I think ssh-ing into production is a sign of not fully mature devops practices.
We are still stuck there, but we're striving to get to the place where we can turn off sshd on Prod and rely on the CI/CD pipeline to blow away and reprovision instances, and be 100% confident we can test and troubleshoot in dev and stage and by looking at off-instance logs from Prod.
How important it is to get there is something I ponder about my motivations for - it's cleary not worthwhile if your project is one or 2 prod servers perhaps running something like HA WordPress, but it's obvious that at Netflix type scale that nobody is sshing into individual instances to troubleshoot. We are a long way (a long long long long way) from Netflix scale, and are unlikely to ever get there. But somewhere between dozens and hundreds of instances is about where I reckon the work required to get close to there stars paying off.
> at Netflix type scale that nobody is sshing into individual instances to troubleshoot
Have you worked at Netflix?
I haven't, but I have worked with large scale operations, and I wouldn't hesitate to say that the ability to ssh (or other ways to run commands remotely, which are all either built on ssh or likely not as secure and well tested) is absolutely crucial to running at scale.
The more complex and non-heterogenous environments you have, the more likely you are to encounter strange flukes. Handshakes that only fail a fraction of a percent of all times and so on. Multiple products and providers interaction. Tools like tcpdump and eBPF becomes essential.
Why would you want to deploy on a mature operating system such as Linux and not use tools such as eBPF? I know the modern way is just to yolo it and restart stuff that crashes, but as a startup or small scale you have other things to worry about. When you are at scale you really want to understand your performance profile and iron out all the kinks.
Yes, there are numerous other ways to run remote commands than ssh, all of them less secure. (Running commands via your monitoring system can even be a very handy back door in a pinch.)
The argument here was that remote commands was less useful at scale, not that ssh was a particularly bad way of implementing it. Which doesn't make sense. You tend to have more complex system interactions at scale, not less.
Right. The answer is having systems that are resilient to failure, and if they do fail being able to quickly replace any node, hopefully automatically, along with solid observability to give you insight into what failed and how to fix it. The process of logging into a machine to troubleshoot it in real-time while the system is on fire is so antiquated, not to mention stressful. On-call shouldn't really be a major part of our industry. Systems should be self-healing, and troubleshooting done during working hours.
Achieving this is difficult, but we have the tools to do it. The hurdles are often organizational rather than technical.
> The hurdles are often organizational rather than technical.
Yeah. And in my opinion "organizational" reasons can (and should) include "we are just not at the scale where achieving that makes sense".
If you have single digit numbers of machines, the whole solid observability/ automated node replacement/self-healing setup overhead is unlikely to pay off. Especially if the SLAs don't require 2am weekend hair-on-fire platform recovery. For a _lot_ things, you can almost completely avoid on-call incidents with straightforward redundant (over provisioned) HA architectures, no single points of failure, and sensible office hours only deployment rules (and never _ever_ deploy to Prod on a Friday afternoon).
Scrappy startups, and web/mobile platforms for anything where a few hours of downtime is not going to be an existential threat to the money flow or a big story in the tech press - probably have more important things to be doing than setting up log aggregation and request tracing. Work towards that, sure, but probably prioritise the dev productivity parts first. Get your CI/CD pipeline rock solid. Get some decent monitoring of the redundant components of your HA setup (as well as the Prod load balancer monitoring) so you know when you're degraded but not down (giving you some breathing space to troubleshoot).
And aspire to fully resilient systems and have a plan for what they might look like in the future to avoid painting yourself into a corner that makes it harder then necessary to get there one day.
But if you've got a guy spending 6 months setting up chaos monkey and chaos doctor for your WordPress site that's only getting a few thousand visits a day, you're definitely going it wrong. Five nines are expensive. If your users are gonna be "happy enough" with three nines or even two nines, you've probably got way better things to do with that budget.
> For a _lot_ things, you can almost completely avoid on-call incidents with straightforward redundant (over provisioned) HA architectures, no single points of failure, and sensible office hours only deployment rules (and never _ever_ deploy to Prod on a Friday afternoon).
For a lot of things the lack of complexity inherent in a single VPS server will mean you have better availability than any of those bizarrely complex autoscaling/recovery setups
The thing is that all companies regardless of their scale would benefit from these good practices. Scrappy startups definitely have more important things to do than maintaining their infra, whether that involves setting up observability and automation or manually troubleshooting and deploying. Both involve resources and trade-offs, but one of them eventually leads to a reduction of required resources and stability/reliability improvements, while the other leads to a hole of technical debt that is difficult to get out of if you ever want to improve stability/reliability.
