mspencer712

Devs make mistakes. We want to put up guardrails so mistakes don’t hurt us so much.

Please don’t deliberately line the guardrails with barbed wire.

Was it just surging or like a compressor stall or something? FOD like a bird ingestion or something?

I mean, Boeing has/had quality problems, serious ethical failures, but also birds exist.

(I’m not good at explaining this, maybe should have found an explanation online somewhere instead.) You know those stages of a combustion engine - intake, compression, ignition, exhaust, all happening in sequence in an engine’s cylinders? Turbine engines do them too, but in a straight line and constantly. The front of the engine is obviously intake, but compressor fans do the compression just using fast and powerful fans, no seals or valves needed. Ignition lights everything up, exhaust can just flow out the back. (It flows over some more fan blades that steal some power from the expanding gases and use it to keep the whole thing spinning.)

Unless something goes wrong with the compressor fan blades, that is. If compression is too weak and the ignited air/fuel mixture can flow back out the front of the engine, that’s bad. And yeah, it happens sometimes, with any engine. Almost never with both at the same time. (Both engines failing at once low to the ground is like a once in a generation thing, and yeah it’s really really bad. And really really rare.)

I got flamed pretty hard for pointing out that this sample size really needs to be in the title, but it needs to be said. Thank you. Sixteen people is basically a forum thread, and not a very popular one.

It’s still useful information and a good read, but a lot of people don’t click through to the article, they just remember the title and move on.

I think it’s more about fair political consequences. I think you’re absolutely right though, and what you brought up needs to be considered as well.

N=16 developers

There’s a kernel of something positive in decentralization, though. Me pointing this out feels a little bit like someone saying how good COVID lockdown was for the environment, but I still feel like it’s an important point.

An internet made of lots of small sites is better at resisting censorship and centralized control. People should remain accustomed to using a bunch of individual sites, not JUST the biggest sites on the internet, and amateur sysadmins should maintain their “host a public web server from an at-home business internet connection” chops.

There being lots of small porn sites makes it harder for anyone to apply pressure and make certain kinds of affirming content disappear.

That’s … just about everything positive I could say about this idea. Not a fan.

I know right? “Number used Once” is what I was taught.

Omaha resident. I don’t drive through Nebraska from end to end. I just live here.

Dungeons of Daggorath. I had a Color Computer 2 growing up, while we lived in a trailer park. I was still a little afraid of the dark, and the hallways and first person view with jump-scare monsters were a bit intense for me. I’d have to run from one end of the hallway to the other, to get to the bathroom and back.

The impressive event queue system in that game felt like magic to me, like I wondered what happened to the monsters when you turn the computer off.

I was a “smart kid” but I don’t think I was a smart kid.

(Something something original author, something something signed copy of the original source code on my github)

As a BBS era kid, I know you’re not trying to simulate the whole thing right now in the comments section. I’d say: you would have done fine, in any era. People talk, they share methods, and you would’ve picked up whatever you needed.

I think it’s just a common sort of nightmare, worrying about being unprepared, dealing with the consequences of lack of preparation.

I recommend the first few minutes of Jason Scott’s The BBS Documentary, for an overview of how people communicated in the pre-internet days. Especially if you imagine yourself a telegraph operator chatting with neighboring stations in the 19th century or something.

Are people dying right now? That’s an immediate need, if so.

Are they in power right now? Campaigning for reelection right now? That’s an immediate need if so.

Please don’t demonize “let’s focus on immediate needs” as I feel that’s a reasonable thing to want.