no matter how bad things get at least im not the guy that pushed the crowdstrike update that bluescreened all windows computers and grounded every flight worldwide. what a week

guys wake up y2k happened

soooo y2k fears just happened but 24 years and a half too late. a faulty software update by CrowdStrike, an american cybersecurity company, is causing global computer outages on windows computers. looks like aviation and 911 services are hit hardest. theres a workaround but it needs to be done on every individual pc

I work for a hospital and we have no OR, no cath lab, no outpatient services, no pager services (they just called a stroke code transport for a specific doctor via the INTERCOM), we can’t log into any of our systems and everyone is just sitting around waiting for stat orders, which have to be read manually. Like the doctor has to sit with the machine we used to scan (not our imaging cloud system) and handwrite a paper report, which we have to scan into the ONE (1) system that does actually work.

Individual choices like switching to Linux don't necessarily help with problems like the CrowdStrike collapse, because that's happening due to a corporate technological monoculture created by economic incentives created by dangerously-rich idiots.

You can't expect a bank or credit card processor or etc to make tech decisions that take them out of the monoculture: that's just not what those guys do. "It's not worth it."

Right now, a bunch of people who can't get into Word on their Windows PCs are, instead, on Google Docs on their iPhones, rewriting the same "cost-benefit analysis" they've been rewriting for years, explaining why continuing to use exactly the same set of brittle, closed-source, user-hostile products that literally every other company uses - CrowdStrike and Windows and iOS and Gmail - was and is better than the potential expense/risk of moving away from them. They're saying that it's fine, and this is going to keep happening, and it's fine. Because:

When everything collapses all at the same time: your competitors are part of the Everything. And your own quarterly earnings are in line with theirs. And no one singles you out. You will not play the goat's role, today. So, it's fine. This is fine. And it's going to keep happening.

idk if people on tumblr know about this but a cybersecurity software called crowdstrike just did what is probably the single biggest fuck up in any sector in the past 10 years. it's monumentally bad. literally the most horror-inducing nightmare scenario for a tech company.

some info, crowdstrike is essentially an antivirus software for enterprises. which means normal laypeople cant really get it, they're for businesses and organisations and important stuff.

so, on a friday evening (it of course wasnt friday everywhere but it was friday evening in oceania which is where it first started causing damage due to europe and na being asleep), crowdstrike pushed out an update to their windows users that caused a bug.

before i get into what the bug is, know that friday evening is the worst possible time to do this because people are going home. the weekend is starting. offices dont have people in them. this is just one of many perfectly placed failures in the rube goldburg machine of crowdstrike. there's a reason friday is called 'dont push to live friday' or more to the point 'dont fuck it up friday'

so, at 3pm at friday, an update comes rolling into crowdstrike users which is automatically implemented. this update immediately causes the computer to blue screen of death. very very bad. but it's not simply a 'you need to restart' crash, because the computer then gets stuck into a boot loop.

this is the worst possible thing because, in a boot loop state, a computer is never really able to get to a point where it can do anything. like download a fix. so there is nothing crowdstrike can do to remedy this death update anymore. it is now left to the end users.

it was pretty quickly identified what the problem was. you had to boot it in safe mode, and a very small file needed to be deleted. or you could just rename crowdstrike to something else so windows never attempts to use it.

it's a fairly easy fix in the grand scheme of things, but the issue is that it is effecting enterprises. which can have a looooot of computers. in many different locations. so an IT person would need to manually fix hundreds of computers, sometimes in whole other cities and perhaps even other countries if theyre big enough.

another fuck up crowdstrike did was they did not stagger the update, so they could catch any mistakes before they wrecked havoc. (and also how how HOW do you not catch this before deploying it. this isn't a code oopsie this is a complete failure of quality ensurance that probably permeates the whole company to not realise their update was an instant kill). they rolled it out to everyone of their clients in the world at the same time.

and this seems pretty hilarious on the surface. i was havin a good chuckle as eftpos went down in the store i was working at, chaos was definitely ensuring lmao. im in aus, and banking was literally down nationwide.

but then you start hearing about the entire country's planes being grounded because the airport's computers are bricked. and hospitals having no computers anymore. emergency call centres crashing. and you realised that, wow. crowdstrike just killed people probably. this is literally the worst thing possible for a company like this to do.

crowdstrike was kinda on the come up too, they were starting to become a big name in the tech world as a new face. but that has definitely vanished now. to fuck up at this many places, is almost extremely impressive. its hard to even think of a comparable fuckup.

a friday evening simultaneous rollout boot loop is a phrase that haunts IT people in their darkest hours. it's the monster that drags people down into the swamp. it's the big bag in the horror movie. it's the end of the road. and for crowdstrike, that reaper of souls just knocked on their doorstep.

