Thoughts and stuff

I have been reading Observability Engineering, 2nd edition. A point that stays with me is that an AI-agent looking at telemetry can query anything and still “understand” nothing (if an agent can even be said to understand). The knowledge needed to interpret the signals usually lives in human heads. What the service is for, what normal looks like, why that threshold exists, what we tried last time, what tends to fail and what looks like a failure but is actually normal. Under the heading “The…

We are going through a large change in how we work with information and knowledge. At the risk of hyperbole, I think this change may be one of the big ones, like the invention of writing, printing, computing or the internet. I am talking about the tools we collectively call “artifical intelligence (AI)” and specifically the large language models (LLMs). There are large ethical concerns using such tools. I have enumerated some myself: Large-language-models (LLMs) have huge issues: They’ve been…

There have been a lot of supply-chain attacks going around recently. Someone nefarious gets control of the publish rights of a piece of software we use to build other software, a library or a dev tool, and push out a version with a malicious payload. The payload usually moves fast: it spreads itself and / or extracts secrets like keys and crypto wallets as soon as it is installed. Some attacks even identify any publishing rights they can get and push malicious versions to other packages. The…