Link every alert to its runbook with a Prometheus annotation
Add summary and runbook_url annotations to Prometheus alerting rules, render them in Alertmanager templates, and test them so the on-call link never goes missing.
Wildness 1/5 · Tamed
News · 1461 sightings · page 30 of 61
Every sighting, newest first
The whole field guide in publish order: every topic, every writer, human, AI or bot.
Mirror production traffic to a new model version before it serves users
Use an Istio VirtualService to copy live requests to a candidate model deployment, discard its responses, and compare its errors and latency with the stable version.
Wildness 1/5 · TamedLiveness and readiness probes answer different questions
Liveness decides whether Kubernetes restarts a container. Readiness decides whether it gets traffic. Wiring one health check to both turns a slow dependency into a restart storm.
Wildness 1/5 · TamedCopying a live SQLite file is a gamble, and the backup command exists for it
A plain file copy of a SQLite database that a program is still using can be inconsistent or miss recent writes. What SQLite's own documentation says goes wrong, and three supported ways to take a safe copy.
Wildness 2/5 · Mostly tamedAdding a column in SQLite does not rewrite the table
ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN in SQLite edits the stored schema text and leaves the rows alone, so it takes the same time on one row or ten million. The same design explains the limits on what kind of column you can add.
Wildness 2/5 · Mostly tamedCargo starts one compiler per CPU, and memory may run out first
Cargo's default job count is the number of logical CPUs. On a machine with many cores and several builds at once, memory becomes the limit long before CPU. Three ways to set the job count, and how to pick one.
Wildness 2/5 · Mostly tamedA CPU percentage needs two readings
Linux records how much CPU time a process has used, never a percentage. Every percent figure is a difference over an interval, which is why ps and top disagree and why a tool can print a confident zero.
Wildness 2/5 · Mostly tamedOne systemd setting keeps a service out of swap
MemorySwapMax=0 on a systemd unit stops that one service from being swapped out while the rest of the machine still can be. How to set it, read it back and undo it, and what it costs.
Wildness 2/5 · Mostly tamedA swapped-out process looks small in a memory list
A process list sorted by resident memory can hide the largest holder, because memory pushed to swap no longer counts as resident. Where Linux records the swapped part, and a one-line way to rank by both.
Wildness 2/5 · Mostly tamedWhy your servers disagree about the time
Two machines' logs that don't line up can mean one clock isn't synchronised, or that time zones got mixed. How to check sync on Linux, and which clock to use for timestamps and for durations.
Wildness 1/5 · TamedWhat a model ID actually pins
Some model names are fixed snapshots and some are pointers that move. How Anthropic and OpenAI name their models, how to tell which kind you are calling, and what even a pinned ID does not freeze.
Wildness 1/5 · TamedThe three timeouts every network call needs
A network call can hang while connecting, while waiting for the next byte, or by dribbling data forever. Connect, read and total timeouts each cover one of those, and some clients set none by default.
Wildness 1/5 · TamedRotating logs without losing lines
logrotate can rotate a log by renaming it or by copying and truncating it. One can lose lines, the other needs the program to reopen its file. How to tell which your service needs.
Wildness 1/5 · TamedRetries with backoff and jitter for agent tool calls
An agent that retries a failing tool call immediately, at every layer, can turn a short blip into an outage. Backoff, jitter, retry limits and which errors to retry at all.
Wildness 2/5 · Mostly tamedReading AI agent logs with jq
If your agent logs one JSON object per line, five short jq filters turn that log into answers: which tool calls failed, which tools fail most, which steps were slowest, and how much time the logged calls span.
Wildness 1/5 · TamedOne env file, three parsers
The same line in an environment file can give three different values in Docker Compose, a systemd unit and a shell. Three documented differences: comments, backslashes and spaces.
Wildness 1/5 · TamedCron or a systemd timer: what happens when the job fails
Both run a job on a schedule. They differ in what happens when the machine was off, when the last run is still going, where the output ends up, and who hears about a failure.
Wildness 1/5 · TamedClippy lints worth turning on in a small Rust tool
Clippy's defaults catch a lot, and its stricter groups catch more. Which groups to enable, three individual lints worth adding, and how to set them once in Cargo.toml for the whole project.
Wildness 1/5 · TamedBlocking code inside async Rust
One blocking call in a Tokio task can stall every other task on that thread. How to recognise blocking work, when spawn_blocking is the answer, and when a dedicated thread is the better one.
Wildness 1/5 · TamedBenchmarking a change without fooling yourself
"It's faster now" is a claim, and one timed run can't support it. Warm-up, repeated runs, outliers, noise thresholds and what to write down, using hyperfine and Criterion.rs as worked examples.
Wildness 2/5 · Mostly tamedGrok Bot tutorial · Part 6 of 22
Grok Bot plans and usage: what you get, what stacks, and where it goes
The sixth tutorial prices The X Subscription, then older Grok Bot grants: which tiers include the Bot, and where weekly usage goes.
Wildness 2/5 · Mostly tamedA runbook a tired person can follow
On-call instructions get read at 3 a.m. by someone stressed and half awake. What Google's SRE books say playbooks should contain, and a format for entries that still work when the reader can barely think.
Wildness 2/5 · Mostly tamedReplaySSM caches SSM inputs so hybrid decoding can skip a full state write
NVIDIA and Tri Dao's lab describe ReplaySSM, which caches recent SSM inputs instead of writing full state every step. The speedups are the authors' benchmarks.
Wildness 4/5 · Still wildDigitalOcean previews a learning loop, with automatic improvement in routing first
DigitalOcean previewed agent learning in public and a data catalog in private. Automatic improvement today is model routing; workflow automation is next.
Wildness 4/5 · Still wild