What I find more harmful is the prevailing notion that "complexity" must be avoided at smaller scales, and that somehow copying a binary to a single VPS is the correct way to deploy at this stage. You see this in the sibling comment from Aeolun here.
The reality is that doing all of this right is an inherently complex problem. There's no getting around that. It's true that at smaller scales some of these practices can be ignored, and determining which is a skill on its own. But what usually happens is that companies build their own hodgepodge solutions to these problems as they run into them, which accumulate over time, and they end up having to maintain their Rube Goldberg machines in perpetuity because of sunk costs. This means that they never achieve the benefits they would have had they just adopted good practices and tooling from the start.
I'm not saying that starting with k8s and such is always a good idea, especially if the company is not well established yet, but we have tools and services nowadays that handle these problems for us. Shunning cloud providers, containers, k8s, or any other technology out of an irrational fear of complexity is more harmful than beneficial.
> I think ssh-ing into production is a sign of not fully mature devops practices.
that's great and completely correct when you are one of the very few places in the universe where everything is fully mature and stable. the rest of us work on software. :)
It's a good mindset to have, but I think ssh access should still be available as a last resort on prod systems, and perhaps trigger some sort of postmortem process, with steps to detect the problem without ssh in the future. There is always going to be a bug, that you cannot reproduce outside of prod, that you cannot diagnose with just a core dump, and that is a show stopper. It's one thing to ignore a minor performance degradation, but if the problem corrupts your state you cannot ignore it.
Moreover, if you are in the cloud, part of your infrastructure is not under your control, making it even harder to reproduce a problem.
I've worked with companies at Netflix's scale and they still have last-resort ssh access to their systems.
In my world, if a developer needs access to the Node upon which their app is deployed to troubleshoot, that's 100% a bug in their application. I am cognizant that being whole-hog on 12 Factor apps is a journey, but for my money get on the train because "let me just ssh in and edit this one config file" is the road to ruin when no one knows who edited what to set it to what new value. Running $(kubectl edit) allows $(kubectl rollout undo) to put it back, and also shows what was changed from what to what
Your world is very narrow and limited. Some devs also have to deal with customer provisioned HW infrastructure, with buggy interactions between HW/virtualization solutions that every 5 minutes duplicate all packets for a few seconds; with applications that interact with customer only onsite HW you only have remote access to via production deployment; with quirky virtualization like vmware stopping the vCPU on you for hundreds of ms if you load it too much which you'll not replicate locally; with things you can't predict you'll need to observe ahead of time, etc. And it does not involve editing any configs. It's just troubleshooting.
Separate from my sibling comment about AWS SSM, I also believe that if one cannot know that a Node is sick by the metrics or log egress from it, that's a deployment bug. I'm firmly in the "Cattle" camp, and am getting closer and closer to the "Reverse Uptime" camp - made easier by ASG's newfound "Instance Lifespan" setting to make it basically one-click to get onboard that train
Even as I type all these answers out, I'm super cognizant that there's not one hammer for all nails, and I am for sure guilty of yanking Nodes out of the ASG in order to figure out what the hell has gone wrong with them, but I try very very hard not to place my Nodes in a precarious situation to begin with so that such extreme troubleshooting becomes a minor severity incident and not Situation Normal
If accidentally nuking a single node while debugging causes issues you have bigger problems. Especially if you are running kubernetes any node should be able to fall off the earth at any time without issues.
I agree that you should set a maximum lifetime for a node on the order of a few weeks.
I also agree that you shouldn’t be giving randos access to production infra, but and the end of the day there needs to be some people at the company who have the keys to the kingdom because you don’t know what you don’t know and you need to be able to deal with unexpected faults or outages of the telemetry and logging systems.
I once bootstrapped an entire datacenter with tens of thousands of nodes from an SSH terminal after an abrupt power failure. It turns out infrastructure has lots of circular dependencies and we had to manually break that dependency.
Passive metrics/logs won't let you debug all the issues. At some point you either need a system for automatic memory dumps and submitting bpf scripts to live nodes... or you need SSH access to do that.
There's a thousand ways to do it without SSH. It can be built into the app itself. It can be a special authenticated route to a suid script. It can be built into the current orchestration system. It can be pull-based using the a queue for system monitoring commands. It can be part of the existing monitoring agent. It can be run through AWS SSM. There's really no reason it has to be SSH.
