Posted on Tuesday, October 17, 2017 at
Epistemic status: value judgement. The internet has a lot of cat pictures.
Let’s say I upload a cat picture to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). As of writing, their marketing materials claim that a stored object is 99.999999999% likely to stay securely stored in a year, which translates into a 50% chance of losing a given cat picture once every 70 billion years years[1]. In storage/networking jargon, this is 11 9’s of durability, a sort of fast n’ dirty logarithmic shorthand for stating how reliable a service is found by counting the 9s in a percentage.