Hey, it's HighScalability time (out Thur-Fri, so we're going early):

 

London Maker Faire 1851—The Great Exhibition—100,000 objects, displayed along more than 10 miles, by over 15,000 contributors.

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Please lend me your support on Patreon. It would mean a great deal to me. And if you know anyone looking for a simple book that uses lots of pictures and lots of examples to explain the cloud, then please recommend my new book: Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. They'll love you even more.

• 90%: accuracy predicting gender from retinal image; $1 billion: Ebay sales per quarter from AI; $78 billion: global AI software market by 2025; $75m: penalty for botched SAP upgrade; 35 million: m^3 of mud dredged out of the Dutch waterways; 138 terabytes: memory per square inch; 500 million: Uber metrics per second; 22x: new faster JSON Sparser; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @IanColdwater: The JIRA tickets will continue until morale improves
  • @david_perell: Three crazy stats from @mikedariano’s newsletter. 1. People watch more Minecraft hours than the NBA, NHL, NFL, and MLB combined.  2. Only 26 countries have more people than PewDiePie has subscribers.  3. Only 20% of YouTube’s traffic is from the United States. 
  • Charlie Demerjian: Why does SemiAccurate say that Intel knows? We have seen their internal documents that show exactly how frightened the company is. The documents go into specifics we don’t feel are appropriate to discuss publicly but there is one thing we can say, Intel knows their position. One of the documents says in no uncertain terms that the company understands they will not be competitive in the server market until AFTER Sapphire Rapids, the 2022 server part. AMD has a clear run in Intel’s core market for at least 4 years.
  • @ScottMcGready: Can we just take a moment to remember that one company I worked for backed up their stuff on tapes religiously- all tapes sent to a warehouse nightly. Years later someone tested a tape... turns out nothing had been written... ever. We had a (paid) warehouse full of empty tapes
  • Uber: Since 2016, Uber has added several new lines of business to its platform, including Uber Eats, Uber Freight, and Jump Bikes. Now, we complete over 15 million trips a day, with over 75 million monthly active riders. In the last eight years, the company has grown from a small startup to 18,000 employees across the globe.
  • @mims: Here is a super important thing that we don't talk about enough: Almost all of the increase in income inequality from 1978 to the present can be accounted for by the difference in wages between top performing firms and everyone else. And now we have some idea what's driving unequal growth in productivity of top-performing firms -- it's how they build and use *their own, proprietary software and other IT/technology
  • @taotetek: Distributed systems tip: Write your system without any queues first. You might find you don't need queues. If you end up needing queues, the retry and reliability code you wrote in order to function without queues will still make your system more reliable.
  • @theburningmonk: I think the visual flow is sometimes under-appreciated - our app support team can easily look at it and figure out what went wrong without knowing ins & outs of implementation details. I can also show the diagram to a product person and he/she would get it as well
  • John Mark: It’s time to understand something about open source software development: it is not going to save us. Using or developing more open source software is not going to improve anyone’s lives. Developing open source software is not a public good. It’s not going to result in a fairer or more equitable society. In fact, as currently structured, open source development is part of the problem. 
  • There are a few more quotes. Don't miss them.