Number Needed to Treat (NNT)

Sebastian Rushworth, a medical doctor in Sweden, takes us on an interesting tour of the medications we take for our health through the lens of two thought experiments,  the NNT measurement, and the "number needed to harm" (NNH) measurement.  15% of adults in Western countries take Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI)  medications despite their 14% effectiveness (NNT = 7) and 25% chance  of seriously harmful side effects (NNH=4).  Worse, a quarter (25%) of adults over 40 take a high dose of a statin every day despite their 2% effectiveness (NNT = 40) and NNH = 2.4, i.e. 42% of these adults suffer a significant, harmful side-effect.  A few years ago, I went to my physician because of my ancestors' heart disease issues. He told me to go running more and eat better instead of taking harmful medications.

Developer Control Plane & other neo-phrase coinage

In addition to "quiet" containers that flag fewer false positives in security scans, social media has recently started coining (minting?) a flurry of new terminology:

1. DevSecOps makes coders more responsible for the security of their code; InfoSec tools embedded in the integrated development environment (IDE) code editors shifts InfoSec "left" to identify issues as the coder types them in. DevSecOps includes other efforts such as red teaming that evolves efforts out of "checklists" and scanners because of recent catastrophic failures of this approach.
2. Developer Control Plane describes how developers are taking more control of their deployment pipelines, observability, and operations (devops).  In particular, the gitops style popularized by gitlabs and embraced by github actions is sweeping our industry because of its elegance and simplicity.
3. Developer Platform Engineering is a synonym and expansion of the configuration management policies, continuous integration pipelines, & deployment pipelines. 

Everything that is old is new again!  Tasking individual coders with more, different specialized disciplines is not always the best approach and does not scale as well.  But the zeitgeist and "fashion" currently is increasing the breadth of a coder's assignments and responsibilities.

Arkship trilogy 2, The Captain's Daughter by Peter F Hamilton

An audible exclusive.  I am very disappointed in the characters, plot, science, and writing. I don't care about the characters.  The conflict is embarrassingly poorly conceived.  1/5 Stars.  I shall likely not read or listen to the last one.

Eight good principles & associated patterns for service reliability and targeted observability

Jason Smale at Zendesk has a nice write-up of his team's eight principles they distilled from the evolution of their reliability journey.  The first principle is another repetition of Charity Major's  "the nines don't matter if your customers can't use your service."  

Read the whole thing.

Nova by Samuel R Delany (1968)

I saw a reference to this book and got the ebook version.  3 pages in, I realized I had read it in 1969 (when it won the Hugo award) and I remembered all the details and the entire story.  I skimmed through the rest of the ebook in a few minutes and noticed the new edition had added  a few paragraphs the author had originally written containing a rant by the antagonist to make him more evil.  I think the original is a little better.  Despite the outdated physics and odd occult mumbo jumbo, the book still holds up, 3/5 Stars.

Deutschland 2050: Wie der Klimawandel unser Leben verändern wird von Nick Reimer und Toralf Staud

Dieses Buch ist ziemlich lang – 400 Seiten. Jeder Abschnitt erklärt sein Thema ausführlich. Die Autoren gehen jedoch implizit davon aus, dass sich unsere Technologie nicht ändern wird. Eine weitere implizite Annahme ist, dass keine Bemühungen zur Abwendung der Klimakatastrophe Wirkung zeigen werden. Diese zweite Annahme ist wahrscheinlich wahr, aber die erste Annahme ist mit ziemlicher Sicherheit nicht wahr. Das Buch ist sehr informativ und erklärt unser Verständnis besser als das Buch von Bill Gates. Allerdings fand ich es an manchen Stellen langweilig. 3/5 Sterne.

Wayard Galaxy 3 by Jason Anspach & J. N. Chaney

The authors have said in an interview that they enjoy writing in this branch of their metaverse because of the "Brody" character.  Brody's dialog and rants make this entire book worth reading. I thought Brody was a little over-the-top and silly in the first two books, but he/it has grown on me. 4/5 Stars.

The Sins of our Fathers by James S A Corey

When a professional writer is confused or blocked because she has not developed her character deeply enough in her own mind to write about how her character will react or behave in specific plot situations, she will sometimes write little vignette stories from her character's past to help her develop the character in her own mind.  And, other elements of a book such as B-plot side actions that flesh out a timeline are cut by the editor so fans never get to enjoy them. Both of these unpublished materials are sometimes expanded and completed after a book becomes popular into a complete short story or novella.  The novellas and short stories of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (pen name "James S. A. Corey") appear to me to be from that slush pile of cut material.  This novella centers on Naomi Nagata's son Filip and takes place after the end of the series.  The societal, ethical, and sociological themes are well-written. 5/5 Stars.

The Kaiju preservation society

I love all of Scalzi's books, especially the cynical, over-the-top sarcastic comedies.  The tropes in this one were a little too predictable and melodramatic, but the dialog was fantastic, 4/5 Stars.

One Data Engineering Team's Observability journey

Here is an interesting story that is near-and-dear to my heart:  A small data engineering team crafted their systems for modest scale and then suddenly had to deal with hypergrowth.  Glossing over their early miscues, Ricardo  Souza has a good write-up of the elegant methods they are using now.