Subject: Re: OT: Cartoon from 2105
https://hachyderm.io/@mitchell...

I thought about posting this link on the Microsoft board in light of their ongoing issues. I think that will get get worse before it gets better.

I also thought about posting this link in reply to my post on Alphabet about GTLB (regarding their ai slop press release this week: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/...).

I'd actually decided not to post it at all, while I was catching up on the day's posts, until I read that comic you posted. It is hard to pin down why, exactly, but it felt apt here. The author is Mitchell Hashimoto, of Hashicorp, among many other notable open source software projects. He is presumably wealthy beyond all conceivable needs and has been speaking freely, in increasingly concerned ways. While 11 years removed and on a separate topic, his post and that comic seemed connected in spirit. I will excerpt his post briefy:

I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really).
[...]

We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying.

I worry.