Lorin Hochstein
Student of complex systems failures, resilience engineering, cognitive systems engineering. Will talk your ear off about @resilienceinsoftware.org
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- Wrote some thoughts about complexity and LLMs: surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/01/31/a...
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- May as well dive right in. Did you know that dogs in ancient Mesopotamia also refused to drop the ball? According to a Sumerian proverb, “The dog understands ‘Take it!’ It does not understand ‘Put it down!’” Source: cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts/34...
- New blog post on the high costs of coordination and the implications for large organizations: surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/01/24/b...
- Resilience engineering is about how successful systems are able to modify themselves to deal with a shock that is outside of what they can handle. This video by David Woods illustrates this phenomenon using the real-life example of an ER dealing with an influx of burn patients. youtu.be/duNMGTmZ4FA
- New blog posts on multiple coding agent scaling: surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/01/19/a...
- Power engineer talking to software dev: “Imagine a distributed system where the load varies dynamically…” “Gotcha.” “…you can only shed load under emergency conditions…” “OK, still with you.” “…and you can’t use queues.” “Wait, what?”
- Reposted by Lorin HochsteinDOJ investigating whether Denmark lied on its Greenland mortgage.
- I wrote a post about the Moylan arrow, and its relationship to Jens Rasmussen's skills, rules, and knowledge model. surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/01/17/f...
- Tired: learn to code Wired: learn to predict the future
- I know it’s only January, but I’d like to nominate this for most “2026-y” headline. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/n...
- I'm anxiously awaiting to hear the details about just what happened with that Verizon outage that occurred yesterday. In the meantime, here's some completely uninformed speculation on my part about what that report will say: surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/01/15/v...
- Dreamland by Joni Mitchell, except instead it’s “Greenland”
- My prediction: post-incident investigation of today’s Verizon outage will reveal planned maintenance as one of the contributing factors. Note: I have no actual knowledge of what happened today. This prediction is just to keep me intellectually honest.
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- Path dependence is a helluva drug
- Reposted by Lorin HochsteinI am calling for a complete and total boycott of the Mercator projection in all news stories about Greenland until every member of the American public has seen this
- Somebody's already made this joke, right?
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- It‘s only been four days since I originally posted this, but I think it’s holding up pretty well so far.
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- Did Frank Black ever find his mind?
- Reposted by Lorin HochsteinA systems-thinking approach tends to require a focus on interactions over components. Here I try to bring a temporal dimension to these interactions. Drift accumulates across loops and creates inconsistencies as mental models lag when trying to keep up with acceleration. ferd.ca/software-acc...
- Liked this observation from Addy Osmani: “Abstractions don’t remove complexity. They move it to the day you’re on call.” addyosmani.com/blog/21-less...
- Gonna be a long year, I see
- How close are we to being able to build a working version of KITT from Knight Rider?
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- Reposted by Lorin Hochstein2025 Headline of the Year nominee (August)
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- Reposted by Lorin Hochstein2025 Headline of the Year nominee (July)
- Systems are designed from the top down, but fail from the bottom up.
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- There was a thoughtful essay written in Aeon by an anesthesiologist (Dr. Ronald Dworkin) who began suffering from anxiety, and how it affected his practice. My thoughts on that essay are here: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/12/28/o...
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- Yesterday, the Bazel team was dealing with an expired SSL certificate that broke builds for external users. I wrote a quick post on why I think SSL certificates are so dangerous: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/12/27/t...
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- There's a new blog post on Waymo's blog on the surprising behavior of their robotaxis during the recent power outage of SF. My thoughts on the post are here: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/12/23/s...
- Some thoughts I had for rating incidents on more than just severity: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/12/22/a...
- Optus recently released an independent report on the emergency services outage that happened in Australia back in September. I wrote a post with my thoughts on that report: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/12/21/q...
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- I wrote a post about why I don't like the name that Amazon uses for their post-incident review process: "Correction of Error". surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/12/20/w...
- There was a great talk at re:Invent about the Oct. 25 us-east-1 outage! My impressions on the talk are here: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/12/14/a...
- Ironically, if you write sloppily, nobody will mistake your writing for AI slop.
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- Another detailed Cloudflare public incident write-up means another blog post from me commenting on it: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/12/06/q...
- Having a little bit more fun with Cloudflare and AWS public incident data: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/11/28/i...
- Spent my Thanksgiving playing with public incident data and seeing if it was under statistical control. surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/11/27/f...
- I finally got around to writing up my thoughts about the recent Cloudflare outage. surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/11/26/b...
- New blog post, on the role of attrition in software incidents, and how we don't talk about that in incident write-ups: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/11/02/y...
- New blog post on the recent AWS incident: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/10/25/q...
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- More fun with Sora. sora.chatgpt.com/p/s_68f9b2d0...
