[rektide]

There's another AWS outage, & presently the top comment is talking about us as barbarians that have stumbled into fancy hot baths & are amazed but have no idea how to keep them running. And a wonderful follow-up reply[1] talking about living in an apartment in a storm versus living in a cave during a storm. It presents another severe image of how much drift there has been in the world, how much more built up, but how we ourselves are not necessarily more advanced, smarter, wiser.

It's work like this (Mess with DNS). This is the stuff. Revealing, experimenting, inviting people in. Tech that illuminates & shows off, that is there to explain & help create understanding. This is the stuff, this is what keeps humanity powerful & competent & connected. Tech does a lot for us, but when it helps us become better wiser more creative people, when it reveals itself & the world: that holds a very dear place in my heart, is the light & heat in a vast cold and dark universe. I love this project. It's a capital example of revelatory technology, of enlightening technology.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29568078

[ASalazarMX]

Humans individually are pretty useless. Abandon a random human in a jungle and they will likely perish soon no matter how smart and well educated they are.

The strength of humanity is teamwork, working together to build things other groups can build things upon. Abandon 100 random humans in the same jungle and they will build a town.

[Lammy]

> The strength of humanity is teamwork, working together to build things other groups can build things upon.

This is why I don't trust anybody who tries to tell me that human population growth is an actual problem and not just our rulers' fear of irrelevance.

[scubbo]

It is possible for the two following statements to be simultaneously true:

* the ability of collaborating groups of humans to achieve/produce scales super-linearly with the number of humans[1]

* the growth of human population is causing problems, and is likely to cause more problems in the future

One reason is the scarcity of resources[2]; another is that "humanity" as a whole is not collaborating with all of itself.

[1] actually, I don't even think this is true, beyond some limit - but it's true for small groups

[2] which could be mitigated somewhat by fairer allocation of resources, or by process changes to focus more on fundamental needs; but, still the fact remains that the resources that we have access to on Planet Earth are limited, and access to extraterrestrial resources are extremely expensive

[malthuswaswrong]

What is a fairer way to allocate resources than you produce for me and I produce for you?

Seems to me any other system is open to being gamed. Sure there are people born into generational wealth. But those are like one in a million and generational wealth doesn't typically last more than a handful of generations as the number of descendants grows exponentially.

[robrorcroptrer]

How many would actually be able to build anything if it was purely random? How many tries of 100 people batches until they've built something?

Not arguing, just questions that came into my mind.

[ASalazarMX]

Random people would have the most varied set of skills. A single person can have skills that are useless for surviving in the jungle, but if any of the 100 people has a good enough idea of what to do, the rest can help.

Even non-random groups like your coworkers or immediate neighbors can have unexpected skills that will make you feel dumb.

[s_dev]

>Abandon 100 random humans in the same jungle and they will build a town.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies

I'm not sure -- but I do think it would be interesting how that would turn out. Australia would founded in this sort of fashion. I think there's a bit more nuance though.

[gruez]

except that's fiction, and this is non-fiction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongan_castaways

[rektide]

I do think though that empowering individuals is key.

Teamwork is still the work of many individuals, and I think a person's upbringing & disposition & the capabilities they've developed are hugely influential on what kinds of teams are possible in the world. The world of computing today gives users interesting capabilities, but only shallowly, only on the surface; it denies us the view below, denies us the freedom to see, understand & explore, and humanity always being so yolked restrains human growth, restricts what I see as one of our key better nature from getting a chance to come out & thrive.

Sure, we are not going to all learn how to build apartment buildings; we will take much for granted. But many people do learn some home repair, or try their hand at fixing appliances. Sometimes just to save some money, but sometimes because it's interesting, & because there's videos showing them how to, because they can. But computer/information tech, in my view, has created a highly resistant unrepairable unviewable digitalia that is anathematic to this basic human engagement with the world about us. It is not just a built environment, but a built environment which resists real understanding, which prevents human empowerment.

Creating an accessible world, one where human's have a strong locus of control, where they have flexibility & options to experiment, to play, to try, to explore is absolutely capital to me. Humanity loses who humanity was when/if we view the world as prebuilt, as a creation of some wider us, that we are but tiny figures upon. Yes there are many things that we have to rely on groups for, but that ability to learn about the world, to understand it, to investigate & understand & experiment in the pieces of it we so choose- that spirit is the lifeblood of this planet, and it's that attitude & disposition that produces highly functional teams & groups. Which is something we will, best I can tell, always need.

