hinkley

The things I most disliked about our in house feature toggle system were:

1) the line between toggle and reloadable config is always fuzzy, in part because you don’t know for sure if it’s a toggle until users give their feedback. About half a percent of toggles stick around in perpetuity as either preferences or emergency relief valves for the operations team. That seems small but when you are doing CD aggressively that’s happening to you once a month or every few weeks which makes it a constant companion.

2) you need a system to track and complain about old toggles. If they survive the end of the Epic that birthed them, they become immortal. And you can see variations on Knight Capital play out when they get toggled years after they were supposed to be static.

Feels like something that should be a solved problem though.

Part of my last job was winnowing down a convoluted feature toggle system, rebuilding parts of it on top of a FOSS library that did a fraction of the same work. It had become convoluted enough though that it was materially affecting both our deployment time and our cluster density.

To be a little fair to the original author, despite not really respecting him, I had to file a couple serious PRs upstream to simplify the most tortured parts. He worked around a couple of bug/misfeatures but took the scenic route to do it. Guy “never met an abstraction he didn’t like” is not true because his favorite thing was replacing one abstraction with three. And he was one of those guys who learned big words all from books and so he used definitions nobody under 65 has ever used in conversation.

What did you just call me?

It’s a pretty common failure mode in my experience. Keep management out of testing as long as you can.

I’ve seen that behavior but it usually doesn’t kick in until the mandate 90%, so that’s a shame. Usually I push back on it being a rule because if you have low coverage, you have a team that’s not good at automated testing, and forcing them to write a lot of tests before they’ve gotten good at it always ends poorly. But typically nobody listens and the shitshow begins.

Do swallows not also exist in North America?

The circle of life!

As written you have stated that Porsche is wrong for ignoring this family's complaints. Because they didn't support an unsupported configuration.

Bugs don’t just materialize out of the ether to swarm lights. Not to feed swallows. They are there and you will encounter them if the density is much more than zero.

There are bugs. You photographed bugs. Maybe more than you would have without lights at all, maybe about the same.

Also better lights don’t necessarily mean perfect lights. We do lots of things to reduce harm. Unfortunately sometimes we do them too much and conserve a significant fraction of the original harm by increasing demand.

They also killed mass transit so let’s call it a draw.

Selective enforcement goes both ways and effective employees know this.

You didn’t tell me to do that, so I am not doing it.

You didn’t tell me not to do this, so it’s done.

Knuth seemed more interested in Tony’s notion of “obviously no bugs”. There always seemed to me to be a self-evident flavor to his literate code notions.

I say that as someone who sees Knuth as problematic in other respects starting in the 2010’s. Physics governs so much of computational complexity now that I think the idealized form he presents has transitioned from merely holding us back to being crippling. Only game designers, hyperscalers, and an esoteric few of the rest of us seem to understand the vast gulf between theory and practice that has developed in the five orders of magnitude that compute power has experienced since his first edition.

Many, many things that are considered constant in his world are instead logarithmic to the size of the data being managed, or in the case of very large data sets, order n^1/2 because of speed of light and thermodynamics. That vastly reorders the toolbox, because second shelf algorithms now rival or beat the top shelf ones and some options even farther down now become interesting for novel situations.

A problem I frequently have with setting up testing policies is in convincing people to test what they can reliably test with the tools, and know what they cannot test.

Inconclusive tests to increase automation and coverage accomplish less than nothing. The opportunity cost, the loss of trust, the conflation of the manual testing surface area, are all worse than doing nothing.

The point of testing is to establish a level of trust. That level doesn’t need to be 100%. It can’t be 100% regardless. So you do what you can, and you solve the remaining problem a different way. But you need to know it’s there to address it, and the smoke and mirrors fight that.

> The software is incorrect if it doesn't support the incorrect setup they require.

Is that what you intended to type?

Software is not required to support the requirements of every potential user. Only the ones they mean to support. That’s why Porsche and BMW ignore people complaining about how expensive they are. You aren’t their customer and they don’t want you.

For months after some researchers “proved” our code signing system sound I was still finding security holes in the system. To this day I’m not sure what they proved. That the architecture worked? We’d already proven that to a hundred people.

Just because it works doesn’t mean it’s not broken.

Anyone who has ever wielded a wrench should know that implicitly.

I’ve been a semi autonomous employee at a number of places and I wonder how much that was “Caltrans” and how much it was George the sign maker just making a sign to replace the old one with all the same information as the current sign.

