(I am avoiding a direct retweet to avoid unpleasant Twitter interactions for a professional reporting a near miss.)
If you get nothing out of Japanese engineering culture via me but this, steal this verbal ritual:
A: “I intend to drop the database on prod.”
B: “You intend to drop the database on prod, and have selected prod.”
A: “I am dropping the database on prod.”
B: “You are...”
“Kinda weird you can just do that for prod.”
Yes by all means implement the technical controls, too, but people are your first and last line of defense, so make sure they are in there and empowered to say “Disengage disengage disengage.”
“Who can say that?”
At the shop I worked at, anybody inclusive of the person sweeping the floors.
(Probability of a catastrophe given least senior team member said “Maybe catastrophe?” way higher than your tolerance for catastrophes in most well-functioning systems.)
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In a scene the financial markets have seen many times before, at some point many claims will chase few actual dollars while the pipes connecting claims to dollars collapse under the strain, are frozen, or begin exploding due to being engineered to expect parity.
“Is he subtweeting Tether?”
I mean, not the only claim dubiously representing a dollar in the world, but yeah I do expect that to be the primary mechanism of contagion when crypto melts down.
I’ve heard a lot about block chains scaling up to commanding *checks notes* tens of TPS the last few years, and if I had money in e.g. Ethereum, I’d want to have a ballpark estimate of how many TPS it would take DeFi to unwind in unrestrained panic mode.
This is simultaneously one of the best arguments for pedagogy *actually working*, since Europeans and Koreans successfully acquire language proficiency via formal schooling but Japanese and Americans mostly do not.
I know that it is extremely uncouth in the US to compare educational outcomes but the stats for e.g. scores on the Japanese Language Proficiency Test are available on a per test site basis, and they say what they say.
(About 90% of US majors in Japanese who are not heritage speakers deserve a refund, or at least they did prior to the YouTube generations.)
The payments wars in Japan are heating up and one of the battlegrounds is convenience store coffee.
“Coffee? What does that have to do with payments?” I’m glad you asked.
Convenience stores are low net margin businesses, which sell some high gross margin goods/services but a lot of low ones, and have high fixed costs and a low ticket size. The typical transaction is under 500 yen ($5) and many are about $1.
They need repeat custom.
A few years ago, all of the chains had a good idea for increasing frequency of use: make a minor capital investment in automatic coffee machines. Sell access to them for the price of a cup / ice; customers self-serve with the machine.
It worked out for me, but, be careful which major life decisions you delegate to the zeitgeist and/or high-status organizations that are not scored on predicting the future accurately.
I worry, a lot, that the tech industry does not do a sufficiently good job of communicating “Despite what you may read in the paper: you can get a job here, your work will likely be in the cause of righteousness, you will be well compensated, and you will do well by your values.”