• 0 Posts
  • 5 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
Cake day: August 28th, 2024
  • somebodysomewhere@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•New largest prime number discovered by former Nvidia software engineerEnglish
    111·
    2 months ago

    Ever heard the saying “if one guy is an asshole, he’s an asshole. If everyone is an asshole, you’re the asshole”?

    Not saying you’re an asshole, but that is to say you’re the only one defending your viewpoint, and you are welcome to it. But we’d all appreciate consideration of the information as opposed to the offense you seem to be taking.

    Nuance exists everywhere in our complicated world.

    The example that springs to mind is when we discovered that Archimedes invented the foundations of calculus long before Newton and Leibniz. The argument typically goes that the foundations of mathematics would be much further along had this discovery been realized but many others argue that we would have had no practical way to apply it in the time that Archimedes lived.

    Now the part that I think you are missing is that the interesting part is not only that we now know that a new number is prime, but that knowing that a number is prime involves verifying that a number is prime and the larger the number is, the more difficult it is to verify so this almost always involves landmark advances in math and computing. Especially since prime numbers are distributed asymptotically meaning they are typically a few orders of magnitude larger than the previous one.

  • somebodysomewhere@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•History's Major Downtimes: Lessons from the Biggest OutagesEnglish
    5·
    2 months ago

    reason for that is isolation and reduncancy though. Most incidents/outages are the result of a change and in the cases you mentioned they are mitigated by the fact that not all instances receive updates at the same time. Presumably, the error is noticed in one place and traffic is then served by healthy instances.

    By all accounts these are practices that significant service providers follow. In fact AWS typically rolls out updates to us-east-1 before updating other regions to use it as a canary to warn against issues.

    With federated services, this is less of a conscious decision and tends to happen only because instance maintainers update on different schedules.

    Blue-green deployments and failover are common mitigation strategies and mature organizations actively employ these. Conversely, these patterns are integral to the decentralized nature of the fediverse and other distributed solutions such as cdn.