2024-11-03 Links Digest

Published: 2024-11-03

Tagged: links-digest

• Ribbonfarm is Retiring
  • Scott Alexander labeled the author of Ribbonfarm, Venkatesh Rao, as postrationalist heresiarch. I can think of no greater honor and no other online writer, save Scott Alexander himself, whom I've enjoyed reading more. I don't even remember how I found ribbonfarm, but I do distinctly remember reading it around 2017, maybe even 2016, and getting absolutely hooked on the firehose of insight (eg. the Gervais Principle, illegibility, premium-mediocre).
• Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Great Financial Scandal of 2003
  • Charles Munger describes how the Quant Technical Corporation imploded suddenly after years of clever accounting that mislead Wall Street. The story is interesting in itself, but what endeared it to me was Munger's focus on how systemic factors in the form of widely accepted accounting practices enabled the descent towards failure. Given that attitude, I think he would've been a terrific SRE.
• Poor Charlie's Almanack: A Lesson on Elementary, Worldy Wisdom as it Relates to Investment Management and Business
  • Don't let the title fool you. Here Munger talks about essentially "Why do smart people do dumb things?" My favorite parts are about cheating ("It’s very, very important to create human systems that are hard to cheat. Otherwise, you’re ruining your civilization, because these big incentives will create incentive-caused bias and people will rationalize that bad behavior is okay.") and about the heavy toll ideology has on thinking ("If you get a lot of heavy ideology young, and then you start expressing it, you are really locking your brain into a very unfortunate pattern.")
• Detecting Node Failures and the Phi Accrual Failure Detector
  • The common, good enough way to detect failed nodes is through heartbeats: send a request every n seconds and if the target host fails to reply m times, mark it as failed. But a Phi Accrual Failure Detector takes into account ever-changing system conditions to come up with the probability that a lack of reply indicates a failure. This article explains is clearly enough and links to a Python implementation.