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Fred Hebert

@ferd.ca

1.7K followers 170 following 320 posts

Staff SRE @ honeycomb.io, Tech Book Author, Resilience in Software Foundation board member, Erlang Ecosystem Foundation co-founder, Resilience Engineering fan. SRE-not-sorry.

blog: https://ferd.ca
notes: https://ferd.ca/notes/

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Fred Hebert

@ferd.ca

Last year I had grown some decently sized carrots, which felt pretty cool. This year’s harvest is just full on monstrously large eldritch taproots.

They taste great, they’re just comically impractical to store.

17 large carrots, some over 12”/30cm long, most of them having 2,3, or more than 4 parts, all laid on the soil in a raised bed.

October 13, 2025 at 3:54 AM

Fred Hebert

@ferd.ca

New SRE team swag is in

A t-shirt showing a pile of tires on fire, saying in large typeface: “fight fire with tire”, with a small byline below saying “SRE: fixing software with more software since January 1st 1970”

There are also 3 round stickers:

1. A bus labelled “SRE” dumping shit off a bridge onto a boat (in reference to the Dave Matthew’s bus tour incident), framed with text saying “Shitposting Reliability Engineering”

2. A bee on fire framed with text saying “honeycomb on-call incident commander”

3. A computer on fire with multiple bees flying around framed with text saying “honeycomb on-call incident responder”

September 19, 2025 at 12:44 PM

Fred Hebert

@ferd.ca

designing truthful bumper stickers

top line on a fiery background: HELL YEAH I DRIVE FAST

The following text is below it and shrinks in font sizes until it becomes unreadable:

Modern urban design and traffic planning inadvertently encourage higher speeds: highway speed limit is based on the 85th percentiles and their entire form is based on increasing the safety of speeding drivers compared to encouraging actual safe behaviors. The good per-mile incident rates of highways then fed into the road design of denser cities with mixed traffic. This in turn inadvertently encouraged speeding within cities and shrunk usage of non-motorized transport. We should also look into systemic contributors, and a long known safety pattern for drivers is to match the speed of those surrounding them to remove the relative difference. What we must re-think is a broader set of speed-enhancing incentives in shaping traffic to truly value safety. Even the choice of metric used to optimize for the last century is based on miles driven and structurally under-emphasized denser areas as less important and

August 5, 2025 at 2:13 PM

Fred Hebert

@ferd.ca

I’ve sowed white sweetclover for the last two years in the strip of soil next to my house and they’ve never even managed to sprout there.

Yet these fuckers are growing wild right outside my fence, taunting me.

A flowering white sweetclover plant in front of a wooden fence

July 30, 2025 at 3:09 AM

Fred Hebert

@ferd.ca

just gotta load up on context, understand the problem and what's already done so you can write a good soluti—

July 11, 2025 at 11:46 PM

Fred Hebert

@ferd.ca

I bought a pen that ended up shaped to only be comfortable with the dynamic tripod grip, but I have always written with the lateral tripod method.

So I’m doing the most logical thing and I decided to learn a whole new writing grip, messing with decades of muscle memory.

A diagram of the 4 pen/pencil holding methods: dynamic tripod, dynamic quadrupod, lateral tripod, lateral quadrupod

June 18, 2025 at 1:00 AM

Fred Hebert

@ferd.ca

James Reason taking no prisoners in Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents

This brings me to another important point: outcome bias. There is a strong inclination, particularly among children and lawyers, to believe that errors having dire consequences arise from particularly reprehensible mental processes. In other words, they presume symmetry between consequence and cause. My shaving cream slip left me blowing bubbles and feeling foolish, but it was essentially inconsequential. Dr X's errors were not. However, it's the circumstances rather than the prior mental processes that largely determine the consequences. I could, for example, switch on the toaster rather than the kettle. The result would be mild annoyance. But if I had made a comparable error on the flight deck of an aircraft or in the control room of a nuclear power plant, the result could have been catastrophic. Such a slip contributed to the Chernobyl disaster.

June 2, 2025 at 11:29 AM

Fred Hebert

@ferd.ca

Just starting to read Dara Z. Strolovitch’s “When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People” and it’s obvious early on that it’s gonna rule

These tensions and claims are thrown into relief by putting constructivist understandings of crises into conversation with work that treats crises as independent variables in the ways I began to do above: On the one hand, the bad things that shape the everyday lived experiences of marginalized groups are not considered crises unless and until they affect dominant groups. On the other hand, however, once a crisis is "hailed into being," it can have real and far-reaching political and material reverberations, both for the lived conditions of marginalized groups as well as for the possibility of opening windows of opportunity to address long-standing inequities.

In particular, through inductive examinations of a wide array of evidence, I begin by showing empirically that crisis neither is a neutral descriptor of empirically bad things nor has it been a constant in mainstream political discourse. Instead, crisis politics have a genesis and a distinct historical trajectory, and both their origins and their arc have significant implications for the politics of marginalization and marginalized groups. We might assume, for example, that bad things are more prone to being labeled crises the more people they affect, the more they rupture with the past, and the more amenable they are to government intervention, but this is not the case. Instead, I show that crisis is endogenous to and recursive within politics. That is, I show that crisis politics are not only productive of but also the products of political battles and decisions, and that having a bad thing "societalized" and recognized as a crisis within dominant institutions is itself a political goal and victory that often has very real material and policy consequences, ones that often have feedback effects of their own.

As lain White and Gauri Nandedkar put it, "crises are truth claims: they are invoked, they define, and, in doing so, they privilege certain ideologies or policy 'solutions' over others" in ways that may lead to different policy interventions and different attributions of political responsibility.

