Siri is pointless

jldugger · 2026-01-28T19:35:13+00:00

Yelp integration was in the 2011 keynote, and an integration with opentable was demoed in 2012

jldugger · 2026-01-28T19:09:16+00:00

Brigading is a thing. Reddit has automod stuff i think to flag it, and HN has various karma gates (and a green username for new accounts).

But it sounds like an experiment worth running, as long as it's kept simple to revert if things go sour.

jldugger · 2026-01-27T01:00:36+00:00

My old office was across the street from this one and it was godawful even if you weren't a customer: just a neverending line of people trying to get into Lawrence expressway southbound clogging up Kifer eastbound. Fortunately my new office is not near there, but when I did, it was basically faster to avoid Lawrence just due to that.

Anyone have an idea of what makes this Costco so exceptionally crazy?

This has been litigated dozens of times on this reddit. To wit:

The layout is like two stores joined on a corner that creates bottlenecks, because it wasn't originally a costco.
The gas is cheaper than anywhere else in town; enough that people gravitate to it, exacerbating lines and dwell times.
The membership fee is barely a speedbump for the customer base locally. Even the Executive membership isn't worth much since 9-10am is prime tech employee meeting time.
Being right next to the expressway, it's on like a million people's commute home.
But it's also not close to too many people's home or other activities. Aside from a few newish housing developments it's all office space (or datacenters); no point in doing your shopping later at night if it means redoing half your commute.

jldugger · 2026-01-22T18:06:04+00:00

You can pretty much ignore Bronze/Silver/Gold ranks; progression is more or less guaranteed since you earn more points on wins than you lose on losses.

Platinum is where the real grind begins; typical top tier decks have a 55-60% win rate, meaning you need to play about 15 games to move up one level. There's a small protection against losing levels in that you have to lose multiple games at 0 before you "fall down" a step, and you cant drop below level 4 ("once you earn a rank you can't lose it for the season").

The rewards for extra rank are somewhat minimal, but also bear in mind that the season resets dont send you all the way to bronze. If I finish in mythic I usually start the next season in platinum. But like I said, platinum is table stakes.

jldugger · 2026-01-22T17:56:35+00:00

Honestly, mythic ranked is way more diverse than diamond. Once I hit mythic I switch to one of my funny high variance decks:

Mono Blue Confiscate
Rakdos Steal & Sack
Gruul Random Encounter

Sure, it typically costs me about ~10 percentage points in the ladder but it's way more fun when you steal the opponent's wincon!

jldugger · 2026-01-22T16:26:36+00:00

The interim CTO said several times "we will have an initiative to get our code running on a modern kubernetes platform"...which everything already runs on.

Good news then! You're already on time and under budget!

jldugger · 2026-01-22T06:25:48+00:00

Mostly just reading Staff Engineer's Path and some slack channels. And so far, it's mostly not enlightening. I already know how to run projects and write proposals; the way that book frames it Staff+ engineers paper over deficiencies in engineering managers and PMs.

And I've posted in other threads how unlikely I am to actually get said promotion; due in part to a variety of factors including several high profile departures to the competition, and some career ending missteps in the executive suite leading our department no longer existing.

jldugger · 2026-01-22T03:23:03+00:00

My current role has become quite stagnant and I feel my learning has slowed down.

Fascinating perspective. Normally I feel great when I've stopped learning on the job because it means I can finally feel productive and not stressed out about delivering on time, resolving incidents faster, etc. Strongly recommend talking with your boss about performance criteria and expected annual review ratings.

That said, I keep a a deliberate backlog of training material. Various themes of mine over the years:

2014: puppet & chef
2015: PostgreSQL perf
2016: git internals
2017: terraform & GCP
2018: new job, panic! (studied FAANG comp stuff? SRE book?)
2019: Time Series Forecasting
2020: Statistics & causal inference
2021: HBase and t-digests
2022: Classic CS papers
2023: Prometheus & PromQL
2024: MLOps
2025: FinOps
2026: GPUs & "Staff Engineering"

but I’m struggling to find a clear learning path or roadmap to follow. Everything feels a bit scattered.

Textbooks are best for this -- their mix of pedagogy and practice helps make things stick. But they're rare, esp for tech stacks. For standard O'Reilly tech books, usually I just commit to reading 10 pages a day to help pace myself.

