Being 'amazed by it' isn't equivalent to fully realizing what SpaceX's achievements imply: specifically tracking the progress of SpaceX means counting down the years until you can buy a ticket to Mars.
Do most people realize that these launches are primarily done to create Mars colonies? Do most people realize that the goal of SpaceX is to terraform Mars into a planet livable like Earth? Do most people really grasp all this?
I haven't met a single person (aside from existing friends) IRL that understands any of this. It seems to be mostly "cool, rockets!" to most people - none of the full understand of what each success is to SpaceX: money in the bank for Mars development and experience launching rockets to colonize space.
The vertical landing via rocket is to make it easy to launch and land on any solid surface in the solar system. Do most people realize the impact of this? I would be shocked.
The only thing that kind of annoys me in the back of my mind, is that these guys are aiming to save humanity, but the average Facebook engineer figuring out how exploit users better is probably being paid 2-3x as much as the average SpaceX aerospace engineer. But that's what the free market is rewarding right now.
Save humanity? From what global warming? Global warming is nothing compared to Mars. If we can terraform mars into a beautiful landscape then climate change isn't really an issue on earth...
Going to Mars for scientific research would be an incredible step forward for man kind. But the feasibility of space still holds a lot in question. It is exciting, but let's not call it "saving humanity".
Save humanity from an extinction level event. Think asteroid impact or global nuclear war rather than climate change. Musk has been pretty explicit about his intention to make humanity a multi-planetary species. [0]
What nightski is saying is that achieving a truly independent colony on Mars, which can survive the destruction of Earth, is much harder than just putting people there.
Mars might an interesting playground for testing climate engineering, since it'd be hard to mess it up more than it is now. That said though, it's hard to imagine fixing things like the lack of atmosphere without a lot of investment.
While I agree that less effort should be spent on what Facebook wants to achieve, there are way more engineers that would rather work on space stuff than positions so of course they are going to pay less. So the market is functioning as it should.
Also, just FYI, your comment comes across as incredibly elitist as well, which is made even worse because the so-called "implications" don't actually follow from what we saw today, or do so only barely.
Oh I agree, it won't be soon! But that's the real goal of today's launch: to learn more about the technology that will enable the technology to terraform Mars (and to bank money to fund it).
I think that is lost on most people. There's no point in today's launch for SpaceX if they don't get closer to colonizing and then terraforming Mars. They don't care otherwise - that is the goal.
Edit: Not sure what you mean by elitest, but okay. Every SpaceX launch, including today's, works towards this goal: this is what watching SpaceX launches is about for a lot of people, maybe most who watch.
Your comment sounds like you're calling "most people" stupid for failing to grasp the "true significance" of this launch (but you and your friends, obviously, were able to). I'd suggest tweaking it if that wasn't your intention.
I think the comment is pretty spot on and I also think most people are stupid and they don't grasp the significance of what Musk is trying to do. I don't know the OP but wouldn't mind being his/her friend.
What can be done to get more people to grasp the significance here? Or is this pattern just human nature?
I'm a big SpaceX fan, and I don't think most people are stupid. For more people to care, SpaceX needs to launch more significant payloads. A communications satellite is humdrum. Shooting a car into space is about as cool as dumping a car into the ocean.
Space telescopes, Mars rovers, Moon missions, these are the cool parts. Exploration! If SpaceX lowers costs enough to give of us more of these missions, then people will care. They've only maybe just started to make an impact, with Beresheet.
Sure, not my intention - I think most people don't care. It's not a judgement about them. I just think they don't grasp it because they don't care and that's okay.
There may be a large group that does care, does grasp it, but is skeptical because the claims are fantasy. Consider that terraforming Mars is way harder than terraforming Earth's deserts, and yet even that is not being done. Also consider the little bit of terraforming mankind managed to do since the start of the industrial revolution, and what kind of resources it took to do it. It doesn't really translate to Mars.
I think that fundamentally people are conservative when it comes to new technology. That's all.
If the rocket puts a car into space, we have the ability to put a car into space. If the rocket lands and is reusable and cheap, we have that ability. If we send colonists to mars, we can send colonists to mars.
