alexpotato

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by alexpotato 3d ago
At a past job I owned both the migration to and running of a centralized alert aggregator. The idea was that any team at the firm could use a standard logging library or Prometheus style metrics to send alerts etc. We were migrating from a
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by alexpotato 3d ago
As always, it boils down to incentives and rule enforcement and this affects humans too. e.g. when Bank of America rewarded employees for getting customers to open accounts, BoA employees started opening fake accounts The reverse is also tr
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by alexpotato 3d ago
> We could have gotten it done faster, but we were well aware of the potential for slop and thus paid an absurd amount of attention to (and tokens for) code quality. For example, there is a 100% test coverage requirement in both server a
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by alexpotato 3d ago
This post reminded me of the story about Jeet Kun Do [0] after Bruce Lee [1] died. JKD was supposed to be a martial art that adapted the best techniques from other martial arts. e.g. "have no style" because your style is constantl
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by alexpotato 4d ago
I def have taste preferences e.g. I like grapefruit better than orange juice. Another example is Sriracha tastes great to me as it's spicy but not too spicy. Too spicy and I just can't taste anything. In other words, I have the sa
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by alexpotato 5d ago
Some books, from off the top of my head, that use interesting color film processing or other "photographs saw something humans can't: - The Sunbird by Wilbur Smith [0] IIRC, archaeologists use side lighting and IR film + lenses to
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by alexpotato 5d ago
Been a lot of talk about how you NEED to use AI to analyze logs etc. Figured we should talk about how to do it the old fashioned way.
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by alexpotato 6d ago
An interesting story about the Photic Sneeze Reflex [0]: it's one of the things that fighter pilots are screened for. The reasoning is that they can't have a pilot looking down and dark ground, look up to scan for enemy fighters a
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by alexpotato 6d ago
Dave Beazley has a great talk about using Python built ins. Def worth a watch as he is funny but also super cool to see someone use a REPL this way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyDLAutA88s
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by alexpotato 6d ago
> Fair enough they advertise a higher precisio This is, for me, a game changer. The new AirPods have both: - the ability for the CASE to send a sound using Find My - have sub-foot accuracy when using a kind of "radar" via the p
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by alexpotato 7d ago
> Insurance and car are separate today because driver and car are separate today. This is an excellent point.
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by alexpotato 7d ago
The most likely scenario at this point it: - autonomous cars cause fewer accidents - so either insurance will be cheaper for them - AND/OR human driving car insurance goes up - even if only one happens, the relative cost of insurance w
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by alexpotato 7d ago
Two quotes I love about this: "I was in the top 100 in tennis. Then I asked myself: 'what if I started training like Andy (Roddick). So I did and next thing I know I'm in the top 8 in the world" - Mardy Fish [0] "Ko
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by alexpotato 7d ago
A lot of this is also moving to SWIFT (as in banking system) messages. I guess in some ways this is better but SWIFT is famously a giant pain in the ass to install and support.
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by alexpotato 7d ago
There is a great story about movies and VHS/Betamax. The movie studios were pretty sure that people would want to buy movies and watch them at home. What they weren't sure about was how to price the movies because this was a brand
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by alexpotato 8d ago
> - Full refunds are paid within 7 business days for cards (20 calendar days for other payment methods) I remember on the show Airline (docuseries about Southwest Airways) one of the passengers didn't want to fly and asked for a re
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by alexpotato 8d ago
I placed an ad on Facebook as an experiment just to see what the conversion rate would be. It's for real estate so you can't select age ranges. The view count grouped by age (highest views to lowest) was: - 65 to 75 - 55 to 65 - 4
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by alexpotato 8d ago
I owned the "broker FTP" service at a hedge fund. There was a project in 2021 to talk to the banks and brokers that we connected and ask them to upgrade their keys and ciphers to modern versions. IIRC, the oldest key/cipher w
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by alexpotato 9d ago
> What they are proposing, in most cases, is a dashboard or website that displays the status of a process that is not ready to be automated, built to track a workflow that does not yet warrant tracking. The tool has not solved a problem
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by alexpotato 10d ago
They were usually small outages that we caught before they got out of hand. If you never have outages, then you need to start getting either creative with the "table top" exercises or you set up a test environment that is very pro
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by alexpotato 11d ago
I was the head of a global SRE team at a top tier hedge fund. We started doing a weekly meeting where whoever was on call would do a table top exercise of an outage that happened the prior week. The idea was to have someone else be the simu
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by alexpotato 11d ago
I get the theme of this post. I also get the theme of DHH and Hashimoto talking about how exciting LLMs are and how much they are getting done. I've also spent the last 10 years of my life feeding my family with my tech skills which ar
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by alexpotato 11d ago
Been doing a lot of interviewing lately. Despite not having written code for about 6 months due to using Claude etc, I've surprised myself with how much the "muscle memory" of leetcode etc has come back to me. I say this b&#x
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by alexpotato 12d ago
Past job had MCPs for the following: - Loki - Prometheus - Grafana - Incident.io - GitHub for our codebase - A custom MCP for our server inventory/nodes Having all of them made it trivial for the LLM to start with an alert, search the
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by alexpotato 13d ago
There is a bit of a trap for smart people with high agency where they assume "well, someone else will just go do <thing>". They assume this b/c they probably have multiple examples in their own life of being the only pe
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by alexpotato 13d ago
How would you know if it's there? I ask rhetorically but I also imagine that at some point there will be an app that tells you and then people will vote with their dollars to the places that don't have them.
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by alexpotato 14d ago
> we had to retract because significance started dropping almost the day the paper was approved. It's stories like this that raise my p(we are in a simulation).
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by alexpotato 14d ago
Speaking as a SRE/DevOps guy with almost 20 years of experience: There are no solutions, only tradeoffs. I'll give some examples: Firm 1 had a single server running tron [0] for ALL scheduling of processes. Pros: very easy to see
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by alexpotato 14d ago
> Freshly harvested birch is flexible, allowing it to be woven into complex forms. Once woven and shaped, those fibers create a rigid structure that resists sagging beneath heavy loads while remaining lightweight. There are stories of Na
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by alexpotato 14d ago
With regards to how skill is more important than technology in these other form of carrying: A couple years ago I read Survival of the Bark Canoe by John McPhee [0]. There are several discussions of a crooked knife and how it was the "

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