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Back to Work

Episode 313: Parents, Old People, and Perverts

Back to Work

5by5

Business, Society & Culture, Barriers, Dan Benjamin, Careers, Communication, Merlin Mann, Creativity, Work, Productivity, Constraints, Technology

4.7 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2017

⏱️ 94 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

TOPIC: You can't perfect life.

This week opens with the carnage of today's Amazon S3 problems and why so much of the internet seems broken. A brief history of outage monitoring is provided and a praxis for improving the process is proposed.

Dan and Merlin debate what can be learned from how kids and other non-olds use technology "wrong." Should they be learning from us or should we be learning from them?

This leads to some deeper ruminations on how we can choose to get better at doubting our own perceptions and correcting our own weird thinking. The future still isn't here yet—and that's kinda what makes it the future.

After some discussion of mental health and creativity, the show pivots into yet more discussion of emerging technology, and how it consistently scares the crap out of people until…it just doesn't.

Dan and Merlin wrap by answering a listener's question about whether it's better to be good at writing or at speaking.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Working hard at repairing S3 believe we understand root cause are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue must investigate further

0:09.1

Hello, hey, Merlin hi, Dan. How are you? I'm great. How are you good? I could be I could be better. Why oh the whole the whole internet is down

0:19.0

Oh, is that affecting you? Yes, and fireside and it's a not a pretty not a pretty day and there's nothing to do but wait and when people say

0:28.2

What's going on you you have to just tell them you're sorry and hopefully Amazon will fix it soon

0:34.8

Is it I was trying to read up on this because I'm not seeing too many problems your your west coast it affects it is east coast

0:41.4

Okay, yeah, and and what I don't know is behind the scenes that had Amazon. I think

0:47.3

Like if your files and stuff whether it's like your images or whatever it is if they're on Amazon's

0:53.7

East Coast structure

0:55.8

infrastructure

0:58.3

And you're coming from the west coast

1:00.5

Is it still down for you or is it down because those files sort of live in one place?

1:04.8

I don't I don't know the answer, but I know that oh god me hearing hearing as far as far west as Texas

1:10.8

We there's everything is nothing works, but Skype is working on fireside fireside is affected

1:17.4

Um, well at least for some people yeah

1:20.6

Yeah, I was just listening to actually I don't even know what runs where I don't think overcast is on s3

1:27.6

Uh, but I mean the thing is that's not working too. So I don't know

1:31.5

Okay, it must be a west coast thing. It's so strange though. I mean this is god

1:34.4

This is one of those like how do you even explain this problem to somebody? I mean I I I'm not a you know a seasoned technologist

1:41.6

I understand roughly what's happening the

1:44.1

The thing that is serving a huge amount of especially content right this is the AWS. So this is s3

1:50.5

Storage services. This is not the computational stuff. This is more the storage stuff, right?

1:54.4

I believe so

...

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