Can someone help me understand the single brick at the very bottom under Linux? What is it representing?
rtkwe 59 minutes ago [-]
The undersea cables actually connecting the entire internet. Sometimes sharks just take a bite of them, they're reasonable well protected but it's enough damage to cause outages and disruptions.
It's the single pin under everything because there are a limited number of those cables especially in some regions so a single shark can take out the entire internet for some countries.
I feel like having them as a single brick is a bit hyperbolic, since undersea cables are pretty redundant in most of the world. Get rid of one and traffic just routes around it. Ships have been routinely destroying cables in the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea in the past couple of years without causing significant disruptions.
CarVac 60 minutes ago [-]
Undersea cables. With a shark biting one.
forrestpitz 55 minutes ago [-]
Looks like an undersea cable to me
apsurd 1 hours ago [-]
The cables at the bottom of the ocean.
Projectiboga 2 hours ago [-]
I like that the hand crank is going counter-clockwise
Nevermark 4 minutes ago [-]
Crap, I saw it as clockwise. (Furious reversal of effort…)
b3lvedere 2 hours ago [-]
Oh wow! :)
Thank you for the laughs. I needed that!
SideburnsOfDoom 2 hours ago [-]
given the events of the last few days, one could add a Shahed drone too.
foltik 7 minutes ago [-]
Very satisfying. I ripped out the load bearing piece and everything stayed standing except for the tiny pieces at the very top. Doesn't seem so bad according to the simulations, maybe we could use a good shakeup?
Register the mousemove event handler on window, then you will still get the events when the mouse moves out of the window/frame while dragging and it won't be that buggy.
DaanDL 4 hours ago [-]
Was about to comment the same. It's a common mistake/gotcha.
benrutter 3 hours ago [-]
Possibly dumb question, but does that still hold inside p5js?
virgil_disgr4ce 2 hours ago [-]
p5 is just a wrapper that adds the setup() and draw() functions, so yes
knowtheory 3 hours ago [-]
I love that the initial state itself isn't stable.
The world keeps moving around us. Can't choose staying still.
tyleo 3 hours ago [-]
Interesting! It's stable on my machine. I wonder if this is due to floating-point differences.
andai 2 hours ago [-]
On my machine, the initial state isn't simulated. It only begins simulation when I touch it. At which point, the weight causes the bottom blocks to intersect each other significantly.
FireInsight 2 hours ago [-]
For me, bottom blocks stay still while those on the very top fall down.
Hamuko 9 minutes ago [-]
If I open it, click on the background to activate the physics and just keep the tab open, pretty much all of the blocks that can collapse do eventually collapse.
rob74 2 hours ago [-]
One more pedantic nitpick: when a block gets wedged between two blocks at an angle, it gets slowly pushed out, although there is a lot of weight resting on the top block. That would be realistic only (maybe) if the blocks were made of ice, but not for other materials...
withinboredom 1 hours ago [-]
Another reason not to let ice on the internet.
tyleo 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe that's what I'm seeing.
LanceH 1 hours ago [-]
That's the javascript effect.
arcadianalpaca 1 hours ago [-]
Just like real life. Sit still, touch nothing, and watch everything fall apart all on its own ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
PenguinRevolver 1 hours ago [-]
I love that clicking the empty space and just doing nothing at all still causes the blocks to fall apart after some time.
tosti 1 hours ago [-]
What blocks? What's the big deal here? I don't get it
oh look at that. removing IBM enterprise apps really doesn’t break anything and the whole stack got lighter. science.
rob74 2 hours ago [-]
Did you actually manage to remove a block without everything collapsing (eventually)? Then you must have an incredibly steady hand, it's nearly impossible to do as far as I can see. Which can also be interpreted as a metaphor for the state of the tech stack, I guess...
seydor 2 hours ago [-]
without touching the block, after a while it begins collapsing, which makes it an even better representation of infrastructure
AshamedCaptain 45 minutes ago [-]
Liked those small Box2D playboxes from decades ago, wonder where all that went.
mezod 4 hours ago [-]
this is the best thing internet since the last best thing in the internet
Previously I'd postpone some tooling since I'd lost more time on it (unless it's something I wanted to learn anyway), but now I'm all in.
jasonjmcghee 56 minutes ago [-]
Played with it on the phone. So satisfying.
I know the time it takes to get something to feel this good.
Really fantastic work.
aanet 4 hours ago [-]
Too delightful. Like a reverse jenga tower you like to topple over.
Of course, glad to see it was another @isohedral project.
jascha_eng 3 hours ago [-]
This is oddly fun to play with. Has that angry birds vibe
barddoo 42 minutes ago [-]
Increase friction
louisbourgault 3 hours ago [-]
Really cool! To be honest, when I clicked on this I had a hope that it would be possible to add things to the stack like the ongoing memes of just putting different things in there (maybe live with other people as a collaborative editor).
bbx 3 hours ago [-]
I was expecting it to open the FFmpeg website at the end.
harvie 47 minutes ago [-]
No title text, No respect...
