>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 The tool is running on whatever the hot stack was at that time - so it is horribly out of date now ...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.
That's part of the problem as well - it's not exactly clear what the Palestinian position is - partly because I think they see things like 'right of return' (which is completely unacceptable to Israel) as bargaining chips to trade for something during negotiations.
>This is exactly the same argument that Russia has been using to annex territories such as Crimea
The rhetoric may be superficially similar, but facts on the ground aren't. The Russian state is not under an existential threat in the same way that Israel would be with Hezbollah in the north, and a similar entity in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel is a tiny nation with a tiny population. Russian and Israel's security issues are simply not comparable.
>talking about the West Bank doesn't justify anything to do with Gaza, which is geographically separate
They are linked, and highlight the core problem to Israel - namely - disengagement does not work with a hostile entity.
Israel in 2005 disengaged from Gaza. It wasn't a full disengagement as Israel still exerted control over the airspace and territorial water, but it also wasn't nothing and it was an olive-branch and a big opportunity. Instead it resulted in a Hamas electoral victory, and rocket attacks, and a circle of retaliatory actions from Israel and Hamas. Imagine a world, where post-disengagement there were no attacks from Gaza, no preparation for war and smuggling of weapons into Gaza by Hamas - by this point, where would we be? Would Israel still maintain the same kind of blockade? I just don't think so. I truly believe it would be a model for permanent peace and Palestinian statehood.
>And why the 1967 borders rather than the 1948 ones?
I mentioned 1967 borders, because as best as I can gather, that is the current Palestinian position. Although it isn't clear exactly what the Palestinian position is as Palestinians do tend to maintain some level of ambiguity on this point.
> If Israel's war is with Iran, why is that war not being carried out in Iran?
It goes the other way actually - Iran is at war with Israel. Iran is using proxies, Hamas, and Hezbollah to strike at Israel.
This is a one-sided description of the conflict. I am empathetic to Israel, because they also do not have a lot options.
Israel, as it it currently constituted (based on 1967 borders) is not a viable state if the West Bank is a hostile entity with a standing army, and funded to a similar extent as Hezbollah. The West Bank bulges into Israel and effectively cuts the country in half and places all strategic targets within shelling distance.
The Palestinian position seems to be "trust us that if you give us full, un-fettered independence, then we will not be a hostile entity" - but that's asking for Israel to place an enormous amount of trust in present and future Palestinian people and leaders, without any historical reasons to base this on, and highlighted by the worst case scenario of Hezbollah in the north, a foreign-controlled militia funded to the tune of 1 billion / year, and potential a hostile party in the West Bank (and Gaza) - effectively surrounding the country.
And it is more than just demilitarization. A demilitarized Palestine is not enough if, for example, Iran funnels hundreds of millions of dollars in arms to militia groups.
Hence we are where we are .. with Israel unable to disengage because doing so presents an existential risk to their nation.
Because it's the most generic ad you can have. All it says is: "Look how many things iPad can help you do". This ad could have been made for any computing device released in the last 20 years (or more!). It's completely generic and corporate. This is a quintessential first-world freak-out - take something that is completely inconsequential and work yourself into a hysteria.
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.