ZeroSolstice

Its a bit ridiculous that in 2024 we have all these apps that tell you about accidents and obstructions but none that actually help re-direct traffic in a meaningful way. You have to hedge your bets on any "suggested" better route.

With smart roads department of transportation could get real analyze on crowded intersections, best place for future on/off ramps, access roads, etc. Traffic congestion and planning is usually an after thought when housing developments go up and then its a catch-up game.

Autonomous trucking should start out with its own dedicated part of the highway between distribution centers. We are trying to build autonomous driving to accommodate our current road structure which humans currently drive on. A dedicated / isolated lane with sensors, etc should be the start. Start small and then you can expand after getting feedback data. Everything is always so costly and unattainable because everyone wants to implement it with the current infrastructure but its not needed.

For reference we already do these types of dedicated lanes with ezpass express or HOV lanes.

  Organized retail crime costs retailers more than $700,000 for every $1 billion in 
  sales on average...

Is this what people think sysadmins and operations do all day? Any place i've worked with an operations team, they were the group deciding on datacenter sites, switches, routers, architecture, operating systems, configuration management, monitoring, services like DNS, dhcp, network security, access control, on-boarding / off-boarding, etc. If you weren't in operations you didn't deploy or make decisions on production changes. At a few other places this was split into an operations and infrastructure groups that worked closely together as they had to plan EOL replacement and new build-outs together.

"Wisdom arrives to anyone exposed to how systems behave. SRE shouldn’t rob developers this learning opportunity."

SRE has always seemed to just be a push for a dedicated sysadmin that can read/write code to support a specific application in production. As noted in the quote above, you can just replace SRE / developers with development / operations. Its the same circle all over again.

Lastly, on-call is just companies being cheap. For startups this might be a good initial solution but for anything that has to be online you should have 24/7, follow-the-sun support teams. This allows for teams to solve problems within their normal work day and not have someone up all night to fix a problem, brief everyone on the issue, and then if they are lucky have the next day off.

Interviews where people just ask these filtering type questions signals to me that this is just another job. If you already have a job its not worth switching as it will just be more of the same. If I can't get into a some what interesting conversation with the interviewer and this is what the company has put forward as their representative, oh well. If my second call isn't with someone I would be working with or knowledgable in the field then whats the point of even talking to them. I interview quite a bit and the amount of phone calls some start-ups and companies want to have as part of the interview is insane. Most of the time the people doing the interviews would rather be doing something else.

When I make a purchase I don't get to decide when to run the batch job for it to post/settle. Retailers however can determine when they want to actually process refunds. What can a customer complain about when the posted refund shows up on the following Monday, Tuesday, Friday, two weeks later?

To further my point of retailers not being incentivized to process your refund quickly there was a small study done that delaying refunds had customers "re-spending" the refund before it had fulled settled.[2]

[1] https://www.freeprivacypolicy.com/blog/return-refund-us-laws...

[2] https://hbr.org/2023/06/how-retailers-can-capitalize-on-the-...

In instances where you have to ship the defective product back. They don't send you an over-night, next day label to get the product back to them as soon as possible. They send it ground. So you paid for a product, you then wait for the product, you then call to get a refund, you ship it back, they receive and process and then you get refunded your original amount. That could be two weeks, even though your refund was settled next business day.

I'd be surprised if any retailer takes a loss with a refund that they can't send back to the manufacturer or write off.

It also seems that there isn't any set refund time limit and varies per state in the US.[1]

[1] https://www.freeprivacypolicy.com/blog/return-refund-us-laws...

IMF eLibrary with some example scenarios[2]. Granted they speak of most of the float data being analyzed with checks, it doesn't seem unreasonable to replace "check" with "credit card" transaction.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/float.asp

[2] https://www.elibrary.imf.org/display/book/9781557753861/ch10...

Why would banks be incentivized to speed up this process? They make money off the delay and get to blame the Federal government. Its the same reason a purchase can be done instantly but then it takes up-to (10) business days to be refunded. Banks and retailers make interest off the money they hold onto. Being able to make money off the refund is a probable reason why they are even offered. Otherwise it would be all-sales-final.

