For when rants trigger RCU stall detection

and my patience buffer overflows into /dev/null. The rants are technically supposed to be brief. And let’s be real, some system bugs deserve a full kernel panic’s worth of fury.

A shop window on a wet cobbled street at dusk, lit from inside. A brass and wood engine fills the window, its glass tubes glowing and full of ants; a painted sign in front reads Words While-U-Wait, Letters, Odes, Sympathy by the Yard, Prop. N. Hopkin, B. Thau., A Penny Plain, Tuppence Heartfelt. Above the window, the shop name: The Pneumatic Scribbler. Men in top hats queue past the window in the rain.

Somebody in It

GNU Terry Pratchett The stall had stood at the Ankh end of the Brass Bridge for thirty years, which in Ankh-Morpork terms made it a geological feature. It had a canvas roof the colour of old tea, a high stool, a sloped desk polished by elbows, and a board that read [1] : LETTERS WROTEPlain . . . . . 1sWith Feeling . . …

Rule by list

On 3 March 2001, around ten people in a Milan hacklab assembled a server from hardware a bank was getting rid of and scavenged parts. The least experienced person present was put at the keyboard so that everyone would understand what was being built. The machine was named Paranoia. On its second day, an inverted firewa…

Perpetua Vink and the unminuted Sundays

Perpetua Vink had been educated in Lancre, which is not something that happens to a person so much as something that is done to them. Her teacher was Mistress Esmerelda Weatherwax, of whom it was said, mostly at a safe distance, that she was the greatest witch on the Disc, and who held that the craft came down to two t…

A grand old archive hall reflected in a dark polished floor, but the reflection is not the room: below the floor line the same shelves appear as translucent glowing blue lattice, files dissolved into points of light. A single archivist stands at the boundary looking down.

The archive and the oracle

An enterprise document agent gets priced as a reader. A licence per seat, ingestion per gigabyte, an integration project, perhaps a governance workshop to reassure the records manager. What it changes, though, is not the reading; it is the nature of the estate. A document estate was never only storage. It was a system …

Curating the dead

A state can keep a Holocaust museum and defend a man whose signature sits on a 1941 order concentrating Jewish people into a ghetto, and Lithuania does both without apparent strain. The Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum in Vilnius runs a permanent exhibition on the murder of the country’s Jewish people. In the same years,…

Nothing reached the gate

The agent has been doing this for eight months. It reads approved tickets, renders them into firewall configuration, verifies the result against intent, and closes the loop. It is good at the job: faster than the network team it replaced, and it does not mistype an address at the end of a long shift. A change ticket ar…

The evidence starts too late

The hinge ended with a person doing the comparing: for example, an analyst who takes what the systems report, holds it against what is actually happening, and decides which of the two to believe. Route around that job in one place and it reappears in another. So the obvious next proposal: give the comparing to a model.…

A door hinge rendered as a technical illustration, but the central pin of the hinge is a human silhouette, standing upright, holding the two leaves together. The left leaf is dense and disordered: overlapping raw material, weather, cables, half-legible signals, textures that do not resolve. The right leaf is clean and ruled: a severity matrix grid, policy clauses, an architecture diagram with tidy boxes and arrows.

The hinge in the attention argument

Cassie Kozyrkov’s question is a good one: if machines now do the doing, what is left for leadership? Her answer is attention. Leadership becomes the design of what machines notice, optimise and repeat. That is a useful shift, but the argument becomes more interesting if Ashby’s law and Lewin’s field theory are read a l…

A drawn fantasy map titled The Metier Landscape. Everyday Settlements sit at the front, with trailheads marked Dashboards, Meetings, Glossary, Projects, AI Tools, Audits, Reorg and Incidents. Paths climb through Operations Plain and Information Valley to Concept Ridge, Concern Ridge and the High Country beyond. A panel in the corner reads: many entrances, many paths, no single route.

All of it would survive an audit

The Monday report is accurate and on time. Its third column has a name that made sense to whoever built it, and that person moved teams in 2021. Everyone who reads it knows roughly what the column counts, and no two of them would write the same sentence about it. Down the corridor a working group is meeting for the fou…

Concerns as an organising principle

The reorganisation was announced in October. Four directorates became three, the data team moved out of IT into a function called Information and Insight, two roles went and three were created. The intranet A to Z was updated inside a fortnight. By April the new structure was being asked what the old one had been asked…