Weeknotes: 2025-W10

Published: 10 March, 2025, updated: 10 March, 2025

Summary

Continued my plan to watch more movies, including compiling a long list of movies to watch. Got side-tracked by binge-watching all 3 released seasons of The Way Home, which may be a surprise to some. After a lot of “research” and also a long time being indecisive, settled on Seattle Makers as my local maker space.

Photos

(Based more on time of processing than time of taking…)

Five years ago…

Enjoying

• Reading:
  • The Traitor (Covenant of Steel #3) by Anthony Ryan
• Watching:
  • Source Code (★★★★☆)
    • A rewatch after a few years - still enjoyable, tight, well-constructed on a rewatch
  • Rebel Ridge (★★★★☆)
    • You get what you sign up for if you hear anything about it, although the non-gun-based combat does make it stand out.
  • 📺🏃 The Way Home seasons 1-3
  • 📺📅 Paradise season 1 (★★★★☆)
    • The back half of Paradise lets it down from an overall plot perspective, but assuming you can get over whether people would do the things they do, the story of what does happen is still enjoyable in the moment.

• Playing:
  • Loop Hero (★★★☆☆)
    • Part of my exploration of matching games on Apple Arcade.
    • Conceptually a good idea, but needs a lot of tuning and polish.
  • finity. (★★★★☆)
    • Part of my exploration of matching games on Apple Arcade.
    • Probably the best of the lot - well-polished, well-tuned, nothing wasted.

Newly discovered

How Filmmakers Shrink Entire Cities - Paul E.T.

I knew about tilt-shift lenses, but not about how easily the brain is fooled by easy-to-apply blur effects. Surprisingly approachable for experimentation…

Highlights

From Moving Past Shallow Incident Data by John Allspaw:

What would calculating the MTTR or MTTD do? … This is valid data about these incidents, but they (and other common measurements around incidents) tend to generate very little insight about these events, or what directions a team or company might take in order to make improvements.

In fact, I believe that the industry as a whole is giving this shallow data much more attention than it warrants. Certainly, filtering this shallow data as means, medians, and other central tendency metrics obscures more about the incidents than it actually reveals.

[…]

Using this data as if they were bellwether indicators of how individuals and teams perform under real-world uncertainty and ambiguity of these incidents 1) ignores the experience of the people involved, and 2) demeans the real substance of how these events unfold.

After years of being involved in and diving into statistics around incidents in my previous job, I largely agree. There are way too many different ways for the statistical summaries to mislead, and people often came to fairly strong beliefs based on the questionable summaries - to the point of writing off the experiences of those more frequently and heavily involved.

I believe that the confidence we have in the value of shallow data (TTR/TTD, etc.) stems from a desire to make what is actually very “messy” (the real-world evolution and handling of these events) into neater and more orderly (read: simpler to understand) categories, buckets, and signals.

In that way, we could view our confidence in this shallow data as just a coping strategy for dealing with the complex stuff that incidents are made of in the real world.

Hear, hear.

Recommended

Hone Your Chisel Like a Boss (The Easiest Way) - Daisy Tempest

12 in 1 Simple Router Hacks - YASUHIRO TV