"Ask Gemini" is the new "Ask Jeeves"

Every year, I give up not eating Cadbury mini eggs for Lent. And I'm not even Catholic! Heck, I'm not even Christian!

The difference between cucumbers and pickles is jarring.

There’s no clast like an iconoclast

The consequences of being able to generate code with AI much more quickly than we can validate that code is Nature’s way of teaching us about Erik Hollnagel’s ETTO Principle. https://www.erikhollnagel.com/ideas/etto-principle/index.html

Further ado is underrated

Do they even HAVE humours?

LLMs can't be conscious because they lack pineal glands. And, as every educated person knows, that's where the soul lives.

The three skills with a lot less overlap than you’d expect: 1. Ability to code. 2. Ability to perform well in a coding interview. 3. Ability to validate code.

🎶grilling meat softly with his tongs grilling meat softly... with his tongs...

GitHub's had some availability issues lately. Their CTO wrote a blog post with some details about recent incidents. I wrote a quick post with my reaction here: surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/03/12/q...

alarming if literal: troubleshooting

Oil crisis 2: [we should all be driving] electric [cars] boogaloo

someone at the pentagon frantically typing “Claude, open the strait of Hormuz for me, quickest possible strategy, make no mistakes.”

i am hearing that any draft would only involve verified bluesky users

Maybe this is a Brewster’s Millions type scenario but it’s about losing popular support rather than money

One of the downsides of being Jewish is that it feels wrong to use the exhortation “My brother in Christ”.

Remember to set your clocks on fire tonight.

New blog post on the surprising increases in load faced by AI companies and the operational consequences: surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/03/07/g...

Are waffles the only food that’s ironed?

I wrote about one of my favorite topics, saturation, for @resilienceinsoftware.org : resilienceinsoftware.org/news/11475336

I was a teenager when “Go to your room” was a punishment and not the same as saying “Go to your arcade/shopping mall/video chat room/infinite music and video library/recording booth/photo studio.”

Is it cars? I bet it’s cars.

At least the War on Protein has ended

There are no tashen like hamantashen

tough to be tender

military-vs-industrial complex

The laser has become the lasee. apnews.com/article/mili...

Stationary Wilburys

Boston news looking out for us all

Example of normalization of deviance: when you tune your alerts to be less sensitive (e.g., longer window). Note: normalization of deviance is not inherently bad! Your initial operational definition of "deviant" was really too narrow, leading to harmful false positive alerts.

I feel like we’re in the “using x-ray machines in shoe stores” phase of AI adoption.

I actually got the failure mode wrong: it was not an unscoped query, it was a misinterpreted flag. Wrote a quick blog post: surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/02/21/q...

this is a really good writeup even by the high standard Ive seen of their past incident write-ups.

Accidentally missing a scope for a query, resulting system behavior is "match everything", with disastrous consequences. another entry in a never-ending series. (See also: missing WHERE clause in a SQL query) blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-o...

From a discussion in RISF based on the old IBM adage, an updated version for the modern era:

Was watching this video by @jamellebouie.net and couldn’t help thinking of the 1991 SNL sketch: ”Campaign ’92: The Race To Avoid Being The Guy Who Loses To Bush”. Bill Clinton isn’t even a character in the sketch! snltranscripts.jt.org/91/91edebate... youtu.be/06aQjoJVUOI?...

some of you are looksmaxxing when you need to be booksmaxxing

my advice? never ever stop posting

My cold take on the future of AI 1. AI tools will improve. 2. Despite the improvements, they will still make mistakes. 3. The kinds of mistakes they make will be different than the kinds of mistakes that humans make. 4. People will continue to argue endlessly over what “intelligence” really means.

Whenever the topic of OKRs comes up, I think about Drucker vs Deming. Not a particularly topical thing to write about, but I think it's evergreen. surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/02/16/p...

I'm seeing a lot of "AI SRE" solutions crop up these days, but not any "AI incident management" ones. surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/02/14/l...

A sci-fi story where, while everyone is arguing over whether LLMs are sentient, it turns out that autonomous vehicles have become sentient, but nobody noticed until one company added a (non-LLM-based) verbal chat interface.

Lorin "ad" Hock-stein!

Proposed KPI: number of important signals that aren’t being monitored because they haven’t been labeled as KPIs. I promise you this isn’t zero.

Incident response is, by its nature, ad hoc. Getting better at responding to incidents means getting better at ad hockery.

“What was life in 2026 like, grandpa?” www.404media.co/waymo-is-get...