Dave’s watchdog was awake, the printers busy chattering with every keystroke, and I was absentmindedly thinking of infrared emissions from the Pleiades star cluster. Suddenly, the terminal beeped twice: Sventek’s account was active. My adrenaline pumped as I ran to the switchyard; the top of the ream of paper showed the hacker had logged in at 2:26 and was still active. Letter by letter, the printer spat out the hacker’s keystrokes.
Hidden Meters
Building observability changes what you see.
← Back to trails
Out on the trail, you could tell the slower kids by the gaps in the line. The slower the kid, the greater the distance between him and the kid in front of him. ... "If we’ve got a Herbie, it’s probably going to have a huge pile of work-in-process sitting in front of it."
He told us that one of the most valuable lessons he learned at Twitter was the importance of instrumenting everything. “For the first two years of Twitter’s life, we were flying blind,” Dorsey explained. “We had no idea what was going on with the network. We had no idea what was going on with the system, with how people were using it … We were going down all the time because of it, because we could not see what was happening.”
At the Hawthorne plant of Western Electric, long, long ago, some psychologists were trying to improve productivity by various changes in the environment. ... Each change caused productivity to rise. One of the men got a bit suspicious and sneaked a change back to the original state and productivity rose!
Subatomic particles and humans have something in common. The act of observing them causes them both to change behavior. ... To their surprise, they found that worker productivity improved no matter how they changed the workplace. The workers were simply responding to the knowledge of being observed; or perhaps, researchers hypothesized, management taking interest in them caused a positive reaction.
The fee would be added to the parents’ monthly bill, which was roughly $380. After the fine was enacted, the number of late pickups promptly went…up. Before long there were twenty late pickups per week, more than double the original average. The incentive had plainly backfired.
They were, moreover, not just maps. Rather, they were maps that, when allied with state power, would enable much of the reality they depicted to be remade. Thus a state cadastral map created to designate taxable property-holders does not merely describe a system of land tenure; it creates such a system through its ability to give its categories the force of law.