People can't use their house because Amazon Kinesis is down
Also, I will never shut up about capitalist realism.
The future is bright
On November 25th, AWS’s us-east-1 region experienced disruptions which apparently caused many people in the area to not be able to use their house.
The reason this happened is because AWS tried to add more capacity to Kinesis in the region. Kinesis allows services to stream and process large amounts of data in real time, which is a pretty important feature of most IoT devices. My only real experience with Kinesis is trying to stream Splunk logs, which is really something I’d rather not have to talk about. But anyway, the added capacity caused servers to exceed the number of threads allowed by the operating system, which computer engineers generally consider to be a “big whoops”. Hence the outage. I’m glossing over a lot, so if you’re interested you can read the full postmortem here.
I think this raises an interesting question over the design of smart home devices. Surely they should come with a backup mode that allows them to operate like a normal device if the services they usually require are down, but I’m no IoT engineer so who am I to say. I’m a little worried about a future where something as simple as turning the lights on or vacuuming can only be done with Amazon’s permission, but for now the issue can be entirely avoided by just buying normal things.
Breaking: A Linux user went outside
Amazon joins the IRA
More Amazon stuff, sorry.
I’m not Irish, so I’m not going to try to comment on or explain the concept of Irish reunification in this newsletter. You can Google it if you’re curious. I do know all the lyrics to Come out Ye Black and Tans though. Am I problematic? Probably.
The right way to deal with being linked by HackerNews
Someone succeeded in making a tweet that quotes itself
I wanted to do this a while ago, but after I realized the work that would go into it I decided it wasn’t worth it. The person behind @quinetweet was a lot more determined though. Oisín Moran figured out the anatomy of tweet IDs and wrote a script to programmatically guess what the ID of a tweet would be. They got it after 960 tweets.
You can check out the blog post here. It’s really neat.
https://oisinmoran.com/quinetweet
Utterly pointless, but it’s also the only tweet where you can make a recursion joke without being wrong.
A kinda sad post
https://www.bennettnotes.com/post/my-only-interest-is-making-money/
I came across this on HackerNews, because where else would it be. It’s a surprisingly self-aware post about the depressing effects of hustle culture, and how it’s so ingrained in the author’s identity that they can no longer find meaning in anything that doesn’t generate a side income. While reading it, I was constantly reminded of this one quote in Mark Fisher’s “Capitalist Realism”:
“Accordingly, neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense. Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a 'business ontology' in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business.”
If you haven’t read Capitalist Realism yet, I really recommend you do. It’s a bit long, but even just the first couple chapters are pretty good at laying how the current economic system has affected our global psyche. Even if you don’t think capitalism is that bad, it’s a good read that’ll help explain some of the weird things you might have noticed about it.
The dominance of profit generation over other systems has successfully created a culture where the things you make are only valuable if they can be assigned a market price. That’s just like, an obvious thing that we take for granted, but I think it’s a very strange way of seeing the world. I think it’s why art and artists are sometimes looked down upon, because they don’t fit so neatly into our understanding of market value.
Maybe I’m just in a certain political bubble, but I feel like at least in tech, this attitude is starting to change a little. Or at least, people are starting to become aware of the fact that it’s even there, as evidenced by the article. Hopefully we’ll be able to start imagining a different future for tech soon.
Some good posts
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ctrlshifti
Tip jar: https://ko-fi.com/cainmaddox
Any typos in the above post are caused by bit flips and are not my fault.
Thank you for these posts! I really like the format, your writing style, and your commentary and takes on the various events. Rock on.
A fun read before bed, thanks for this!