And even got SSH you can have special keys with access authorised to only specific commands, so a service account would be better than personal in that case.
This seems like it’s conceding the point since SSM also allows you to run commands on nodes - I use it interchangeably with SSH to have Ansible manage legacy servers. Maybe what you’re trying to say is that it shouldn’t be routine and that there should be more of a review process so it’s not just a random unrestricted shell session? I think that’s less controversial, and especially when combined with some kind of “taint” mode where your access to a server triggers a rebuild after the dust has settled.
Yes, you nailed it with "it shouldn't be routine" and there for sure should be a review process. My primary concern with the audit logs actually isn't security it's lowering the cowboy of the software lifecycle
> combined with some kind of “taint” mode where your access to a server triggers a rebuild after the dust has settled.
Oh, I love that idea: thanks for bringing it to my attention. I'll for sure incorporate that into my process going forward
The first time I heard it was a very simple idea: they had a wrapper for the command which installed SSH keys on an EC2 instance which also set a delete-after tag which CloudCustodian queried.
No, what we're talking about is (to extend your very condescending tech support analogy) shipping the customer a new PC from the factory, and telling them to throw the old one away because it doesn't matter. It will only start to matter if they have 3 bad PCs in a row, at which time it becomes (a) a demonstrable failure and not just stray neutron rays (b) an incident which will carry a postmortum of how the organization could have prevented that failure for next time
I did start the whole thread by saying "and then I grew up," and not everyone is at the same place in their organizational maturity model. So, if you're happy with the process you have now, keep using it. I was unhappy, so I studied hard, incorporated supporting technology, and lobbied my heart out for change. Without maturity levels we'd all still be using telnet and tar based version control
I was a very long time screen user and tried tmux early on in its existence. It was slow and different so I bailed back to screen. Last year I tried tmux again and have switched to it full time.
One of the things I like most about it is how easy it is to extend. In the role I was in last year, I'd have several long-lasting SSH sessions to various hosts. With a very simple bash script I was able to create a prompt in tmux that I could trigger to ask me where I wanted to ssh to. If I already had a connection to that host, it would switch me to that window, if not, it would create a new one and ssh to the host.
I wanted to do that in screen for years, but it just didn't have the features to facilitate it. On top of that I was able to easily re-map all of the keybindings to be just like screen for my muscle memory.
Probably the top reason I wanted to get GrapheneOS was the privacy/security aspect of it, this includes: no google play services by default, multiple user profiles (more than the Stock OS can have), a network permission for apps (this normally can't be toggled), disabling all usb data connections (can easily be activated in the Settings if I need it), Bootloader can be locked again after flashing the ROM and much more.
It also has very frequent updates, and my phone will get them for a long time (also true for the Stock Android on Pixels, but that one really sucks), which was also very important for me, as I want to be able to use my phone as long as possible.
What made this even more appeling is the possibility to install sandboxed google play in a seperate profile/user for apps that really need it, which works surprisingly well, and even then the google play services don't run with elevated permissions like they normally do, but with the same permissions like other apps.
And the battery life is insane, if I don't use my phone it basically does not loose any battery, and even with heavy usage I don't need to charge it daily.
So GrapheneOS was the easiest way to start degoogling (kind of ironic using Google Hardware) my mobile phone, while still being able to run nearly all of the Apps I need.
Oh right! I think I have that on a tablet. I was confusing it with the alternative to Android that Google is developing when I asked you about it. Thanks for the info.
You're talking about execution, while I'm talking about creation (composition). It is easier to, say, copy Guernica than to paint it having never seen it before. Easier in the sense that way, way more people can do the former than the latter.
You're moving the goalposts from difficulty to recreate (your choice of words), i.e. copy, to difficulty of creating something without having seen it before (i.e., telepathy).
By this definition, this comment of mine is peak artistic merit. Nobody could've created it without seeing it here — except me, just now!
>how difficult it is to recreate an artistic work, or something very similar to it, especially without having seen it before
You don't need to be telepathic to recreate something someone else has made if the creative space for a given medium contains a small number of "interesting" solutions. One time when I was a teenager playing around in QuickBASIC I independently rediscovered H trees. Did I read the mind of the person who first discovered them, or is it that the space of symmetric binary trees where each branch is a constant ratio of its ancestor small enough that I was bound to find them?