To speak to technology & it's revelatory potential, to put it in scope here, I think it's important to review Ursala Franklin's dichotomy of technology. She divides tech into work & control related, work that helps individuals do things, control that regulates systems. Going further, she divides tech into holistic & prescriptive techologies- prescriptive technologies which break down work into fixed, predictable, deliberate steps & processes, and holistic technologies, which amplify the capabilities & prowess of the tool-bearer. There's a lot of tech on this planet, but even "creative" tech like a photo-sharing sight is mechanistic in nature, follows limited & fixed flows, & affords only superficial control to it's users. Where-as tech like Mess with DNS amplifiers human understanding, gives us the power to explore & test out what is possible, lets us set our own rules. This world is in need of techno-spiritual healing- computers are widely used but rebuff understanding, they have become overwhelming elements of control rather than empowerment. I look forward eagerly to a shift, to revelatory technology that abides different ends, that seeks a holism. Mess with DNS is "just" a little playground for some tech, hardly an attractive application on it's own, but I believe that individuals everywhere would be much better off- that teams would be much richer as a result- if tech worked to open up the engine-bay & allow some monkeying around.

[Karrot_Kream]

Julia Evans's cool stuff aside (and it is _very cool_, we need all the high quality didactic material we can get!), all this info _is_ on the net. I'm always surprised when I see engineers (like in that linked post) who don't understand how to do things like regional failovers, DNS load balancing, load balancing strategies, load shedding, circuit breaking, AZ balancing/failover, etc. These are pretty standard concepts in the world of high reliability net services, writing the code is the easiest part! I guess that says a lot about the problem domain I'm in and how different reliability guarantees tend to be in other problem domains.

[rektide]

I've never seen anything at all as interactive & playful as this. Nothing that comes close. All in one, designed to create the experience of DNS. It's in the name: Mess with DNS. That makes it far far far & away different

And I think that makes all the difference. I tend to believe very strongly in hands on experience, think that seeing things happen yourself & getting to play is by far the best way to learn, just incredibly surpassing.

There's a theory of education called Constructivism[1] that is broadly similar. Adherents include folks like Seymore Papert[2], creator of Logo, employee at One Laptop Per Child (which I think is the most interesting & innovative software environment we've ever created, vastly under-appreciated). Projects like Logo are supposed to create that hands on feedback, to make programming not just writing scripts & having programs run, but ways to see the code really execute, to create more interactive modes.

With software eating the world, it is so so so important to me not just to create knowledge, to tell tales of what software is, but to let people have the experience themselves. To create playgrounds to meddle, to mess around. I wish so much that applications could actually show & explain what they are doing, what's inside of them, could reveal their workings, but we're so far away from that Enlightened world, we've fallen into such deep shadows imo.

(Side note, I see things very differently, but I also am disappointed folks would downvote your perspective like this. As for the lack of knowledge/experience, I'd say that most engineers don't have familiarity because there's not a lot of opportunities to set up & learn systems work; most coders spend their time coding, not setting up bits of infrastructure to run code on. You yourself also say "writing the code is the easiest part", which underscores just how complex/inter-related/particular all the systems/infrastructure stuff is, how probable it is engineers might not feel fully competent or brave enough to engage.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Papert

[Karrot_Kream]

> I've never seen anything at all as interactive & playful as this. Nothing that comes close. All in one, designed to create the experience of DNS. It's in the name: Mess with DNS. That makes it far far far & away different

Oh absolutely! I don't mean to diminish this. The ability to interact and play also works very well for my own learning.

> There's a theory of education called Constructivism[1] that is broadly similar. Adherents include folks like Seymore Papert[2], creator of Logo, employee at One Laptop Per Child (which I think is the most interesting & innovative software environment we've ever created, vastly under-appreciated). Projects like Logo are supposed to create that hands on feedback, to make programming not just writing scripts & having programs run, but ways to see the code really execute, to create more interactive modes.

+100

> With software eating the world, it is so so so important to me not just to create knowledge, to tell tales of what software is, but to let people have the experience themselves. To create playgrounds to meddle, to mess around. I wish so much that applications could actually show & explain what they are doing, what's inside of them, could reveal their workings, but we're so far away from that Enlightened world, we've fallen into such deep shadows imo.

You bring up a good point overall about the lack of interactive materials for engineers/students/interested folks. I also suggest opening up any cloud provider (cheap for playing around is probably better!) and trying these things with services like Traefik (which are easy to configure/play with). Try to do some multi-region failover stuff, observe what happens with different load balancing strategies, that sort of thing. It reminds me a lot of watching videos about setting up IP networks, stuff like Cisco certification material.

You've given me some food for thought on educational materials for sure.

> As for the lack of knowledge/experience, I'd say that most engineers don't have familiarity because there's not a lot of opportunities to set up & learn systems work; most coders spend their time coding, not setting up bits of infrastructure to run code on. You yourself also say "writing the code is the easiest part", which underscores just how complex/inter-related/particular all the systems/infrastructure stuff is, how probable it is engineers might not feel fully competent or brave enough to engage.

Yeah this stuff isn't easy and operational work is often a different skillset than writing code.