Made by Mikal – Page 5

Reactions to a history of block storage at Amazon EC2

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 23, 2024
Post category:EC2

This is an interesting read about the history of the EBS subsystem in Amazon EC2. This quote particularly stands out to me: What I didn’t realize until I joined Amazon, and seems obvious in hindsight, is that you can design an organization much the same way you can design a software system. Different algorithms have different benefits and tradeoffs in how your organization functions. Where practical, Amazon chooses a divide and conquer approach, and keeps teams small and focused on a self-contained component with well-defined APIs.

Artificial Condition

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 23, 2024
Post category:Book

Another short and fun sci-fi read. Our favorite anxious and depressed murderbot is off trying to solve the mystery of why in fact he murdered all those nice people. Along the way he meets a mildly annoying but actually kind of friendly AI transport ship with a lot of unexplained capabilities. Definitely worth a couple of winter evenings to read.

Children of Time

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 19, 2024
Post category:Book

While being a fairly transparent metaphor for refugees, this book is also an excellent read with a relatively believable premise. I especially like the ending, which I thought was quite unexpected. I don't want to ruin any of this for anyone, but I really really enjoyed this book.

Everything is Obvious, Once You Know The Answer

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 13, 2024
Post category:Book

This is a book about common sense. Specifically, it's about how when you're told a fact it seems obvious -- common sense -- that it's true. Interestingly, this can be the case even if that fact is in fact untrue. This is at least partially because common sense is mostly practical, that is it's more concerned about "getting to the right answer", preferably quickly, than it is about exactly how it got to that answer. It's also partially because common sense is cultural, we map new situations to things we've seen previously to infer the correct answer. Different cultures have different experiences and so therefore have different common sense. The book spends a chapter discussing the ways that humans make decisions, and how logic isn't really the answer. We instead imagine ourselves in the projected situation and then work through what will happen. This means that we're bad at seeing attempts to anchor our thinking, or other forms of bias. We also tend to think that incentives will work better than they actually do in the real world. That is, we are bad at predicting what factors will be important in someone's decision making process and then apply ineffective incentives.…

The Kubernetes Book (2024 edition)

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 6, 2024
Post category:Book

This is yet another accidental purchase of a self-published book, although I think this one makes a lot of sense as a self published work. Writing a technical reference book isn't a particularly lucrative pastime for most authors, and self publishing likely makes it more worthwhile than the traditional publisher route, especially if you can rustle up a good set of technical editors and reviewers yourself. That said, I think one of the risks with self published technical books like this is that they are overly credulous, and I think this book falls into that trap early by describing Kubernetes as the "cloud operating system". Like I get it, you're excited about Kubernetes, but making claims that all of the cloud runs on Kubernetes just undermines your work before you've even really started. I can't find any public data, either academic or anecdotal, which supports the assertion that Kubernetes is even the most popular way to run workloads in clouds. I'm sure that AWS has more VMs not running Kubernetes for example than they do have running it. That said, it is clear at this point that Kubernetes is the dominant player for container clustering. So why not just say…

All Systems Red

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 5, 2024
Post category:Book

This book was a short but fun read. Sufficiently short in fact that perhaps it was a little over priced, but not outrageously so. It follows an adventure of a slightly rogue but generally nice cyborg SecUnit which has charmingly named itself MurderBot. That's confusing, because said cyborg is too busy being depressed and anxious to actually do much murdering. I will definitely read the sequels.

The Man Who Broke Capitalism

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 1, 2024
Post category:Book

With Cisco announcing that they no longer need 12% of their staff this calendar year (5% in February, and another 7% in September), I am left wondering what is so terribly wrong with American Capitalism. Interestingly at about the same time someone recommended I read this book, so here we are -- seeking to understand the behavior of our corporate masters once more. This book starts with this quote: To understand a civilization, consider its heroes. Which is telling because its so true. I think it also works for organizations -- if you want to see the values of an organization, don't look at what they say, look at who they promote and idolize. That's really the author's point though, so I shouldn't take too much credit. It's clear from the start that the author doesn't like Jack Welch or his leadership of General Electric and that he thinks Welch's legacy is toxic. Honestly though, he makes a pretty convincing argument that leaves me not being a huge fan either and certainly GE didn't survive the experience of Welch and those he chose to replace him upon retirement. It is asserted that Welch had three main maneuvers in business: downsizing;…

Digital Minimalism

Post author:mikal
Post published:July 21, 2024
Post category:Book

This book argues that technology, especially social media, has been deliberately engineered by Silicon Valley to be addictive, and that often there are detrimental impacts to the products we all use every day. That argument makes sense in that these products are measured by the amount of time they are used per user (and thus the advertising revenue generated), and have evolutionary pressure to find ways to increase user minutes per day. There is also research cited in the book that anxiety levels in teenagers have increased in a manner which correlates with the release of the smart phone. Now, I don't think I could ever be a digital minimalist as described in the book, especially when work expects so much connectivity from me (it will be interesting if a right to switch off ever passes in Australia, put it that way), but I do think there are interesting ideas here. For example, asking why you have certain technology is probably reasonable. The low hanging fruit here seems to be smartphone apps for most people -- can you explain why you have all those apps installed? Especially when many of them are bad for your privacy? The bar proposed by…

Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy

Post author:mikal
Post published:July 4, 2024
Post category:Book

This book is an interesting read coming straight off the back of Human Origins. The book starts out by explaining the impact the invention of the plow had on humanity -- it asserts that farmers being able to produce substantially more than they needed for their own subsistence was a driving factor in the creation of both other specializations (by freeing people up from farming), but also a more unequal society (as it allowed a ruling class to live off resources produced by others). This is an interesting assertion to me. Next the book moves on to observing that with all innovations there is a winner and a loser. An early example is the phonograph -- before the invention of recorded media there was a market for quite-good-but-not-great performers to entertain people. Once there was an ability to record great performers, the earning capacity of the great performers went way up but the earning capacity of the not-quite-great performers went down. So while society overall might benefit from innovation, it is not true that all participants in the market benefit at the time of the innovation. The book then starts walking through a series of inventions. Each is presented as…

The Cuckoo’s Egg

Post author:mikal
Post published:July 4, 2024
Post category:Book

In 1986, Clifford Stoll and his coworkers were frustrated by what they thought was a billing error of 75 cents in their monthly accounting. Suspecting a software bug, the new guy (Clifford) was put on to working out the error as a starter problem while he got familiar with the systems he was to manage... I've been home sick this week with a chest infection, and what with having a limited oxygen supply I didn't feel like I was braining super well. So what better way to pass the time between naps than another old book I've read before? This is another book I must have read before I started blogging such things, but discussions of old computing systems made me a bit nostalgic for a good gold fashioned tale of computer hackery. The story has some historical significance too, as shown by this quote from Wikipedia: This was one of the first⁠ —⁠ if not the first ⁠— documented cases of a computer break-in, and Stoll seems to have been the first to keep a daily logbook of the hacker's activities. There are a few things which strike me about this story -- Stoll was lucky. He arguably committed…