I would say that your definition of artistic merit disagrees with what people in the art world use (both artists and people who appreciate art), and is way more aligned with the criteria the patent office and the copyright law use.
That's to say, your definition of artistic is very close to "patentable or copyrightable" (originality and novelty are required, emotional response isn't).
So you're not talking about art at all. What's important to you is not what makes art art.
The question to ask with art is a simple one: when people saw it, did it make them feel or think differently are the moment? And did it make them feel differently from the way other art pieces did?
You can't understand art without understanding the audience, because art is made for the audience — even if the audience is the artist themselves. You can't examine art in itself, just like you can't examine a mechanical tool in itself, without asking why it was made, what it was made for, and whether it was good in doing that.
You can't look at a saw and discuss its merits without understanding how it transforms objects it's applied to (and what materials the saw was meant for). You need to tell a wood saw apart from a hack saw, and you need to know whether it actually could cut wood well to talk about the saw's merits.
A wood saw isn't bad if it doesn't cut metal. And if it cut a million trees down, it is a good saw beyond doubt.
You can't look at art and discuss its merits without understanding how it transforms people it's shown to (and what audience the art was meant for). You need to tell early 20th century suprematist art apart from art made today, and you need to know whether it actually could make people in early 20th century feel and think differently in response to it to talk about the art's merits.
An early 20th century suprematist artwork (like the Black Square) isn't bad if it doesn't cut it in today's artistic landscape. And if it changed the way a million artists thought and felt about art itself (which it did), it is good art beyond doubt.
The recommendation others had of taking an art history class is a solid one. It really widened my perspective when I took it, and I think it'll do the same for you.
PS: the same criteria apply to mathematics, which is art with a particular audience in mind.
Anyone can prove the Pythagorean theorem, and many have rediscovered it. It would be asinine to say it has no mathematical merit, or that Pythagoras wasn't a great mathematician.
Same goes for many other results. Calculus is common knowledge — and even in its time in was independently developed by both Leibniz and Newton.
The fact that any freshman knows to compute an antiderivative to find the area under the curve doesn't take away from magnificence of Leibniz and Newton doing the same.
But you'd have no idea what's so important about Calculus if that was all you knew about it - which, sadly, is how it's taught, and which is why people have no appreciation of neither mathematics, nor art.
Only learning about Calculus in a wider historical and mathematical context would enable you to do that.
You'd need to know how mathematics was before calculus, what compelled people to develop it, how it affected mathematicians, what kind of mathematics came into existence because of it, and ultimately, how it changed the world.
You need to know about which problems the scientific society was facing at the time, what question was Calculus an answer to, what the objections were at the time (and there were many - it was seen as heresy! Infinitesimals were whacky!), and why it was accepted in spite of them.
And once you do, you will see the simple integral sign differently than just a fancy way to write the letter S (which, by the way, it is: S for "sum", d for "difference", and the integral is, literally, a sum of differences multiplied by varying weights).
That's a lot of definitive statements for something as poorly defined as "art".
>The question to ask with art is a simple one: when people saw it, did it make them feel or think differently are the moment? And did it make them feel differently from the way other art pieces did?
Why? Why is that the question to ask? Why must be considered in this specific way, rather than any other?
>You can't understand art without understanding the audience, because art is made for the audience
So something that's made to be made rather than to be seen is not art, even in the case that if someone did see it they would think it's art?
>You can't examine art in itself, just like you can't examine a mechanical tool in itself, without asking why it was made, what it was made for, and whether it was good in doing that.
No. No, no, no. There's no justification for this besides that you say so. Why can't I look at the thing in isolation and decide for myself what it's good for? What do I care what the person who made the wood saw thought he was making? If for my purposes it's a good screwdriver and I use it like that, is it wrong because I'm not properly interpreting the message the manufacturer embedded into the tool?
>You can't look at art and discuss its merits without understanding how it transforms people it's shown to (and what audience the art was meant for). You need to tell early 20th century suprematist art apart from art made today, and you need to know whether it actually could make people in early 20th century feel and think differently in response to it to talk about the art's merits.
Again, why? Exactly what prevents me from doing that? What, I'm barging into a club? Well, sorry, but I didn't see any signs on the door. I just saw a bunch of people gushing over trash and thought I'd speak my mind. If you don't like that I don't like what you like because I don't care about the things you care about then that's too bad.
>the same criteria apply to mathematics, which is art with a particular audience in mind. Anyone can prove the Pythagorean theorem, and many have rediscovered it. It would be asinine to say it has no mathematical merit, or that Pythagoras wasn't a great mathematician.
