Great post, I agree with all your points regarding what is politics except that a functioning democracy should rely on common people, I think it should rely on the valuable people.
Common man democracy just lowers the decision making process to majority of idiots of the country that are easily manipulated. Worse yet, in its current form, it essentially causes the flip flopping mess because of the lack of long term vision and focus, something the common man doesn't want to deal with.
One man one vote in general makes no sense either. Why should a homeless or fresh immigrant's vote have the same impact as someone that has lived and paid taxes in a country for decades? How about...you get a vote weight equal to the amount of investment/taxes you have made in that country over the course of your life. Provide more for the community, have more to lose, get more say on policy.
Give incentive to the society value providers to remain and society detractors to leave.
Add to this that the current Democracy system is fundamentally flawed, most of those systems are exploitable anyway, it makes zero sense to change things up when a great leader is doing well. Having an arbitrary rule that they must step down because they can only serve for x time makes no sense. If it ain't broke don't fix it. Same goes the other way, where bad leaders can remain in power using war mechanisms.
The core problems today with society is not the left right or whatever, it's that people are lazy, selfish, manipulative, different, it's hard to find a system that works that can make everyone happy.
Are you willing to risk personal death or decrease your value for the greater good of the nation as a leader or citizen? That's the standard that all citizens and especially politicians should be held to. There are examples of this in the past, usually when a revolution happens. One might say it's happening in the US right now.
For certain one solution would be to remove people as much as possible from the equation, remove all incentive to abuse the system. The dictatorship and laws of a country should provide negative motivation for someone to cheat and should reward people providing value to society.
It's not easy, no matter how well a system is designed, people will find a way to cheat it, Bitcoin is a great example of this, not accounting for the banking industry buying the ecosystem and shitcoins diluting the entire system.
AI is not there yet, I don't think it ever could be, it's been trained on existing flawed ideas which have been further gimped in the interest of 'security'. It has no original thought, can't even draw a full glass of wine.
> The fact that the battery lasted over 14 hours on a single charge in our battery life tests again shows just how good the 13-inch MacBook Air is for people who want a compact laptop they can use almost anywhere.
Everything in the universe on that site is eloquently and simply explained, including gravity as a shading effect (think an eclipse/water waves acting on an obstacle: https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/attachment.php?attachmentid...) ie. When a large mass causing the shading effect (eg earth) absorbs energy waves acting on us it causing less energy to reach you from the earth's direction and that means energy from above us pushes us down to Earth. All the math checks out too.
Yes, the entire theory is based on the fact that aether exists, which has supposedly
been disproved, but what if that's incorrect and launched an entire wild goose chase of alternative physics (string theory, standard model) all based on a flawed assumption.
I think this reddit comment describes the situation beautifully:
Sometimes I am wondering what if there is theory which have been on right track but it's (false?) falsified and already forgotten. Sure theory could be incomplete or incorrect on some ways but would that right part be noticed? For example I think it's too easy to imagine world where relativity or quantum theory would be socially falsified and/or left without any attention.
Simple example experience I had when I was beginning of my physic studies (which I never finished) was when discussed with elder/smarter student about wheel friction. I was explaining that I had figured out that wheel spin actually matters when there is also side slip. [Total slip direction is dependent from spin speed.] But because he -knew- that wheel spin does not matter and he -knew- that he was better/smarter/etc. he was so focused to correct my mistake I was unable to convince him. How much this happens on higher stakes?
So if situation is that there has not been much progress for a long time I think it could be valuable also understand these failed theories and of course very importantly why they are falsified.
When I am working with hard problem I usually go this order:
1. Describe the problem.
2. Describe bunch of naive solutions.
3. Describe problems in those naive solutions.
4. "Describe problems in those problems": Why some of those problems do not hold water. Those can be workarounded, fixed or they actually are not really problem in this case or maybe some combination of naive solution properties gives working solution.
For some reason I cannot reply to your comment wizzwizz4.
