@kloenk @navi Back when 128 kB was the limit for argv+envp, Google was hitting it too because they passed all the configuration for their whole software stack on the command line as --long-option=value switches.

Their solution? Compress the command line. So every binary started by ungzipping argv[1] and parsing it to get the configuration.

The person explaining this to me saw my horrified face, and said with the perfect Hide The Pain Harold smile: "a series of individually completely rational and reasonable decisions led to this." and I have been thinking a lot about it since.

@hipsterelectron @kloenk @navi The main insight I've acquired about how Googlers think is that they're used to working at Google scale, which is only relevant in FAANG companies, but when you're at Google everything is designed to make you forget that the outside world exists and is important; so your mind gets used to thinking *always larger*.

If you're designing software for a single machine, or a rack of servers, Googlers won't really understand you and you'll talk right past each other. If it doesn't scale to thousands of machines (or even millions), it has no value to them.