> Businesses and peoples’ livelihoods are online nowadays
What happened to having a business continuity plan? E.g. when your IT system is down, writing down incoming orders manually and filling them into the system when it's restored?
I have a creeping suspicion that people don't care about that, in which case they can't really expect more than to occasionally be forced into some downtime by factors outside of their control.
Either it's important enough to have contingencies in place, or it's not. Downtime will happen either way, no matter how brilliant the engineers working at these large orgs are. It's just that with so much centralization (probably too much) the blast range of any one outage will be really large.
My wife and I own a small theatre. We can process orders in-store just fine. Our customers can even avoid online processing fees if they purchase in-store. And if our POS system went down, we could absolutely fall back to pencil and paper.
Doesn't change the fact that 99% of our ticket sales happen online. People will even come in to the theatre to check us out (we're magicians and it's a small magic shop + magic-themed theatre - so people are curious and we get a lot of foot traffic) but, despite being in the store, despite being able to buy tickets right then and there and despite the fact that it would cost less to do so ... they invariably take a flyer and scan the QR code and buy online.
We might be kind of niche, since events usually sell to groups of people and it's rare that someone decides to attend an event by themselves right there on the spot. So that undoubtedly explains why people behave like this - they're texting friends and trying to see who is interested in going. But I'm still bringing us up as an example to illustrate just how "online" people are these days. Being online allows you to take a step back, read the reviews, price shop, order later and have things delivered to your house once you've decided to commit to purchasing. That's just normal these days for so many businesses and their customers.
I’m not so sure about that. The pre-internet age had a lot of forced “mental health breaks”. Phone lines went down. Mail was delayed. Trains stalled. Businesses and livelihoods continued to thrive.
The idea that we absolutely need 24/7 productivity is a new one and I’m not that convinced by it. Obviously there are some scenarios that need constant connectivity but those are more about safety (we don’t want the traffic lights to stop working everywhere) than profit.
Just want to correct the record here, as someone who worked at a local CLEC where we took availability quite seriously before the age of the self-defeatist software engineer.
Phone lines absolutely did not go down. Physical POTS lines (Yes, even the cheap residential ones) were required to have around 5 9s of availability, or approximately 5 minutes per year. And that's for a physical medium affected by weather, natural disasters, accidents, and physical maintenance. If we or the LEC did not meet those targets contracts would be breached and worst case the government would get involved.
Okay, as someone who also worked in that era I’ll be pedantic: internal phone systems went down. I experienced it multiple times so I certainly know it happened.
FWIW nothing I said was “self defeatist”, I made it clear I don’t think it’s a good thing. It’s just a simple financial reality that the additional redundancy isn’t worth the extra cost in a lot of situations.
Most businesses are totally fine if they have a few hours of downtime. More uptime is better, but treating an outage like a disaster or an e-commerce site like a power plant is more about software engineer egos than business or customer needs.
If AWS is down, most businesses on AWS are also down, and it’s mostly fine for those businesses.
I’ve worked in cloud consulting for a little over five years. I can say 95% of the time when I discuss the cost and complexity tradeoffs of their websites being down vs going multi region or god forbid “multi cloud”, they shrug and say, it will be fine if they are down for a couple of hours.
This was the same when I was doing consulting inside (ie large companies willing to pay the premium cost of AWS ProServe consultants) and outside working at 3rd party companies.
It's better to have diverse, imperfect infrastructure, than one form of infra that goes down with devastating results.
I'm being semi-flippant but people do need to cope with an internet that is less than 100% reliable. As the youth like to say, you need to touch grass
Being less flippant: an economy that is completely reliant on the internet is one vulnerable to cyberattacks, malware, catastrophic hardware loss
It also protects us from the malfeasance or incompetence of actors like Google (who are great stewards of internet infrastructure... until it's no longer in their interests)
This is a super simple idea that has yet to be executed in a meaningful way. Instead of empowering affiliates to go and sell your product, why hasn’t anyone created something that empowers people to gain you newsletter subscribers or Instagram followers?
Very impressive “Sold” list! I’ve created a similar portfolio site for myself, but haven’t added a “Sold” section. Seems obvious, so I think that’ll be in my next update. Link below for reference:
Simple concept: spend time building a very well curated RSS feed for a high-value niche (sources articles, blog posts, tweets, YouTube videos) and format the content into a visually appealing newsletter. Make money from ads and partnerships effectively productizing your RSS feed.
TrendSpotter helps users find all high-engagement posts for a given keyword that were created in the last 24 hours or less on Bluesky Social.
Use it to:
- find posts getting a lot of attention and join those conversations
- research news stories, products, websites, etc
- understand what kinds of posts are going viral for a given topic/niche
TrendSpotter finds all the high engagement posts created in the last day or less.
Bluesky’s native search only shows “Latest” posts (everything getting churned out), and “Top” which is usually a few days stale and not getting a lot of attention anymore.
TrendSpotter is better at finding trends and viral posts.
This thing summarizes the top posts in the past 24 hours for any subreddit. It also summarizes the comments section and provides key takeaways. Pretty good for really busy subs if you just want a high-level overview. If you can tell you're interested in a post, you can just click the link in the extension and it'll take you there. Totally free too, just need to add you own OpenAI API key.
The internet can’t afford to just “give people mental health breaks.”
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