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Aquileo | cake
Cake day: June 7th, 2024

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  • What they don’t show in a lot of SciFi is the mundane day-to-day stuff (AFAIK, the only shows that came close were Red Dwarf and Firefly.)

    Problem is, things break. Connectors come loose. Temperature makes things brittle. Small debris cross pads and create shorts. Most automated manufacturing lines can catch assembly problems, but none have 0% failure rate. This is what post-deployment maintenance is for. Somebody shows up in a van with a bunch of test gear and replacement parts. They diagnose the problem, swap out a cable or board, and the business keeps humming.

    Add IoT and fancy telemetry. Monitor sensors and run ML to do predictive analytics. It still requires someone in a cargo van with a bunch of spare parts.

    If you put an installation in a remote location, under water, or in space, there are benefits. But you just multiplied the cost of basic maintenance. You can build in redundancies, but a small glitch at a single-point-of-failure could cascade to a catastrophe.

    Microsoft and Google tried putting data-centers under water, and after years of trials they nixed it because of these issues. Multiply that for something far out in space.

    Only alternative is to build failure into the business model. Something breaks, you just leave it to rot (or burn in the atmosphere) and send another container out. Maybe the finance math works out, but it sure is wasteful.

    tl:dr: SciFi is fantasy. A clogged toilet is reality.










  • The whole thing about moving from centralized to decentralized had a core glitch. Whatever server you signed on would effectively lock you in. What happened if things didn’t go as planned? LOLA is a good step, but it’s still not enough.

    Long time ago, URNs were designed to handle URLs that moved. These were permanent resource indicators that would allow the underlying data to move but not break the link. The HTTP redirect codes were supposed to help. Idea was, a website could redirect to a new location so clicking on a link would never get you a 404. It assumed both source and target site were still accessible so source could send the 301, 302, 307, or 308 codes. Very genteel. But what if the source site or account were zapped or suddenly blocked?

    Redirect codes work if the owner moved them and has now set up a suggested next location. But it doesn’t handle the negative reasons. Getting forcibly banned, site getting hacked, sites shutting down, owner not paying the bill (for economic, health, or political reasons), anything else that could render the content inaccessible. It’s nice to add constructs to avoid getting account hacked. But what if owner is in jail, muffled, coerced, going through a tough personal stretch, or dead?

    They still need to solve for real life and how shit happens.









  • Three or more large satellites or used rocket stages burn up in Earth’s atmosphere every day, according to the European Space Agency’s Space Environment Report published last year. Every year, hundreds of tons of human-made objects reenter the atmosphere and evaporate, leaving behind clouds of microscopic ash along with some fragments that happen to fall all the way to the ground.

    Meanwhile, the amount of space rocks today entering the atmosphere, to be clear, outstrips the amount of reentering space junk. An estimated 44 tonnes of space rock enters the atmosphere per day, most of which burns up.