Nick Land Acknowledgement feat. Ed Zitron

"Nick Land Acknowledgement" is very good. The joke hook y'all missed out on? Crowdstrike's CEO is named "Kurtz". Like the Colonel. Also, he was CTO at McAfee when they flamed out and had to sell out.

I've talked to a few people that worked on the y2k fix, and it wasn't actually fixed. What they did was too kick the can down the road by putting in a pivot year at 30 or 40 depending on the system. (I.e. '29 is 2029; '31 is 1931). Some of those mainframes _have_ been decommissioned, but not all of them.

I feel like calling their model ‘growth at all costs’ is giving them too much credit. The tech industry, and modern economy at large, isn’t predicated on anything that normal people would think of as ‘growth’. As you’ve pointed out, they don’t make things and they don’t improve productivity.

That Friday was a very long day for me. I spent it remediating the Crowdstrike crash at a managed services provider with thousands of customers. Lots of people got this story wrong (explained below for anyone who wants to read the details). The actual fix involved booting Windows in "safe mode" which would allow you to get into the system without loading services (like the Crowdstrike agent) that aren't essential for the system to run. You would then navigate to the directory where the Crowdstrike agent stores its "drivers," then remove the botched file and restart the system normally. Fairly easy fix, but tedious when you have to apply it to all your servers in rapid succession to get everything back online. All the reporting on this has been like witnessing a very boring game of telephone. The problem was not that Crowdstrike made these computers reboot a bunch. The "reboot 15 times" thing itself came from bad advice on the internet, and it was just a Hail Mary. The idea was that the system might stay online long enough that the Crowdstrike agent could download the fix they pushed out before it loaded the problematic driver and crashed everything again. (I personally did not see this work once, nor hear of it working for any of my company's thousands of computers, with a footprint of tens of thousands of Windows servers and VMs). Early reporting called this a "Microsoft outage" or a "Windows outage" or even a "technology outage" (whatever that was supposed to mean), because this problem affected Windows systems, so people immediately jumped to blaming Microsoft since their suck factor is a known quantity, unlike Crowdstrike, which is a name most people had never heard of. And look, I can't believe I've been put in the position of defending Windows, but the blame for this one is fully on Crowdstrike. A proper testing regimen would've prevented this. To Zitron's point that "no one is prepared for anything anymore" and "this is the first calamity"—respectfully, this is wishcasting. We all want to see these old tech giants fall, but these sorts of critical failures get discovered and fixed all the time; usually before they cascade into major outages. In the grand scheme of things, the Crowdstrike failure was a very tame and uncomplicated issue that just happened to affect a lot of systems at once. The Meltdown/Spectre thing from just a few years ago has already been memory-holed, and was a much nastier problem. Same with the WannaCry attack. The Kaseya VSA breach in 2021 hardly even made the news cycle because it didn't have a juicy "state actors" angle like the Solarwinds RMM breach the year prior, and even that was barely a blip on the radar in hindsight. We've already lived through so many "calamities" that it's hard to even enumerate them at this point. An easily remediated crash like the Crowdstrike incident is nothing compared to the constant security exploits that we only barely avoid like passing meteors. IMO, the real test of these tech companies' ability to survive a major computing incident is still on the horizon, and the beast's name is Broadcom VMware.

Milo might not be in the episode but they rebuilt him in the aggregate

Trump greeted the bitcoiners the way I respond to my dog when she's super excited that I came home and won't give me any space.

Surely an AI would like to have fake friends and would be more likely to cut the real friends out of its life

The summary around 48 minutes in forgets about the other bit of privatized infrastructure in the US and UK: Railroads. The observed pattern still holds though.

banger title

I've heard rumors (unconfirmed) that Crowdstrike actually did lay off like 100 QA people fairly recently and tried to replace them with AI tools

Both of this week’s episodes are absolutely amazing.

Iconic title, great work everyone

Riley was really cooking this episode!

Hussein with the epic pun!!!!

n1x Land >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Nick Land

nick land isn't dead? pity, that.

Wait did Nick land do systemspace

Hello bitcoiners!

Under-investment and focus on QA having catastrophic consequences? In MY tech industry? Surely no one has been screaming about that for over a decade now...

I actually really like Ed and his podcast Better Offline, but I want to scream at the end of every episode “Yeah dude, that’s Capitalism”. It’s like how I feel about John Oliver

I’m going to keep banging this drum: Riley doing voices is good

Whenever the English make land acknowledgement jokes I pray their shitty land swallows them whole.

It's the fun one!