That's why everything running in the cloud runs in containers on a cluster (Kubernetes or similar). If a physical server dies, the cluster control software just drops that server from the cluster. Load management then automatically moves the containers to the remaining servers in the pool. When enough servers are dead they send a tech and a truckload of replacements out. Same for storage: everything's on RAID arrays and as physical SSDs die the array drops that drive and keeps on going with no data loss. Once enough drives in the bay are dead they send someone to swap them out and the RAID controller takes care of initializing them and restoring data from the existing drives as required. It's not uncommon for 30% of the capacity to be out-of-service before replacements are ordered.

They still have to catch up to IBM's old mainframes though. Those you could go in during peak business hours and start pulling and replacing CPUs and memory modules and I/O controllers while everything was live and not disrupt anything.

> Meta doesn't really know how to do anything else with any skill.

They don't know how to do Facebook very well either: it's been pretty much stagnant and enshittified to death for the past 22 years, and it feels like a forum for greying people whose greying friends haven't bothered to move on either, or to get the date of the next annual meeting of the bridge club.

No.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The language part, true. The problem is dependencies. Any time you upgrade, especially if you're jumping a large number of versions, you're going to have packages your code uses needing upgrades too. Those package upgrades will usually require code changes to accommodate. Some of those changes will require refactoring to handle structural changes needed for things to work right. That is usually where you end up down a rabbit-hole.

one of those companies whose sole purpose seems to be annoying you by slapping their name as a watermark on a generic image you'd like to use in a meme, and force to spend 10 seconds finding somewhere else because you were never going to pay a stupid company to remove their mark on a bad picture you can find everywhere.

I wonder how those companies still exist, let alone make any money.

Anyway, the modern way to use copyrighted photos for free is to ask stable diffusion to regenerate it, because the AI companies have done all the data stealing for you and repackaged the stolen data into "models" you can use for free.

I'd prioritize updating Java 8 applications to Java 11 first. Those are going to be the hardest to bring up-to-date with Java 25 (latest LTS), bringing them up to Java 11 buys the most time. Then upgrade to Java 25 starting with Java 17 applications, then Java 21, then Java 11.

Remember that Java 25 will end support in 2033, so plan on starting your upgrade from Java 25 to the next LTS version basically as soon as your last upgrades to Java 25 are done.

Yes. The construction jobs are very short-term, and once built the data centers bring huge costs (financial and otherwise) while contributing only a handful of permanent jobs. Remember, these are lights-out hands-off facilities. They'll employ a handful of security guards and maintenance workers, the rest will all be handled remotely from Malaysia or the like.

True up to a point, and governments are past that point. They can in fact tell companies what formats the government will accept and generate and companies can't afford to just ignore that. And that's actually the first step towards sovereignty: dictate formats that aren't controlled by hostile entities. So, start by declaring the ODF formats the official government standard formats. You'll accept documents in other formats, but you can't guarantee they'll be correctly rendered on your end and you won't put any effort into trying to clean up Word and other non-standard format documents. If they're bad or unreadable or whatever, they'll be rejected and it's on the sender to fix the problem. When you send documents you'll only send them in ODF format, no others, and it's on the receiver to be able to read them.

Internally you standardize on something like LibreOffice that natively handles ODF formats. Anyone else can use anything they want as long as it can handle ODF. Word, BTW, actually does a decent job of handling ODF. Inertia may be a thing, but remember that governments have a lot more mass behind them than private companies. If the government insists and won't budge, any company that needs to do business with the government will slowly come around.

So now NHS has nearly half a million headaches. I'm not sure this is an improvement.

You said "Open Source development." Which in the grand scheme of things is pretty small.

I think the possible adverse impacts to society would not be outweighed by something that small.

Ehh, I liked Universe a lot, and I never could get into the main Stargate series.

Please, no. Often when writing code I need the API reference and only the API reference. I know what I want to do and how to do it, I just need a quick check of the exact order of arguments or exact symbol names. I don't need to try to sift that out of commentary. Likewise when I'm learning how to use the library I'm more interested in the overall view. I don't need to know the exact names of the options for a call, only what the options are for. I expect the code in the user's guide to be accurate, but I don't want the same things out of it that I want out of the API reference.

Except for the bit where it does that caching for a loop where each lookup only occurs once. Because everybody caches lookups, so that must be the right thing to do (it's the most likely thing to happen) in a case where the cache is never used. Riiiiight...

Something critical to note: intent is the most important thing to document when it comes to software. You can see what it does by reading the code, that's straightforward. What I need to know most, both when writing software and maintaining it later, is why it's doing that. What's it supposed to be doing? Why is it doing it in that way? What were the alternatives and why weren't they chosen? How is it supposed to be used by code that calls it? An LLM can't generate any of that just from the code.

This is why traditionally software libraries have had two separate pieces of documentation: an API reference that details every call and it's arguments and results, and a user's guide that lays out how and why to use the library.