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by psychoslave 194 days ago
No it's like saying if one single point of failure in a global food supply chain fails, nobody's going to eat today. And which is in contrast to if some supplier fails to provide a local food truck today their customers will have to go to the restaurant next door.
1 comments
esrauch 194 days ago
Ah ok, it is true that if there's a lot of fungible offerings that worse but uncorrelated uptime can be more robust.

I think the question then is how much of the Internet has fungible alternatives such that uncorrelated downtime can meaningfully be less impact. If you have a "to buy" shopping list, the existence of alternative shopping list products doesn't help you, when the one you use is down it's just down, the substitutes cannot substitute on short notice. Obviously for some things there's clear substitutes though, but actually I think "has fungible alternatives" is mostly correlated with "being down for 30 minutes doesn't matter", it seems that the things where you want the one specific site are the ones where availability matters more.

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hunter2_ 194 days ago
The restaurant-next-door analogy, representing fungibility, isn't quite right. If BofA is closed and you want to do something in person with them, you can't go to an unrelated bank. If Spotify goes down for an hour, you're not likely to become a YT Music subscriber as a stopgap even though they're somewhat fungible. You'll simply wait, and the question is: can I shuffle my schedule instead of elongating it?

A better analogy is that if the restaurant you'll be going to is unexpectedly closed for a little while, you would do an after-dinner errand before dinner instead and then visit the restaurant a bit later. If the problem affects both businesses (like a utility power outage) you're stuck, but you can simply rearrange your schedule if problems are local and uncorrelated.

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psychoslave 194 days ago
If utility power outage is put on the table, then the analogy is almost everyone solely relying on the same grid, in contrast with being wired to a large set of independent providers or even using their own local solar panel or whatever autonomous energy source.
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