Sleep doesn't really work in the realm of arithmetic and there is no way to credit extra sleep because you slept in on Saturday so how can you "lack" sleep because you stayed up longer one night verse the previous night?

What if you did an extra exercise that day are you now lacking sleep because you exerted yourself more?

I bought mine from Costco for the simple reason that I could return it if broke.

[1] https://paulwieland.github.io/ratgdo/

I did a google search for domain hijacking, ad injection, javascript and while it does look like .tk domains had/have this issue it doesn't necessarily point to the registrar. After all they are offering free domain registration which is going to get abused. Its also not surprising when their own website doesn't use HTTPS, however their mission statement isn't about security on the Internet.

> The goal is always more (and more precise) data points. Being able to run JS on the same origin as the request is more valuable than just the rough GeoIP data the ISP already has.

But isn't this what Google, Bing, Amazon, Alibaba, already do when they fingerprint your device? They can't use just an IP addresses due to NAT so they collect unique characteristics to your specific device. My question was more so if advertisers can already get down to the device level when you visit their site, what is the ISP's motivation if their data won't be as unique or specific? or maybe a better question is what organizations would be buying the "less" specific data that an ISP could get from your session data?

If you are operating at a level where your personal blog can have all possible transit paths compromised by a third-party such that they are hosting some or all resources that you provide for download, modifying them and producing new checksums then you have bigger problems than a blog that doesn't have HTTPS. You would also at that point consider using someone else's platform that will absorb or actively be motivated to thwart these exact scenarios. Not to say that always works out[1].

Additionally your concern of checksums being compromised can easily be thwarted by hosting packages on github, gitlab, bitbucket, pastebin, or a google groups mailing list. All of which still don't require your blog to have HTTPS. You don't have to manage getting your own certificate, paying for yearly renewals or setup any auto-90-day let's encrypt auto-bot.

Great grandma's cookbook recipes on a blog don't need HTTPS.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/krebs-on-security-booted-off-a...

Anything that needs some form of validation from any site should be verifiable in multiple ways. Just because they have HTTPS doesn't mean the provided information or data is automatically correct.

Do you also have any reference to what exactly the collected data is useful for? I could see an ISP selling traffic data for a zip or area but they would already have that based on your billing address.

From the paper I referenced its huge cluster and if its their own software I'm sure with the development experience at google they have accounted for loosing a cluster node. Losing any number of cluster nodes is the same scenario if you were performing an software or hardware upgrade in which case you would be taking a node offline. I would be very skeptical that there are people manually kicking off upgrade jobs for nodes in the cluster. Maybe an A/B deployment or burn-in for a week before fully pushing it out with a pipeline workflow. I'd more so say that their borg implementation probably runs at different minor versions frequently.

Google runs their own data centers, thats the video documentary I referenced[2].

For machine procurement I don't see that as a SRE task. If they are making custom boards and systems they are going to have an entire group supporting that. At the size of google I'm thinking they wouldn't be running into supplier issues that they could figure out easily or account for in their borg software. Again its supposed to be one big abstraction.

For the regulatory changes for services like SEO/advertising, GMAIL, search, etc they all have separate teams for those services and would seem separate from SRE's that are maintaining borg the service which is provided to those groups.

[1] https://research.google/pubs/pub43438/ (research paper on borg)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZmGGAbHqa0 (documentary at their data centers)

There look to be a number of search engine startups[1] some big, some small.

[1] https://startupsavant.com/startups-to-watch/search-engine

Just to address the parts you laid out.

1. Keep Borg running

What would entail running? There are plenty of small teams that manage hundreds of servers and virtual machines through monitoring, deployment, networking, decom, etc lifecycle. This seems counter to purpose of cloud computing, commodity hardware and abstracted compute resources that can be deployed on-demand. Not to mention redundant sites, availability zones, <insert your cloud providers name for High Availability(HA) feature here>. Is this the part that SRE's maintain?

