Perfect example, Skynet is an excellent engineer. Be like Skynet.
I turn 60 in June. I’m doing this with my body.
I turn 42 next month, but my body is beat up from 2 decades of military service. I’m definitely experiencing some “catastrophic functionality” myself.
I will say that you don’t have to lie down and take it. Over the past few years I’ve been on a journey to restore and rejuvenate my body, and the results have been miraculous. I went from morbidly obese with metabolic syndrome, including uncontrolled high blood pressure, to literally the best physical condition of my life. 60 year old me could kick 30 year old me’s ass any day of the week. All of my health issues have been resolved, and all of my old man aches and pains have gone away. I did a deep dive on the state of the art of longevity science, which is reasonably summarized in Peter Attia’s book Outlive. (It’s a free audiobook on spotify premium.) I’ve basically optimized sleep, exercise, nutrition, supplements, and the use of prescription drugs, including the drug rapamycin. Rapamycin has extended lifespan of every organism it’s been tested in, including budding yeast, fruit flies, mice, rats, and non-human primates. While there are ethical and time considerations that make such placebo controlled lifespan studies in humans difficult, there is data to suggest that rapamycin has a similar therapeutic effect in humans. Joan Mannick’s 2014 study using Everolimus, a slightly tweaked analog of rapamycin, demonstrated that pulsed mTOR suppression in elderly humans greatly ameliorated immunosenescence, the decline in immune function during aging, and the ongoing trials of rapamycin with respect to ovarian aging have shown impressive effects. I’ve been on rapamycin for almost 3 years now, and while I can’t isolate its effects from my other interventions, I’m pretty much never sick and I’ve had significant grey hair reversal, which was unexpected. TLDR: there is a lot you can to mitigate the effects of aging and implement “graceful degradation” in your life.
🎼One of these links is not like the others
One of my favorites
Now please learn about Progressive enhancement. If you ever do a webpage, use this.
Modern web designers: “Nope. Best I can do is ‘You must enable Javascript to view this webpage.’”
It’s a dark pattern to steal your data.
Its a dark pattern to make me instantly leave the web page.
I’ve always used escalators as a great example of this. If they lose power or break they elegantly degrade back into stairs.
“Sorry for the convenience” – Mitch Hedberg
escalators are actually a bad example of this. What you describe is what is supposed to happen, and they’re supposed to be built with mechanisms to ensure that’s what happens, but there’s been examples of escalators failing in such a way that the weight of too many people on it makes it go faster and faster and people get crushed and deadified.
I watched a youtube video about a famous example a while back, don’t remember the channel that did it though or I’d find and link it.
Escalators have many security features and they are one of the safest modes of transportation.
I think that specific example was shown to be sabotaged at the behest of management to try to save on maintenance costs so no that doesn’t count
yup, that’s the one
Well in that case it WAS built with multiple safety mechanisms and failsafes, and it was deliberate human actions that caused the catastrophy.
So escalators are a good example, human greed is the bad example.
I thought that as well, then the weight of us going up caused it to go down.
I’m reminded of the recent image of the curiosity tyre
Tabletop rpg design uses the term “fail gracefully” to describe being able to still function when you forget the rules.
Older games used to regularly stop amd collapse into boring chart-reading and index-looking-up. A lot of modern games are entirely playable if you forget everything except the core mechanic.
The corporations can’t sell you an overpriced newer model of your old one doesn’t completely die from the slightest issue.
Yeah, it’s kind of the exact opposite of planned obsolescence.
Funny that’s like nature works too. I’m dead inside and still working enough to work
Just think of the shareholder value tho
That’s interesting, but I need two types of batteries to use it at full power.
The internet works this way too. Blow up one undersea cable and traffic rerouted somewhere else, but slower.
See: nuclear weapons.
The “safety” engineering is crazy. Basically if anything is not exactly right with the arming sequence, if they’re at the wrong altitude or anything, they’re duds. They have oldschool security systems. And if you mess with them, they explode, but with no nuclear yield; just a small conventional explosion that showers their tinkerers in fun isotopes.
https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/nsam-160/pal.html
“Bypassinag a PAL should be, as one weapons designer graphically put it, about as complex as performing a tonsillectomy while entering the patient from the wrong end.”
IANAL, but I’d guess this is a huge component of nuclear proliferation concerns.
It’s not… just about countries having nukes. It’s about having prototype nukes stuffed with high explosives, without decades of safety engineering (see: the many near-calamaties with 50s bombs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accidents#1950s )
And it’s about nukes without extensive US/Soviet security systems (making them a risk if stolen). And nukes without known blast signatures (so if one goes off, the world knows exactly where it came from; less risk of a false flag).
In other words, if I were president, I’d seriously consider loaning Iran or NK Soviet/US nukes just so they don’t make their own, and lose them. Which is part of why I am not president.
