Will be interesting to know if Soham ever worked for an AI startup that was trying to “revolutionize tech hiring”. Him passing the interview and working for them would be the greatest indictment of their product then, lol.

Personally, I don’t feel the need to join in with everyone saying how tacky Bezos’s wedding was. If you’re vaguely familiar with Indian oligarch weddings, Bezos’s wedding feels like a quiet affair in comparison. 😅. A price tag of “only” 66m is like Walmart wedding territory.

As widespread use of AI for “homework” becomes the norm, I wonder if Western countries will adopt the Asian approach of … having your grades entirely be determined by closed book, hand-written tests and exams, where you’re not allowed your phone, or calculators, or computers.

This might be one anecdote, but what a soul-crushing environment to work in, with no leadership, no engineering mission, no camaraderie between coworkers, no clear ownership … just isolation and disorientation. And to think of all the VCs who said go work for Twitter 2.0 …

RT @jamesacowling: The #1 rule of scalable systems is to avoid congestion collapse. This is when a system slows down, starts timing out, t….

2021 was 4 years ago, which is quite a long period of time, but it just doesn’t *feel* that long ago to me. I vividly remember 2017, 2018, 2019, and even 2020. But 2021 - 2025 has become something of a blur that I can’t really tell apart. 🙁.

For the first time ever, our wait at @plow_sf was just 10mins (as opposed to ~1h). The trick, I guess, is to stop by on a weekday (which I’ve never done before). This place def ties for my top breakfast spot, the other being Lou’s Cafe, which makes the best breakfast sandwiches.

RT @_joemag_: Recently, I've been discussing throttling with one of our teams. It's a super deep topic, probably deeper than it gets credit….

Massive, massive, absolutely massive #nokings protest on Market Street in SF happening right now. 🇺🇸❤️

Nice set of action items as well. - move toward “fail open” architecture.- not everything needs strong, instantaneous, global consistency. - don’t run your monitoring on the infra it’s monitoring . Funnily, I blogged about some of these very lessons back in 2019 (2nd image).

Full report for yesterday’s Google outage. - not feature flagging a new code path.- null pointer crashing a binary when reading empty fields from Spanner.- remediation causing a thundering herd as there was no exponential backoff.- which required manual throttling to recover from

A lot of times, it’s hard to even know what’s the best design unless you’ve tried out different ideas. Often the best ideas happen *when* you’re in the middle of prototyping, and it becomes obvious another design works better. AI (as of now) can’t make such course corrections.

AI can vastly cut down the speed of prototyping, no doubt. Unless you work on a team where you design every single API, every interface right down to every class, method, error returned etc in a word document first, before writing any code, I don’t see how AI can do it all.

Am I the only person who needs to prototype a few API’s before it becomes obvious what the right design/layering/abstractions are?. I doubt (at least when working with complex, existing codebases) telling AI agents to implement design docs will produce the most optimal design.

Amazon/AWS famously use a shared-nothing “cell based” architecture which allows for complete isolation, where everything from config changes to deployments happen in “waves”. AFAICT, it’s always been the one distinct way in which Amazon’s distributed infra differs from Google.

Preliminary GCP outage report is out, and as expected, it’s a bad config change pushed out globally by some automation. A similar incident from 2020 comes to mind (though I bet there are countless other such incidents due to bad global config changes).

The only info we have so far about the GCP outage is that an “underlying shared dependency” required recovery in multiple regions. It’s been years since I’ve closely followed outages, but I’d wager it was a config change to a shared, global service, most likely a control plane.

Dinner at the newly opened Jules, and the pizza was definitely worth the trouble it took to get the reservation. They were awesome with accommodations, and the menu can be made vegetarian friendly.

This is the work of all those who hated “DEI” so much (which mostly involved performative bullshit like using cringe language, doing trainings, writing letters and other stupid gestures) they voted for the anti-science, anti-research, anti-STEM party. Well done, everyone.

RT @MarcJBrooker: New blog post, about some of my favorite papers from this year's HotOS program. Love Little's law? Hate fork? Think stati….