2. Machine maintenance

From documentaries[2] and other comparable data center operations this would seem to be handled by on-site datacenter staff. Disk replacement, physical replacement, network cabling, etc. Without any other operational info I would doubt resources would just be dedicated to borg as its a bit of a overall technician site work. As for OS and software updates and again without any other info or insight would seem to fairly automated after passing testing or at least passed to another team that just handles updates.

3. Machine procurement

Again commodity hardware or if its all custom still that would seem to be more of a EE task for build out and accounting for purchasing. Otherwise at Google's scale you would just get pre-populated racks delivered and replace the entire rack when 51% of the machines have failed. This doesn't really seem SRE or developer specific. It would also be happening for other services if they are already aren't abstracted from the underlying hardware/network layer.

4. Regulatory changes

I'm not sure what this would be in relation to a job processing system? Is this checking where you are saving data? Seems like a feature that is built once.

I agree that if you have follow-the-sun and need to be up with 5 (9's) 50 people in one time zone would be hard to ensure that but once the foundation is setup its just (50) people in a different location or timezone there isn't really anything too different about what they are doing.

If you have additional information or insight that would interesting to hear about.

[1] https://research.google/pubs/pub43438/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZmGGAbHqa0

1. Shielding the group 2. Provide non-technical analysis of the group/state of product 3. Remove road blocks 4. Provide resources

The industry that you are operating in seems to be adapted to the (4) principals you laid out.

You quoted a statement that wasn't part of our conversation and seemed misplaced in our thread.

Based on your displayed reading comprehension level it seemed prudent to include the thread since you were unable to piece a few previous sentences together and were mis-quoting previous statements.

I've also decided to break out my sentences so they are easier for you or your screen reader to work with.

I hope whatever bot this is training works out well and can help improve its comprehension levels. Don't get too tired typing one sentence answers today, drink some water and take some breaks.

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/opsec/documents/ [2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/v6ops/documents/

There are plenty of organizations that have transition mandates but those are self imposed and would easily be delayed for other monetary business objectives. The Internet as we know it was only created/available in 1993[1] and while some RIR's have exhausted their available IPv4 space it doesn't mean IPv4 addresses are not available.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/04/30/1172276538/world-wide-web-int...

>>I just have written two paragraphs on my personal experience

I see. So you haven't directly experienced being yelled at or having your picture scrutinized, you just observed it happening to other people?

>seem to think that verifying your membership by asking for your card is "being treated like a criminal."

>>not at all what I said, but I think you knew that

I think its disingenuous to cherry pick parts of quotes. I'll list it out again so you see that it wasn't directed at you specifically.

"as quite a few commenters on the thread seem to think that verifying your membership by asking for your card is "being treated like a criminal."

I'll leave it to you to scroll through the thread if you want to see what I was speaking too.

>This will be the scenario you run into when your membership expires

>>Again, gift cards are highly regulated in my state. They don't suddenly lose all value contingent on the buyers standing at the store. You're making that up for some reason.

I think if you read the reviews from the link I referenced[1] there was no mention of loosing the cards value. I said Costco only let them use it once as a non-member. There are a number of different scenarios listed in the reviews that people ran into. If you don't want to read the reviews thats fine, but there is nothing being made up instead you are creating a scenario which wasn't stated. It makes no sense why I would do that and then provide you the link to the source of the information.

> Do you work for Costco?

I pointed you to the Costco site which is where I would go to find out about their policies and because of that I must "work" for Costco now? I was simply pointing out other peoples experiences as "non_members" which you alluded to as your future plan here with the cards.

Here are the reviews incase you missed the link previously, look through the (1) star reviews to see what I was talking about.

[1] https://www.costco.com/costco-shop-card.product.10024438.htm...

>Great, then apply your personal knowledge to where you live

>>That's... what I've been doing this whole time, thanks

Yes and where you live is known to you, not everyone in the thread. We were only granted the illuminating information of cards being "highly regulated in your state" later on in your response post. No one would have known this information prior to that.