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Bird Architecture (mitpress.mit.edu)
85 points by onemind 1855 days ago
4 comments

There is a species of parrot that has established itself throughout the south-east US called the Monk Parakeet. They are one of the few parrots that nests communally, as in, a large colony will share one giant nest.

They usually nest on cellphone towers and big utility poles. I have seen their nests become as big as a car before.

im not sure why, but i was surprised it was about actual birdies
Is Bird a new operating system? A distributed container orchestration system? Or perhaps a new storage system? No, it’s ornithology!
Or those scooters. The company behind them is a startup, they must have a thousand microservices and their own orchestration framework by now.
My first thought was Bird Internet routing daemon
If anyone is interested in amazing nests look up pictures of the ones built by the Bowerbird. They're not necessarily functional but they're amazingly arranged and should be considered works of art.
In computer systems that humans have to use, I often find really poorly operating systems that are defended because their design decisions were more "elegant". Which is really terrible, when you think about it: a system designed to mimic the traits of beings who are more concerned with formal appearance than function.
I find "elegant" used properly is usually an indicator of a pretty decent system. It's the abominations justified as "modern" I dread.