The reason you can drive a car everywhere is because people put roads everywhere. People are capable of putting safe bike and walking paths and public transit infrastructure everywhere too. Asphalt and gravel roads are not naturally occurring. You being tied to your car if you want to “go anywhere” isn’t a feature of cars it’s a construction as artificial as the car itself

The “freedom” that comes with cars is also possible with other things. Car manufacturers have brainwashed you into thinking it has to be this way. There are places in the world you can leave whenever you want on a whim and go wherever you like on transit or on a bike. This function is not unique to cars. Cars are just the only thing in many parts of the world that get any attention from those funding the infrastructure.

Expanded public transit and bike paths and train service and walkable cities and towns mean freedom. Cars do not need to have a monopoly on freedom.

I guess my question, and this is a sincere question, not me trying to be a dick, is what if my freedom is not about going to a place in a city easily served by public transit or accessible by bicycle, but is about going to a quiet, isolated campground, an empty hiking trail, a lonely beach? Because those are the places I go with my car, and a bus line out to them would sort of be anathema to what I'm looking for.

Plenty of people take a bus or train close to where they want to go and take a bike or walk the rest of the way. Even in California where I’m from where car dependence is a major problem there’s a lot of people who go camping with just bikes or go on long hiking journeys by foot.

Also, renting cars only when you want to use them is an option for many people who don’t want to own a car but still want to use one sometimes. There are companies that you can sign up for a subscription with like zipcar that’ll let you rent a car hourly or for a day without all the paperwork and lack of spontaneity typically associated with car rentals. And renting a car as needed when you do most of your daily travel through bike or transit is almost always cheaper than owning one.

Also if you’re someone who absolutely needs to own a car for whatever reason you can still bike and transit. In fact, you should if you can. It saves you money on gas, gets you some exercise, and you’re not adding to traffic and congestion and road wear and tear when you don’t need to.

There’s also systems in some countries for rarely used train stops that could be implemented in some places. In Switzerland where some of my family lives almost every nowhere town has a train stop but that doesn’t mean the train stops there every time. Instead you can push a button to let the next train know that there’s someone at the stop. And a little nowhere town can easily serve as a base for you to head out from on foot or by bike.

Thank you. I appreciate the thoughtfulness and thoroughness of your answer.

So, thanks to President Biden’s Infrastructure Bill, remote locations on the Navajo Nation Reservation will be receiving electricity for the first time — ever.

Also, water treatment devices are being developed to help the tribe access clean running water. After decades without.

#controversial opinion: the infrstructure bill was one of the most important bills passed in the past decade (or even... longer)#the fact that biden got it passed can never be understated. that bill sat in congress for YEARS.#we're fixing problems that have been problems for decades because of this bill

not to sound old fashioned or whatever but getting rid of payphones is a mistake, and the only reason we should do it is if we're replacing them with free, public use phones. Having the ability to reach out to others in every place of public congress and transit is an important safety feature and the advent and adoption of smartphones does not negate their utility.

I know i've already lost this battle, so it's somewhat pointless to say, but smartphones die. chargers aren't always there. smartphones break. some people don't have them. Being able to call someone and ask for help, to get in touch with friends and family, without relying on something you yourself own, is a societal good.

Furthermore, expecting everybody to have a single piece of fragile technology on them at all times to the point that critical services are not available without them is truly mind-boggling to me. This goes for things like restaurant menus and transit maps as well. you should be able to navigate the world without a brick made by Apple or Samsung, and if you can't, then something is fundamentally broken. It's one thing for new technology to augment an existing real-world experience, it's another thing to usurp it entirely.

It takes on the order of $500k/year to run AO3. You can employ maybe 5 professors of literature for the same money.

Considering the impact that AO3-scraped A/B/O porn has had on AI safety studies, the choice is obvious.

Tbf this really isn't much of a condemnation of English professors as it is a reinforcement of how ludicrously impactful-per-dollar AO3 is - it more impactful then 5 salaried professionals of nearly every profession. The cost effectiveness of well-designed digital infrastructure is like vaccine-level.

