Mike Robbins

Co-Founder @ @CircuitLab

[Mike Robbins @compumike]

@StedmanBlake @alfongj Heii On-Call https://t.co/Hg127E15w9 @HeiiOnCall — please let me know what you think!

[Mike Robbins @compumike]

@pauld_fgc I wrote IdleGC shard https://t.co/jnYtkNXeeC to combat @CrystalLanguage slow memory growth. Runs garbage collection when not servicing requests. Running in production on https://t.co/svzc4NpyHu Lmk if it works for you.

[Mike Robbins @compumike]

Number one on Hacker News 🎆💥🙂

[Mike Robbins @compumike]

Today I'm launching https://t.co/heteLqQFg4 - Inflation-adjusted stock charts.

[Mike Robbins @compumike]

... doing the deep dive today puts new tools in your toolbox, and new tools expand your reach for future projects. The expected payback period is surprisingly short. But this doesn't fit with the conventional sprint/ticket model of software development teams.

[Mike Robbins @compumike]

My first Kubernetes controller: hairpin-proxy:v0.1.0 https://t.co/Dg6zGGcjJg solves a kubernetes/nginx-ingress/cert-manager problem reported on GitHub issues for years. It's fun to dive one or two layers deeper and figure out how the magic works so I can fix it. More importantly,

[Mike Robbins @compumike]

@rubiety Thinking carefully & analytically is hard work! Does society appropriately reward those who do that hard work? Does the reward encourage others to think critically too? Do those suffering from a lack of analytical thinking have a viable alternative?

[Mike Robbins @compumike]

@AaronLCannon Good point! And that means you might be able to relocate offices out of expensive core downtowns as well. (Public transit / bike-to-work fans might be unhappy.) Or use shared space that 5 companies rent out on different days of the week.

[Mike Robbins @compumike]

@AaronLCannon Definitely. They probably have a relatively weak revenue-driven motive: increasing Meet adoption probably only slightly reduces G Suite customer churn. Most of the customer lock-in is still elsewhere (documents and emails). But Zoom/Quip/etc threaten that integration.

[Mike Robbins @compumike]

"For a good conversation about ideas both sides should share a single motive — finding the truth. I'd like to believe this is the only motive anyone has when discussing ideas but it's not the case." https://t.co/AJ8yPrrLyg

[Mike Robbins @compumike]

@spiegart @alexandrosM @eladgil I modeled this as a closed-loop feedback system to quantitatively show the shape of our range of long-term strategy choices, from now until immunity (vaccine or not). https://t.co/NEzNDjxUPQ

[Mike Robbins @compumike]

The good news is that behavior seems heterogeneous. Heterogeneous behavior (both geographically, and between more-careful and less-careful households) leads to better overall outcomes than the homogenous models suggest. But those rewards are distributed heterogeneously as well.

[Mike Robbins @compumike]

Feedback systems pop quiz! What happens when you combine:

(1) a process with open-loop exponential growth behavior
(2) a feedback signal with lots of delay and noise
(3) a not-very-smart controller that's targeting R=1?

Answer: oscillations and (unfortunately lethal) overshoot.

[Mike Robbins @compumike]

A month ago, I published my analysis of the pandemic as a feedback control system https://t.co/UyionSrh1J. (I didn't model shorter-term oscillations because I was focused on long-term strategy outcomes.)

The bad news is that strategically, the US does seem to be targeting R=1.

[Mike Robbins @compumike]

"Surprising COVID-19 Strategy: Reduce Economic Damage and Deaths Simultaneously" https://t.co/QlqjzmUdNc I analyze pandemic as a feedback system and show the policy frontier is concave down. Counterintuitive! There is no tradeoff between saving lives & reducing economic damage.

[Mike Robbins @compumike]

@gandibar You can help your customers with the CA root expiration incident https://t.co/gl8Rstm7aO by distributing an updated GandiStandardSSLCA2.pem file that replaces the 2nd cert with AAA. I created one explained here: https://t.co/xNlnCGBHT9 Happy to provide the file.

[Mike Robbins @compumike]

@youyanggu @youyanggu Short-term forecasting is important for risk assessment and policy feedback, but I really like your "what if" scenarios.

It would be great to start a public conversation about long-term strategy, and that strategy will probably be driven by health & economic modeling.

[Mike Robbins @compumike]

@youyanggu Small variations in transmission lead to incredible reductions in human suffering.

We're still in the horizontal region of the deaths-vs-duration strategy curve.

If we go a bit further we can reduce economic disruption simultaneously.

(slide from https://t.co/QlqjzmUdNc)

[Mike Robbins @compumike]

"Surprising COVID-19 Strategy: Reduce Economic Damage and Deaths Simultaneously" https://t.co/QlqjzmUdNc I analyze pandemic as a feedback system and show the policy frontier is concave down. Counterintuitive! There is no tradeoff between saving lives & reducing economic damage.

[Mike Robbins @compumike]

@AaronLCannon @triple_byte bucket_low = 20*floor(actual_percentile_int / 20.0);
bucket_high = bucket_low + 20;
Ship it! 🚀
(Dear engineering team: I doubt this is actually the issue...)

[Mike Robbins @compumike]

"You scored between the 100th and 120th percentile" -- looks like I broke @triple_byte's cool new software engineer skills report! Please don't fix, I'm happy to be in that bracket :)