this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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You'd be hard pressed to find an online service that isn't associated with AWS in some way.
Sadly, there are some who don't even know it, because they're buying services from someone else that buys them from someone else that buys them from Amazon. So they're currently wondering what the fuck is even going on, since they thought they weren't using AWS.
Well those people are fucking idiots.
That's not really fair, I think. Smaller organizations are especially dispositioned here. Think small businesses, charities, local municipal services, etc. Small IT budgets, low staff (if any) and just enough to pad out a subscription cost to a service provider that fits their needs.
AWS is an incredibly low cost solution, and it's probably where most of these low cost services point themselves at when building platforms at scale. Not everyone can build and maintain a datacentre or home server for their every need.
This isn't to say that there are definitely idiots who pad their resume by chanting a prayer to SaaS and boasting about having moved their company to the "cloud" via a cheap and unreliable AWS rehoster, before failing upwards though.
Fine, most of them are fucking idiots. Know where your infrastructure is people! Whois your IP.
Do you know what power stations feed your electrical circuit? Do you know which transformers are most critical to keep you in service? Do you know who manufactured them?
Do you know where your water comes from? Which facilities treat it? How it's treated?
Can you name your senators, house rep, state senators, state rep, and local officials?
Everyone can't know everything. I doubt you do, but I wouldn't call you a fucking idiot for that. I would call you a fucking idiot for being such a small-minded asshole though. You're not the smartest person in the room, and even if you were, you still wouldn't understand how 99% of human technology works. We're in this together and we lean on each other. That's the beauty and curse of being human
Sounds like you've taken offense. Don't know who your host is huh? If you work in IT doing websites you gotta know same basics. Sorry if my statements don't align with your world view.
Did we not read the same comment? Not every service that was taken down was a website, like OP's school. Plenty of small businesses, charities or local municipal services don't have IT staff, commissioned their sites (including initialisation) and don't necessarily know that 𝑥 company they pay, pays Amazon. Or how to do a whois search. You clearly don't have a firm grasp on the realities of the world, nor work in IT "doing websites".
Holy fuck. Look people if you don't like it then fuck off. My point isnt that OP or rando schools with down services are fucking idiots. it's the people responsible to secure hosting for services - if they dont know what the fuck they are doing then they shouldnt be doing it.
Very clever and smart, clearly you have good takes on the world.
Deflecting harder than a politician.
You need to look up the word deflection. I work in cloud. None of my stuff was affected because I'm not an idiot and properly multi cloud and utilize availability zones for redundancy.
I'm pretty sure most of Azure (Microsoft), OCI (Oracle), and GCP (Google) have all been fine.
Bezos is a craven beast but I don't see many companies above with CEOs that I'd feel comfortable babysitting my teenage daughter
The company I work for is an Azure shop. However, our provider for customer 2fa tokens uses AWS.... So still in trouble.
Once Larry Ellison owns TikTok he's going to be babysitting all the teenagers and a whole bunch of other people!
I really hope that super villain wannabe croaks out real soon
I don’t think his son is any better.
If daddy croaks now we will see how much is actually David's doing vs Larry
Sure, but online services can certainly leverage multiple modules, from multiple companies, hosted in multiple places. So maybe your site mostly works fine, but a key aspect of it is broken.
See the above post from the Azure shop ... that uses AWS for 2FA tokens
You want to add multiple companies in parallel as alternates/failovers, not in serial where any one failure blocks the whole flow
But that would cost more money, that's anticapitalist.
Yes, it's much more expensive to have two providers. Both in terms of outright costs but even more so in terms of ongoing engineering/technical overhead.
The calculus is how much the expectation downtime is, versus that cost. It's a reasonable calculation and TBH if outages are a few hours once every few years for most cases it's acceptable.
OFC if your hospitals or emergency services depend on a cloud service, you happily fork over the extra money same as you do for any other insurance.
If there's anything I know, it's that "businesspeople" are never proactive.
Also allow things fail gracefully, independent of each other.
Lemmy seemed fine, Reddit did not.
Federated, open source
Centralized, corporate
That doesnt really have anything to do with this issue. Lemmy can absolutly be hosted in AWS via ECS (or EKS if you love Kubernetes). Hell, it could be hosted directly on EC2 if preferred.
Federation as a whole is more resilient because each operator can chose whatever hosting solution they prefer. But if your particular server happened to be hosted in AWS in the useast1 region; your shit was gonna be a bit busted.
Amen to that, good thing though. Got me to learn what Lemmy was. Apparently I've been under a rock.
Welcome to the fediverse!!
Walmart.com would likely work fine, as they are rabidly anti-Amazon, especially AWS. They don't even want their SaaS vendors using AWS under the covers for them.
Can confirm, about 10 years ago, the company I worked for migrated to AWS, and I managed the transition. We planned everything meticulously so that there would be no downtime, and used it as excuse to fix a lot of tech debt. No one was supposed to even notice the cutover, and when we did it, I expected the only feedback to be that things seemed faster and were working as expected. A few hours later, we get a complaint from an Account Manager for Walmart that they can't access the platform at all. There was a lot of confusion and back and forth, turns out their IT department had an allow list or something in the corporate DNS to not resolve to AWS owned IPs unless approved. We eventually got them to add our domain to their allowlist, but it seemed insane that they would spend the effort to implement and maintain that level of control.
Amazon and walmart are competitors
Totally, I understand that, but seemed to be an extreme measure they are inflicting on their employees that doesn't really change anything. It'd be like if ExxonMobil didn't allow their employees with company cars to fill up at a Chevron station.
That is likely very much the case. When you drive a company vehicle, you have a fuel card for fill-ups that is for a particular chain and doesn't work anywhere else.
Yeah I don't think this is the best analogy, but the point being is brand loyalty can only go so far. Like if you're going to run out of gas in the next 20 miles and there isn't an Exxon station within 100 miles, do you just pass all other gas stations and have your employees break down on the side of the road?
I just can't imagine any actual competitors to AWS would impose such restrictions on their employees that put them in a worse position to do their jobs, so it's a bit silly that it's coming from Walmart, when they don't compete in that space.
Honestly? Yeah, pawbably. Or you pay for it yourself and go through getting a reimbursement which may or may not happen.
Edit: Just like, you're expecting companies to be intelligent and reasonable, and they just aren't.