1e1a 4 hours ago [-]
It looks like the stroke/border is not taken into account in the physics simulation.
4 hours ago [-]
merryocha 2 hours ago [-]
I knew exactly what this would be before even clicking it. Someone had to make it!
rererereferred 1 hours ago [-]
There is so many xkcd things, I didn't know which it would be.
fragmede 10 minutes ago [-]
It's 2,347. There's also 927. And 538, and who can forget 386. 936 is also a classic. 1205 is a favorite, although AI changes the scales these days. As does 303. 1838 is another good one for when CC is "thinking". 1425.
Edit oh and Extrapolating out; 605.
normie3000 3 hours ago [-]
It's like open source Angry Birds.
9dev 2 hours ago [-]
I hope Randall reads HN and sees this, he’d love it.
mghackerlady 2 hours ago [-]
I'd be surprised if he didn't read HN at least occasionally
briansm 3 hours ago [-]
Just to mention the original was cited in the most recent Veritasium video:
"The Internet Was Weeks Away From Disaster and No One Knew"
Feature request - be able to change the text and re-share it.
Half the fun of this xkcd is referring to it in context of whatever just went haywire.
withinboredom 1 hours ago [-]
The source code is right there ... just change the background image to whatever you want.
CivBase 2 hours ago [-]
It'd be really cool (and probably useful) if someone could figure out a way to generate diagrams like this for any software project.
You'd first need to figure out a way to generate a complete dependency tree. For each box, I interpret its height as a measure of its complexity and its width as a measure of the support it receives. The hardest part would probably be figuring out a way to quantitatively measure those values.
TonyStr 2 hours ago [-]
One naiive solution could be to cloc the dependency and use the size as the height, and fetch number of github contributors as width
bro. it asks for the ability for some random github user to literally take over your private repositories.
palad1n 3 hours ago [-]
THIS IS THE BEST THING EVAR!
_nivlac_ 3 hours ago [-]
Now we just need a generated version of this based on a package.json!
tobylane 4 hours ago [-]
I'd like a medal for clearing the screen of all debris. What's that you say, some of it is still useful? oh
MagicMoonlight 2 hours ago [-]
The blocks feel a little bit too slippery
efilife 4 hours ago [-]
If only it wouldn't collapse by itself after clicking anywhere (clicking seems to activate physics) this would be 10/10
koolba 4 hours ago [-]
> If only it wouldn't collapse by itself after clicking anywhere (clicking seems to activate physics) this would be 10/10
I think that's the other metaphor here.
It's not just standing on the tiny shoulders of one forgotten maintainer. The entire system only appears stable because we're looking at a snapshot of it.
In reality it's already collapsing.
glkindlmann 4 hours ago [-]
but I came here for amusement, not existential dread.
the weird physics are mildly infuriating. still funny though
eastbound 3 hours ago [-]
That is the joke, I think. The game is to touch anything and try to not make the rest fall
down.
wink 3 hours ago [-]
Not sure. It's not it being unstable, it's small bricks moving bigger stuff to the side and maybe even upward. If I missed the joke I just don't find it funny.
seba_dos1 3 hours ago [-]
Simply clicking on the empty background already makes things fall down.
venusenvy47 2 hours ago [-]
Is this website intended to break HN on Android? I've never had a website lock up the HN app like this. I couldn't back out, and I was stuck in a loop when the app restarted on the same page.
andai 2 hours ago [-]
App?
Telaneo 2 hours ago [-]
There are a few HN readers out there, but none of them are official as far as I know.
Rendered at 16:04:47 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The AI crank always cracks me up.
It's the single pin under everything because there are a limited number of those cables especially in some regions so a single shark can take out the entire internet for some countries.
http://www.mirceakademy.com/uploads/MSA2024-6-6.pdf
Thank you for the laughs. I needed that!
The world keeps moving around us. Can't choose staying still.
Previously I'd postpone some tooling since I'd lost more time on it (unless it's something I wanted to learn anyway), but now I'm all in.
I know the time it takes to get something to feel this good.
Really fantastic work.
Of course, glad to see it was another @isohedral project.
Edit oh and Extrapolating out; 605.
"The Internet Was Weeks Away From Disaster and No One Knew"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoag03mSuXQ
(at about the 9:50 mark)
https://bash-org-archive.com/?5273
Half the fun of this xkcd is referring to it in context of whatever just went haywire.
You'd first need to figure out a way to generate a complete dependency tree. For each box, I interpret its height as a measure of its complexity and its width as a measure of the support it receives. The hardest part would probably be figuring out a way to quantitatively measure those values.
I think that's the other metaphor here.
It's not just standing on the tiny shoulders of one forgotten maintainer. The entire system only appears stable because we're looking at a snapshot of it.
In reality it's already collapsing.