Thankfully, my family understands that stuff on the internet is "someone else's computer", so it's easy to explain why something is down - "It's their fault"
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
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I've managed to train my family to understand "server side issue"
It seems like a lot of people are not even aware of AWS, which leads to an underestimation how badly the world is infected with Amazon.
Absolute Waste Shit
There’s enough commercials for aws (on consumer channels for some reason) for them to know an aws issue is not something you can help with.
“Part of the internet broke. They’re working on it.”
But I don't using the Internet, I use the Firefox? Should I switch to the Google?
Its amazing how little they want to know why and just want to vent their frustration at you. Laughter doesn't calm them down but it sure makes me feel better after I've explained it ten times.
Really makes me try and catch myself complaining and just to stop it.
A lot of conversations revolve around 'dont you just hate this one process, or people like x, or y never works' and it's always weary and exhausting, but much more so since I became the tech guy and realize how much people default to stories like that when they have nothing else to say about your profession.
If you want to say 'ive noticed that x never seems to work properly and I'm wondering why it couldn't be fixed with z' and are genuinely curious I'm more than happy to problem solve and/or explain complexities, but most people never want to hear a complicated answer about systemic forces.
I was talking with someone not particularly computer literate about AI. He was quite dismayed at how factually inaccurate it is about so many things. He asked me, as a much more computer literate person, if I could build him a different better AI system. I was like "Dude, I build websites. No."
How many techie types have had someone come to them and say something like "Hey, you know tech thing XYZ? You know how it sucks? Well I've got a great idea: make a BETTER one! So what do you say? You whip it up in an afternoon, I'll handle marketing, and we'll be rich!"
Like they really thought that the issue is just that no-one can see the flaws. They thought that the fix is super easy and they're just the first person clever enough to see it.
My rule of thumb is: if I see an incredible easy solution for a problem in a field I am no expert in, the solution must be garbage for reasons I don't understand
LOL, I feel this so hard 😂
Sometimes I wonder how people can be so naive. Even if they don't know just how much money is thrown at AI, just the fact that it is now in literally anything and on the news every day should be a clue that it is a huge industry. You wouldn't expect the guy that changes your cars tires to be able to single handedly build a car that is better, faster, cheaper and more efficient than all car companies together.
America has always had an anti-intellectualism streak and it's become 3000 miles wide.
You know those cute stories: "Kids solve problem that the experts couldn't handle". They're propaganda. The paper left out that the kids' solution wasn't economically viable, and the dumber among us walked away thinking the "white coats" didn't have enough "common sense".
No one can, because they (LLMs) are fundamentally not suited to the tasks people try to use them for.
Imagine trying to explain this 20 or 30 years ago.
"Yeah you know that website that sells books? One of their computers crashed and took half the Internet out."
AW Shit not again
Of course many don't know what AWS is but honestly it isn't that hard to explain/grasp.
I don't repair my peers' Windows computers, but I feel a bit of responsibility in being the one who tries to explain shit like that in understandable terms.
what's a server?
it's a computer in a building somewhere else.
why can't they click around and fix it?
because there are other servers that are talking in a group and they all need to get fixed.
why would they need more? can't they just run it all in one building?
it is in one building but the building is 20k sqft.
that's ridiculous! how many computers do they need to run this crap. they're just wasting taxpayers dollars. Fox news told me...
and that's why I just say, "the internet is broken."
I have to admit I presumed I'd be starting from a point where people know that web sites are not actually inside their devices.
Also not talking to a fox news nutjob
web sites are not actually inside their devices
Proceeds to:
- install Termux onto Android phone
- mirror simple websites with wget
- serve them with NGINX
- install kiwix-serve and serve the entire English wikipedia
- install Navidrome music server
- set up port forwarding or use cloudflared (or just stay on LAN)
Under proot I was also able to run Jellyfin server, and someone else also did Nextcloud and at some point a public BBS.
But oh well, soon Google will block unauthorized apps because I probably just purchased a license to use the phone, as opposed to actually buying the device.
As for why, it's just a battery-powered computer, so why not. And by the way, Navidrome in Termux is probably as easy as it gets anywhere, since it's in the repo. No docker or installing a .deb, just apt install navidrome.
the internet is broken
Well, true. IPv4 exhaustion yet not enough IPv6 support
de-peering
If this dispute escalates further and a complete de-peering happens in that case both networks will end up having a blackhole. Customers sitting on either side (and their single-homed downstreams) will not have any routes to each other.
BGP hijacking
On April 8th, 2010 China Telecom hijacked 15% of the Internet traffic for 18 minutes, experts speculate it was a large-scale experiment for controlling the traffic flows. The incident also affected US government (‘‘.gov’’) and military (‘‘.mil’’) websites.
AWS is that cloud everyone kept going on about before AI was the big buzzword see this is actually your fault tech ~~literate~~ illiterate (Oops, auto correct) audience for putting faith in powers you couldn't hope to understand and much less control.
Hey man, the tech literate people were saying this:
It's the VCs and the marketing people who were pushing cloud services as the next big thing.
My phone has literally the worst auto correct in the world I will blame that on the technical people but reread my comment.
Oh, yes that does change the meaning.
"A Weird Symptom"
"Aliens With Shutguns"
"Aliens With Shutguns”
So thaaaaats what is in area 51... This whole time it was aliens with shotguns threatening web developers in order to keep the Internet running.
"Human! Asafum is attempting to connect to the human butt website, make it happen!"
The cloud done burst.
I found success just saying Alexa wasn't working and a bunch of stuff uses it. Not even that far from correct, at least?
Honestly I'd compare to using Google in your everyday life and say Amazon is the business version of that