Quick takes on the recent OpenAI public incident write-up

FAA data shows 30 near-misses at Reagan Airport – NPR, Jan 30, 2025 The amount of attention an incident gets is proportional to the severity of the incident: the greater the impact to the organization, the more attention that post-incident activities will get. It’s a natural response, because the greater the impact, the more unsettling … Continue...

The California-based blogger Kevin Drum has a good post up today with the title Why don’t we do more prescribed burning? An explainer. There’s a lot of great detail in the post, but the bit that really jumped out at me was the history of the enormous forest fires that burned in Yellowstone National Park … Continue reading The danger...

The sorry state of dashboards It’s true: the dashboards we use today for doing operational diagnostic work are … let’s say suboptimal. Charity Majors is one of the founders of Honeycomb, one of the newer generation of observability tools. I’m not a Honeycomb user myself, so I can’t say much intelligently about the product. But … Continue reading...

Today’s public incident writeup comes courtesy of Brendan Humphries, the CTO of Canva. Like so many other incidents that came before, this is another tale of saturation, where the failure mode involves overload. There’s a lot of great detail in Humpries’s write-up, and I recommend you read it directly in addition to this post. What … Continue...

Well, who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes? – Chico Marx (dressed as Groucho), from Duck Soup: In the ACM Queue article Above the Line, Below the Line, the late safety research Richard Cook (of How Complex Systems Fail fame) notes how that we software operators don’t interact directly with the system. Instead, … Continue reading Your lying...