There is a company Dan Luu knows about.
This company has a reputation for great engineering practices.
This company had 2 9s of reliability when Dan last checked.
The reason it has 2 9s of reliability is a predictable result of its engineering practices.
Although this example is about a specific company, you can't identify the company from the description.
You can't identify the company from the description because it is a description that applies to many companies.
You also can't identify the example from the previous paragraph [of Dan Luu's post] because that paragraph's description also applies to many companies.
Multiple companies have engineering practices that cause such reliability problems and find these engineering practices to be completely and totally normal.
And I could easily double it (as in half the unavailable time) if any ok ISP become available at my place.
I didn't say that this is a normative viewpoint in engineering or whether I personally agree with it. As you can see from other commenters, many do hold this view. A sometimes opposing philosophy, however, is “release early, release often” which many open source projects adhere to.
1) Maybe yes. If the practices are really bad, it could be surprising that they're widespread and that people don't see a problem.
2) In general, when someone is pointing out something bad, saying "you're surprised?!" is counter-productive. You don't have to be surprised to call something out (I'm not surprised anymore how much our government spies on us, but it seems bad).
"There’s the company with a reputation for having great engineering practices that had 2 9s of reliability last time I checked, for reasons that are entirely predictable from their engineering practices. This is the second thing in a row that’s basically anonymous because multiple companies find it to be normal. Multiple companies find practices that lead to 2 9s of reliability to be completely and totally normal."