of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024.
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-literacy-statistics
Illiteracy is a huge and intentional crisis in America and is a major reason we’re in the mess we’re in now. American education has been steadily hollowed out since public schools were integrated and now those chickens are coming home to roost. We are in for a long, bad time of rebuilding I’m afraid.
A poor architect blames their tools. Serverless is an option among many, and it’s good for occasional atomic workloads. And, like many hot new things, it’s built with huge customers in mind and sold to everyone else who wants to be the next huge customer. It’s the architect’s job to determine whether functions are fit for their purposes. Also,
Here’s the fundamental problem with serverless: it forces you into a request-response model that most real applications outgrew years ago.
IDK what they consider a “real” application but plenty of software still operates this way and it works just fine. If you need a lot of background work, or low latency responses, or scheduled tasks or whatever then use something else that suits your needs, it doesn’t all have to be functions all the time.
And if you have a higher-up that got stars in their eyes and mandated a switch to serverless, you have my pity. But if you run a dairy and you switch from cows to horses, don’t blame the horses when you can’t get milk.
It’s an old joke from back when IBM was the dominant player in IT infrastructure. The idea was that IBM was such a known quantity that even non-technical executives knew what it was and knew that other companies also used IBM equipment. If you decide to buy from a lesser known vendor and something breaks, you might be blamed for going off the beaten track and fired (regardless of where the fault actually lay), whereas if you bought IBM gear and it broke, it was simply considered the cost of doing business, so buying IBM became a CYA tactic for sysadmins even if it went against their better technical judgement. AWS is the modern IBM.
No one ever got fired for buying IBM.
One of the things that really excites me about the internet is its impact on the development of language. We’re still at the very beginning of its impact, considering the timescale on which language has traditionally evolved, but I suspect that in time the advent of the internet will be considered a major inflection point in the history of language, maybe the single greatest inflection point in the history of language itself. All of a sudden, billions of people who otherwise would never have had the means to converse directly, are now able to converse directly with billions of other people all over the globe, in near real-time. I can’t really imagine how that doesn’t have a seismic impact on how human language evolves. I would love to jump forward in time a few centuries just to see how the things that are happening right now shake out in the long term.
Because violent revolts elevate violent leaders. Because violence is the last, worst option for influencing the behavior of your fellow humans. Nonviolence isn’t more effective than violent political action if all you want to do is swap out who’s in change, but it is more effective (I would argue necessary) if what you want is a nonviolent society governed by a nonviolent democratic government. Once both sides have devolved into violence, really the only thing that sets policy is which faction is able to inflict the most pain. It also proves the fascist rule of “everyone is ultimately violent, so your best bet is to stick with the violent team that shares your religion / skin color / flag / etc.” and dominate through might, rather than trying to build a genuinely peaceful coalition that could, if empowered, build a genuinely peaceful government that makes its citizens’ lives better.
Or, to put it another way, you can use The One Ring to defeat Sauron, and you may succeed in defeating him, but you will corrupt yourself in the process and become the very thing you sought to destroy.
The strange thing is that is has been, for some of us, for a while now. The screws have been tightening my whole life and people don’t realize how close to destitution they are until it hits them. It’s like the poverty version of “If my neighbor loses their job it’s a recession, if I lose my job it’s a depression.”