Interesting line of reasoning. Mathematics is art, therefore mathematical merit is artistic merit. Artistic merit by my definition is about originality, therefore mathematical merit (being artistic) is about originality. I hope I don't need to say I don't agree with either the soundness of the reasoning nor with the conclusion.
I don't agree that mathematics is art with no qualifiers whatsoever. Mathematics is, very reductively, primarily concerned with the search for true statements, not with the search for beautiful statements, nor with self-expression or cultural transmission.
>But you'd have no idea what's so important about Calculus if that was all you knew about it - which, sadly, is how it's taught, and which is why people have no appreciation of neither mathematics, nor art.
Calculus is useful, regardless of its history. The reason people don't appreciate mathematics is because a) they think mathematics is manually calculating things (because that's what they're taught to do), which sours them to the idea, and b) they're forced to learn things they think has nothing to do with their daily lives, not because they don't learn about the history. And if we're honest, they're right. Very few people will ever need to know calculus at any point in their lives (outside of school), and fewer still will need to calculate things by hand.
>You'd need to know how mathematics was before calculus, what compelled people to develop it, how it affected mathematicians, what kind of mathematics came into existence because of it, and ultimately, how it changed the world.
That's one way to appreciate it, I'm not denying that. But you're arguing that it's the way to appreciate art, and that if I don't do that I'm missing the point.
Your approach to art is a beautiful combination of a toddler and a grumpy old man. It's immature, ignorant and stubborn in its refusal to actually listen to what others are saying. You have made so many straw-men that it's difficult to consider your posts as being neither well-intentioned nor inviting a meaningful discussion.
One thing is to say 'I don't get it, this is not for me'. Another is to lie down on the museum's floor and start kicking and screaming in a tantrum about the lack of artistic merit of something like the Black Square without a glimmer of open mind and the tiniest will to at least attempt to understand it before dismissing it.
And all you're doing is complaining that someone doesn't like what you like, and trying to invalidate their opinion through ad hominem. Sorry, but I don't need to engage with the thing the same way you do to form and voice an opinion on it. That's just the way it is.
This is one of the straw-men. No one is complaining about you not liking what other people like. No one. Not a single person. Even the authors of these pieces wouldn't complain. That is not the point whatsoever and yet you are bringing it up in many posts.
People are frustrated that you insist on your 'opinion' being valid when the position you hold is void of a thought. It's actually a lack of an opinion. It's a tantrum. You have eyes, you have the time and perhaps even the interest to look, and yet you put your head in a sand and claim that the darkness you see gives you enough data to claim whether something has artistic merit or not.
The frustration comes from witnessing the blatant and confident ignorance, not from whether you 'like' or 'dislike' something.
"I think this piece of art is overrated as it has comparatively little content for the amount of interest it generates" is very much not a non-opinion.
You're not offering any reason why I should form my opinion in any way other than the way I do, you're just trying to invalidate my opinion because you think how I formed it is wrong, again without offering any reason why that is so. Yes, perhaps if both your and my opinions were informed by the same facts we would agree. But so what? That doesn't invalidate my opinion, and I'm not going to shut up. I'm just going to keep calling out low-effort garbage when I see it. I don't care if it frustrates you. If that lowers your opinion of me I'm fine with that; I also don't have a high opinion of the people who think this sort of trash is deep.
You seem to really have very little education, perspective, and experience regarding art. When you have very little education, perspective, and experience, your opinions are irrelevant and it frustrates people to see someone so content (and self-righteous) in their ignorance
Someone on this thread likened it to watching a boxing match and then complaining that they aren't using their legs. This is a good comparison. I would also compare it to having only eaten chicken nuggets your whole life and then complaining that a serving of foie gras isn't filling enough.
Yes, the foie gras isn't really filling, the boxers aren't using their legs, and the art doesn't look like real life. But your judgement is based on ignorance. You lack the vocabulary to describe what you're seeing-- but more than that, you lack the eye to even see it in the first place. And instead of conceding that you just don't really know what you're talking about, you double down and insist that you're actually privy to some profound truth about art. It can't be that the countless Art History PhDs, renowned critics, museum collections, and artists who see the relevance of Warhol based on years of study and consideration are correct. No, your perspective is greater because you... were dragged to a museum one time and didn't really pay attention? Because you have delusions about "effort" and the difficulty of trompe l'oeil? For fuck's sake, read a book.