^^^ Yeah, what @centrally-unplanned said. Five structural engineers, five Physics professors, five (random)Mathematicians, ABSOLUTELY five aerospace engineers; with the exception of sanitation experts you could probably say this about any profession cuz infrastructure, by design, is meant to accomplish way more than a handful of individuals can(in fact it's meant to MULTIPLY what people can accomplish).

And I mean it's not even really that amazing a point if you stop and think about it. Your local public library has probably done more good for humanity in general since it's founding than most anybody who draws a six-figure-plus salary, and Ao3 is a library for the whole planet(albeit a rather particular one).

Almost all the complaints I see online about what kind of books get published in the modern day are the result of a critical infrastructure problem. 

Before I took a serious crack at writing professionally I really struggled with finding current books that fit my interests. And since then it’s taken a significant investment of time and effort, following from recommendation to recommendation to find the books out there that fit with me. 

The idea that nothing interesting is happening out there is an illusion! The middle infrastructure - the critics and newspapers, magazines and bookstores by which people used to discover things - has mostly gone away and we haven’t managed to replace it. People are writing the books you want to read, somewhere out there, and they want to find you just as badly.

not even an exaggeration

We need more of this but even bigger actually put whole community centers, gyms, schools, restaurants, theaters and hospitals in too.

this fucks so hard i'm gonna be walking funny for days

Jess kellgren-fozard recently talked about how even as a disabled person, she'd followed the English narrative to move into small town or rural semi isolation for 'independence'

Visiting family in Malaysia she realised what a liberation it was living in a big tower block with cafes and laundry and shops and everything in your building connected by lifts. How much more she could do. And how weird the idea of independence was linked to isolation and inefficiency in the UK.

My wifes (rural german) family think we're weird and or refusing to grow up because we intend to stay in the city. But it's bad enough getting round town to the doctors and clinics and shops as it is, at least they're all connected by bike or tube.

And it's not just about disability, but families and everyone else having easy access to resources and community. Things to do, third spaces, resource pooling.

If Americans think all this so bad why like cruise ships?

Wishing everyone who thinks gender neutral bathrooms are scary or an impossible to execute fantasy a very Literally Just Go Visit An Alamo Drafthouse.

Transphobes: "gender neutral bathrooms will never work what a horrible idea!"

Alamo Drafthouse:

If u think this scary or impractical I think that's like legitimately just a You problem.

Ghibli films be like maybe the real hero was public transport

Was staring at a piece of infrastructure, pondering on the strangeness that, as sturdy as it was, it required maintenance and eventually replacement. That everything was like this – except for biological constructs that could perpetuate themselves. But they mutate. So – what if we could build everything out of biology? Our sinks and bridges become immortal – yet destined to become eerie, shifted, unrecognizable things within thousands of years.

#yup lets do it#with trees#transarborealism

surely this is a good idea that doesn't have the capacity to end real fuckin badly

Bridges aren’t supposed to have weight restrictions on them. That is, they don’t come with weight restrictions on them when they’re new. So a bridge with a weight restriction on it is a sign that something has gone wrong and the bridge does not meet current standards.

The maximum weight that a vehicle is allowed to carry on the Interstate System per federal law is 80,000 pounds gross vehicle weight (with a max of 20,000 pounds per axle). That’s 40 tons. That limit applies to every inch of pavement, not just the bridges. Since this is a known cap, a new Interstate bridge will be designed to accommodate an 80,000 lb GVW load on it. You could say the bridge’s weight limit is 80,000 lb/40 tons but that doesn’t really have much meaning, because a load higher than that would be illegal to transport on public roads anyway, and the road leading up to the bridge has the same weight restriction. (In practice, the bridge doubtlessly will be designed to have a little bit of let to it just in case some idiot tries to squeak by a few hundred extra pounds.)

Now, note that that law applies to the Interstate System only, because the federal government only has a governing interest in the Interstate System (and other roads that together make up something called the National Highway System) because they partially fund it. Most long-distance roads are owned and funded by the states. The states could theoretically set lower standard weight limits and/or design bridges with lower weight limits...but in practice they don’t.

One, because all of that 80,000 lb GVW traffic on the Interstate system has to go somewhere when it exits the system.

Two, because a group called the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO, who are best known for picking the road numbers) maintains a catalog of standard components for making bridges that meet Interstate System requirements. Engineers are expensive on a per-hour basis, so if you can direct your engineer to use standard components and make a standard bridge, that’s a lot cheaper than having them design a bridge from scratch to go over the creek in Nowheresville. As a result, most new bridges meet Interstate standards and have an 80,000 lb GVW rating even if they aren’t on the Interstate system. (This is also why all new bridges kind of look the same, but we’re not worried about how boring the bridges are for the sake of this post.)

