Toots from 2025-09-23

Doubling down on the latest technology fad: State Machines

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Introducing a net-new coordination point might alleviate a known coordination bottleneck. It’s …

Introducing a net-new coordination point might alleviate a known coordination bottleneck. It’s often the case that the net-new coordination point will introduce a new bottleneck with unknown second-order impacts. Now there’s two coordination point breakdowns.

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“Some engineers described the platform as “jolly” and mentioned that it actually made them …

“Some engineers described the platform as “jolly” and mentioned that it actually made them want to open incidents. The approachable design lowered psychological barriers for engineers to declare incidents and made it feel like a natural, even positive, part of their workflow.”

https://netflixtechblog.com/empowering-netflix-engineers-with-incident-management-ebb967871de4

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“The amount of standardization, autonomy, harmonization and integration the platform provides s…

“The amount of standardization, autonomy, harmonization and integration the platform provides should be dictated by the business context and desired outcomes — not by abstract architectural ideals.”

https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/platforms/the-evolution-of-platform-engineering--lessons-from-the-trenches

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“The OpenAI research identified three mathematical factors that made hallucinations inevitable:…

“The OpenAI research identified three mathematical factors that made hallucinations inevitable: epistemic uncertainty when information appeared rarely in training data, model limitations where tasks exceeded current architectures’ representational capacity, and computational intractability where even superintelligent systems could not solve cryptographically hard problems.”

https://www.computerworld.com/article/4059383/openai-admits-ai-hallucinations-are-mathematically-inevitable-not-just-engineering-flaws.html

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“The truth is you almost always have time to think ahead. And this is not a bottleneck. The rea…

“The truth is you almost always have time to think ahead. And this is not a bottleneck. The real bottleneck is thrash. So planning needs to be seen as a task in and of itself.”

https://www.thecaringtechie.com/p/tech-has-a-planning-aversion-problem?publication_id=341480&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=23ox6&utm_medium=email

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While this article isn’t about the pre-DevOps “throw it over the wall mentality”, it might as wel…

While this article isn’t about the pre-DevOps “throw it over the wall mentality”, it might as well be. Optimizing the time it takes to pop a message off the queue isn’t the same goal as optimizing the latency and rate of successfully delivered messages.

“Yet a recent report from the MIT Media Lab found that 95% of organizations see no measurable return on their investment in these technologies. So much activity, so much enthusiasm, so little return. Why?”

https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-productivity