depends on if you mean just AWS proper or all amazon web stuff including s3 but probably either way everybody on the internet would be massively screwed

S3 is a part of AWS.  By “AWS proper” do you mean EC2?  Anyway, yeah, I meant the whole of AWS.

argumate:

In the 1950s, Isaac Asimov wrote several stories featuring MULTIVAC, a huge computer the size of a building, city block, or even entire city, that answers questions and keeps society running in an optimal fashion.

Hi vision of underground facilities filled with endless corridors of vacuum tubes and operators typing incomprehensible commands into terminals began to feel somewhat quaint in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when the microcomputer revolution was in full swing. We had a PC on every desktop! Computing was decentralised, and computers themselves were tiny! Asimov’s inability to predict the semiconductor revolution had rendered his stories anachronistic!

But I guess he had the last laugh:

Makes me curious what the noticeable consequences would be if AWS suddenly went down.  (That is, consequences for people who don’t directly use it, and don’t work at companies that do)

(via kitswulf)

He loves making lame puns, which earned him the nickname “The King of Humor.”

it seems to me that every social media site is a bloodthirsty, parasitic monster, facebook is just a more efficient destroyer

it more rapidly and overtly attacks people who do use it, but scares smarter people into the false security of less competent/efficient parasites

I agree that we should be suspicious of any social media venue, but at least in the short-to-medium term it is a given that people will be using these things, and we shouldn’t let the best become the enemy of the good here.

There may be fundamental problems shared by Facebook and other sites, but on top of those, Facebook has its own special problems, and those problems are important.  Facebook really is worse.

(Perhaps I just don’t understand you.  When you say these sites are parasitic, is it because they centrally host everyone’s data?  Because they have central control of how data is presented, and present it according to their own goals which are not aligned with the users’?

I assume that a social networking package like phpBB, which you can use on your own site that you 100% own, would not be parasitic.  If there was something like phpBB where everything was owned by one entity that had the final say in everything, but didn’t exercise that power much, would it be parasitic?  Is LiveJournal parasitic?  What about Dreamwidth and AO3, which are centrally hosted but with hosts people seem to trust?  On the other hand, what about gmail and Google Docs, which are hosted by a giant company with its own opaque goals, but which are relied upon by many people doing important stuff, and have thus far worked well for this purpose?)

Reading that article about Facebook’s latest incredibly creepy “feature,” I found myself thinking again, “I don’t know why anyone chooses Facebook as their main venue for internet communication.”

I wouldn’t go so far as to say people shouldn’t have Facebook accounts, necessarily.  (I still do.)  It’s legitimately useful for finding and coordinating meatspace social events, and for making sure that you don’t miss big developments in the lives of people you know but don’t talk to regularly.

But it just doesn’t make sense as a venue for long-form writing or forum-like discussion threads.  Admittedly, all of the venues with any significant user base are bad for this on a design level, and it’s easy for me to forget how unworkable tumblr looks if you aren’t viewing it with the help of third-party aids like Xkit and siikr.  Maybe there is a set of add-ons that, taken together, solve Facebook’s most glaring problems?  (I know about Social Fixer.  Is there anything like siikr that makes it possible to search reliably for a Facebook post?)

Even with fixes in place, there is something about Facebook that feels to me like it is meant for ephemeral content, and that I shouldn’t be typing any words into its boxes that I wouldn’t want getting lost in some digital void.  A lot of this, I think, is that unlike tumblr – where you can go to [name].tumblr.com and get something that looks comfortably firm and stable, with page numbers and everything – on Facebook you can only interact with posts via an AJAX interface that is deciding dynamically what to show you next.

Without add-ons, this interface won’t even give you the same thing if you go to the same page twice in a row.  With Social Fixer, you can (I think?) fix that problem, but there is still the feeling that Facebook posts do not live in any kind of fixed context.  Each post, as an isolated entity, is stably accessible via permalink, but getting to a post’s neighbors in temporal and social space can be difficult or even impossible, and is clearly not the sort of thing the site expects you to be interested in.

Even when it is not difficult, you’re still doing it by giving the right commands to this opaque AJAX genie, not by clicking through hyperlinks that can each be saved and shared elsewhere.  (For example, I can navigate easily to my own Facebook posts from a particular month in the past, but having done so, I can’t share what I’m seeing with someone else, or my future self, via a URL.  On tumblr I can.)

That is all just one side of the picture.  The other side is Facebook’s creepiness.  Far more than any other social networking company, Facebook seems interested in collecting as much detail about people’s personal and social lives as it can, for its own purposes.  And it has openly expressed an interest in shaping those lives.

This explains the fundamental instability that pervades the interface.  Sites like Tumblr (I think Instagram and Pinterest are in this category?) are based on the premise that people like collecting content in their own personal arrangements, and for all their faults, these sites recognize that people get attached to the specific arrangements they make, and want those arrangements to be respected as objects unto themselves.  Facebook does not respect any arrangement of content larger than the individual post; it treats your posts as raw input to be first remixed, and then ignored, as it dynamically generates a social experience for each user from moment to moment.

Relative to these other sites, Facebook is much further away from the old Web 1.0 model where you’d buy some space and “host” your words and creations there, fixing them each in a stable place where they will live for as long as you still own the space.  Facebook is fundamentally not interested in hosting what you type into it, and it’s not a place to put anything you want to be hosted.

I still check Facebook somewhat regularly, but I rarely spend more than a minute or two on each visit.  For me, the site isn’t even addictive the way it aspires to be, and the way some some other social networks are; it’s simply too incompetent as a venue for anything I’m interesting in looking at.

Last update to Almost Nowhere was roughly 3 weeks ago.  I have the next chapter planned out thoroughly and all that remains is sitting down and writing it, but it’s been harder to write lately, for approximately two reasons:

1. I haven’t been sleeping as well as I’d like lately (this has been a problem for all of 2018) and usually when I do any serious fiction writing I end up staying up late, either because I’m still writing in the late evening, or because it’s hard to wind down from the excitement built up while writing; the sleep problem is bad enough that if I’m aware of a habit that keeps me up late, I feel like I ought to avoid it, even if that habit is “writing.”
   
2. I’ve been assigned a new, more open-ended project at work and the creative side of my mind seems to have latched onto it to the exclusion of AN.

I think #2 should be easily surmountable – I’m already trying to force myself to not think about the work project on weekends, which I expect will help me sustain productivity and creativity on it beyond the short term, and also I wrote my earlier novels in grad school where my research was competing with them in a similar way, so there’s a proof-of-concept there.

#1 is more concerning.  I think I’ll try to do some writing in the morning and early afternoon tomorrow if I feel up to it, and impose a hard cutoff time for how late I can keep writing.  This does mean that the writing will go less quickly overall, and I expect that even if I can settle on a sustainable and nonzero update rate (which is the goal), it’ll be considerably slower than my rate earlier this year.

Liberals love “dirty movies from Sweden,” knotheads gravitate toward “clean” films, like The Sound of Music, Flubber, and Ice Capades of 1981.

He knew his own workings to their smallest parts. His inspection system was flawless. There was no unconscious.

“If I had ever spoken or moved from the smallest subconscious impulse, then the world would have been promptly destroyed. The world should be grateful for my awareness of myself. Awareness has nothing to be proud of but control.”

Perhaps, he sometimes thought, he was a hydrogen bomb equipped with consciousness. It was clear in any case that he was not a human being.

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