Gongol.com Archives: December 2024
December 29, 2024
NPR offers a retrospective on the Y2K bug that caused colossal worry a quarter-century ago, unhelpfully dismissing the outcome by saying that the Y2K bug "didn't live up to the hype". The event still resides in living memory for enough people still involved in the computer sector that some have quite vocally skewered NPR for the tone of the article, with others noting that Y2K occupied a unique intersection between society's dependence upon technology and the relatively juvenile stage of technology management at the time. ■ It is very hard to make the general public understand that technological issues are worth confronting head-on. Much of what saved us from Y2K disaster took place behind the scenes, and things are a quarter-century more complex today than they were then. ■ Yet some of the problems emerging now are potentially just as dreadful as the Y2K bug. Microsoft, for instance, has declared that it will end support for Windows 10 on October 14th of the coming year, having already ended support for Windows 8 and what came before. A plausible case can be made that Microsoft can't continue to secure anything older than Windows 11, so forcing customers to upgrade is the only safe way forward. ■ But the move will absolutely put a lot of Windows users in a much less safe environment, since they either cannot or will not upgrade their hardware and operating systems. This will leave them using platforms which are no longer receiving security updates, which effectively turns every newly-discovered security flaw into a zero-day vulnerability. And a lot of important things still run on old equipment. ■ The American cultural mainstream is pretty soft on its appreciation for sustained maintenance. More often than not, people prefer "fix on failure" to preventative or predictive maintenance approaches. Chewing gum and baling wire keep a lot more things together in the physical world than they should. ■ As bad as that is in the physical realm, it's vastly worse in the digital world. It's not about gears wearing down or grease slowly drying out -- things that typically fail slowly. Digital maintenance is often (literally) a binary issue: It is either correct or not, vulnerable or not, protected or not. The only grace period is how long it takes for bad actors to find the holes. ■ We learned the wrong lesson from Y2K: The bill for lots of deferred maintenance came due on a high-profile date, and a lot of frantic work fixed the problem and saved the day...but the general public never realized it. And in not making a bigger deal about the rescue, we missed the opportunity to reinforce a message about sustained attention and responsibility. The next disaster, unfortunately, won't come with such a memorable deadline as Y2K.
Lost in the very strange debate over whether mainstream American culture has "venerated mediocrity" is a vital distinction about America's extreme devotion to laissez-faire as an ethos. ■ The worst advice commonly given to new graduates is "Do what you love and the money will follow". That's a recipe for a very high rate of disappointment -- not to mention, also one for turning a lot of very good hobbies and recreational interests into drudgery. But a very close second in the bad-advice race is "Do whatever will make you the most money". This advice, often doled out both directly and indirectly by well-meaning parents and other influential adults, proposes a perilously imbalanced lifestyle. ■ The right advice goes like this: "Do whatever maximizes the gap between how you're rewarded and what you have to give up to get it." Maximizing that difference is what economists would call utility maximization. ■ Every occupational choice comes with some form of reward: Usually it starts with money, but the basket of rewards also includes things like social status, personal pride, joy in the work itself, potential for growth, leisure time, job security, and more. ■ Likewise, every occupational choice comes with trade-offs: How long it takes to obtain education and training, the stress of the job search, foregone opportunities to try other careers, and all of the ordinary stresses and drawbacks that come from devoting some 40 hours a week to performing a task in exchange for a paycheck. ■ If the only thing that gets measured is the size of the salary, then it's like looking only at a company's revenue figures and ignoring the expenses. Doing so would be daffy, yet many people pressure young people into doing just that -- not just in America, but around the world. ■ America's secret superpower is the sense of freedom to experiment, to try lots of things (especially in youth), and above all, to fail early and often without that failure derailing an entire future. The more introductory courses and extracurricular activities a young person tries, the better: Some won't click at all, but a few might. ■ And it's especially when those low-stakes encounters pay off that Americans benefit most from our culture -- like Bill Gates discovering computers in a club atmosphere while in junior high. The growing backlash against all-absorbing youth sports (and the crowding-out effect those leagues have been having on other free-ranging childhood endeavors) is a sign many parents understand implicitly that an over-structured adolescence is overrated. ■ It may seem contrary to logic, but it's precisely the way America avoids high-pressure circumstances for young people that liberates them to find the things that maximize the gap, rather than just chasing what pays the most. Does that sometimes lead to laziness and sloth? Sure. But it also leads to an efficient allocation of skills and resources, chosen by the people who will live those lives and careers, rather than by their parents (or, worse, their government).
