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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

I thought this would be advocating "chaos monkey" style intentional shutdown to test institutions for resiliency in an outage situation. Might not be a bad idea. Maybe once every four years on leap day or something.

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> Maybe once every four years on leap day or something.

Advantage: You no longer need to fix that leap day bug on your website.

would it be better to start the intentional shutdown at say a couple of minutes before midnight so you know the shutdown wasn't perhaps caused by the leap day bug?

In general I agree, but too much resilience can lead to worse infrastructure. Where I live, a couple hours of unannounced electricity outage every week is a non-event, so wires are patched in more and more points. And there's little motivation to invest significant money and time once to replace them by something more robust.

It would leave most developed countries in chaos, people would die because of it.

Centralized infrastructure is fragile and to the extent that the internet has become centralized unscheduled Internet shutdowns are bound to happen. The benefit of scheduled Internet shutdown is that people can prepare for it while at the same time gaining experience which helps with dealing with an unscheduled Internet shutdown.

On the other hand, if we force all systems to be resilient to an internet shutdown then we'd end up regressing society by a lot. Think about how much more work a single doctor is able to handle more efficiently by having internet access (eg. charts, patient history, access to all the world's libraries) that would be lost without the internet.

If we don't force critical systems to be resilient to an internet shutdown, we'll be doing the meme. Specifically:

Weinberg’s 2nd Law:

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

we do annual unannounced firedrills and now one dies as a consequence.

That's because the unannounced firedrills don't involve setting the building on fire. A "drill" equivalent would be if we all pretended the internet is down sometimes, and in some cases that still might be impossible to do without negative consequences.

Fire drills do involve denying access, though. We wouldn't need to bomb the datacenters but we would need to make them inaccessible.

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