New, by me: A Middle East surveillance vendor has been caught exploiting a new attack in SS7, a set of protocols used by phone carriers, that can trick a phone operator into disclosing a person's phone location without their knowledge.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/18/a-surveillance-vendor-was-caught-exploiting-a-new-ss7-attack-to-track-peoples-phone-locations/

Compartimos la historia de esta familia, que como muchas otras, perdieron el acceso al agua cuando el #CentroDeDatos de Meta llegó a su comunidad

https://www.nytimes.com/es/2025/07/15/espanol/negocios/centro-datos-meta-escasez-agua.html

the mythical man month is one of the most useful books I've read. But not because of the mythical man month. Once I read his section on the second systems effect I realized that was a pattern causing issues throughout my life. (The first time you do something you'll be careful, the second time you do something is when you're actually going to fuck up because you're still new but doing okay the first time made you think you knew how to do it)

it still bites my ass constantly 😩

When I suggest that people will game whatever metrics we put in place, I'm often met with shocked indignation. We would never game the numbers! And yet we do.

I took my car in for service this morning and I was asked if it was ok that they split the bill across two transactions. "You're being measured on number of cars through?" I asked. The answer was obviously yes, and this way I counted as two cars.

It's not just a matter that the numbers are now wrong, we have now introduced waste into the system. There were two credit card transactions rather than one. Two receipts instead of one. There was additional time for the workers to explain why they wanted to do it this way. Overall, this was complete waste, but because they felt they were being judged on the count of cars through, it was justified.

If people think that they'll be judged based on measurements then they'll game those. The more judgement, the more the numbers will be inaccurate, and the more waste will be introduced into the overall system.

You might think that I'm opposed to measuring anything then but that's not at all true. I'm a big proponent of measuring those things we want to improve. I'm just a realist and recognize that we have to design our measurements very carefully. If we measure the wrong things, or in the wrong way, we'll drive the wrong behaviours and that's our problem to solve.

#metrics