And I am stealing this quote
With attribution
Someone please hire this person.
Actually, wait no, give me 3 weeks to figure out if I can hire this person in my new Team Lead role. And then if I can’t, absolutely fair game here.
Because this is the best wording I have yet found around a very very difficult concept to explain in distributed systems.
People love to talk about the immortality of the machine, but I'm a mechanical engineer, so I know they delude themselves. Most machines are far more mortal than flesh.
How long does a machine last? A car is a very solid machine, expensive, precision designed, and you're lucky if you get more than three decades out of them.
Your enemy is not the flesh. It's entropy. It's the death knell of the energy imbalance. If you want to live as a complex machine you will, by necessity, generate a great deal of entropy until your machine breaks irrevocably.
You want to be immortal? Then don't worship the machine, worship the stone, the forest. Seek that which is either simple enough to never know death or diffused enough to accept every death.