… whose the most resilient of them all? I am down in Tampa Bay in the post-Tropical Storm Debby wetlands and so no column this week.
Podcast: Why engineers are using chaos to make computers more resilient
The CrowdStrike meltdown on July 19th shut down the world with one faulty patch — proving once again the interconnected fragility of global IT systems. On Tuesday this week, the company released its Root Cause Analysis as both an explanation and a mea culpa, but the wider question remains: with so much of our lives dependent on silicon and electrons, how can engineers design resilience into their code from the bottoms up? And more importantly, how can we effectively test how resilient our systems actually are?
Kolton Andrus is one of the experts on this subject. For years at Amazon and Netflix, he worked on designing fault-tolerant systems, building upon the nascent ideas of the field of chaos engineering, an approach that iteratively and stochastically challenges systems to test for resilience. Now, as CTO and founder of Gremlin, he’s democratizing access to chaos engineering and reliability testing for everyone.
Kolton joins me and Lux’s scientist-in-residence and complexity specialist Sam Arbesman. Together, we talk about why resilience must start at the beginning of product design, how resilience is aligning with security as a core value of developer culture, how computer engineering is maturing as a field, and finally, why we need more technological humility about the interconnections of our global compute infrastructure.
🔊 Listen to “Why engineers are using chaos to make computers more resilient”
The Orthogonal Bet: The Art of Cultivating Curiosity
In this episode, Sam speaks with our multi-time returning guest Eliot Peper. Eliot is a science-fiction novelist and all-around brilliant thinker, whose thrillers set in the near-future explore many delightful areas of the world at the frontiers of science and technology. In Eliot’s most recent novel, Foundry, he takes the reader on a journey through the intricacies of semiconductors, from their geopolitical implications to their profoundly weird manufacturing processes.
Sam talks with Eliot not only about the plotting of Foundry, but also how Eliot uncovers these key topics while building wondrous worlds that are incorporated into his books. After writing almost a dozen novels, they talk about how to continually cultivate the muscles of creativity and curiosity, keeping our minds nimble to the rapidly changing world around us.
🔊 Listen to “The Art of Cultivating Curiosity”
Lux Recommends
- I supremely enjoyed reading Rory Stewart’s memoir, Politics on the Edge (published as How Not to Be a Politician in the United States). Stewart was a candidate for British Prime Minister against Boris Johnson, eventually losing to the former London mayor and several other candidates in a bruising fight for the Conservative Party’s nomination. But the book’s thesis is that the UK’s governance model — centered on an unwritten constitution, Parliament, a centralized London bureaucracy and rapidly rotating political leaders attached to entrenched civil servants — is no longer capable of serving the British public’s needs. Frustrated and at times a touch histrionic, Stewart narrates the inanity of governance in a once-proud country.
- Our head of platform Tracie Rotter is a cheery colleague who loved this menacing story in Wired by Sandra Upson on “How Soon Might the Atlantic Ocean Break? Two Sibling Scientists Found an Answer—and Shook the World.” “Tipping points are absolutely everywhere. Throw water on a fire, and the flames will shrink but recover. Dump enough water on and you’ll cross a threshold and snuff it out. Tip a chair and it’ll wobble before settling back onto its four feet. Push harder, and it topples. Birth is a tipping point. So is death. Once you’ve pushed a system to its tipping point, you’ve removed all brakes. No exit. As one 500-page report recently put it, climate tipping points ‘pose some of the gravest threats faced by humanity.’ Crossing one, the report goes on, ‘will severely damage our planet’s life-support systems and threaten the stability of our societies.’”
- Zach Dorfman (who will be joining us on the Riskgaming podcast shortly) wrote a spy thriller from Silicon Valley for Politico Magazine in “Moscow’s Spies Were Stealing US Tech — Until the FBI Started a Sabotage Campaign.” “During the Cold War, FBI spy hunters like Rick Smith were thinking hard about the issue, too. ‘At the time, there was a lot of interest in technology transfer,’ recalled Smith. So his chance run-in, at that local watering hole, with a tech entrepreneur who had sprawling business connections in Europe — well, that presented some tantalizing possibilities. Smith says the Austrian didn’t take much convincing. That night, over drinks, the two began hatching a plan, one refined over many meetings in the months that followed. Working under the FBI’s direction, the Austrian agreed to pose as a crook, a man willing to sell prohibited technology to the communist Eastern Bloc.”
- I talk about China and U.S. export controls more frequently than the typical newsletter, and the New York Fed last week had a major report on early statistical evidence of America’s trade actions against China the last few years. The conclusion? American export controls accelerated Chinese industry to indigenize, while undermining many of America’s most important companies. “On the extensive margin, we observe that the Chinese targets offset the reduction in relations with U.S. suppliers by forming new ones with alternative Chinese suppliers—an indication of reshoring on the Chinese side.”
- Finally, Lunch with the FT last week was with Helen Toner, a notable AI safety researcher at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology and former board member of OpenAI, where she was part of the movement against Sam Altman in the coup that electrified the tech industry — and the world — late last year. Toner: “For the board, there was this trajectory of going from ‘everything’s very low stakes, you want to be pretty hands-off’ to ‘actually, we’re playing this critical governance function in an incredibly high-stakes — not just for the company, but for the world — situation’.”
That’s it, folks. Have questions, comments, or ideas? This newsletter is sent from my email, so you can just click reply.
