Machine Learning
This book is a delightful collection of short stories by Hugh Howie, mostly not about actual machine learning or AI. What else can one say about a book of short stories with no overarching theme? Was good. Did enjoy.
What is a LLM “security harness” and why do people keep talking to me about them?
Increasingly I am being told to “use a security harness” when analyzing code for potential vulnerabilities, but what is a “harness” and how does it differ from just running Claude Code and asking it nicely to find me some sweet vulns?
This post is literally my notes on reading up on this topic via a series of Cloudflare blog posts. That is, this post is a summary and does not intend to provide anything you cannot find anywhere else (with a lot more words used).
The Chairman’s Lounge
The Chairman's Lounge
Simon & Schuster Australia
2024
359
This is the story of the downfall of an Australian business hero, the destruction of an iconic Australian brand, and hubris. In a mere four years Alan Joyce when from hero status in Australia, to literally hiding out with his mother in Dublin while being hounded by the press. Truly his downfall was impressive.
However, I think it’s also another example of Welshian management ultimately failing, as seen with General Electric in The Man Who Broke Capitalism and Lights Out. This includes: publishing accounting results that while inline with the definition of the accounting standards appear to have redefined expenses in a manner convenient to management with little rationale provided; misleading customers on their refund rights at a time when those same customers were trapped at home suffering and Qantas was sitting on massive cash stockpiles; illegal union busting; and shedding large numbers of highly skilled staff which simply couldn’t be replaced in a timely manner when travel ramped back up again. That is, optimizing for this quarter’s numbers by completely ignoring the longer term impact of the decisions being made.
Stumbling across a 5% performance increase in OpenStack Kolla-Ansible CI
I went on a side quest a couple of weekends ago which seems like it might have ended up being a big win. That win likely applies to other people running both OpenStack, but also other cloud orchestration systems using libvirt like oVirt, Proxmox, Shaken Fist, and so forth.
By way of back story, I have a stack of patches which I maintain on top of OpenStack’s Kolla and Kolla-Ansible. Most of those patches continue to progress the new “spice-direct” console type in OpenStack Nova, but I also occasionally find little bugs or CI regressions along the way that I want to clean up. One example of such a bug was Kolla’s failure to setup virtlogd to provide instance console log rotation, which is currently being backported to various releases. Another one is the topic of this post.
It appears to be Debian’s stance that the behavior I experienced is completely normal
Unsurprisingly, I awoke to a disappointing response from the Debian bugs team. The email was sent privately so I wont post it here, but it boils down to “nah man, this is normal”. On a whim, I have therefore asked the Debian TC if they have a policy on quality and correctness review of patches inserted by Debian into upstream software:
Platform Decay
Platform Decay
The Murderbot Diaries
Tor Books
May 5, 2026
256
So I just finished reading the latest Murderbot book and I had caused me to realize I have questions, but we’ll get to those in a moment. This book is fairly standard Murderbot fare — Murderbot is doing something they think is dumb because their humans asked nicely. Very Bolo Tank if you will. The book is ok, for what I would call a “travel book”, but it does feel like the overall plot isn’t being progressed much in these recent books. Like I get it. Corporates bad, weird hippy dumb circle planet and university with mercenaries good — but shouldn’t there perhaps be something bigger happening here?
Let’s see if the Debian complaints process gets anywhere
On the recommendation of a friend on a business themed social network, I have just sent the following email to owners@bugs.debian.org about my experiences on the Debian bug tracker recently. It will be interesting to see if anything comes of it.
Is this the standard of behavior we get from Debian now?
So… a really really long time ago I wrote a small set of PNG utilities called pngtools. They’re not particularly complicated or anything, but a few distros decided to package them, including Debian (and therefore Ubuntu), Gentoo, Mint, and so forth. I’ve talked previously here about resurrecting the old subversion commit history and attempting to modernize the code.
And then something weird happened. A couple of weeks ago a github issue was filed against pngtools. The entire bug report is a single sentence pointing to the Debian bug tracker where people are being… weird. I think perhaps I accidentally overlapped with two things — a slightly entitled user, and people who appear to “karma farm” by pushing bug reports from Debian upstream with the minimum possible level of detail. Certainly when I look at the github history for these users they do not have a good hit rate for reporting bugs which actually result in a fix upstream. I am unclear on why they would be doing this thing if their goal isn’t either to acquire a fix or to earn some sweet sweet made up internet points.
Early assessment of Fable, Anthropic’s new “slightly safer” LLM model
This is obviously not a scientifically valid assessment, but it is my general early impressions. This started as a really really long slack message, but it became pretty clear that slack wasn’t the right place for something like this — so here it is as a blog post instead.
PNGtools 1.3
This is just a delightfully retconned note to say that PNGtools 1.2 was released on this date.