A scourge.
In the business world, they say that culture eats strategy for breakfast—meaning that the people implementing the strategy, and the skills, attitudes, and assumptions they bring to it, will make more difference than even the most brilliant plan. In government, culture eats policy.
This article is also a story about the importance of domain knowledge and why it's difficult (and risky) to push back against the norms, especially when it's the right thing to do. As I say: the process is not the point.
Rhode Island said it’s being extorted after hack of Deloitte-run benefits system.
An Act providing for consumer data privacy, for duties of controllers and for duties of processors; and imposing penalties.
Pennsylvania Consumer Data Privacy Act
To date, 20 states have passed data privacy laws in the U.S. Other states have also introduced bills to keep up with the data privacy race.
CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) went into effect more than five years ago. I was in grad school when this legislation was signed into law. I distinctly remember being hopeful that it would be a good model that could be adopted at the federal level. Fast forward to 2025 and I am not actually surprised that this remains at the state level and has that classic patchwork approach vibe.
Automated decision-making systems contain hidden discriminatory prejudices. We’ll explain the causes, possible consequences, and the reasons why existing laws do not provide sufficient protection against algorithmic discrimination.
I have always been interested in how folks talk about sunsetting services.
"There are seldom technical solutions to behavioral problems."
- Ed Crowley
While this an interesting idea, note the source.
AI could make our human interactions blander, more biased, or ruder.
A good, quick, interesting read.
Just like any great idea Pitt students have, the school’s most beloved tradition of singing “Sweet Caroline” was born at Hemingway’s Cafe.
I have participated in this tradition without knowing the history of it!
✨ Build AI interfaces that spark joy.
They don’t allow outside contributions.
All of the facts are interesting but the one above was especially of interest to me. 🦖 Fossil (a kinda fun VCS) is based on SQLite.
At best, making oncall the exclusive responsibility of an elite SRE class increases our tolerance for complexity.
See Simplicity.
Oncall is a form of toil – it needs to be done but it doesn’t leave our systems in a better state.
Stakeholders see high-profile incident response/oncall happening, and don’t demand clarity on what other work the group is undertaking.
To go further – incident command and management is a specific set of skills that you can definitely be good at, and where the business really, really needs a consistent and competent response, every time. At Twilio, we have a specific team that manages all incidents, follow-up actions, and operational insights around incidents company-wide. We’ve found that making sure that the data and insights around incidents and their followup flows back into the business is a full-time job. Relying on a rotation of variably interested volunteers to ensure this happens will get you mixed results.
It will be useful to have Chapter 11 (Being On-Call) from Google's SRE book available (it's one in a series).
goblin.tools is a collection of small, simple, single-task tools, mostly designed to help neurodivergent people with tasks they find overwhelming or difficult.
Cloudflare recently shipped improved upload speeds across our network for clients using HTTP/2. This post describes our journey from troubleshooting an issue to fixing it and delivering faster upload speeds to the global Internet.
😂 Ask me how I know about this!