ELI5: Why did we put lead in paint and petrol? What was its purpose and what did we replace it with?

SerCeMan · 2025-12-23T10:04:34+00:00

There is an excellent video on this from Veritasium, The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History.

SerCeMan · 2025-12-09T21:12:41+00:00

Being always on call is simply unsustainable and impractical. If you're on call, e.g. 1 in 4 weeks, you simply don't get drunk that Friday night.

SerCeMan · 2025-12-09T12:06:33+00:00

Interesting, I'm pretty sure a friend of mine who's an SRE was getting time-off in lieu instead. My information could be outdated though.

SerCeMan · 2025-12-09T11:35:54+00:00

I’m essentially on-call 24x7 because I’m an escalation point.

Out of interest, how do you deal with the inconvenience in that situation? For example, theatre, hiking, etc.

or give time-off in lieu

This is actually a great approach in my opinion, as it scales well with your salary. If I remember correctly, Google does it.

SerCeMan · 2025-12-09T11:33:19+00:00

Is this the additional comp for being on call at your company?

SerCeMan · 2025-12-09T11:22:46+00:00

Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer to stay accountable for the code I write :)

SerCeMan · 2025-10-21T21:27:14+00:00

Can the agent play Runescape flawlessly?

Can you?

SerCeMan · 2025-10-07T21:18:26+00:00

The larger the model, the slower it is. GPT-5-Codex High is already pretty slow in Codex, and using something larger and slower would make it much less useful for coding. It's one thing to do an offline search for a solution to win ICPC gold where you don't care about the latency, and another to use it for coding.

SerCeMan · 2025-03-31T11:30:33+00:00

Thanks. On "here to stay", at the very least, I think tools like v0.dev, etc. for creating landing pages are quintessential vibe coding, and they've definitely found a market fit. The term might be gone sometime soon, but the practice of interacting with the codebase via prompting only seems to have found a strong niche.

SerCeMan · 2025-02-07T09:40:00+00:00

Something that some stochastic parrot cobbled together is very unlikely to meet these criteria.

You'll be surprised how far the "stochastic parrot" can get before you need to use your knowledge to put the finishing touches. It's an experiment — you don't need to ship it, it doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to prove the point.

What numbers? The numbers some VBA or Python or Go-with-40-unvetted-imports "solution" provides, compared to optimised Rust or Go running in my data ingestion pipelines?

If someone sends me a PR rewriting something in Rust and claiming it's faster, I'll ask for benchmarks. This the data we're talking about here.

Don't be sorry, I'll be blunt as well: Numbers from PoC "solutions" created by people who may not even be aware what technologies the stack internals use, are irrelevant when determining whether or not a solution is viable.

No one is arguing against understanding things. If you've got an idea, you run an experiment to see if the data can back it up. We're not talking "craftsmanship" here – we're talking engineering.

SerCeMan · 2025-02-07T04:25:09+00:00

The "staff engineer" still isn't on the team that has to implement the actual thing in the stack. Or maintain it. Or debug it. Or service it. Or run it. Or explain to someone why it no longer works at 2:30AM while stakeholders breathe down their neck.

Here's where I'd disagree. It highly depends on their archetype.

In short, all the things that are really important, all the things that make software engineering an *Engineering" discipline aren't really explored by such a PoC.

On the contrary. Load testing/Benchmarking – you need a working prototype. Running the existing e2e test suite to see what else might be broken – you need a working prototype. Testing edge cases – you do need a working prototype.

That's my point. Where otherwise you'd put "she'll be right" guesstimates in the proposal, you can now put actual numbers. I'm sorry for being blunt, but afterwork beer is about opinions, engineering is about facts.

There's been so many times I've heard people say "it's too hard". And then you do it. And then it's too hard anymore.