Until it's done, people won't worry about it or incorporate it into their worldview. Short of offering to help, what's the point in worrying about it until there's something new that I can do? There are way too many things to worry about them all, I just care when a new thing is actually available.
It is extremely short-sighted, how we have treated our planet. With oil and gas companies lying to the public about their research for 50 years, and politicians intentionally taking stances that we should pollute more (just because we can), the main issues on Earth are around decision making.
It will not be technology that solves climate change; it will be a reigning in of externalities, correctly pricing pollution into corporate development and taxation, and the recovery of truth into politics and decision making.
It should be common knowledge that most corporations are trading our long-term health for short-term profits; if only the corporations could wait 5-10 more years for profits, they could be had sustainably for centuries, rather than all in a burst today.
We need better decision making on Earth - and better technology. But it's hardly SpaceX's fault that we haven't solved our Earthly crises yet.
Sorry, but no. Musk said he wants to go to Mars and thus he founded SpaceX (and the other companies). Musk has already delivered - it's not there yet but you can't deny the guy's wide-ranged success in his mission.
I went to (a lot) of school for science and engineering. I’m on the internet all the time. I’m hip to this. I know I should be blown away by this kind of thing, but this, and the recent black hole pic for that matter, don’t do it for me. A really good movie, band or even a show like rick and morty will. I’m terms of science/engineering - the theoretical work or ingenious experiments do it for me. I guess what really amazes me is pure novel/creative thinking. The application of that thought is just a lot of work - and unless it’s s moon landing or nuclear fusion or curing a major disease or something like that I’m just like whatever.
I’ve seen the unfortunate side effects of losing these types of folks. I’m also a believer that though this happens through the natural course of life, it is also happening more and more to younger developers as well. I’ve seen plenty of talented senior and principal engineers leave organizations at the 7-15 year mark, in their prime, because of what software shops are becoming. Sure, it’s easy to argue that there has ways been a vein of sweatshop mentality to the software profession, but it’s growing to extreme levels. The attitude of the startup mentality of working yourself to the bone seems to have become a model for all size organizations. I’ve always believed our field, though called computer science, is equal parts science, art, and philosophy.
The art, science, and philosophy is being replaced with deadlines akin to working in other fields where timelines are nearly exact. Immature CEOs and CIOs think that because their disciplines are exact, that they can will-into-existence complex line of business software by working developers harder than ever, and firing those who aren’t dedicated enough.
The brain drain of our profession is happening because the art of gardening (making software) is being slowly replaced by factory farming versions of producing software.
I’m not amazed. While many stacks support it, most organizations still have lift on their end to implement this behind the other “priority” customer change requests.
Of all the micro-optimizations I could think of for web apps, the one with the highest cost and the least benefit would probably be supporting http2 (or *quic). In almost all cases, there is a fix that will speed up http1.1 to acceptable levels.
What's the "cost" to supporting HTTP 2 as an app developer, though? As far as I know, adding support to nginx requires changing one line of code. That's about as close to free as you can get.
For a tiny startup, you might be able to just add http2 support in 10 minutes and everything might be fine, but most of the time it's more complicated. It's a bit like if I said, can I change your app libraries to bleeding edge? It's just a one line change.
Could you be more specific, though? What's more complicated? I'm legitimately curious because I know very little about HTTP 2, but at work (not a tiny startup) we recently enabled it and it turned out to be a trivial change. Unless you're implementing the networking layer of your backend yourself, it seems like a change with practically no cost or tradeoff, as long as your server software supports it.
I haven't implemented it myself, but here's some example scenarios:
Policy: What is allowed architecturally and what isn't? Are there regulatory requirements? Do you have strict enforcement mechanisms?
Instrumentation: Do you need to watch traffic going over the wire? Will your network filters flag it? Do you have application proxies that route traffic based on payload? How is it going to handle multiplexing if existing solutions don't take it into account? Are you using any proprietary stuff?