If all you can do is tell me that I can't be right because I'm less educated on art than someone who doesn't agree with me, that just tells me I'm probably right. I'll stand in front of an art PhD and tell them their degree is worthless and a waste of time because it didn't teach to see something an uneducated idiot like me can see.
Sorry, you can't get me to shut up through ad hominem and appeals to authority. You have to actually convince me I'm wrong. Argue your point or don't bother; you're just wasting your time otherwise.
Would you stand in front an astrophysicist PhD and tell them their degree is worthless because you can’t see dark matter and supersymmetry? Would you stand in front of an archaeology PhD and tell them their degree is worthless because you can obviously see that aliens created the pyramids? You don’t know what you’re talking about. Your idea of art as a purely subjective study isn’t held by anyone with even casual knowledge of the field. It’s like claiming mathematics is subjective because we all have different favorite numbers.
Multiple commenters have used pathos and ethos to argue with you because your understanding is so rudimentary and your ignorance so great that to argue the nature of art with you would be like trying to teach algebra to an ape. You cannot comprehend an actual argument from your starting point.
I for one don’t really like Warhol. I’m a spurned formalist along the likes of Greenberg and Fried, and I think the true inheritor of post-modernist conceptualism lies with Minimalists like Serra, Morris, Smithson, etc. I’m not convinced by Baudrillard, and I think the strongest Warhol is his early and late periods where he was much more concerned with illustration and surface treatment, respectively. I am still not such an uneducated simpleton so as to make the claim that Warhol isn’t art or worthy of art historical study. -This- is what an argument against Warhol looks like. Demonstrated knowledge of art history, methodology, and reasoning. You are claiming people aren’t engaging with you but you lack the fundamental skills to be engaged with. Again, this is like arguing mathematical proofs with someone who can’t multiply two numbers. Read a book!
>Would you stand in front an astrophysicist PhD and tell them their degree is worthless because you can’t see dark matter and supersymmetry? Would you stand in front of an archaeology PhD and tell them their degree is worthless because you can obviously see that aliens created the pyramids?
No. Obviously I don't have the same respect for all fields.
>-This- is what an argument against Warhol looks like. Demonstrated knowledge of art history, methodology, and reasoning.
See, you're misunderstanding. You expressed an idea in the form of an argument that might convince someone educated the same way you are, of its truth. I simply made an appreciation and then explained how I got to it. It was never meant to be convincing, it was just meant to be out there. And all I got were a bunch of people who said I shouldn't say that, or I shouldn't look at it that way, yet could offer no reason why I shouldn't say that, or why I shouldn't do that. You're doing it, too; you're just telling me to read a book. I'm not going to read a book on art history. I don't have the inclination or time, and my appreciation of art doesn't work like that the way it does for you. I have nothing to gain from reading a book on art, and much to lose. You're the one who thinks I shouldn't be saying the things I'm saying, convince me I shouldn't.
WHY am I wrong in approaching the subject in this manner? Because so far the only problem I see is that it ruffles the feathers of people with art degrees. If that really is the only reason then I simply do not care.
>I simply made an appreciation and then explained how I got to it. It was never meant to be convincing, it was just meant to be out there… WHY am I wrong in approaching the subject in this manner?
You’re asking me to justify to you why one shouldn’t flap their mouth about things they don’t know anything about and then stand by their willful ignorance when confronted by domain experts? You want me to convince you that it’s not ok to just spout bullshit and insist that it’s a valid position to hold irrespective of knowledge, methods, accuracy, reasoning, logic, research, justification, experience, etc etc? Lmfao. You’re delusional.
The point here is that nobody owes you a course in art history which would answer all of your why questions when many such courses are available.
You're not entitled to free education from us, particularly - against your will ("convince me"), when there are many resources out there available to you.
We can point out why your opinions are bad (they are grounded in too little knowledge of what you're opining on), we can point out where to get more knowledge.
If you want to learn, you will.
The saddest thing here is not even arrogance, but lack of curiosity.
So you want something out of me, but are not willing to explain why I should do it. Okay, then I'm not compelled to do it. I can simply tell you to piss off. I'm not entitled to receive an education from you and you're not entitled to have me not write stupid things.
>I can simply tell you to piss off. I'm not entitled to receive an education from you and you're not entitled to have me not write stupid things.
The difference is that I'm not asking you to not write stupid things, but you ask me to explain things to you.