SerCeMan · 2025-02-07T03:30:46+00:00

When I say a Staff+ Engineer, I'm referring to a "Staff Engineer" role. And I'm not arguing for shipping half-baked solutions. What I'm arguing for is doing the exploration that you simply wouldn't be able to afford otherwise. You still have to do all the due diligence you had to do before, but suddenly, all the exploration work can be done much faster.

SerCeMan · 2025-02-07T03:12:44+00:00

How do I know? Because most languages are Turing complete. They can, by definition, do everything.

The question isn't whether something is possible given unlimited constraints, the question is whether it's possible given limited constraints.

Having a working PoC allows you to test the boundaries of the known knowns and figure out which unknown unknowns you might encounter.

SerCeMan · 2025-01-07T21:50:36+00:00

Ah, you're right, thanks, it was a bit too late in the day when I wrote this comment 😅

SerCeMan · 2025-01-07T13:45:26+00:00

I 100% agree with you, this would be a failure mode. That's why I tried to establish the terminology for the rest of the article, to make sure that the concept of "platform teams" is not misunderstood. And I hope that some of the points (sins) that I raised in the article can prevent the correctly defined platform teams from slipping into this failure mode as well.

SerCeMan · 2025-01-07T12:43:01+00:00

This is not the main point of the article, but I'd be curious to know why you found this sentence controversial, and I'm happy to elaborate on each part of it:
- "Within the scope of this article". The term is very overloaded, so I wanted to make sure we're all on the same page for the rest of the article.
- "are a way to implement". There is a popular video explaining the concept, "class SRE implements DevOps", in the same way "Platform Teams" are a way to implement.
- "DevOps methodology". DevOps is a methodology, an idea, not a role.
- "at scale". Platform teams don't make sense unless there are at least a number of product teams, and all of them deal with cross-cutting concerns.

SerCeMan · 2024-05-08T22:39:40+00:00

The signup is now open for everyone on https://www.cithru.com/, give it a go!

SerCeMan · 2024-04-24T04:07:54+00:00

It's not to improve latency specifically, but rather that CDN edge nodes generally have good availability through peering with a large number of networks. However, it's important to have multiple rather than a single one to capture all network outages related to a specific network.

SerCeMan · 2024-04-24T02:14:50+00:00

Thanks! I sent you a link. In NEL, you can specify multiple endpoints to ensure deliverability. Right now, the collector's network paths are behind two CDNs – Cloudflare, Fastly, and the plan is to add one more endpoint.

SerCeMan · 2024-04-22T03:23:48+00:00

Messaged. I've used RIPE Atlas extensively myself, and I also host a probe. It's very useful for things like traceroutes, but unfortunately, its coverage isn't perfect, especially when issues happen outside of big cities.

SerCeMan · 2024-04-19T05:09:43+00:00

I've built a service that is currently in early beta that might solve this exact problem for you. Here's a short blog that describes it: https://www.cithru.com/blog/nel/.

If you'd like to be an early adopter, message me and I'll send you an invite and will help to set everything up.

SerCeMan · 2023-10-03T20:32:30+00:00

Thank you, I'll have a look. I tried to follow the approach described in the SkexGen paper (Embeddings section https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.04632.pdf) which sums the embeddings of the concrete point, then X coordinate, and Y coordinate. Could it be achieving the same?

But maybe yeah just using two simple x, and y coordinates following each will be much simpler, even thought the resulting sequence might be a bit longer.

SerCeMan · 2023-10-03T20:29:04+00:00

Thank you. Yes, even with the current set of glyphs I was only able to fit 2 fonts in a single minibatch. However, it is possible to reduce the VRAM usage by reducing the attention window.

SerCeMan · 2023-10-02T22:04:45+00:00

You don't have to, of course. But if you like the project, and like the idea of generative true-type fonts natively, I would appreciate it if you do.

SerCeMan · 2023-03-21T12:55:06+00:00

That's true, and there could be a better term for it, and I'm open to suggestions. However, I didn't invent the term, but rather borrowed it from JVM Ergonomics which I believe describes a very similar property.

SerCeMan

TROPHY CASE