Sometimes you just do things and dare the bosses to say something about it. If they had their way they might have changed it back. But it’s already made and it’s not worth the grief to do anything about it. Too many people like or need George.

“Jaywalking” is partially a psyop by the burgeoning automobile industry to blame the victims instead of the drivers.

I suppose it didn’t work that well because as a rule a car or bike hitting a pedestrian is still almost always at fault.

Unfortunately that’s also how the Seven got away with it like generations before them. I’ve been wondering lately if the private force is a net negative on society.

The origin story for the Union Jack-inspired sidewalks on my university’s quad was the president looking out his window on a snowy day and seeing all of the footprints in the snow and asking the facilities to put diagonals in.

Guess some schools have wiser faculty than others.

I still think the better way to go is to find lawyers who will aggressively seek civil suits against the idiots who hit cyclists.

Two of the prominent members of our club were hit by a drunk driver outside a small town. Nobody died but bikes destroyed, nasty bruises, cracked ribs and vertebrae.

The driver shouldn’t have still had his license based on previous offenses. But his dad was a politician. Mayor I believe, and had been bailing that piece of shit out of trouble for who knows how long. I bet daddy would stop protecting him if he was on the hook for a couple million in damages. And/or corruption charges.

One of the victims was in fact a lawyer but I think he was property law not criminal.

The brain is meant to flush fluids during the night and they think that system isn’t working properly in some patients. So as a treatment that makes some sense.

Car insurance has long moved to trust but verify with repair shops. They let the shop assess the damage to your car, rather than sending their own adjusters. The adjusters they have are used to audit their repair shops and sanction or remove ones that are cheating.

The compensation to the shops is in the form of steering business to them from their agents when customers call and say they’ve been in a wreck.

They could do the same with tire centers. We offer a discount if you get tires from here or there. But I think the problem is that what those companies want to do is not change your rates except when you have a life event, get a new car, or have an accident. Tires would have your rates going up and down, unless they made a AAA type of deal with tire centers where you show your insurance and they give you a discount for the tires. Which perhaps could work.

I don’t know if it “certainly” would be cheaper for them to administer a program and maybe that’s why they don’t. It still takes manpower and maintenance teams to keep the program running and maybe that’s not worth enough dollars per year.

Also as we discovered from the Firestone/Ford debacle, a safe tire on one model of vehicle is not safe on another. So you have to do safety research on every vehicle and tire combo.

Modern CSS has some simpler mechanisms to deal with the light/dark dichotomy now. I translated a blog to support dark mode recently and it wasn't that difficult. The two sticking points were <code> and picking foreground colors that didn't blend in, and the github icon.

The other was Github's icon. But `filter: invert(1)` does a pretty decent job of handling that as long as the icons are black and white.

To be fair, SF is the hilliest city and Seattle is #2 last I checked. But nobody in Seattle complaining about everyone else in Seattle is talking about people sliding into intersections downtown, they’re talking about the number of completely avoidable ditches and accidents in places that are inexcusable.

The first time I went out of my way to research tires I was shocked how much braking distance typical tires lose at 50% wear. I would have expected 50% to be when things first start getting bad, not 25%.

These days I aim to replace my tires at about 50% wear and no later than 60%. New tires make you corner so well it almost feels like a slightly newer car.

I would counter that it depends on the kind of tires you are running and anyone selling tires in Cascadia that aren’t wet rated should be locked up for reckless endangerment.

Seattle isn’t that bad in wet pavement, unless it hasn’t rained. Which only happens about four to six times a year but that’s still enough that people should pay attention.

I lived in Seattle longer than I lived in the Midwest. I’m not talking about people spinning out on big hills, and I never got the impression other people were. It was seeing cars spun out on curves or gentle inclines that rated bagging on Seattleites for being dumb as a box of hammers on the road.

I’ve seen two cars on their roofs on an uphill in Seattle. How the fuck do you even DO that?

And don’t get me started on the theft lane.

Punctures and pinches can take out one tire. As can psycho exes, teenagers whose parents didn’t raise them right, manufacturing defects. And the passenger side tires are more susceptible to sidewall damage from poor parallel parking.

The sting of losing two tires due to a mistake is a lot less than that of losing all four when three are still good. It’s one extra versus three extra tires.

However every time one of your tires goes bad you have to replace all four.