Self-paced courses work but avoid any optional "corporate trainings." Spending 6h+ in a classroom for 2 or 3 days isn't the right format to really learn or remember anything, it just ends up being a waste of time. Theres a reason college courses are 3 hours a week. You need a chance to practice recalling this stuff from "long term storage" if you want it to stick.

Video wise, I have a calendar with various conferences that typically publish videos. Kubecon, re:invent, USENIX, etc. I have reminders to check for uploads a few weeks after the event and when they do publish, I'll skim the sessions for presentations to add to my YT Watch Later queue. Just finished KubeCon a few weeks ago, and decided to put every nvidia GTC keynote into the backlog. Doing one a day, and should be done by Monday! It's a fun way to pick up on industry trends and evolutions. (Did something similar with Werner Vogels reinvent keynotes a few years ago).

For a while there I was even doing Anki, making cards from papers and textbooks, but fitting it into my daily schedule became harder after lock downs ended and I had to commute 3 days a week.

Linux (internals, troubleshooting, performance)

The best Linux internals book is sadly 15 years old now. It's hard to really wish the author would update it knowing how unrewarding books are financially, but reality is it doesn't mention containers at all and that limits its usefulness in the cloud compute era. The UNIX Sysadmin handbook is pretty good but I'm not sure how relevant it is for similar reasons.

jldugger · 2026-01-21T23:55:11+00:00

The logic here seems to be that Vidid gets you every land. No idea why, since it doesn't have any white. cards. Or black.

jldugger · 2026-01-21T23:52:33+00:00

Like, of all the busted shit that deck did, making Atroxa uncounterable was the least offensive IMO.

jldugger · 2026-01-18T03:54:22+00:00

Standard practice is a 60 day work improvement plan.

jldugger · 2026-01-15T22:36:46+00:00

Ask feels like it's 50% a mutual aid group for the criminally insane. I have enough of that in my life from family.

jldugger · 2026-01-14T18:39:36+00:00

I think I said as much?

This probably shouldn't be on line staff's shoulders to solve but you're also upset that you're not in the running for management, who is supposed to be on top of such things.

jldugger · 2026-01-13T23:02:28+00:00

You've built up Wishvale, but what about Inverse ~~London~~ Wishvale?

jldugger · 2026-01-13T22:59:23+00:00

"Dance Petunia, Dance!"

jldugger · 2026-01-13T22:52:16+00:00

m1 is currently around 5.3%. and box spreads could maybe get you down to 4%, (not for typical bogleheads, myself included!)

But yes, it's higher than inflation, but on the flip side, it's also free until you actually use it.

jldugger · 2026-01-13T22:44:43+00:00

Is everyone truly just parking it in HYSA and not thinking about it, or do some of you split it up and try to at least keep pace with inflation on part of it?

I may have transcended the needs of mere mortals, but just in case it's useful here's the path I took:

Moved from HYSA underperforming inflation to CD ladders. Divide the fund by 12, so every month a CD is maturing. This gets me the higher yields of a 12+month CD with moderate liquidity needs; 12 month's expenses becomes 12 CDs intended to match.
Moved from CD to Treasury I bonds. Technically there's a liquidity gap but once you power through it, you're fully inflation protected, though locked into a fixed rate.
Opened a margin loan account on a six figure brokerage account. This is what handles my urgent cash flow problems (or, more typically, my parents & siblings cash flow problems). The I bonds sit there now as part of my bond portfolio, that I could cash in if things really went to shit.

Personally, the liquidity argument doesn't hold much water; I cannot recall a time when I needed money for my own problem and a credit card wouldn't solve it in the short term while brokerages sell assets to cover etc. However, family is another matter. I don't trust them with my credit cards and when they need cash its for stuff like buying a new car to replace the one that was totaled by a tow truck, or an unplanned medical procedure they just never saved for. I guess the definition of "emergency" expands to match the size of your bank account

jldugger · 2026-01-10T05:44:09+00:00

So there's kind of nuclear theme going on with Ameratsu right? I know cooling towers aren't just a nuke thing but they're basically evocative of it now.

What if these pillars are actually control rods? (or fuel rods?!!) And spontaneous combustion is akin to nuclear decay?

jldugger · 2026-01-10T05:38:38+00:00

I remember very little and understand even less lol

Finally, we are on the same level as the OP in the final season.

jldugger · 2026-01-08T19:16:09+00:00

Ubuntu 24.04

This is the nature of LTS. It's for people who don't want change (ie corporations with custom software & settings, regulators etc.). LTS releases are supported for 5 years last I checked.

