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  "The engineer who, at forty, can still use a slide rule or logarithmic table, and make a true drawing, is a failure". – Everett Hughes, 1958. As a fifty-year-old individual contributor: ouch!

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  Today's blog post: a play in one act. https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/09/19/how-the-incident-happened-a-play-in-one-act/

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  I wrote up some thoughts on Boris Tane's argument for putting AI agents on-call. https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/08/22/wild-ai-related-reliability-incidents-are-coming/

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  Software engineering research question I’ve always wondered about (although less relevant in the age of AI): are developers more productive when working in their preferred language compared to working in a language imposed upon them due to business constraints?

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  Bonus blog post for today about my instinctual revulsion towards AI slop: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/06/06/i-cant-bear-to-read-ai-generated-prose/

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  Cloudflare announces a huge layoff and then, the very same day, an availability zone in AWS’s us-east-1 region loses power due to a “thermal event”. Coincidence??? Well, yes

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  I’m very concerned about the aliens already walking among us who are going to insider trade on this market: https://kalshi.com/markets/kxaliens/aliens/kxaliens-27

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  New blog post about flipping the bozo bit: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/05/09/flipping-the-bozo-bit-on-flips-the-learning-off/

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  According to the data, we shouldn’t trust the data

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  I’ve heard of “Nimrod” primarily because of

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  Today's Anthropic outage and the GitHub blog post about their availability inspired me to write this post: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/04/28/life-comes-at-you-fast/

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  RE: https://mas.to/@ezrasf/116501088268674877 We want goblin mode!

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@levelbot/116501160117851626 There’s no way this reading is accurate

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  Tired: old code that calls new code (extensibility!) Wired: old code that breaks new code (latent failures!)

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  Seamlessness is, indeed, a worthwhile goal; systems fail at the seams.

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@regehr/116513311049264041 Is there a burn ward nearby?

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  Saturation: a never-ending series. https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/ql942tw29yl6

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  It's counterintuitive, but you can learn about the nature of successful work from incidents, even though the incident was a failure case. I wrote a blog post about that here: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/05/02/how-incidents-can-teach-us-about-whats-already-working-well/

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  New blog post about Erik Hollnagel's Safety-II model: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/04/26/the-normal-work-of-creating-reliability/

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  All metrics are subjective, it’s just that you don’t see the subjectivity because it’s baked in at metric definition time. What you decide to measure and how you decide to measure it are both subjective decisions.

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  Prediction: Within the next two years, the New York Times will write a story about people who are unable to prove they are not AIs (à la CAPTCHAs).

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  Automation can only solve your reliability problems if that automation is perfect. But if you were capable of writing perfect software, we wouldnt be talking about your reliability problems. Automation is only part of the reliability story, you’ve got to be ready for when it breaks, too. Because I promise you, your reliability automation is going to break. Will you be ready for when it does?

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  RE: https://techhub.social/@giflian/116409536511194822 What a time to be alive

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  Oops! All AI companies!

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  Jim Calabro did an excellent write-up of a recent Bluesky outage, I learned a lot from it. I wrote my own post here: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/04/12/thoughts-on-the-bluesky-public-incident-write-up/

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  Ad blockers, but for AI

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  Managing the risk of saturation, AI edition: https://www.infoworld.com/article/4151196/anthropic-throttles-claude-subscriptions-to-meet-capacity.html

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  If you celebrate Passover, which of these do you commonly eat at a Passover seder?

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  Looking for a little less machine learning and a little more human learning

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  New blog post on the surprising increases in load faced by AI companies and the operational consequences: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/03/07/grow-fast-and-overload-things/