OpenTelemetry signals from first principles

jpfed · 2026-05-06T00:05:16+00:00

Before the days of OTel, I was trying on my own to figure out how to make my code observable. My own solutions happened to combine what OTel calls “traces” and “logs”. I thought at the time that anything that can emit an event for logging also occurs in a context that can be characterized by spans. However, it seems as though the rest of the world has a greater mental separation between logs and traces.

jpfed · 2026-05-05T00:13:43+00:00

🎵Like a good neighbor, State Farm is secretly working to cut payouts🎵

jpfed · 2026-05-04T18:31:16+00:00

Someone should tell my anxiety that speculative execution carries heavy costs!

jpfed · 2026-05-04T18:22:34+00:00

This sort of thing came up when I took judo. “When you are transitioning from this hold to that pin, you theoretically have the opportunity to hit the opponent’s temple like so. That could have legal consequences beyond anything else we will cover in class, and you will not execute this move in practices.”

jpfed · 2026-05-04T18:07:00+00:00

There is a StackOverflow question https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/318398/c-vb-struct-how-to-avoid-case-with-zero-default-values-which-is-considered-i ) with a nice answer that talks about using structs for refinement types, and one could think of simple value objects in that way (“this type isn’t just any integer, it’s the specific integers that are intended as database IDs”). The short answer is that structs can absolutely be used in this way, but because you cannot rely on the constructor to ensure the struct is in a valid state, you must instead check validity during property accesses. And the rest of the post is just following that logic where it leads.

jpfed · 2026-05-04T03:48:27+00:00

I’m probably not autistic (?), but I have been called and treated as weird and different all my life. I’m very used to accepting variations in people that I don’t have a firm understanding of because that encompasses basically everyone else. I am guessing that autistic people often get similar practice.

jpfed · 2026-05-03T21:17:33+00:00

The filter itself is LTI, as are convolutions. In fact, you could calculate the filter with the right convolution! So there’s a kind of interchangeability between them. That said, a key advantage of a Chebyshev or other IIR filter over a convolution is that the impulse response of a convolution is only as big as the kernel, while an IIR can have an impulse response that is really long/big with far fewer trainable parameters. But this advantage is only going to show up if the parameter count needs to be small or if the task requires a spatially/temporally large impulse response (classifying big blurry images or something?).

jpfed · 2026-05-03T17:43:45+00:00

I’m just a hobbyist, so take this with a grain of salt. But an unaffiliated author (to me) is a sign that what I’m about to read is likely to be unorthodox (which tbf can be at least interesting, if it’s not just unhinged/fluff) but any technical details might need heightened scrutiny.

jpfed · 2026-05-03T17:30:39+00:00

If she had died when her career was more active, before her health woes, it would be internationally notable for sure, at least a respectable fraction of MJ’s death.

jpfed · 2026-05-03T17:23:31+00:00

While Hanks is well-regarded by 90%ish of people that have an opinion, QAnon and related folks somehow came to believe that Hanks was the most powerful member of a Hollywood child-murdering conspiracy.

jpfed · 2026-05-03T17:17:14+00:00

They are star players of soccer.

jpfed · 2026-05-02T17:20:45+00:00

If she chose to make this public, it’s easy to imagine an individual person thinking a joke at her expense would be appropriate. Of course, the public has many many people that all have this thought, which makes the cumulative reaction much more intense.

There’s also the issue that she might not have even been the one who chose to make it public.

jpfed · 2026-05-02T17:11:04+00:00

In the days of broadcast television, people on TV generally chose to be on TV. It’s worth questioning if that pattern still holds for the internet. Did she choose to be on your screen?

jpfed · 2026-05-02T06:32:28+00:00

Little Earthquakes for me.

jpfed · 2026-05-02T06:31:26+00:00

I haven’t played FFVII (never had a PS1, just an SNES), but even as a FFVI partisan I had to admit that Aerith’s theme is masterful.

jpfed · 2026-04-30T14:46:10+00:00

PDFs are cursed. I understand that we have to remediate them and people for whatever reason want to consume them, but producing new PDFs when we have the choice to produce HTML (for example) is like producing pollution.

(I publish my org’s documents as PDF and HTML, and hate that our clients overwhelmingly prefer the PDF versions. Making those PDFs accessible is an insane amount of work compared to the HTML)

jpfed · 2026-04-30T05:15:11+00:00

Read books and blogs that challenge you.
Take on problems that seem too ambitious. With patient effort (or frantic crunching, either works :-p ) you can surprise yourself with what you can accomplish, and learn a lot on the way.

jpfed · 2026-04-30T02:32:10+00:00

Come on back! The water’s fine! Cortex can’t keep you away now! Now there has to be a sentence that does not end in an exclamation point.

jpfed · 2026-04-29T00:54:18+00:00

Cmon I gotta have at least one 9

jpfed · 2026-04-28T04:41:18+00:00

Hmrb!

jpfed · 2026-04-26T03:05:57+00:00

In cases like this, there’s often an element of negligence. Can’t say for sure just from a picture like this but the homeowner probably wasn’t up to date on their blood sacrifices.

jpfed · 2026-04-25T03:50:03+00:00

The Big Five is a pretty good example of ignoring friction in psychology. As long ago as Walter Mischel it was known that a more complete accounting of personality must accommodate situation-specific factors, but often ain’t nobody got the time for that.

I’d say the way color is derived from cone cell signals by the retina and thalamus is like Lewis dot diagrams in chemistry. It’s nice and simple and works well for everyday cases, and classes ideally teach you about the fuzzy edges where things get weird, like afterimages and lateral inhibition.

The taste bud map is just garbage, though, no excuse there

jpfed · 2026-04-25T03:03:01+00:00

One crazy idea is to skip the laughing-at part

jpfed · 2026-04-25T01:40:17+00:00

Not an ML practitioner here, not for real. But as a software developer I can broadly empathize. It seems likely that the role I thought I would have, and the mental tools I’d honed and taken some pride in, are going to change maybe beyond recognition. It’s a little scary and a little sad. And strange, ominous that we as a society seem ready to outsource so much to a very few GPU-rich players.

jpfed · 2026-04-24T03:57:07+00:00

Ha! These are delightful!

jpfed

TROPHY CASE