Sean Scott

An open letter to Grammarly and other plagiarists, thieves and slop merchants To everyone at Grammarly, I am writing a book right now, a really challenging endeavor that no doubt someone in Silicon Valley will think it’s fine to steal the day it’s published. I’ve been a profes...

Be sure to read this in full: the kicker is cathartic! 💥💥💥https://www.moryan.com/an-open-letter-to-grammarly-and-other-plagiarists-thieves-and-slop-merchants/

So called "writing software" that uses "AI" disrespects both the craft and art of writing and writers themselves in a way that is entirely without precedent or peer.

I recall a few years back a member of a hunting party was attacked by a bear. They had to raft 2-3 days before reaching a point they could exit the Salmon River canyon and get him to an airstrip for evacuation.

I've been to places in Utah and Nevada that can only be reached by driving 6 or more hours on unmarked dirt roads, and inaccessible (even with 4WD) when it rains.

But if you really want remote in the lower 48, my daughter worked in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness.

The drive from Las Vegas north to Twin Falls, Idaho is almost 8 hours on US-95/93. In that time you'll pass through two actual towns, maybe three wide spots on the highway where you can get gas, and cross one interstate, I-80.

It is mind-numbingly empty and vast.

Boyle handed up what he referred to as a memorandum apparently related to this matter. Judge: This isn't a memorandum. Boyle: Sorry I gave you the wrong document.

This thread was not dull.

Oh, so AI knew what you had done and could recreate your work?

That's not AI, that's called saving your work, and pretty much every word processing tool does it for you out of the box and automatically.

Even if AI could write a novel what problem has been solved? The problem of knowing what you’re reading was written by another person? Who loves reading novels but hates the part where your mind briefly and mysteriously touched another?

"... we'll figure out how to solve problems as they come to us"???

How about, "we gamed out dozens of scenarios and prepared appropriate responses" and not some fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants, mealy-mouthed "our enemeez iz unprudiktuhble" nonsense?

What, plans to rename it Strait of Freedom isn't enough for you?

"Computer, do my homework for me" is equivalent to "Computer, I don't want to practice the cello, just make me sound like Yo Yo Ma."

All the bright, bold colors of a Rothko, but with the appeal of crisp, precisely parallel edges and uniform saturation and tone.

Looking forward to Clod in the style of Bukowski but without the errant and clunky syntax.

Jay Streisanded skeets into existence.

So no, taking out data centers in the ME isn't going to shut down the planet. US banks and hospitals aren't losing records or going offline in this scenario. Regional flight disruption, yes, but otherwise mostly unaffected. I'm not saying it won't be bad, but not as severe as suggested.
/fin

ME infrastructure or shipping, logistics, or energy production companies might not recover. Downing municipal functions/dependencies—911, traffic control, cell, comms—is equally disruptive. If folks can't get to work or communicate, an airport being (technically) online still isn't operational.
/13

So, Iran hitting DCs in the ME would probably be devastating locally.

Imagine having a heart attack and your doctors have a *general* idea what to do, but need to Google everything.

But also maybe the internet is down.

It'll create shockwaves globally.
/12

TBH, most people responsible for managing data/systems are sadly unprepared for disaster. Emphasis on practice is rare b/c it's not profitable, and often put into the backlog. Sadly, the first real experience most people in IT have with DR is an actual disaster.
/11

BUT that's not saying every system is resilient. Regional markets would certainly be impacted, and businesses are NOT always good at DR/HA.

In fact, most businesses aren't good at DR/HA UNTIL they've had an event that drives home the cost of not being good at DR/HA!
/10

Another reason is limiting distance for latency-sensitive apps like games. Here, you host game servers in diff't regions and route connection by IP addy (effectively geography) so players get the best experience.

Still sharding, but here I can failover (albeit with increased latency).
/9

eg, a bank with customers in the US, EU, APAC, and/or ME has to comply with everyone's data regs. They'd put US customer data in the US, EU data in the EU, etc. (We call this sharding.)

Loss of one DC affects one shard, but others remain online, unaffected.
/8

For example, OR & AZ prob won't see simultaneous natural disasters or power outages. so having primary in one, secondary in the other makes sense. But it would be very unusual to choose primary/secondary in the US and the gulf.

The exception to this are corps doing cross-regional biz.
/7

Again, this is due to latency. The recovery point (how much data you risk losing) for failure is highly sensitive to latency, and transactional systems (banks, markets, etc) try to keep secondary sites close, but not so close that regional events could hit both/all.
/6

If you go onto a cloud provider site, you'll see that the US and Europe are packed with data centers. It's very unlikely that a US/EU biz would choose to host somewhere far away unless there was a business driver.

The same goes for backup/failover. You don't send backups too far.
/5

Mostly b/c physics. The ME is far away & distance=time. Non-regional transactions have more latency.

Also, data center builds in EMEA are still new. Gulf states only recently started adopting EU-like data residency laws, so demand for infra there is still *relatively* fresh.
/4

So, the idea that strikes on, say, data centers in the UAE brings down every bank, hospital, etc is false. Businesses using cloud services in the US, EU, APAC, etc are very likely NOT using infrastructure in the Middle East, nor storing data there.
/3

First, most major countries have data residency laws for financial and citizen's personal information. For example, EU resident's banking and healthcare data must be stored within the EU. EU banks can't send or store data outside the EU. Similar for US & many APAC nations.
/2

This is not *entirely* accurate, but it is not entirely false.

For the record, I work as a database engineer. My focus is backup/recovery and design/mgmt for high availability and disaster recovery systems. I analyzed DR/HA failures for a living for several years.
/1

Sure, if your idea of flirting involves rohypnol.