Matt Button

Firm believer in the power of 80's music. Engineer at @geckoboard

[Led By Donkeys @ByDonkeys]

"And once you come to this conclusion you cannot remain silent."

Location: Parliament Square, London (sound on)

[Louise Wateridge @UNWateridge]

Across northern #Gaza, there is no way of telling where the destruction starts or ends.

No matter from what direction you enter #Gaza City, homes, hospitals, schools, health clinics, mosques, apartments, restaurants - all completely flattened.

An entire society now a graveyard.

[keewa 🇵🇸 @keewa]

When tens of thousands of children have been brutally murdered but they're arabs so it's ok

[Sam Freedman @Samfr]

The irony being that those most "proud" of our history are the ones who hate Britain today the most. (Cf. all Telegraph op-eds includings this one).

[Owen Jones @owenjonesjourno]

Just listen to this.

Out and out, loud and proud, unapologetic genocidal mania.

Served up by Israel's longest-running English podcast.

They mean what they say. Listen to them. Take them seriously.

[Matt Button @BRMatt]

@monzo Also to clarify - I’ve got a support thread open about my specific situation. Just thought it was worth highlighting these issues outside of that case

[Matt Button @BRMatt]

@monzo I’m having trouble reporting a transaction I don’t recognise on my flex card. The “Which transactions is this about” part of the reporting flow is only listing txns from my personal account. None of the txns from my flex are showing up in the list, only active card check

[Matt Button @BRMatt]

@monzo Also the flex flow won’t let you start the reporting flow until you’ve selected a repayment plan. Surely someone shouldn’t have to agree to that before being able to report a fraudulent transaction?

[Matt Button @BRMatt]

@lawrjones @martyhambert One thing we found difficult with pre-made metric dashboards is how large spikes in errors/latency can be caused by/only affect handful of orgs & can be difficult to spot when just looking at aggregate metrics/individual log lines. Is it easy to get that context in your setup?

[Matt Button @BRMatt]

@lawrjones @martyhambert Thankfully tail based + dynamic sampling + sampling aware telemetry has helped reduce the number of times we run into situations where traces we care about have been dropped. If you end up having to sample again I'd really recommend tail based sampling rather than in-app sampling

[Matt Button @BRMatt]

@lawrjones @martyhambert Thanks, that was an interesting read! I can't see any references to sampling/cost control - is this something you've had to do, or is everything retained?

[Reza Schwitzer @SchwitzerEd]

People moaning about a £50k delegation, ha! When I left DfE we were rocking a £0 delegation. Yep, every new penny of spend had to be approved by HMT. That’s how bad the relationship got.

[Sam Freedman @Samfr]

This is exact opposite of what they should be doing. A big reason it's so hard to make anything in government is tiny amounts of spend need to be signed off by HMT and/or Cabinet Office.

Creates delays and means good civil servants leave because it's so frustrating.

[Rhys Hartley @HartleyR27]

А very good take, as usual from Ash Sarkar. Remember noticing this at the age of 18, seeing the city centres of Reading and Liverpool that felt like a carbon copy of the new development in Cardiff. Then realised how few independent shops but even pubs and restaurants there were.

[Led By Donkeys @ByDonkeys]

It’s more important than ever to know exactly who Farage is 👇

[Saul Staniforth @SaulStaniforth]

Brendan is a carer and was on a call taking care of someone when his car was destroyed.

[Faiza Shaheen @faizashaheen]

What the hell is this?! Could their bias and prejudice be anymore obvious?!

[Hannah Al-Othman @HannahAlOthman]

Just wanted to share quickly how lovely yesterday felt in Southport; a total contrast to the night before. 🧵

The mosque and people’s garden walls were rebuilt by builders and bricklayers volunteering their time and labour:

[Yishan @yishan]

If anyone wants a lay explanation of how a reactor could possibly be meltdown-proof, here it is:

Nuclear reactors generate energy by giving off heat in a controlled way. The reactor core fissions and emit heat, and the cooling systems carry away that heat to do useful work.

Older designs required the cooling to remove excess heat. This cooling apparatus was typically a pump, powered by the plant’s own output, with backup diesel generators in case the plant failed.

If the power went out AND the backup generators failed, the cooling system would stop, heat built up in the reactor core, and things exploded. This is what happened at Fukushima: the backup diesel generators got flooded by the tsunami and didn’t come online.

(The above is a simplification, obv)

In the pebble bed reactor, the fuel and its configuration are constructed so that as temperatures rise, it becomes less efficient and gives off LESS heat. Thus, if unexpected external events cause a disruption in the cooling system (e.g. the generators break), the reactor’s own overheating causes it to slow down, which passively reduces the reactor’s output to a lower equilibrium until things can be fixed.

This is actually a bit like how human bodies work: if you exercise (e.g. run) really hard, you give off heat. When you overheat, you don’t explode, your muscles just stop working and you are forced to stop until you cool off. If you have better cooling, e.g. running upright dissipates heat, but also cold drinks or even ice packs, you can keep on running for as long as you have fuel.

So the cooling elements of “meltdown-proof” reactors are designed to carry away the heat for useful work, but if the cooling elements stop, the reactor fuel gets too warm to fission efficiently and slows down its own heat generation.