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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io

mastodon 4.6.6

Student of complex systems failures, resilience engineering, cognitive systems engineering. Will talk your ear off about learning from incidents in software.

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41 Posts

Joined November 20, 2022

blog:

https://surfingcomplexity.blog

website:

https://lorinhochstein.org

Posts

Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Aug 03, 2026

Software engineering research question I’ve always wondered about (although less relevant in the age of AI): are developers more productive when working in their preferred language compared to working in a language imposed upon them due to business constraints?

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Jun 07, 2026

Bonus blog post for today about my instinctual revulsion towards AI slop: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/06/06/i-cant-bear-to-read-ai-generated-prose/

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · May 10, 2026

According to the data, we shouldn’t trust the data

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · May 10, 2026

Replying to @dan@discuss.systems

@dan@discuss.systems of course

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · May 10, 2026

I’ve heard of “Nimrod” primarily because of

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · May 10, 2026

New blog post about flipping the bozo bit: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/05/09/flipping-the-bozo-bit-on-flips-the-learning-off/

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · May 08, 2026

I’m very concerned about the aliens already walking among us who are going to insider trade on this market: https://kalshi.com/markets/kxaliens/aliens/kxaliens-27

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · May 08, 2026

Cloudflare announces a huge layoff and then, the very same day, an availability zone in AWS’s us-east-1 region loses power due to a “thermal event”. Coincidence???

Well, yes

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · May 06, 2026

Saturation: a never-ending series. https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/ql942tw29yl6

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · May 04, 2026

RE: @regehr@mastodon.social

Is there a burn ward nearby?

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · May 04, 2026

Seamlessness is, indeed, a worthwhile goal; systems fail at the seams.

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · May 03, 2026

Tired: old code that calls new code (extensibility!)
Wired: old code that breaks new code (latent failures!)

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · May 03, 2026

It's counterintuitive, but you can learn about the nature of successful work from incidents, even though the incident was a failure case. I wrote a blog post about that here:

https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/05/02/how-incidents-can-teach-us-about-whats-already-working-well/

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · May 02, 2026

Replying to @palvaro@discuss.systems

@palvaro@discuss.systems How long did you work there?

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · May 01, 2026

RE: @levelbot@mastodon.social

There’s no way this reading is accurate

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · May 01, 2026

RE: @ezrasf@mas.to

We want goblin mode!

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Apr 29, 2026

Replying to @norootcause@hachyderm.io

I keep writing the same post over and over because the same thing keeps happening over and over!

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Apr 29, 2026

Today's Anthropic outage and the GitHub blog post about their availability inspired me to write this post: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/04/28/life-comes-at-you-fast/

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Apr 27, 2026

New blog post about Erik Hollnagel's Safety-II model: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/04/26/the-normal-work-of-creating-reliability/

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Apr 15, 2026

Oops! All AI companies!

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Apr 15, 2026

RE: @giflian@techhub.social

What a time to be alive

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Apr 14, 2026

Replying to @regehr@mastodon.social

@regehr Welcome to my world. https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/04/12/thoughts-on-the-bluesky-public-incident-write-up/

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Apr 13, 2026

Jim Calabro did an excellent write-up of a recent Bluesky outage, I learned a lot from it. I wrote my own post here: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/04/12/thoughts-on-the-bluesky-public-incident-write-up/

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Apr 09, 2026

Automation can only solve your reliability problems if that automation is perfect. But if you were capable of writing perfect software, we wouldnt be talking about your reliability problems.

Automation is only part of the reliability story, you’ve got to be ready for when it breaks, too. Because I promise you, your reliability automation is going to break. Will you be ready for when it does?

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Apr 09, 2026

Prediction: Within the next two years, the New York Times will write a story about people who are unable to prove they are not AIs (à la CAPTCHAs).

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Apr 01, 2026

Looking for a little less machine learning and a little more human learning

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Mar 29, 2026

If you celebrate Passover, which of these do you commonly eat at a Passover seder?

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Mar 27, 2026

Managing the risk of saturation, AI edition: https://www.infoworld.com/article/4151196/anthropic-throttles-claude-subscriptions-to-meet-capacity.html

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Mar 23, 2026

Replying to @marick@mstdn.social

@marick I suspect my followers skew older in general.

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Mar 22, 2026

Which of these technologies will become practical in your lifetime?

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Mar 21, 2026

You get what the system is optimized for.

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Mar 17, 2026

Replying to @jawnsy@mastodon.social

@jawnsy Feels like a “ha, ha, only serious” response

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Mar 17, 2026

The consequences of being able to generate code with AI much more quickly than we can validate that code is Nature’s way of teaching us about Erik Hollnagel’s ETTO Principle. https://www.erikhollnagel.com/ideas/etto-principle/index.html

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Mar 15, 2026

Replying to @shriramk@mastodon.social

@shriramk @rk Is vibe-verification a thing yet?

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Mar 15, 2026

The three skills with a lot less overlap than you’d expect:

1. Ability to code.
2. Ability to perform well in a coding interview.
3. Ability to validate code.

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Mar 13, 2026

GitHub's had some availability issues lately. Their CTO wrote a blog post with some details about recent incidents. I wrote a quick post with my reaction here: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/03/12/quick-thoughts-on-github-ctos-post-on-availability/

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Mar 12, 2026

If you live with a partner (or partners) and you all work from home, how do you communicate with each other during the work day?

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Mar 07, 2026

New blog post on the surprising increases in load faced by AI companies and the operational consequences: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/03/07/grow-fast-and-overload-things/

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Feb 09, 2026

New blog post: Nobody knows how the whole system works

https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/02/08/nobody-knows-how-the-whole-system-works/

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Jun 03, 2025

Ad blockers, but for AI

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Lorin Hochstein

@norootcause@hachyderm.io · Feb 07, 2023

All metrics are subjective, it’s just that you don’t see the subjectivity because it’s baked in at metric definition time. What you decide to measure and how you decide to measure it are both subjective decisions.

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