Re:Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing ...
by kevan on Sunday January 12, 2020 @03:37PM
(#22029132)
Loss aversion[1] describes the phenomenon pretty well:
> Humans may be hardwired to be loss averse due to asymmetric evolutionary pressure on losses and gains: for an organism operating close to the edge of survival, the loss of a day's food could cause death, whereas the gain of an extra day's food would not cause an extra day of life (unless the food could be easily and effectively stored).
For lots of companies an accidental over-use of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars is an annoyance, but for a single person that could bankrupt them. I generally avoid programmatically interacting with cloud providers on my own time for exactly this reason. One mistake in a loop can get expensive fast.
Re:Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing ...
by swiley on Thursday January 16, 2020 @05:49PM
(#22069894)
That's not quite what I'm describing, it's more like how people will ignore git error messages and randomly fiddling with things thinking "that's just how it is and I can't understand it" rather than figuring out what's actually broken.
This pattern seems common among business people: things working in the common case vs things working in corner cases, it’s how you end up with consumer windows running critical machines. I’m always shocked and moderately disturbed when I see it but I guess we all need to accept the reality that most people are very pragmatic. It makes sense, most people’s intuition comes from “the real material world” where you have to pragmatic, I think many of them fail to realize that on a computer you don’t have to give up certainty the way you do in “the real world.”