Pokémon GO launched one week ago and reality has not recovered. The park across from our office, normally four pigeons and a guy with a guitar, now hosts hundreds of humans at 10pm, phones aloft, hunting a Snorlax. It’s the fastest app to 10M+ downloads anyone can remember; Nintendo’s market cap grew by tens of billions (for a game they licensed more than made, which the market eventually noticed); and the servers have been down roughly as often as up, because no capacity plan on Earth included “entire human population, simultaneously, outdoors.”
The engineer subplot: Niantic’s infrastructure story is going to be the scaling case study of the year, with traffic allegedly 50x their worst-case estimate. Thundering herds (drink) meets augmented reality. I’ve watched teenagers explain server status pages to their parents. The whole planet is learning our vocabulary one outage at a time.
Somber counterweight, logged carefully: Tesla disclosed the first known Autopilot fatality. A Model S under Autopilot drove under a crossing truck in Florida in May. My earlier note (“this will go fine until it doesn’t; noting the date”) has its date. The debates (statistical safety vs. individual tragedy, “beta” labels on two-ton objects, marketing names versus system capabilities) are all now live with a body count of one. Autonomy’s postmortem era has begun.
TIL: geospatial sharding, why everyone in one park is the worst-case load pattern. Population density is a hot partition.