QA: Every client, server and intermediary may be using different implementations, and that means bugs. Have you certified all the devices in the chain to make sure they operate correctly? (It doesn't matter, until it really matters)
Operation: Each implementation needs to be upgraded one at a time, so the extent of your technology will determine how long and potentially error-prone all this will be. It will be different for each org, but definitely take a long time for really big ones.
I imagine its more bureaucratic complexity than technical. This change would require lots of committee meetings, reviews, meetings, discussions, etc. at my company. It would probably take a year to decide to do it and 5 days to actually do it (Get all IT groups into a large war room, make the change on dev servers and then everyone has to completely test all their apps and sign off on it. Then do it again on staging. Then again on prod. It would probably require a bunch of all nighters. I wish I was joking.)
Changing a version number is a special type of one line change because it only appears to be a one line change. In reality, that could end up being potentially millions of lines of code being changed in dependencies.
We had nginx running as a proxy for one of the apps. It runs on RHEL 7 because that's the standard for the enterprise. The stock nginx available in nginx did not support http/2.
* There is no chance someone will approve this server to run a nginx instance someone compiled themselves
* There is no chance someone will approve this server to run anything but nginx as that's the company standard for proxy servers.
* There is no chance someone will approve this server to install software from a 3. party yum repository. (And that's even a much bigger chance than someone allowing the firewall in front of that server to allow outgoing connections to the internet, so installing form 3. party repos could even be performed)
In the end there was likely 2 ways to get http/2 support for that service:
* Pay some 3.d party to make it happen and be responsible for that server.
* Wait until nginx in RHEL (the epel repository, which was approved and mirrored internally) supported http/2.
We did the latter, which happened many months later.
One thing I’ve ran into is misconfigured native apps who accidentally treat headers as case sensitive. In particular the usual HTTP client in iOS handles header case sensitivity for you, unless you use newer versions of Swift where it converts the custom header dictionary into a vanilla Swift one that doesn’t treat header lookups as case-insensitive :/
Supporting http2 at an nginx reverse proxy doesn't help the problem in the original post, which is mostly about internal connections between microservices, e.g. going from your nginx proxy to your node or rails server.
Putting http2 here is a pain because you probably don't want https. You'd have to have nginx decrypt and reencrypt all the traffic, and you'd have to deal with certificates etc.
Server push can’t be free. You need the web server to somehow know what resources will be required by the page and I still don’t understand how it doesn’t defeat browser caching but I presume it must involve some non trivial configuration.
Server push also isn’t required to reap most of the benefits. In the places where I’ve tried it I’ve not seen any benefit over link preload headers + HTTP2 without push. Many CDNs that support HTTP2 haven’t bothered to support server push at all, I suspect due to the limited advantages compared to the extra complexity.
Pretty sure server push is being deprecated - current implementation is 'only half a feature', as clients lack the ability to tell the server what's already in cache.
In theory the client can cancel the response for a resource it's already got but by the time the response bytes reach the client it's really too late
Yes bloom filters were a potential for Cache Digests, original prototype for Cache Digests used Golomb coded set as memory representation is smaller than Bloom filter
I’m not 13 years into my career (three under the table at a hometown co and ten professionally), I’ve had the mom and pop shop experience, the big corp experience, and currently the startup experience. I’ve found the same abuse everywhere, but it’s not always caused by top level executives. I think the abuse in software has a dynamic that other industries don’t have. A lot of product managers and IT managers don’t understand what we do (and I say that on behalf of devs, ops people, the whole works). They want to look good for their executives and they overpromise, or they start treating us like garbage because they are afraid not to have anything to show in their weekly updates with their boss.
When product managers and CIOs don’t have anything to show, we get tossed under the bus. I’ve never been a fan of the dev unionization movement, but I’m becoming more of a fan it by the day. I think of how I feel after having given my all to my career, and I can’t imagine how young H1B professionals feel when the abuse they put up with is far worse than what I’ve dealt with.
Unionization doesn't have to be inherently bad. It is possible for well disciplined unions to be an overall positive force for both sides of the coin. Sure, there are plenty of negative aspects to unions but there's also a lot of negative aspects to having limited bargaining power. I personally believe growing rampant abuses in this industry is starting to warrant it.
1. https://www.bouncycastle.org/java.html