Approach to integrating SysAdmin work into Agile Software Development in the days of PaaS and Continuous Delivery. (more)

Continuous Delivery (more)

aka Continuous Integration

Dan Shipper: The Fall of Roam. I used to use Roam every day, but I don’t use it much anymore. (more)

E-Commerce, spreading from Book Store to "everything" (more)

treatment, esp drug, for depression

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are a class of drugs that are typically used as antidepressants in the treatment of major depressive disorder, anxiety disorders, and other psychological conditions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_serotonin_reuptake_inhibitor

vitamin associated with sunshine; anti-depressant? at least fights SAD. Also reduces COVID-19 infection effects?

Zvi Mowshowitz: On Bounded Distrust. Response to (2022-01-26) Alexander Bounded Distrust. Would that it were that simple. (more)

Gordon Brander: Exapt existing infrastructure (Exaptation). Designing an Internet (by David Clark) is a history of the internet’s technical design decisions, by one of the internet’s key designers. (more)

A micromort (from micro- and mortality) is a unit of risk defined as a one-in-a-million chance of death.[1][2] Micromorts can be used to measure the riskiness of various day-to-day activities. A microprobability is a one-in-a million chance of some event; thus, a micromort is the microprobability of death. The micromort concept was introduced by Ronald A. Howard who pioneered the modern practice of decision analysis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort (that page includes many specific activities)

We created the concept of the "microcovid" as a new quantitative unit for risk. One microCOVID is a one-in-a-million chance of getting COVID-19. An activity that’s 20,000 microCOVIDs means that you have a 2% risk of getting COVID every time you do it. An activity that’s 20 microCOVIDs (or 0.002%) is relatively safe, as you could do it every week for a year and still have only accumulated about a 0.1% chance of getting COVID. https://www.microcovid.org/ (more)

Data dredging (data fishing, data snooping, equation fitting, p-hacking) is the misuse of data analysis to find patterns in data that can be presented as statistically significant, thus dramatically increasing and understating the risk of false positives. This is done by performing many statistical tests on the data and only reporting those that come back with significant results... Conventional tests of statistical significance are based on the probability that an observation arose by chance, and necessarily accept some risk of mistaken test results, called the significance. When large numbers of tests are performed, some produce false results, hence 5% of randomly chosen hypotheses turn out to be significant at the 5% level, 1% turn out to be significant at the 1% significance level, and so on, by chance alone. When enough hypotheses are tested, it is virtually certain that some falsely appear statistically significant, since almost every data set with any degree of randomness is likely to contain some spurious correlations. If they are not cautious, researchers using data mining techniques can be easily misled by these apparently significant results. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging (more)

see Vaccination

Scott Alexander on Bounded Distrust. (Deciding what you can believe from an untrustworthy source.) (more)

Matt Webb: Risk: micromorts, microCOVIDs, and skydiving. I find these kind of calculators useful to educate my intuition. (more)

Scott Alexander: There's A Time For Everyone. Last week I got married. I met her two years ago. (more)

Ben Goldhaber: First, do no harm - how the FDA crippled America's response to COVID-19. This is a partial account of how the FDA and the medical establishment failed America in fighting COVID-19, and how the inherent structure of the FDA made the pandemic worse. They prevented individuals and companies from creating and providing timely drugs and tests to combat COVID-19, contributing to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans and trillions of dollars of lost economic output. (more)

Gordon Brander: Block reference mechanisms. Writing is linear, serial, and one side-effect of communicating serially is that you have to force ideas into some sort of order. (more)

Steven Johnson: We Need A Standard Unit Of Measure For Risk. “The average weekly chance that a boosted person died of Covid was about one in a million during October and November… That risk is not zero, but it is not far from it. The chance that an average American will die in a car crash this week is significantly higher—about 2.4 per million.” There was a flurry of controversy last week about David Leonhardt’s “The Morning” newsletter in the Times (more)