Weekly Digest #30

Articles

• Are we there yet? Thoughts on assessing an SRE team’s maturity

Key SRE indicators:

1. SREs mitigate present and future incidents (responsibility and accountability for a service’s reliability
2. SREs actively regulate service reliability (reliability goals and feedback signals are fundamental for both motivating SRE work and influencing the prioritization of development work.
3. SREs engage early and comprehensively (SREs should be empowered to make tomorrow better than today)
4. SREs automate anything repetitive

• The Rise and Fall of the OLAP Cube.

The author distinguishes OLAP and OLTP by

OLTP (online transactional processing): using a database to run your business

OLAP (online analytical processing): using a database to understand your business

OLAP Cube: developed to solve the computing challenge in OLAP but at the time introduced complex ETL pipelines and require a large team of engineers.

MPP (massive parallel processing) architecture + column store: e.g. Bigquery helps to distribute SQL queries in the background without the need to pre-compute OLAP Cube

• AI can now emulate text style in images in one shot — using just a single word. Neural text style transfer. Text font learning.
• Starlink review: broadband dreams fall to earth. The author records the Installation and operation of StarLink. Conclude that the service is usable but with a very bad user experience.
• Claude Shannon: Tinkerer, Prankster, and Father of Information Theory.
• How We Protect Pinners’ Passwords. Pinterest journey and framework on how they protect user credentials
• Improving Language Model Behavior by Training on a Curated Dataset. We can improve language model behavior with respect to specific behavioral values by fine-tuning on a small, curated dataset

Tools

• n8n — Workflow Automation Tool. fair-code distribution modeled jsbased workflow automation tool.
• TermPair. View and control remote terminals from your browser with end-to-end encryption
• Keptab is a powerful tabs manager that convert all your tabs with one click to a simple list
• Awesome-privacy. A list of free, open source and privacy respecting services and alternatives to privative services
• NocoDB. Open source Airtable alternative. Turns any MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, SQLite & MariaDB into a smart-spreadsheet.
• rfc.fyi. A RFC standard search engine

For Fun

• Securing a swift return: how a simple brick can help migratory birds.

• Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity. Cannabis farm turned out to be a Bitcoin mine

• Linus on vaccine
• Representing SHA-256 Hashes As Avatars

• When your dog defaults to 320x240 resolution