Man, your behavior when you realize you got something wrong is something the rest of us can aspire to. This is one of the things I like the best about you.
I learned it from newspapers: papers that publish prompt and clear corrections when they publish mistakes are more credible than papers that don't acknowledge their errors.
Have you run into that? I can't recall ever facing that issue. Seems very weird to strip down that much and then use a different editor. Do you remember if ed was missing in those machines?
> Do you remember if ed was missing in those machines
I had to laugh out loud. I couldn't imagine such a system, that wouldn't be POSIX compliant. So I looked it up, and indeed, it's entirely possible. Debian doesn't necessarily include it.
While not mandatory, vi is part of the POSIX commands. I mean you could use ed or even hack your way with awk, sed, and/or grep but no one wants to deal with that bullshit. And if you're installing vi you might as well install vim, right?
I've been on a lot of systems and can't remember a single instance of not having vi (though I do vim). So pretty rare, like you said
AWS because I know how it breaks, Google Cloud if you’re starting from scratch due to great DX, Oracle Cloud if you trust them to not go all Oracle with it someday since it’s solid tech, Azure if you spent Thanksgiving dinner eating crayons at the kids’ table, IBM “Cloud” if you hate your company and yourself.
It turns out that anyone who wants to can just go on the Internet and spout bollocks. I like how there isn’t even a byline here, just “editorial staff.” Because who’d sign their name to this kind of tomfoolery?
I seem to recall someone signing a name to the idea that the event was so bad because the smart engineers had left AWS, so my own expectations about the amount of bollocks I'm going to read about it have risen
I think there’s a meaningful difference between “a ton of organizational knowledge has departed over the past few years” and “they let people go last week so now their site fell over.”
And I object strongly to the mischaracterization of my point as “the smart engineers left.” It’s unfair to the incredibly talented folks that work at AWS to cast the tenured folks as being any more or less skilled—it’s just that they definitively have more experience with the environment.
If you're in the mood to object to mischaracterization, maybe the best thing would have been to object to your piece being published with a headline including the phrase "brain drain" and a subheadline involving the phrase "When your best engineers log off for good". Whatever you may have meant I do not have a publicly appropriate adjective for how this from somebody prominent felt to see while eating lunch with the other "incredibly talented folks" in the light haze of foundational services event-recovery sleep deprivation.
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