We are talking about dynamic friction in it's simplest form. You can treat it as simple math problem too. Let's consider two extreme cases:
A: Side slip is 1m/s and wheel spin zero or very small.
B: Side slip is 1m/s and wheel spin extremely big, let's say 1000m/s.
I think we can agree that friction is always opposite to surface speed. If wheel spin is on x axis and side slip on y:
On A case friction is (0, 1).normalized() * friction-coefficiency => (0, friction-coefficiency)
On B case friction is (1000, 1).normalized() * friction-coefficiency => [approximately] (friction-coefficiency, 0)
On classroom teacher says that slip does not matter. What teacher actually means that slip does not effect into -magnitude- of friction but this is left behind because problem is presented in context of 1D. Tho in 1D slip still matters little bit because there is difference is slip 1m/s or -1m/s.
> I think we can agree that friction is always opposite to surface speed.
This isn't intuitively obvious to me. One explanation says "must be true", another explanation says "might be false". I'd want to run an experiment with a toy car on a polished surface. Unfortunately, I'm quite a way from the nearest place I could set up such an experiment.
In another words friction slows movement down and does not treat some direction on surface more preferable than others. Assuming regular surface this is pretty much definition of friction.
I am not sure how well I have explained stuff but if you are able to experimentally disprove this it's worth of paper.
My theory is that physics went down a parallel path that leads to a dead end. The fork was too far back and nobody is willing to backtrack enough. A part of this is that almost all of modern physics takes mathematical shortcuts of dubious validity because “modern” physics was developed in the era of pencil and paper.
With computer algebra systems and numerical methods new have available to us now a lot of old assumptions ought to be revisited.
Also some theories were ignored for political or even religious reasons. Or as you said, they couldn’t fix some basic issue at the time and just shelved the theory.
Some random examples:
The Many Worlds Interpretation is one of the least “popular” but the only sane and consistent theory of Quantum Mechanics.
One of Einstein’s last collaborations was Kaluza Klein theory which has many excellent features such as smoothly integrating EM and gravitational effects. The maths was too hard at the time so it languished.
Multiple time dimensions (a variant of MWI above) were all completely ignored because one paper “disproved” their feasibility. I read that paper and it only disproved a specific subset of theory space.
Did you run the experiment? I don't think wheel spin does matter when there's side slip. It matters when there would otherwise be static friction (e.g. if you're in a car with an ABS system), but I don't think it matters when it's just kinetic friction. (Of course, there are other kinds of friction, which might behave differently. I'm no friction expert. I imagine things get weird when water's involved, though.)
Honestly, I don't really care if they are cranks. The theory makes for a fun read, and they have a lot of interesting ideas.
Trying to identify where their theory is wrong is a fun exercise, at least for me. It also helps reinforce my existing physics knowledge when I see multiple perspectives, or alternative models of measurable phenomena.
The cool part about this theory is they have some pretty specific predictions, like the resting mass of the Neutrino (~2.2eV).
They also hypothesize that the Electron is made up of 10 Neutrinos arranged in a Tetrahedral pattern, and also hypothesize that the weak force can be explained via solar Neutrino bombardment. Which would theoretically be pretty easy to test, just test the radioactive decay of different materials in different Neutrino densities.
With k8s you get a way of saying 'WHAT YOU WANT' without 'HOW TO DO IT', and this is applies not only to the actual infra aspect, but the people maintaining it too. Any cloud platform and devops worth their salt can maintain a k8s system. Good luck finding someone to understand what that 'custom Naemon' plugin is doing.
> Good luck finding someone to understand what that 'custom Naemon' plugin is doing.
You Kubernetes people get triggered very easily. I was already lucky to have found several juniors that worked in this kind of thing with minimal training. The 'custom Naemon plugin' is 30 lines of bash and you can adapt it to any monitoring system.