May 29, 2025 at 4:11 AM

Fred Hebert

@ferd.ca

Seeing some cool sights

Statue of Maréchal Joseph Joffre at Champs de Mars, all being repaired and fixed

May 12, 2025 at 6:23 PM

Fred Hebert

@ferd.ca

overhearing LLM programming chat and this is all I can think about

remake of the old comic strip telling the user to "write a map-reduce in Erlang" to query the DB and resulting in "Did you just tell me to go fuck myself?" and "I believe I did, Bob."

This version has the first character ask "How do I make the AI learn things?", with the response "It doesn't it grows stateless context".

The next panel has the character clarifying "ok, it doesn't. How do I make it remember?" to which the other responds "You have to use the LLM as its own MCP server!", which leads to an unchanged original panel ("... I believe I did, Bob")

April 9, 2025 at 5:15 PM

Fred Hebert

@ferd.ca

The right side stuff is native plants.

Here’s the previous year’s plan for rotations. Left topmost box is an experimental one, bottom 3 cycle every year.

February 23, 2025 at 8:54 PM

Fred Hebert

@ferd.ca

Winter months are spent planning and shopping for seeds, for those I don’t just finish prepping from the previous years harvest (stored in the cold and dark until then)

February 22, 2025 at 11:24 PM

Fred Hebert

@ferd.ca

I finally had time to get back to it and now my little file synchronization mechanism works and supports parallel updates!

I imagine it will take me a while to do the remaining 4 menu items since I've just cover my main bit but welp. Also a massive code clean-up is needed.

February 20, 2025 at 1:54 PM

Fred Hebert

@ferd.ca

New slogan proposal for the SRE team at work:

FIGHT FIRE WITH TIRE

A honeycomb lanyard over a card with a poorly aligned label maker text going “FIGHT FIRE WITH TIRE” over “SRE”

January 28, 2025 at 6:53 AM

Fred Hebert

@ferd.ca

it's okay i patched the new feature in

a power outlet that's poorly wired through another power outlet, seen in a big gap through a hole in a styrofoam board

January 11, 2025 at 2:09 AM

Fred Hebert

@ferd.ca

Human-in-the-loop is a kind of "we're doing this responsibly" blanket for automation & AI.

Experiments show large outcome variations based on where in the loop the automation and the humans are, and what sort of control is given.

A question that should follow is WHERE in the loop is the human?

From https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-51725-8

A Standard of care scenario: Readers 1 and 2 see the same episode and opt to recall or not-recall, if they disagree Reader 3 arbitrates. B AI standalone scenario: all decisions are taken by the AI Reader without human intervention. C AI single-reader scenario: Reader 1 takes the final decision using AI Reader input. D AI reader-replacement: same as (A) but with AI Reader replacing Reader 2. E AI band-pass scenario: AI Reader screens out episodes before Readers 1 and 2. Episodes with high scores trigger the recall decision directly, and episodes with low scores trigger the no-recall decision directly. The other episodes continue to the usual reader system. F AI triage scenario: AI reader triages the episodes before Readers 1 and 2. Episodes with high scores continue to the usual system, and episodes with low scores go through the path with only 1 reader.

Scenarios D and E show more robust improvements, and F is mostly useful for triaging when overloaded. Others have worse outcomes than Standard of care.

Angry goose meme. Panel 1 is the goose asking "what is the human in the loop expected to do, exactly?", second panel, the goose is chasing a person screaming "WHERE IN THE LOOP IS THE HUMAN, MOTHERF*CKER?"

December 6, 2024 at 5:41 PM

Fred Hebert

@ferd.ca

I've been messing around with ncurses to make an interactive terminal UI for my file syncing app, and I realized that I was inadvertently writing a custom text editor.

December 4, 2024 at 11:33 PM

Fred Hebert

@ferd.ca

I haven’t opened it all year and the icon is doing this now

Duolingo app icon, but it’s somehow shattered like glass and also sweats?

December 3, 2024 at 12:37 PM

Fred Hebert

@ferd.ca

This week's paper is Jon Kleinberg and Manish Raghavan's Algorithmic Monoculture and Social Welfare (www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...)

In this one, they show that better algorithms can lead to worse outcomes, particularly when they are adopted in a uniform manner.

notes at ferd.ca/notes/paper-...

Regions for different equilibria. When human evaluators are more accurate than the algorithm, both firms decide to employ humans (HH). When the algorithm is significantly more accurate, both firms use the algorithm (AA). When the algorithm is slightly more accurate than human evaluators, two possible equilibria exist: 1) One firm uses the algorithm and the other employs a human (AH) or (2) both decide whether to use the algorithm with some probability p. The shaded portion of the green AA region depicts where social welfare is smaller at the AA equilibrium than it would be if both firms used human evaluators. The AA and HH areas are of almost equal size and cover most of the chart; a narrow sliver shows AH as an area; the shaded section within AA is almost the same size and right next to the AH sliver

November 22, 2024 at 12:50 AM

Fred Hebert

@ferd.ca

The SRE-not-sorry one also got turned into sew-on team badges with the emote we used when killing hosts or containers :)

Stabby bear emote (copyright unknown) as an embroidered badge, with the text stating "SRE-not-sorry"

November 18, 2024 at 12:47 PM

Fred Hebert

@ferd.ca

made an alternative logo for people who like principles of anarchism but won't commit to the full ideology and will instead just apply small versions of them in every day life. it's called anarcho-lowercapitalism.