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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

All infrastructure is fragile and always will be.

Bridges collapse; police go corrupt; electricity has outages; gasoline suffers price shocks; governments have a 100% failure rate; an 1870s-style solar flare would send us back to medieval times.

All we can do is:

A. Diversify, under the belief nothing is infallible; and even perfect engineering can experience catastrophic failure

B. Enjoy what we have today, knowing it is a gift, not a right

Also, while we blame CrowdStrike, let’s not forget that SSH was within weeks of being backdoored on a global scale. The power that would have unleashed (and proxy power, I.e. breaking into CloudStrike and then Windows by extension) very well could have ended the internet.

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> All infrastructure is fragile and always will be.

No, and it doesn't need to be. We can build redundancy on every level. We can plan for failure and prepare for contingencies. We alwas need a plan B (and C and D for critical services). Will it be efficient or cheap? Of course not - we'd be building two for the price of two, but being sure that, when one fails, we have a redundant one to catch the fall of civilization.

We can't just optimize away every gram of safety and hope everything goes to plan (as they did in this case). Hope is not a strategy.

I agree with your main point on entropy, but

"an 1870s-style solar flare would send us back to medieval times"

This is not true and it would have no effect on microelectronics.

It doesn’t really matter what happens to your microelectronics if there’s no power anywhere.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event

It actually does, restoring power is much easier than restoring power and replacing every electronic thing in existence

Batteries and generators will still work, surely.

> A. Diversify, under the belief nothing is infallible; and even perfect engineering can experience catastrophic failure

Hence keeping cash alive has it’s advantages

Some infrastructure is more fragile than others.

2020s UK electricity infrastructure is more reliable than 1980s UK electricity infrastructure, for example.

And with the push towards renewables and battery storage, 2040's energy grid is expected to be MUCH more robust than 2020's.

I wouldn't say fragile. A bit of Roman stuff is still functional today. The pyramids are holding up too. Cathedrals also have a massive stability streak. The stuff that has been falling over is mostly brick, steel, and concrete. And that's due to lack of required maintenance. I could even use the opposite word to describe them: strong and solid.

But isn’t that survivor bias? The Romans built all sorts of things that didn’t last.

And plenty of cathedrals collapsed without proper maintenance, or were destroyed by invaders, or had their stones taken by locals for use in building. All it took was a spark in the wrong place to destroy Notre Dame.

Not if you actually look. Romans invented a concrete recipe that was lost for a millennium. Their ports were holding together longer than any modern concrete. This Roman concrete recipe was recently rediscovered and has been getting traction again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete#Modern_use

On a long enough timescale, all of these things are dust, though.

...basically, label your axes.

Or a planetary nebula

The inevitable march of entropy.

"Fragile" isn't the same as "will eventually fail".

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