>So you want something out of me
That would be projection. You want something out of other people (an explanation), whereas we want you to get something for yourself.
We get absolutely nothing if you learn more about the subject you opine on. You will.
>I can simply tell you to piss off.
You certainly can. You're not in the right forum for that though.
I did write an explanation up the thread - long enough to not fit into the limits of a single comment on HN (a hilarious limitation for 2024, but I digress).
>Why? Why is that the question to ask? Why must be considered in this specific way, rather than any other?
Have you asked the same question about your definitions? You might as well ask why words have certain meanings rather than any other.
A short answer: art is commonly understood as an expression of thoughts, feelings, emotions, ideas, etc. in some form. Creating art is converting human thoughts and emotions into objects of art. Consumption of art is the reverse process: thoughts and emotions emerging when the object of art is consumed (seen, heard, etc).
Taking an art history course will leave you with a better answer. Maybe a google search on "what is art", too, if you actually put some effort into it.
>So something that's made to be made rather than to be seen is not art, even in the case that if someone did see it they would think it's art?
See, now you're getting closer. You're defining art by saying that it's art because someone who sees it thinks it's art, i.e. you're analyzing the emotional impact.
When an art object is made, the audience is the set of people that consumes it at has thoughts and emotions as a result. It may or may not include the artist themselves. In your example, the person that thinks it's art is the audience.
Without an audience, there is no art.
Something that's "made to be made" has the artist as its audience at the very least.
>No. No, no, no. There's no justification for this besides that you say so
I'd hope, common sense would be one. Sadly, it's an increasingly uncommon asset these days. In any case, it's me and everyone else in this thread, which could give a hint that you're missing something.
>Why can't I look at the thing in isolation and decide for myself what it's good for?
Can a caveman look at a microscope and decide for himself what it's good for? Absolutely. He can decide it's good for beating other people with. And then talk how there are many better sticks out there, and how anyone who thinks a microscope is valuable is an idiot.
And insofar as the caveman is concerned, he's right! He has no other use for a microscope because he is too limited in his understanding. He would be better off with a large stick.
You, too, certainly can do the same, but your understanding will only apply to yourself.
Insofar as other people are concerned (and your judgements of them), your opinion will be less than worthless, because it's only based on what's in your head, and there isn't enough there to judge others.
> If for my purposes it's a good screwdriver and I use it like that, is it wrong because I'm not properly interpreting the message the manufacturer embedded into the tool?
You're welcome to use a saw as a screwdriver.
But if you leave a one-star review for a saw because it's a shitty screwdriver, and start judging other people who like them for reasons beyond your understanding, you'll be laughed out of every room.
>Again, why? Exactly what prevents me from doing that?
Your ignorance. Which is what you'll actually be opining on instead of art and its merits.
There's a logical fallacy at the very basis of your thought:
- you decide what something is good for, without looking at a larger context
- you observe that it's not good in that way
These two statements are in contradiction to each other. The second statement shows that what you decided on isn't the right thing.
Instead, you conclude that the object is not good at all, and everyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot.
>Interesting line of reasoning. Mathematics is art, therefore mathematical merit is artistic merit. Artistic merit by my definition is about originality, therefore mathematical merit (being artistic) is about originality.
I have no idea where you are going with this. This wasn't what I wrote, and it doesn't make any sense to me either.
>I don't agree that mathematics is art with no qualifiers whatsoever. Mathematics is, very reductively, primarily concerned with the search for true statements, not with the search for beautiful statements
Says who? Not the mathematicians. And I am one[1] - so I am qualified to say this. Are you? If so, please show me your work, and I can use it as a basis of explaining things further.
Otherwise, you'd be better of listening to someone who has created works of mathematics and art (also see [1]).
As mathematicians, we see beauty in truth. But finding un-truths is even more fascinating. Posing a conjecture and finding counter-examples is fundamentally a part of mathematics.
So is "bad" math. "Lapses in mathematical reasoning"[2] is a great mathematics book.
Finding ways in which something we thought was true isn't is the crown achievement - like the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry.
Mathematics itself has been proven to be either inconsistent or incomplete[3]. And a lot of mathematics is concerned with things like Riemann's hypothesis (which may or may not be true), or the continuity hypothesis (which may or may not be answerable).
> Mathematics is, very reductively, primarily concerned with the search for true statements, not with the search for beautiful statements
Let me emphasize again that it is, in fact, the opposite.
Generating true statements is easy. Generating beautiful statements that are true is mathematics.
