Can We Stop With the Uptime Percentages?

I was reading Jason Gorman’s article “The Wall Confronting Reliable Coding Agent Autonomy” and he says: the journey from 90% to 99% reliability is just as hard as it was to get to 90%. And from 99% to 99.9% is just as hard again. This stood out, as I’ve been experiencing more and more “downtime” in my day-to-day work. GitHub’s down. CI’s down. AI’s down. Slack’s down. Downtime’s going mainstream! More and more I find myself visiting service status pages, where I’m confronted with a wall of colors and numbers like this: 100%? 99.72%? 99.09%? 98.98%? Those don’t all seem so different or bad? I mean, those are all an A in grade school. Then I have to remind myself of Jason’s point and re-interpret the numbers, which is more like reading earthquake measurements. The difference between a 6.2 and a 7.8 might not seem that big, but it represents a massive difference in magnitude. Uptime percentages have a similar problem: 99.9% and 99.99% look pretty much the same, but the latter is 10×…