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I don't buy it. I mean the entire society is set up this way. If we tried to reduce reliance on others and others systems, are we saying we should all build our own operating systems that are hardened from solar radiation? About one week ago I woke up to my great uncle knocking on my RV (we live in his driveway temporarily) and he said, the fastest moving fire in CA history is moving toward Paradise again and we need to get ready to evacuate. We had no electricity and so updates were bad. Later he updated us after driving to the top of the hill that the fire was 40 miles away. Later that day I found out he was wrong, it was 10 miles away :P. The sky was red, the world had stopped, everything was hopeless. I went to gas up the RV, hundreds of people doing the same, all scrambling trying to avoid a repeat of mistakes from 2 years ago. Everything is nuts, no one is calm. Except the world didn't stop. Mail was delivered in Magalia and Paradise that very day. UPS and Fedex dropped off packages in both cities that very day. The world is actually a lot more robust that we give it credit. Sure, maybe we are constantly 2 minutes to midnight. But maybe, just maybe this modern society can handle pandemics. I know the literature is saying the exact opposite. And maybe in a year we're all going to be starving to death. But if that's the case, then the least of my worries is how many dependencies I have. If anything, if I have more, perhaps we're strengthening our society just a little by paying 5 SAAS companies to keep mine running. Just tying it back to my fire experience, I depend on daily, so many freaking companies and people, ACTUALLY doing stuff that day, that I don't care that my code is resting on the backs of 4000 developers I haven't met, that haven't touched 90% of that code in 3-4 years anyway. Not saying I wouldn't enjoy a completely different society, but that's a different essay. |