot stack was at that time - so it is horribly out of date now ... but the original people that wrote it have long since left the company. The engineers don't want to touch it. Product doesn't want engineers to work on it because it takes away from our core business.
There are commercial off-the-shelf tools that provide the same feature-set (+more) and don't tie up my engineers, but now the thing is engrained into workflow and moving off of it is a major project spamming multiple departments (including engineering).
>And sometimes, especially now with AI, coding your own solution exactly tailored to your needs can be simpler than configuring a complex product designed to match as many use case as possible.
Coding a solution was never a problem. Supporting and maintaining it was. I can guarantee you an in-house ticketing system will be more expensive than Zendesk for every small and medium company.
>Critics call the SAT inequitable and say high school grades are a good predictor of college success.
Well .. is it? We have decades of data that should either prove or disprove this. Why is this even an argument? There is an underlying, easily-veriable, objective reality.
Being coal-free is possible. Being fossil-fuel free is harder. Most of Irish energy comes from Natural Gas and Oil - the former is what supplanted Coal, not Wind.
It's not that bad. It's well integrated into Sharepoint, Exchange, and Office, and does the job. I've used both Slack and Teams and if you're using MS365, then Teams is absolutely the better option.
>You don't. When your server crashes, your availability is zero.
As your business needs grow, you can start layering complexity on top. The point is you don't start at 11 with a overly complex architecture.
In your example, if your server crashes, just make sure you have some sort of automatic restart. In practice that may mean a downtime of seconds for your 12 users. Is that more complexity? Sure - but not much. If you need to take your service down for maintenance, you notify your 12 users and schedule it for 2am ... etc.
Later you could create a secondary cluster and stick a load-balancer in-front. You could also add a secondary replicated PostgreSQL instance. So the monolith/postgres architecture can actually take you far as your business grows.
>It's sure a corny stance to hold if you're navigating an infrastructure nightmare daily, but in my opinion, much of the complexity addresses not technical, but organisational issues: You want straightforward, self-contained deployments for one, instead of uploading files onto your single server ...
You can get all that with a monolith server and a Postgres backend.
>I personally wouldn't like to put caching in Postgres, even though it would work at lower scales.
Probably should stop after this line - that was the point of the article. It will work at lower scales. Optimize later when you actually know what to optimize.
>So sure, you can make a unscalable solution that works for the current moment.
You're making two assumptions - both wrong:
1) That this is an unscalable solution - A monolith app server backed by Postgres can take you very very far. You can vertically scale by throwing more hardware at it, and you can horizontally scale, by just duplicating your monolith server behind a load-balancer.
2) That you actually know where your bottlenecks will be when you actually hit your target scale. When (if) you go from 1000 users to 10,000,000 users, you WILL be re-designing and re-architecting your solution regardless what you started with because at that point, you're going to have a different team, different use-cases, and therefore a different business.
>This is basically an article describing why you can’t just look at an event after it occurs, see that it has some extremely rare characteristics, and then determine it was unlikely to happen by chance.
No. That's not it. In this case, if you properly control for all the factors, it turns out that the odds of Nakamura having that kind of a win-streak (against low-rated opponents) was in fact high.
Social media, and smart phones are partially (or even largely responsible) ... However I wouldn't discount 'social contagion' as a contributing factor since 2012 was around the time focus on "mental health" (specifically focusing on 'mental health' and related issues) came into wide prominence, especially amongst the younger crowd.
Then you have to over-build your infrastructure, not just for daily intermittency but also seasonal intermittency. So you have to add that to your calculation. But this point is moot anyway, because there is no battery technology that is capable of that much storage.
Come on. Don't be disingenuous. What do you do in the evening? at night? on cloudy days? Just not use electricity?
I'm not against solar, nor wind and I'm happy you're happy with your rooftop solar deployment. Both have their niches. But I don't see renewables powering a modern economy.
>We have huge unpopulated deserts and humans aren't really causing any stress on their ecosystems outside climate change.
Unpopulated by humans you mean.
>humans aren't really causing any stress on their ecosystems
If you place tens of millions of solar panels in a region you will destroy the ecosystem of that region, and yes, deserts are ecosystems too. Maybe you feel that is a fair trade and we will need to make these kinds of trade-offs ... but what if there was an alternative that used 100 times less land area for the same amount of power generated and works at night too? Would you still make the trade?
Also, there is this weird assumption made by proponents that only deserts or 'undesirable' land is going to be used for renewable deployment. That's not true today, and it will not be true in the future as we scale up the renewable infrastructure.
Who thinks they are easy? Elon Musk? The guy that spews obvious (even to him) bullshit like we're going to Mars in the next 5 years?
I don't even want to read the article. It is obvious that Orbital Data Centers have MASSIVE engineering challenges. They may never be cost-effective.