Jonathan Blow on Five 9's, Operating Systems and Software

Nowadays we changed to nine 5s. 55.5555555% uptime

As an artist, Jonathan Blow almost makes me want to be a programmer; the passion he has for his craft is infectious.

We absolutely still use that measurement in business systems. It's true that any dependencies that we have directly impact our ability to maintain specific service level objectives. That said, I'm aligned with the message that the software industry is built of bad practices and failed mythologies.

Corporations or more important entities still use this notation when buying/selling services from each other. It's just not something you sell to regular people.

"five 9's" might have lost usage, but now we have great motos like "move fast and break things". Surely that way of thinking must be very sustainable.

now ppl do weekly updates so you are around 98% update if you are lucky

Maybe a bit of a nitpick, but we are absolutelly using the 9's principle for datacenters and cloud providers. So saying that we do not use it anymore is not true. Obviously this does not mean that the main theses is not accurate.

I've been a cynic ever since ATX power supplies came along. Why the hell should my machine be on all the time? Why can't it just power down? Why does it need to shut down and write junk to hard disk for 10 - 20 seconds? USB made me even more of a cynic. Universal unischermsal. USB C is even worse. 120Watt over a USB cable. Universal, but not all cables are made the same, USB A, B, C, mini B, micro B, several power ratings for USB cables, analog audio over USB C? You kidding me? And worst, it doesn't always work. Plug in an analog audio cable, and wow, it works! Zero latency, driverless! Your only enemy is getting your cable between the door. I sound like a luddite now, but I actually love getting new hardware and trying it out, and writing good code. The problem is, half the time I don't know where the OS is going to get in my way. All day I'm fighting the complexity of system d, udev, you name it, and then udisks2 has segfaults.. in 2023. The standard USB mounter in most linux distros has segfaults. Get real.

C++ is not "afraid" of pointers. It enable you to automate resource management efficiently without loss of performance in most cases. And wherever you need manual control you can have it.

what jonathan blow probably means was the silicon graphics workstation that was used to make jurassic park, which was used by rare to make killer instinct and donkey kong country. rare was using a huge mallet to drive a small nail coz the graphics was compressed to fit the snes anyway. it was just a waste of money

He's not exactly on point here. Going up the abstraction ladder isn't intended to increase programmer productivity. It's intended to increase the number of programmers, effectively increasing the amount of work produced. On that front, it's a rousing success. But are we better off for it.............?

I fought against Five 9s around 2000-2010. Lost every single time. Five 9s = 5minute downtime / YEAR How realistic is that? Not at all ofcourse! Still companies wanted Five 9s and our sells department and project managers apparently didn’t have anything against it.

I don’t think the five nines ever applied to a client OS. Even if the OS was good enough, the hardware won’t be. From this perspective it seems a bit silly to note nothing on a laptop can’t reach five nines reliability. That’s a hardware issue, not software. Beyond the hardware, how many workstation OSs can be upgraded without a reboot? Not windows, that is for sure. So again, there go the nines. We need to exclude the hardware and allow some reboots, which means the discussion is about something very different than five nines. Do we expect the software to update seamlessly while running? No, well thats kind of the point of 99.999% uptime. Do we want the program to handle crashes on the background? That sounds like a stupid idea, now it needs reduntant processes with reduntant memory. I’d like it to crash instead. So while software might have become messier and less reliable, the five nines concept was never applicable nor should it ever be.

I have rarely heard so much bullshit in a presentation. Everything is generalized, seen in black and white and not questioned. Maybe he should implement a large application that processes huge amounts of data, is scalable, communicates with a large number of surrounding systems, takes security seriously, has to be constantly adapted to changing requirements, etc. Let's see how far he gets with his low-level approach from the past.

99,999% uptime is referring to what? It means 1 in 100000 frames might break the system? With system runing 60 fps, that's every 30 hours. This sounds like the reliabilty of the adobe products.

I don’t buy this. Taking this into the real world, you could say “What happened to us, we used to build bridges with three people in an afternoon!” where the bridge was two logs and some rope. Now it takes us a year+ to build a bridge (we’re so unproductive!) but the bridge is doing something completely unimaginable to those people building log footbridges, carrying millions of passenger cars , trucks, and trains every year. Yes, it takes longer now, but the expectations are vastly different.

CS curriculums are a joke classes that should be required aren't

These are Windows and Linux problems. Microsoft screwed up their entire ecosystem and Linux is balkanized by definition. MacOS is where the productivity is.