X : Any thoughts on climate change?
Me : It's not a good idea?
X : How to fix it?
Me : The people who can change it, profit from it and the people who can't change it have other more basic concerns to worry about.
X : So?
Me : I suspect we will just blame the poor?
X : That's not very helpful.
Me : If you want to fix something, you first have to be honest enough to admit what causes it.
X : Fossil fuel?
Me : Partially. The larger issue is transactions and our attempt to fix the problem with more transactions.
X : Are you saying the market can't be sustainable?
Me : The market is based upon transactions which are based upon property which is based upon exclusion. You can't exclude people from the environment. The market will never be sustainable, it's why you need to govern the market.
X : Can't Government demand change?
Me : That's the only way. Government can force the people who could change it ... to change it.
X : Did you hear AWS was down?
Me : Didn't notice, been busy with other things. Was it a region?
X : US-East-1 had problems.
Me : Ok. Last long?
X : A couple of hours?
Me : And I assume we discovered that there are companies out there still not building across multiple regions?
X : I don't know.
Me : Probably. This was good practice almost a decade ago. It wouldn't surprise me.
X : Delta had problems.
Me : Delta Air Lines? Like the outage in their own data centres about five years ago which grounded flights for three days?
X : I didn't know that.
Me : Data centre outages which lasted days if not weeks used to happen quite often, especially in the old days of home grown data centres. A region of AWS being down for a couple of hours is a pain but ... well, multi-region was good practice long ago. When did the outage happen?
X : Thoughts on the metaverse?
Me : Depends upon what you mean. I'm all in favour of remote collaboration, co-operation and distribution of power but I'm not in favour of plugging myself into the matrix with Zuckerberg as the architect. I have met Mark. No thanks.
X : You don't think it will be a success?
Me : Depends. Not in the East but in the West, it'll be a huge success. People are more than happy to sell their future and the future of their children for a few baubles. We're suckers for this ...
... I can imagine those future conversations.
Daughter, we may all be enslaved in the metaverse, there is no life beyond it but through a lifetime of work, I now bequeath you (pursuant to the rules of inheritance, section 5.01) the hammer of majikthise. Go change the meta world.
Excellent reporting by @BBCRosAtkins and @BBCNews. However, given the lack of integrity shown by this Gov, I can only assume that the "noise" over the party is misdirection away from something else ->
or alternatively the work of critical theorists trying to destabilise the Gov by demonstrating its behaviour doesn't hold to our values in order to present a new way -
X : You're often quite harsh on Google.
Me : What?!? Where did that come from. I like Google but they've got tough challenges ahead. Friends don't just go "you're doing fine" when you're not.
X : What tough challenges?
Me : Ok ...
1. The rise of serverless and FinOps, especially when we get things like carbon reporting / energy use per function etc. Google's down the Kubernetes path and AWS is running away with it. 2. The shift of networks into space and the application of Moore's law ...
... once networks get up there, compute and storage will eventually follow. AWS (GroundStation et al), SpaceX etc are all over this. 3. The growth of competitors from China (Alibaba, Baidu). Don't underestimate the impact to the cultural psyche of Silicon Valley as ...
X : Thoughts on Re:Invent?
Me : Wasn't there. Keynotes I listened to were encouraging. I particularly liked the focus on sustainability and serverless. Some interesting new services. Seemed like a solid event that reinforced AWS leadership in the new world.
X : Can a graph be a map?
Me : All maps are graphs but only some graphs are maps. In a map, space has meaning ... however ...
Me : ... if you collapse all possible paths (i.e. all options) to only those shown on the graph i.e. there is no possibility to wander off the defined paths and to explore the space then in that very special case ... the graph is also a map as the space is exhausted of meaning.
However, most "maps" that I see - mindmaps, business process maps, systems maps - are not in fact maps but graphs. The options are not exhausted, they provide no means of exploring the space and the landscape does change.