Red neon signs with skulls are not typically charming. At the Brewdog bar in Edinburgh airport, however, I found this example. It is, I think, charmingly customised to its location. Further, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the only airport bar in the world with a decent alcohol-free beer on tap.

This is something I keep trying and failing to explain, so I am writing it down to hopefully create something that makes sense. Then I can refer people to it, rather than rambling away at them for a time and leaving them slightly bewildered.

A CPU stall is created when a process uses up all of its allocated CPU, and is put to sleep by the kernel, often for 10s of milliseconds.

Sometimes this isn’t noticeable, other times it is catastrophic. It depends on how latency critical the workload is. A few 10s of milliseconds on something that takes a few minutes, like a background batch job, doesn’t matter much, but if it’s a database operation on a critical user-facing request path, perhaps it’ll be an issue. It’s one reason monitoring tail latencies is important — this kind of thing doesn’t show up in averages, only in tails.

Anyway, now we know what the problems are: what causes it? And how can we prevent it?

My daughter will be growing up as AI imbues itself into society at a deep level. The first place she will feel this is at school. The Homework Apocalypse talks about some of the issues that we are going to start to see over the next couple of years, as students and teachers adapt to the availability of tools like ChatGPT.

Students will cheat with AI. But they also will begin to integrate AI into everything they do, raising new questions for educators. Students will want to understand why they are doing assignments that seem obsolete thanks to AI. They will want to use AI as a learning companion, a co-author, or a teammate. They will want to accomplish more than they did before, and also want answers about what AI means for their future learning paths. Schools will need to decide how to respond to this flood of questions.

I’m a bit of a Luddite with respect to AI tools that are designed to help with my work, like GitHub Copilot. I’m starting to think that I should use them, to enable me to better understand the challenges and opportunities she is going to have to deal with in the coming years.

Several years ago, I wrote that I was not a fan of technical debt as a metaphor. I’m still not convinced. But recently, someone I respect wrote about tech debt in Tech debt metaphor maximalism:

I really like the “tech debt” metaphor. A lot of people don’t, but I think that’s because they either don’t extend the metaphor far enough, or because they don’t properly understand financial debt.

So let’s talk about debt!

There’s a lot more detail than I ever thought about, and certainly far more than I wrote down. After one read through, all I know is that I am not sure I was right.

I’m going to add a reminder to read the piece again in a few months, to see what I think after my hindbrain has stewed on it for a while.

At Lagos Zoo, they have several enclosures that you can go inside, to be right up close to the animals. For the flamingos, there’s a little fenced off outcrop into the enclosure rather than it being free-roaming for the humans, but you can still be closer than I’ve been to flamingos before.