(no subject)
Dec. 27th, 2022 02:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scrottieSouthwest reportedly cancelled "at least 70%" of its flights today, after all the other airlines recovered: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/26/1145536902/southwest-cancels-nearly-2-800-flights-in-a-full-blown-meltdown
I was vaguely wondering how much Southwest lost on that mess, but search terms drug out an apparently similar event on Columbus day last year, where 70% of flights were cancelled and it took four days for the airline to recover: https://www.businessinsider.com/southwest-airlines-lost-75-million-in-four-day-meltdown-2021-10
This is interesting to me in the way Fukashima is... complex systems failure. I'm taking a few leaps here, but from the talk of modernizations Southwest was talking about before and now, and comments CEO-dude made about limitations of their legacy systems, other airlines can build routes like https://www.southwest.com/air/flight-status/path.html?departureDate=2022-12-27&flightNumber=1424 on the fly, and Southwest cannot (if that link expires, it's just one aircraft doing a big circuit during the day) which is a bit more interesting as I recently did that for werk, kind of, clustering secret shops in to routes... on the fly. A lot of CompSci things read like board game instructions... "every place exactly once... must enclose a space creating an inside and an outside... may not cross paths of other player's clusters... scored based on the sum of the squared distances between places...". Most likely, some pencil neck could pretty quickly spit out new routes based on where planes are all currently stuck, but plugging it in to the systems is an enormous task. Still, I want a whine about having done what Southwest has been trying for years to do, and doing it in about 6 hours of billable time, so that maybe I can get a job doing fewer budget miracles. I'm sure Southwest doesn't care if aircraft cross paths, tho. It's def one way to think about all of this stuff tho that computers are computer opponents in board games, often not very good opponents, but have near infinite attention for stupid games where human attention for stupid games is extremely limited, and that's a big part of why us and the planet are subjugated and likely doomed.
This post will probably self-destruct. I commented before about how commits weren't qualifying for GitHub's rules for being included in the little color coded checkerboard that badly approximately represents programmer productivity, that often gets looked at when companies shop for programmers, and gets heavily gamed. I went a little rogue to make stuff show up, but now stuff is moving off GitHub. Trying to appear marketable is a lot of work.
On the subject of computers gaming things, Youtube apparently removed the option to disable autoplay, or it did for the group my mother is in. If you don't know, companies with lots of "users" (if they can ID you, whether you have an account or not) will create arbitrary numbers of partitions and test interface changes across partitions. If none of the online tutorials for how to disable autoplay on Youtube look remotely like the Youtube you're seeing, that's one reason. Incidentally, cranking out A/B tests for UI changes for a big company is a good way to spam code commits that show up as pretty green tiles. They aren't just experimenting on you, they're running thousands of experiments on you at the same time, with a singular goal of increasing ad impressions. In this case tho, those ad impressions go to a sleeping elderly woman with a cell link. I started my mother on the Tally Ho project, and she adores it and Leo, but it does the apparently impossible and puts her to sleep. Then Youtube adaptively maximizes playback resolution, ignoring your quality selection from the last approximately half hour video, and streams video and ads at a sleeping woman hour after hour, with no option to lock video quality or disable autoplay.
When Amazon was beginning to become popular, there was a lot of online discussion about absurdly expensive versus absurdly cheap prices different people were seeing for the exact same item at the exact same URL. Rejecting Amazon's stupid offers is essential to not being gamed up to higher and higher prices. Sadly Amazon's garbage hosting offering often fails, but this piece of complex system likely won't. I had a friend who played online poker, many years ago, but was not one of the people who didn't realize exactly how things were stacked against them that just played a few tables at a time. He played as many tables at a time as he could throw computing at, and the computers played, but the computers didn't play because they were better at counting cards or strategy or anything, but because it took a huge number of concurrent players in order to accomplish the real win scenario of having multiple co-operating players randomly assigned to the same table so they could collude and edge out the humans. Tending to only just lose money seems to have made a lot of people just not play, and botnets playing against botnets cut margins razor thin. In that case, people slowly, collectively figured out how out organized they were and just walked, except for a small trickle of suckers. Ok, just walking might be a bad metaphor for airline failure. This is kind of two different blog posts that got dumped in the pot together.
