Efficiency is the removal of redundancy.

[pawsplay@dice.camp]

@ekuber This reminds me of an argument I had with management of the network operations center where I worked. I made a beautiful point about "pickle factory staffing" versus "firehouse staffing" but it took them months to see my point.

[naclknight@c.im]

@dymaxion @ekuber

I'm interested AF. This sounds fascinating.

[dotjayne@tech.lgbt]

@ekuber and boy has private equity prospered by gutting all the redundancy they can find while leaving the rest of us to deal with the inevitable system failures.

capitalism sure is efficient when we let capitalistic vultures define efficiency

[riffraff@mastodon.social]

@ekuber i think it's an EU regulation that you have to indicate the origin of fruits and vegetables. This is certainly the case in Italy too, they generally indicate regional production too. And it does impact sales somewhat, but people buy out of season fruit from abroad just the same, cause it's a cultural issue.

[be@floss.social]

@ekuber but what if we just ask the magic bullshit machine instead. That's more efficient than listening!

[teajaygrey@snac.bsd.cafe]

That's a different perspective of how I perceive efficient systems as a decades long sysadmin sort.

To me: downtime is inefficient.

Redundancy: improves system availability and uptime, thus maximizing resource utilization.

Figuring out the balance is a challenge, perhaps even an art form.

I've been pretty good at it on occasion!

To me: SPOFs are horribly inefficient and to be avoided and mitigated whenever possible.

Let's take a simple example, of a NAS (Network Attached Storage). Presumably, comprised of a RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive [well, originally that was the acronym] Disks).

A RAID0? Hella fast, horrible, a single disk in the array will take the entire thing down, so for each disk in a RAID0? It adds a multiplicative rate of failure.

RAID1? Redundant, but meh.

RAID5? Now we're getting somewhere! Has some decent trade offs. Can lose a disk and still rebuild, but has some better advantages for a bit more storage and not horrible speed sacrifices.

RAID6/(NetApp would call this: RAID-DP, [Open]ZFS RAIDz2): gettin a bit more sophisticated: can lose two disks in an array simultaneously and still recover. Circa 2006? I encountered failures such as that when drive densities were around 72GB and a 2TB NetApp array cost around $60,000. Still: being able to recover from that kind of failure (and stay up and have data available)? Total life saver of a feature. The BER (Bit Error Rate) of disks, tends to go up, as disks get denser, and guess what the storage industry does? Makes denser disks cheaper and more widely available as part of their ongoing business model/design.

OpenZFS RAIDz3 (able to endure 3 simultaneous disk failures) is about the minimum I would tolerate for well over a decade; even better: a CARP (Common Address Redundancy Protocol) HA (High Availability) pair of OpenZFS RAIDz3 systems (kind of imagine creating a RAID1 of two RAIDz3s; but the abstraction layer is more at the TCP/IP layer, so the NAS is available, even if one goes totally offline for some reason).

There are of course, more elaborate realms of redundancy (I haven't even talked about off site stuff yet for DR[Disaster Recovery]) and generally speaking: the more impactful downtime is? The more critical such designs become. Circa 2002-2006 I was a Network Security Specialist at a company that had a "burn rate" of $100,000/minute for each minute of down time. My annual salary? Was like $75,000/year; so I felt the stress there pretty keenly if things went down for any appreciable period of time.

Heck, even before that I helped an employer go from "two nines" to "three nines" of uptime (despite being a much smaller company with a much lower burn rate, and in an industry where "five nines" was considered industry standard) but these days? It seems as if AWS doesn't even manage three nines, it's dumb founding; but I guess Jeff BeeZoos empire is too big to fail or something? I don't get it. Must be a cushy job if you can get it (when he isn't laying off 16,000 people at a time).

[casandro@f-ckendehoelle.de]

@ekuber Yes this is true, but there's a new kind of efficiency hindering process that provides no resilience against crises. It's things like Billionaires who, increasingly, not only waste valuable resources directly, but also influence policy making into wasting even more resources. It's what got us into car-centric worlds, despite of cars being highly inefficient and fragile systems.

[artnacrea@mastodon.ie]

@ekuber

Perhaps there's a lesson here for Wellington Water, the local councils and nNZ government.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/585854/wellington-s-moa-point-wastewater-plant-floods-shuts-down-fix-could-take-months

#nzpol #Wellington #Aotearoa

[oscherler@tooting.ch]

@ekuber So let’s invent effefficiency, which will be the removal of reredundancy.

[spdrnl@sigmoid.social]

@ekuber Neo-liberalism reduces economic reality to a quest for optimality.

This reduction indeed loses sight of other qualities a system should have, like resilience and adaptability.

Somehow the simplicity is very attractive. There is some sort of meta-quality to the ideology. Think as little as possible to maximize output.

It is where also the thinking is reduced where things gets wonky.

1/2

[spdrnl@sigmoid.social]

@ekuber There is something called Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety.

It states that for a control system to effectively manage, regulate, or stabilize another system, it must be capable of a range of responses (variety) that is at least as complex as the range of behaviors or disturbances in the system it is trying to control.

Somehow neo-liberalism considers itself exempt from this law. It is all very messy.