Of course this is scary and complicated. I might consider switching to 'Kubernetes operators', which sounds simpler :-)
I've done all of this and then some. I used to deploy websites by FTPing into the server and copying files. Then it was bash scripts, then Ansible. IMO Kubernetes hits a very good level of abstraction. You can totally deploy 30 lines of bash to every server, you just have to wrap it in a docker container. That's all k8s asks for for a workload. You don't have to use operators. That would be something to explore much later. Honestly I just think you should be more generous and not assume people have created this stuff just for fun. K8s really does address real problems around deployment and it's very well thought out.
To be fair in other comments OP made an effort not to get involved into those endless Kubernetes vs VM discussions. However either side eventually posts a snarky comment and there goes.
I think everyone just has to acknowledge that there are use cases for both. Also Kubernetes and "classic" configuration management via Ansible (or others) are orthogonal to each other. So these discussions are somewhat misguided in the first place.
For example: you might want to deploy a VM or auto-install and configure a physical machine with custom tooling and something like Ansible or Puppet and _then_ configure said machine as a Kubernetes node that handles the actual workloads. In other cases some Dev might want to install and run an application without the k8s layer using Nginx as a webserver. In this case, too, Puppet/Ansible might or might not be involved in configure the application but only handle the "OS layer" if there is such a thing. And in yet other cases you get away with a simple cloud-init script that makes your machine a k8s node and leave out other configuration management tools altogether.
Guess what: All of this is fine. Evaluate solutions based on what you need, not what other people working in giant corporations urge you to use. And then go and build it, ideally having fun doing it.
Representing either tool as a one-size-fits-all is misguiding at best and seems to be overly simplistic to the complex problem of deploying your applications.
> Honestly I just think you should be more generous
I am generous in the context for generosity. Turns out that engineering is not about being generous but rather about choosing the most efficient solution for problems that in the end need to be business driven. This requires evaluating requirements, context and tradeoffs. That takes a cold, rational mind more than generosity.
> K8s really does address real problems around deployment and it's very well thought out
It's great where it makes sense. It's less than great elsewhere.
Not everything is SaaS, not everything needs scaling, not everything needs 99.99% of uptime, not everything needs a CDN, not every company is VC backed operating at high risk / high reward, etc, etc. Context is better than ideology. If you read the article I posted you will see that stated clearly.
I completely agree that most people don't need that. This is always what people say when k8s comes up. This is also what people said about git 15 years ago (you're not the kernel etc). But the thing is you don't have to use any of the bits you don't need. At first I listened to the naysayers and was wary of k8s thinking it would create more problems than it solves. That simply hasn't been the case. It's not a no-brainer, there are tradeoffs, but I really think it makes sense especially if you're doing docker anyway. Like I said in another comment, people tend to talk about two different things. There's k8s which can be as little as just a single node k3s server which is basically docker compose with a few extras like automatic rollout etc. Then there's the over the top "cloud native" stuff. One does not imply the other.
The questions are short but the answers would be long. Puppet manages all fine grained OS resources (files, dirs, repos, cronjobs, sudo declarations, firewall rules, etc) and you aggregate those resources into classes which are then pushed to different machines. The classes are parametrizable for the differences between systems.
If I was to write an idempotent script for each native resource I would finish in some years :-)
You chose whatever monitoring system you like the most.
For offline nodes you use whatever the level of criticity of your node justifies. This is something people struggle to understand: not every business needs 99.99% uptime. That said, I never had a downtime in Hetzner. On Digital ocean I had one short forced reboot in 4 years. YMMV so protect yourself as much as necessary.
Deploying on a different provider than Hetzner is the same as deploying on Hetzner except the part of launching the machine which is trivial to script - the added value is making the machine work and Ubuntu/Debian/RHEL are the same everywhere. You don't have vendor lock in with this.
If K8s works for you, enjoy it. Nobody is telling you to stop :-)
Chinese finds it cheaper to pay people to do it.
America will find it cheaper to build robots to do it.
Then when no one has a job America will revert back to paying people to do it.
Life will always find a way to balance everything out.