So a bridge only has an explicit weight limit if it has been damaged in some way (through failure to properly maintain it usually) or because it predates the application of Interstate System standards and the standard AASHTO bridges.

Older bridges often have other problems in addition to the weight limits: many older designs are what we call “fracture critical”, which means that if one component of the bridge fails the whole thing collapses. Modern bridge designs have redundancy designed into them so that if one beam fails the other beams will carry the load until the damaged beam can be replaced. Older bridges also often don’t meet other standards, like height (16 ft clearance) and width (12 ft per lane plus 14 ft for shoulders) requirements.

Biden isn’t advocating eliminating weight limits and letting it be a laissez-faire free-for-all where trucks can just go wherever they want. He’s advocating for replacing bridges that carry weight limits with new ones that don’t have them.

wow i got absolutely schooled thank you for all this this is really informative. i have learned so much

This is a great explanation of what the fuck Biden was talking about in his tweet. because I will freely admit that I also went ".......wtf?????" when I read it. So thank you.

Today I learned about civil engineering.

I almost added onto a post but you know what Imma be incoherent on my own post

I am once again asking you to consider physical infrastructure and why we need government, or at least an overseeing organization before you go off and make your anarchist-mutual-aid-utopia-commune.

We need government because there are people who think that this

is an acceptable way to hold up a house. What you’re looking at is two 2x4 beams supporting the floor joists for a two story section of house. The 2x4s are braced on a windowsill and a bit of broken foundation and are not secured in any way.

I should not have to explain that this is not how houses are supposed to be held up.

The building codes we have now were bought with a century or two of buildings falling down and killing people. It is actually important to observe building codes, and it is also important to have a body to oversee the building codes and send someone around to make sure that they’re being followed.

I am fully aware that the current implementations are biased could use a lot of improvement especially in the realm of doing things about reported problems. But step 1 is making sure that things are built well to start with. (With less capitalism, step 1 would be a lot easier and prevent disasters like grenfell.)

Without basic oversight, there are people out there who really think that this in an acceptable way to build a house.

Yeah.

(The other side of it is worse I just can’t get the picture off of my phone.)

I want fully automated luxury space communism as much as the next guy. But I also want building codes because people will cut every corner and pass it off as fine. They won’t do it maliciously: this person was building their own house, the people who shorted the cladding on grenfell were trying to stick to the construction schedule. Grenfell wouldn’t have been as bad if the tower had been up to code.

I’m just begging you all to realize that people are gonna people. They’re gonna do stupid shit that gets people killed for no reason other than “it’s probably gonna be fine”. We can learn from past mistakes but instead of everybody having to analyze every disaster for what went wrong every time we wanna put up a building, we can just have building codes, yanno? And an ideal government can make sure that everyone has to follow the same building codes.

Like as someone who ALSO wants a fair and just world where nobody dies from lack in the middle of surfeit etc my biggest problem with a lot of rhetoric and even actual activist “plans” is that they fail to consider the very real truth:

Life after the revolution will still contain all the idiots you’ve ever met who’ve done all the stupid things you’ve ever had to deal with. It will contain the petty selfish people you meet day to day, the guys who really do think “well it’ll be fine”, the antivaxx twerps, and every single one of the people who thought masks were really unfair.

They will still be selfish. They will still be well meaning but really really stupid. They will still be the people who agree that hand washing is very important but they are REALLY IN A HURRY so this time it’s fine.

All of them and more and worse will still exist. Ending capitalism will not change that. So if your future does not involve measures to deal with this that aren’t EVEN WORSE than what already exists (because forced reeducation camps are not a viable solution) then you’re not actually going to fix anything.

i learned that Joseph Bazalgette, the man who designed London’s sewers in the 1860’s, said ‘Well, we’re only going to do this once and there’s always the unforeseen’ and doubled the pipe diameter. If he had not done this, it would have overflowed in the 1960’s (its still in use today) (x)

As an archaeologist who has seen the chaos of an 1860s sewer system in Canada that was NOT designed for double its existing demand, I have to say it… this man was a genius and a saint.

why is there no electricity after the apocalypse?

something people writing post-apocalyptic fiction always seem to forget is how extremely easy basic 20th century technology is to achieve if you have a high school education (or the equivalent books from an abandoned library), a few tools (of the type that take 20 years to rust away even if left out in the elements), and the kind of metal scrap you can strip out of a trashed building.