I was vaguely wondering how much Southwest lost on that mess, but search terms drug out an apparently similar event on Columbus day last year, where 70% of flights were cancelled and it took four days for the airline to recover: https://www.businessinsider.com/southwest-airlines-lost-75-million-in-four-day-meltdown-2021-10
This is interesting to me in the way Fukashima is... complex systems failure. I'm taking a few leaps here, but from the talk of modernizations Southwest was talking about before and now, and comments CEO-dude made about limitations of their legacy systems, other airlines can build routes like https://www.southwest.com/air/flight-status/path.html?departureDate=2022-12-27&flightNumber=1424 on the fly, and Southwest cannot (if that link expires, it's just one aircraft doing a big circuit during the day) which is a bit more interesting as I recently did that for werk, kind of, clustering secret shops in to routes... on the fly. A lot of CompSci things read like board game instructions... "every place exactly once... must enclose a space creating an inside and an outside... may not cross paths of other player's clusters... scored based on the sum of the squared distances between places...". Most likely, some pencil neck could pretty quickly spit out new routes based on where planes are all currently stuck, but plugging it in to the systems is an enormous task. Still, I want a whine about having done what Southwest has been trying for years to do, and doing it in about 6 hours of billable time, so that maybe I can get a job doing fewer budget miracles. I'm sure Southwest doesn't care if aircraft cross paths, tho. It's def one way to think about all of this stuff tho that computers are computer opponents in board games, often not very good opponents, but have near infinite attention for stupid games where human attention for stupid games is extremely limited, and that's a big part of why us and the planet are subjugated and likely doomed.
This post will probably self-destruct. I commented before about how commits weren't qualifying for GitHub's rules for being included in the little color coded checkerboard that badly approximately represents programmer productivity, that often gets looked at when companies shop for programmers, and gets heavily gamed. I went a little rogue to make stuff show up, but now stuff is moving off GitHub. Trying to appear marketable is a lot of work.
On the subject of computers gaming things, Youtube apparently removed the option to disable autoplay, or it did for the group my mother is in. If you don't know, companies with lots of "users" (if they can ID you, whether you have an account or not) will create arbitrary numbers of partitions and test interface changes across partitions. If none of the online tutorials for how to disable autoplay on Youtube look remotely like the Youtube you're seeing, that's one reason. Incidentally, cranking out A/B tests for UI changes for a big company is a good way to spam code commits that show up as pretty green tiles. They aren't just experimenting on you, they're running thousands of experiments on you at the same time, with a singular goal of increasing ad impressions. In this case tho, those ad impressions go to a sleeping elderly woman with a cell link. I started my mother on the Tally Ho project, and she adores it and Leo, but it does the apparently impossible and puts her to sleep. Then Youtube adaptively maximizes playback resolution, ignoring your quality selection from the last approximately half hour video, and streams video and ads at a sleeping woman hour after hour, with no option to lock video quality or disable autoplay.
When Amazon was beginning to become popular, there was a lot of online discussion about absurdly expensive versus absurdly cheap prices different people were seeing for the exact same item at the exact same URL. Rejecting Amazon's stupid offers is essential to not being gamed up to higher and higher prices. Sadly Amazon's garbage hosting offering often fails, but this piece of complex system likely won't. I had a friend who played online poker, many years ago, but was not one of the people who didn't realize exactly how things were stacked against them that just played a few tables at a time. He played as many tables at a time as he could throw computing at, and the computers played, but the computers didn't play because they were better at counting cards or strategy or anything, but because it took a huge number of concurrent players in order to accomplish the real win scenario of having multiple co-operating players randomly assigned to the same table so they could collude and edge out the humans. Tending to only just lose money seems to have made a lot of people just not play, and botnets playing against botnets cut margins razor thin. In that case, people slowly, collectively figured out how out organized they were and just walked, except for a small trickle of suckers. Ok, just walking might be a bad metaphor for airline failure. This is kind of two different blog posts that got dumped in the pot together.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-27 09:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-27 09:31 am (UTC)Is there an Internet slogan version of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised?