Colin Douch

QCon London by InfoQ Debugging Distributed Systems March 17 / The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre - London Liz Fong-Jones, Technical Fellow

Hosting Debugging Distributed Systems track at #QConLondon next week; thrilled to have @hazelweakly.me, @hakshak.bsky.social, @voidmaze.bsky.social, @colindou.ch , and @palcu.net joining me. And we all want to hear your war stories at the unconference session!

Agenda: qconlondon.com/track/mar202...

My thoughts on AI If there’s one thing that has come to define the modern era, it’s AI. From the early days of ChatGPT, to image generation, to the massive sweeping statements about how AI is going to “change the world...

I wrote a quick thing on AI: blog.colindou.ch/posts/my-tho.... While AI is a semi-useful tool, we also need to acknowledge that the downsides to it are in some cases catastrophic, and no-one pushing AI does that. I miss the days when we used to laugh at Bitcoin using a countries energy supply.

Ironically, losing a bunch of subscribers for supporting the US war machine might actually be a really good business strategy for OpenAI, considering by their own admission they lose money on every subscriber

The `aria-label` is "Live event happening now: NFL Playoffs" - something live streaming related? That was a thing they announced recently

A business card for "The Kiwi", a New Zealander run bar in Amsterdam serving the worst New Zealand beer

Always fun to travel Europe and still find home, even if all they have is Tui

It's fascinating reading Hacker News and seeing all the posts about how to protect yourself from the AI tools you're using. How to stop them from deleting things, how to stop them stealing your secrets, has there ever been a tool in the past that we just accept as being actively hostile to the user?

Didn't you hear? We're doing install.md now, so you get all the insecurity of running a random bash script, with all the terrifying stochasticity of an LLM in one "makes you want to tear your eyes out" package

Hey Perl folks - anyone know if there's a definition of what the file that NYTProf outputs actually _is_? Or am I going spelunking into the C++ that reads it for nytprofhtml?

There's so many people lauding the fact that we can produce software so much faster with AI, and so little pushback as to whether more software is even a net positive. We just do it because we can, like a software manifest destiny

My time at Cloudflare: A Retrospective It’s been just over a year since I left my 7 and a bit year stint at Cloudflare, and I’ve had a lot of time to mull over the experience. I have … a lot of thoughts, and I figured the best way to get t...

I've been going back and forth on posting this one, but it's nice to get back into writing. Part memoir, part technical document on my time at Cloudflare: blog.colindou.ch/posts/my-tim...

A pamphlet describing "how to complain"

Mandatory reading that should be included in the UK citizenship pack

That feature was a major cause of a friend and me having a split for a while when he saw what I _really_ thought before deleting it 😂

My one comment on the Cloudflare outage from yesterday is that it's ironic that it's almost exactly the same failure mode as the 2019 outage: shipping a config file worldwide without any validation steps. Bets on the 2031 outage reason?

A flat white, on a wooden plate with a Kiwi burned into it

In Nuremburg again for OSMC, and making my yearly pilgrimage to have a bit of a taste of home on this side of the world.

There's a great quote from Vonnegut in Player Piano: A step backwards, when you've taken a wrong turn is a step in the right direction. Call me a luddite, but I think about that a lot with modern tech

Lights! Crackers! Action! It's launch week!

The Kickstarter for book 2 in mine and Johnny Schumann's CHEESE! series is launching at 10am on Thursday.

Maybe just for a certain age then 🤭

I'm flying out at 6 am tomorrow, but am I getting bladdered at a Eurovision party? Obviously. I don't want to lose my queer card 😅

GitHub - sinkingpoint/onotify: A drop in replacement for Prometheus Alertmanager, built on top of Cloudflare Workers A drop in replacement for Prometheus Alertmanager, built on top of Cloudflare Workers - sinkingpoint/onotify

I'm going to disappear from the internet for a couple of weeks, so before I go, let's drop something I've been working on. A while ago I wrote about the lack of serverless applications in the open source world (blog.colindou.ch/posts/open-s...), so here's one: github.com/sinkingpoint...

GitHub - cloudflare/parquet-tsdb-poc: A POC for a tsdb storage using parquet A POC for a tsdb storage using parquet. Contribute to cloudflare/parquet-tsdb-poc development by creating an account on GitHub.

Even though I'm no longer there, I continue to be proud of what the Cloudflare Observability team is accomplishing. Pushing boundaries to solve unique, and not so unique problems: github.com/cloudflare/p...

Pancake Day - Maid Marian YouTube video by Swimace

God I feel old youtu.be/gj_aHCpZl4k

My stack of pancakes for pancake day

It's pppppppp-pancake day!

An OpenAI status page going from "we're experiencing an elevated level of API errors" to "We've spotted that something has gone wrong"

Chowder - OH NO! IT ALL WENT WRONG!! YouTube video by ProteinBlob

Obligatory: youtu.be/TIZneWRGxZ8

Small things that bring me joy: The OpenAI status page has "we've spotted that something has gone wrong", which is separate from their "we're investigating an issue" update. What happens between those two? What is the transition from "issue" to "something has gone wrong"?

Even I forgot they did that 😂 What a weird acquisition

Hey, I'm not saying Nagios was _perfect_, but man I feel old having to explain anything non Prometheus to folks

In every conversation I've had with Pagerduty folks recently they've been really heavily pushing workflows, which is funny because everyone shits on Nagios which had event handlers 20 years ago and we've been rebuilding it worse ever since

This is the internet. If you don't know one, you can find one. It's really not that hard - there's even a dedicated subreddit if that's your thing

Small rant: If you're using AI generated images in your conference talks, and there are obvious AI artifacts, you clearly don't care about your talk and I don't care to listen. Do better than garbled text and stub handed monsters. Or better, hire an actual artist! They still exist!