if you want an 18th century tech level, you really need to somehow explain the total failure of humanity as a whole to rebuild their basic tech infrastructure in the decade after your apocalypse event.

i am not a scientist or an engineer, i’m just a house husband with about the level of tech know-how it takes to troubleshoot a lawn mower engine, but i could set up a series of wind turbines and storage batteries for a survivor compound with a few weeks of trial and error out of the stuff my neighbors could loot from the wreckage of the menards out on highway 3. hell, chances are the menards has a couple roof turbines in stock right now. or you could retrofit some from ceiling fans; electric motors and electric generators are the same thing, basically.

radio is garage-tinkering level tech too. so are electric/mechanical medical devices like ventilators and blood pressure cuffs. internal combustion’s trickiest engineering challenge is maintaining your seals without a good source of replacement parts, so after a few years you’re going to be experimenting with o-rings cut out of hot water bottles, but fuel is nbd. you can use alcohol. you can make bio diesel in your back yard. you can use left-over cooking oil, ffs.

what i’m saying is, we really have to stop doing the thing where after the meteor/zombies/alien invasion/whatever everyone is suddenly doing ‘little house on the prairie’ cosplay. unless every bit of metal or every bit of knowlege is somehow erased, folks are going to get set back to 1950 at the most. and you need to account somehow for stopping them from rebuilding the modern world, because that’s going to be a lot of people’s main life goal from the moment the apocalypse lets them have a minute to breathe.

nobody who remembers flush toilets will ever be content with living the medieval life, is what i’m saying. let’s stop writing the No Tech World scenario.

the thing *I* get mad about is no one goes and fixes up any of the hundreds of thousands of airplanes lying around, or even puts together any new ones. like the big fucking stumbling block for all those thousands of years for humans seemed to just be no one managed to combine the idea for a propeller with an engine that would spin it fast enough. but now the genie is thoroughly out of the bottle: drawings of planes have the propeller on it. we will remember that the secret to airplanes is smallish airfoil wings and a very very fast propellor (or three) for a thousand years, until all the books and drawings and planes themselves have decayed away. 

like yeah you couldn’t make commercial jetliners in your garage, but if you camped out in an old airfield, you could probably bang together some kind of working franken-cessna. 

I have an uncle who got bored and built a flyable franken-cessna in his garage a few years ago based upon his knowledge as an automotive worker so you really don’t need to be a specialized aeronautics expert to build a plane. You just gotta be able to stop your dog’s weird anti-aircraft vendetta long enough to put it together.

but yeah, the electricity thing bugs me so much. Solar panels are everywhere these days. It isn’t super hard to set up small wind turbines. But! the thing that bugs me the most is the assumption that the whole power grid of a continent would just fall apart all at once and never get back up and running (assuming your apocalypse doesn’t explicitly state why that happened).

like look at the 2003 Northeast Blackout in North America. Cascading failures sent about 250 power plants offline. But even in areas hit by the blackout there were pockets that were fine. Either they had local power generation or they caught on to what was happening and separated from the grid before it hit them. Or they got back up and running the same night. And it didn’t expand beyond the northeast area because the whole of north america isn’t connected to each other. You could have something hit the east coast and the west coast but Quebec and Texas would be there happily flipping everyone off as they basked in their separate grids.

And! different types of power generation are going to have different levels of protection. A solar farm probably has a fence that will keep out the local hooligans. A wind farm is just fuck off tall and leaves it to sheer height to stop people from fucking with it. Hydroelectric dams depends on how big it is, could be dedicated armed security, could be the two dudes on duty to run the turbine that day who’re just annoyed they’re missing lunch. Nuclear has an entire department who’s sole purpose is to fuck you up and they are very bored and would like to have a reason to use the armoured truck. So yeah, you can’t just walk into most of these places with the intent to “destroy the grid” or if you can walk into them people are going to be like, why is that random dude out there literally tilting at windmills maybe someone should stop him.

Also, I am always disappointed when north american authors forget that ARES (amateur radio emergency services) exists. It’s a bunch of local volunteers who are super into radio but also they will drop everything and head into disaster zones to run emergency communications. Your cell phone might not work, your internet might never come back on, but buddy down the road has access to a  radio and a can do attitude.

some fantastic additions here!

and to everyone who was like “you can’t use your devices directly off a turbine” oh my god i knooooow, did you think my post was a tutorial? you can do the farming part of the postapocalypse. please leave electricity to people who know there are reference materials.