> nor with self-expression or cultural transmission.
Let me assure you that you are wrong on both accounts here as well.
There is a very strong cultural element in mathematics; different mathematical schools have different mathematical traditions.
Mathematics in inherently a cultural, group activity. It's all about self-expression. That's why theorems have names attached to them.
That's why we talk of "Lwow School of Mathematics"[4], for example.
Further discussion of this subject is out of scope. I ask you to not have strong opinions of this kind on mathematics if you are not a mathematician.
>I don't agree that mathematics is art with no qualifiers whatsoever
No art is without qualifiers. Mathematics is a kind of art. So is painting.
Not every calculation or result is art, and not every application of paint.
The qualifiers are what we are discussing.
>Calculus is useful, regardless of its history.
Useful to whom? Certainly not to the college student taking it only because it's a required course during the last semester.
>The reason people don't appreciate mathematics is ... not because they don't learn about the history
You have neither authority, experience, nor qualifications to say that.
>And if we're honest, they're right. Very few people will ever need to know calculus at any point in their lives (outside of school), and fewer still will need to calculate things by hand.
So, you have proven me right, and yourself wrong with this statement.
You very clearly demonstrate that there's no reason for most people to learn Calculus for the purpose of using it.
The conclusion should be : this is not WHY Calculus should be taught.
Not we should not teach Calculus.
You get the WHY wrong, everything else follows.
> But you're arguing that it's the way to appreciate art, and that if I don't do that I'm missing the point.
You are missing the point, indeed.
If you see something, and you like it, I am in no position to tell you that you are doing it wrong.
But if you are not enjoying something because you have no idea what it's for, I could point out a way that will change your experience.
I'm telling you that:
a)you're missing something, and
b)point you in the direction to learn more to find out what you're missing.
I can't implant that knowledge into your head, you have to go and actively learn.
This is not specific to art, mind you - which is why others are so irritated with your argument.
You can look at the first transistor ever made, and say that it's stupid because it's larger than a radio lamp, which does the same thing. You can't appreciate that invention without knowing the history of how it affected electronics engineering, the connections, the impact.
You don't need any of that to enjoy electronics. But you need to do that if you want to criticize it, which is what you are doing.
In fact, forget about art.
There's something in the world that a lot of people talk about. You look at it, and say it's stupid. We tell you that it may seem stupid to you, but regardless of your perception, it had an impact on the world, that there is more to that something than what you're getting, and what you need to do to see it.
You sound like a person that says that a book is stupid because they only read the cover, and doesn't know that one can open a book and there will be much more inside.
We are telling you to do that before you judge the book.
It may not be the way to enjoy books, as you put it, but if you don't do it (and decide, in isolation, that the cover is the only important thing), you are depriving yourself of something.
And trying to criticize and correct others based on that level of interacting with books is surely not wise.
On that note:
>Why can't I look at the thing in isolation
This is precisely one of the biggest themes and questions of modern art, most prominently - in late 19th / early-to-mid 20th century.
This question has been explored in depth before you were born.
Taking an art history course will expose you to that exploration, and allow you to answer it for yourself.
We really cannot do this for you, and we surely cannot do it in HN comment section.
This is a good question, but a good answer to it involves referring to a good deal of prior art and philosophy. To boot, the entire notion of symbolism requires a larger context to have things that a symbol can stand for, and symbolism is one of the most ancient forms of art.
The 20th century thinkers and artists have very conclusively shown that there is no such thing as a "thing in itself" when it comes to art in particular. There was never a time when art was a thing in itself.
Art pieces like Cage's 4'33" were made precisely as counter-examples to the claim that you even can make art as a thing in itself.
Of the Black Square, painted by Kazimir Malevich, a Ukrainian, in 1916, I can tell you that it was an important enough piece of work to be officially and specifically banned in the USSR for fifty years (1930 - 1980).
So I hope that, if anything, you'd have enough curiosity to find out why the Soviet regime considered it dangerous.
Which, perhaps, it was. The USSR collapsed in 1991.
Whether there was a connection or not isn't something you'll learn by looking at the painting in itself.
Same goes for Andy Warhol (born to Ukrainian parents in the US, incidentally).
Sincerely hoping that reading this will be a starting point of exploration and learning for you, and not an opportunity to double down on what you have already said.
I remember vividly the day "WWW" showed up in the university's Gopher menu. I asked my friend what it was all about and he said, "I looked at it; it sucked."
