I always gets the sense around a third of the way through his articles that whoever reads his drafts just gives up. It goes from wordy and repetitive to wordy, repetitive, filled with rage-bait exasperation and more filler than content.
Give the man a 2000 word budget and he could probably write a better article and cover the same information
It's the same sort of pedantry as correcting someone's use of their/there/they're. Yes, technically you're correct in what you're talking about, but arguing minutiae that is probably not relevant to the overall discussion.
_allegedly_
Until there's evidence of the CVE's the model found and the severity of them etc. it's just a statement and "trust me bro" vibes wrapped in a PR puff piece
His articles conflate quality with quantity. An aggressive edit with a more coherent structure would improve the message and sound less like a stream of consciousness rambling. Advertising his newsletter as "over 7000 words" is like bragging about LOC, it's an impressive number but doesn't itself indicate whether it's a necessary amount or if it's useful.
Unfortunately though I can't really find anyone else looking at this same information, so for now I have to wade through these newsletters to pick the gold from the shit
Most of the time checking for "typical" thresholds for infrastructure will yield more noise than signal. By typical thresholds I mean things like CPU Usage %, Memory Consumed and so on. My typical recommendation for clients who want to implement infrastructure is "Don't bother". You are better off in most cases measuring impact to user-facing services such as web page response times, task completion times for batch jobs and so on.
If I have a client who is insistent on monitoring their infrastructure I tell them to monitor different metrics.
For CPU, check for CPU IOWait
For memory, check for Memory swap-in rate
For disk, check for latency or queue depth
For network, check for dropped packets
All you want to check at an infrastructure layer is whether there is a bottleneck and what that bottleneck is. Whether an application is using 10% or 99% of available memory is moot if the application isn't impacted by it. The above metrics are indicators (but not always proof) that a resource is being bottlenecked and needs investigation.
Monitor further up the application stack, check for error code rates over time, implement tracing to the extent that you can for core user journeys, ignore infrastructure-level monitoring until you have no choice
There's a point at which you need to actually specifically refer to what low-hanging fruit there is, "trust me bro" and "do your own research" shows you either don't know or don't have conviction in what you're saying
Was this not specific enough, from my previous comment?
> For example, I run a database of information that needs constant updating. I set up automated fact checking (with a human looped in), that enables nearly live updates, which would be incredibly expensive without an LLM. There are so many projects, big and small, just like that one, that are being created right now.
Of those 800+ commits, how many were for the prompt progress capture as compared to the actual code? It also feels contradictory to state something was both "production ready" and in the next sentence say "respectable alpha version". To my mind at least the two are very different levels of completion.
The idea that there's a global cabal of ultra-wealthy real-estate owners who have globally conspired to control people to go back to the office holds about as much weight in my mind as the idea that there's a global cabal of ultra-wealthy who have globally conspired to create a virus to control the population.
Covid was an outlier event, and the outcomes that occurred as a result of it will revert to the mean over time.
Is that what we are calling business now? As if industry players don't buy media outlets precisely to push their narratives (look at tech outlets, crypto outlets, pharma etc). How is this a "cabal"? It's cheaper to just talk to your friend who owns business insider and also invests in the same RE funds to ask "journalists" to research on the topic.
Also, plenty midmanagement in many industries love RTO: it's harder to justify their roles (and what they got promoted for) unless they have bags of flesh to oversee. It's not a cabal of midmanagement. It's just midmanagement slow pushing for RTO internally.
The conspiracy theories are frequently based on the optimistic idea that the world is under somebody's control. Mind you, it's a bad control, but the idea is still optimistic because we can theoretically have a revolution and put it under "good" control.
The reality is much more depressing -- nobody is in the control. Not the Illuminati, not the Jewish bankers, and not the C-level executives conspiring to force RTO to maximize their investments in the (unrelated) commercial real estate. These all are just conspiracy theories.
You can believe COVID happened however you want — but it’s documented reality that the elites practiced exactly the authoritarian response they used mere months before the virus outbreak.
Similarly, those same elites wrote a book about how they want to use the authoritarian measures they implemented during COVID as a gateway to imposing their vision on society. Again, documented reality.
> it’s documented reality that the elites practiced exactly the authoritarian response they used mere months before the virus outbreak.
Isn’t that point of training and exercises? To be ready and have a plan when the situation you trained for actually occurs?
If you read the John Hopkins’ Center for Health Security link you provided, they did similar exercises in 2018 ("Clade X"), 2005 ("Atlantic Storm"), and 2001 ("Dark Winter").
To me this doesn’t prove that there is a conspiracy of any kind.
It simply and reassuringly shows that some of those who’s responsibility it is to be prepared for and help us collectively get through these kind of situations are actually taking their jobs somewhat seriously.
I guess you could call that a conspiracy. A conspiracy to do their jobs well.
Aside from conspiracy theories, remote working was already a thing before Covid, Covid just accelerated the process and showed to everyone that it worked. IMHO what we are now seeing is a "counter-revolution", an attempt to get the genie back into the bottle, and those are mostly doomed to fail...
It’s more there’s a bunch of people who put their life savings into cheap structures on expensive land in SF and Seattle. If the next generation of high income professionals doesn’t have to buy their shitty 100 year old money pit, they’ve now taken a loss on the single biggest purchase they’ve ever made while the schools they bought for get worse. Many of these folks work at places like Amazon.
No conspiracy needed for a bunch of people to act in their own perceived best interest and work backwards to a justification.
Because the leadership who makes decisions, or even just has the potential to voice their opinions and have them weighted, own real-estate.
Better yet, those leaders maybe also love exerting control over their employees and find this more enjoyable in an office environment.
Companies ARE NOT a democracy. In my mind, there's a huge overlap between being high company leadership and also being a self-serving narcissist. Are we then surprised that narcissists prefer to do things in their own self interests, and prefer to boss people around while looking at them? To me, that's not surprising at all. I think people don't understand these decisions aren't made by hundreds of people, but rather less than a handful per company.
I think if you reframe company leadership as egotistical man children, then it becomes very intuitive. Most companies aren't that, but in my mind, there is serious overlap between being a career executive and having narcissistic tendencies.
Is it that Sun was particularly respectable, or that it disappeared before the current run of subscription-driven lock-in revenue strategies took off? I can't imagine any reason to think they wouldn't be doing the same thing as everyone else if they were still around as an independent company today
Give the man a 2000 word budget and he could probably write a better article and cover the same information
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