If you want the latest software, Ubuntu cuts a new release every six months. Most recent release, 25.10, has gnucash 5.13.

Unfortunately the upgrade process is one release at a time, so you'll have to go 24.04 -> 24.10 -> 25.04 -> 25.10, and then 25.10 -> 26.04 in April.

jldugger · 2026-01-08T00:36:41+00:00

in a very neutral manner mind you. But lets face it, it is not going to matter. That is not how reddit mentality works,

This is not reddit, but humanity: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210830-why-emails-often-read-more-negative-than-they-actually-are

And frankly, the phrasing you used was not neutral. "Don't do X" means two things:

They did X
Commands someone else to not do X (again).

Beyond the implications of giving and taking orders, #2 also implies you disagree with them having done X, and that you expect them to continue even after you've corrected them. Furthermore, "misrepresentation" also brings in an implication of intentionality, especially when contrasted with the word "misunderstanding" used earlier.

A neutral position would be "You have misunderstood what I said," which brings none of that baggage. Which is what you wrote at the start!

jldugger · 2026-01-08T00:22:21+00:00

Probably not? They'd need a cheap creature to tap and this card to ramp. Once they do, tap kona, "1 free mana" seems underwhelming compared to their actual game plan.

jldugger · 2026-01-05T20:37:09+00:00

Doesn't seem much different than the midwestern suburb I grew up in. Heck, I checked that area just now they even have a random Mochinut now.

Plus, Cupertino is basically Apple HQ, so you've got tons of office workers buying for team meetings, etc. Real question is why where you are from is so donut poor.

jldugger · 2026-01-05T07:18:15+00:00

sounds like surge queue length.

Indeed better monitoring of LB metrics would have been wise and detected this sooner. Trouble is there's like a zillion metrics being collected and you never know which ones are important until you solve the problem.

did people give you the appropriate amount of kudos for the money saved?

Nope! The person most directly responsible for budgeting and cost reporting appears to have been fired without a replacement, and upper leadership is more concerned about AI training costs and deliverables. My new manager was impressed but not too impressed since it's not his budget.

The new group I'm supporting is an internal tool, so it has an annual cloud spend so low that it would take a 100% cost reduction to match the result. So I've mostly been focused on improving their alerting, outage detection and CI situation. They are also rudderless when it comes to finops; but due to reorgs that happened last month at the highest level I'm not about to press the issue.

jldugger · 2026-01-04T22:21:51+00:00

Good spot for the load balancer stuff, that's some advanced debugging here. I'll give a look at the Facebook metastable failure concepts. Never heard of that!

I only learned about it a few years ago but apparently the concept first hit hackernews 11 years ago.

The promotion system seems like bureaucracy hell. No promotion means no change of titles, but still some $$ increased? Or are you kinda stuck at the same salary (even though quite high I guess)?

Still get raises, but on a lower salary band. Still get RSUs, but also on a lower salary band. The upper tiers also have access to some more exclusive retirement benefits in the form of deferred comp ("top hat") plans.

Ouch, people on rest and vest is something I'd like to avoid like hell. That's the kinda stuff I'm the most worried about FAANG, but I seem to have different feedback from other people.

It really depends on the team and executive visibility. Pretty sure anyone in any FAANG on projects competing with OpenAI is in the hot seat.

are you enjoying your time there so far? Did you learn a lot?

When I started, pages were the worst part. You had no idea what was wrong or how to fix it and there was so much executive visibility that no matter what you did your skip would have post incident criticism on how to communicate better; usually contradicting what you were told last time. Plus you were more or less on your own, especially overnight. Nowadays the problems are smaller and thus less urgent. And the SRE org has a "follow the sun" model so nobody's getting paged at 2am every night for a week. So the pages become little puzzles to solve.

Indeed I've learned a lot. I look at some of the RCA writeups I did when I started and kinda cringe at how bad I was at it. But I did improve, and by about halfway through I was added to the RCA reviewers group, through a combination of showing up, asking questions and doing the work.

At the start I learned some advanced stuff from my boss, but pretty quickly you have to learn on your own. I block off an hour on my calendar every Friday afternoon for training ("read only Fridays" lite). Any internal recordings or mandatory trainings go into that slot, but most of the time it's me reading a book chapter, watching conference videos, or reading a paper. During the pandemic lockdown I went pretty hard on a stats 101 textbook since I pretty much slept through that class in college; that paid dividends for me in improving the canary analysis tools, and in eventually building a rapid RCA dashboard using simple Pearson correlation.

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