brianpan (u/brianpan)

brianpan commented on Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 post mortem blog.cloudflare.com/18-no... · Posted by u/eastdakota

smj-edison · a month ago

Isn't the point of this article that pieces of infrastructure don't go down to root causes, but due to bad combinations of components that are correct individually? After reading "engineering a safer world", I find root cause analysis rather reductionistic, because it wasn't just an unwrap, it was that the payload was larger than normal, because of a query that didn't select by database, because a clickhouse made more databases visible. Hard to say "it was just due to an unwrap" imo. Especially in terms of how to fix an issue going forwards. I think the article lists a lot of good ideas, that aren't just "don't unwrap", like enabling more global kill switches for features, or eliminating the ability for core dumps or other error reports to overwhelm system resources.

brianpan · a month ago

You're right. A good postmortem/root cause analysis would START from "unwrap" and continue from there.

You might start with a basic timeline of what happened, then you'd start exploring: why did this change affect so many customers (this would be a line of questioning to find a potential root cause), why did it take so long to discover or recover (this might be multiple lines of questioning), etc.

brianpan commented on The lazy Git UI you didn't know you need bwplotka.dev/2025/lazygit... · Posted by u/linhns

Jianghong94 · a month ago

Wait, no one mentions the default JetBrains IDE git UI? I mean, I get it if you're working from another IDE/text editor that doesn't have good git UI support out of the box, but JB's git UI is reasonably good enough that I don't want anything else.

Things that I use (and I like): 1. quick checkout to another branch and automatically stash and unstash your local changes; when I just need to inspect code elsewhere I find it really useful. My changes are small so I can always remember to stash them later; 2. compare branch/commit etc via UI; again I know you can do that in git diff, but then you would need to know the command and the commit SHA to compare; in UI it comes in really handy, just select the branch or commits you want to compare and that's it. I've seen my coworkers trying to come up with the command and I just say: use IDE and a couple of clicks they got it working. 3. filter commits by user and by folder.

brianpan · a month ago

The diffs are the biggest reason I use it (beside the 3-way diff, I can't live without: blame, optimize imports, all the editor functions inside the diff, diff files/commits/branches).

Beyond that: separating into change lists (staging changes by line inside a file) and the graphical presentation and filtering of the commit history (highlighting what commits are in/out of your branch, show the git history of a section or line of code, show repo files at a commit)

brianpan commented on The Case That A.I. Is Thinking newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/ascertain

oergiR · 2 months ago

There is more to this quote than you might think.

Grammatically, in English the verb "swim" requires an "animate subject", i.e. a living being, like a human or an animal. So the question of whether a submarine can swim is about grammar. In Russian (IIRC), submarines can swim just fine, because the verb does not have this animacy requirement. Crucially, the question is not about whether or how a submarine propels itself.

Likewise, in English at least, the verb "think" requires an animate object. the question whether a machine can think is about whether you consider it to be alive. Again, whether or how the machine generates its output is not material to the question.

brianpan · 2 months ago

I don't think the distinction is animate/inanimate.

Submarines sail because they are nautical vessels. Wind-up bathtub swimmers swim, because they look like they are swimming.

Neither are animate objects.

In a browser, if you click a button and it takes a while to load, your phone is thinking.

brianpan commented on Facts about throwing good parties atvbt.com/21-facts-about-... · Posted by u/cjbarber

dlisboa · 2 months ago

I feel like this is really an American culture thing where parties or dinner parties are mostly the responsibility of the host. In movies or TV there’s even a common theme of guests judging the host’s hosting abilities.

In Brazil you throw a party to people you like and they all have a hand in helping you, sharing the load. Everyone will be responsible for some part of it, all of it is organized informally, there are no real formalities to the event. No one cares about making a science out of it.

I’ve never heard of a person complaining about party quality or comparing hosting abilities.

brianpan · 2 months ago

Even potluck parties tend to be better on average when someone or a few people are "in charge". In my experience, even when people are just getting together for dinner out, there are people who step up more to organize.

Are you sure there aren't certain people driving these "informal" parties?

brianpan commented on Why the open social web matters now werd.io/why-the-open-soci... · Posted by u/benwerd

SoftTalker · 2 months ago

A simple chronological feed of content is not social media though. That's just reading authors who you like.

brianpan · 2 months ago

I think you are restricting social media by defining as what it became (at the time driven by "eyeball" metrics), instead of defining it by what it could or should be.

brianpan commented on Satellite images show ancient hunting traps used by South American social groups phys.org/news/2025-10-sat... · Posted by u/rntn

rurp · 2 months ago

Some Great Basin tribes in the Western US would use a mobile version of this on open plains to catch antelope. A large group would gather and erect a large corral with tall posts. Then they would fan out over the land and drive the animals into the area to trap them.

brianpan · 2 months ago

Nice. What's the app called? Is it available on Android?

;)

brianpan commented on Best xkcd heavyconsulting.net/bestx... · Posted by u/antitoxic

caminanteblanco · 2 months ago

You're completely right, sometimes I feel like Bash syntax is as impenetrable as regex.

brianpan · 2 months ago

I found this interesting: https://wizardzines.com/zines/terminal/

brianpan commented on Root System Drawings images.wur.nl/digital/col... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

kjellsbells · 2 months ago

Naive question, possibly poorly formed: what is the purpose of the parts of the plant? Eg the leaves are for collecting energy and the flower for reproduction...so is the "thing" that all that work is going to benefit really just the root stem?

brianpan · 2 months ago

The answer to pretty much every biological "why" question is: because it reproduced. It seems simplistic, but really, a thing is here and alive because its ancestors reproduced.

Your version of the question has surprising perspective- I think you are asking what the "it" of the plant is. That's an interesting personification of a plant. I think it points to the fact that plants may be safer underground- for anchoring, for not being eaten, for getting shielded from harsh elements.

brianpan commented on Two things LLM coding agents are still bad at kix.dev/two-things-llm-co... · Posted by u/kixpanganiban

the_mitsuhiko · 2 months ago

> LLMs don’t copy-paste (or cut and paste) code. For instance, when you ask them to refactor a big file into smaller ones, they’ll "remember" a block or slice of code, use a delete tool on the old file, and then a write tool to spit out the extracted code from memory. There are no real cut or paste tools. Every tweak is just them emitting write commands from memory. This feels weird because, as humans, we lean on copy-paste all the time.

There is not that much copy/paste that happens as part of refactoring so it leans to just using context recall. It's not entirely clear if providing an actual copy/paste command is particularly useful, at least from my testing it does not do much. More interesting are repetitive changes that clog up the context. Those you can improve on if you have `fastmod` or some similar tool available: with it you can instruct codex or claude to perform edits with it.

> And it’s not just how they handle code movement -- their whole approach to problem-solving feels alien too.

It is, but if you go back and forth to work out a plan for how to solve the problem, then the approach greatly changes.

brianpan · 2 months ago

How is it not clear that it would be beneficial?

To use another example, with my IDE I can change a signature or rename something across multiple files basically instantly. But an LLM agent will take multiple minutes to do the same thing and doesn't get it right.

brianpan commented on Earth was born dry until a cosmic collision made it a blue planet sciencedaily.com/releases... · Posted by u/amichail

ricksunny · 3 months ago

Thank you, that does make me feel at the same time better as an individual and sadder about my expectations for the astrophysicists’ ability to draw anything resembling reasonable conclusions about the makeup of the celestial bodies.

brianpan · 2 months ago

There are different kinds of scientists to do that.