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The Chairman’s Lounge

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The Chairman's Lounge Book Cover The Chairman's Lounge
Joe Aston
Simon & Schuster Australia
2024
359
★★★★★

This is the story of the downfall of an Australian business hero, the destruction of an iconic Australian brand, and hubris. In a mere four years Alan Joyce when from hero status in Australia, to literally hiding out with his mother in Dublin while being hounded by the press. Truly his downfall was impressive.

However, I think it’s also another example of Welshian management ultimately failing, as seen with General Electric in The Man Who Broke Capitalism and Lights Out. This includes: publishing accounting results that while inline with the definition of the accounting standards appear to have redefined expenses in a manner convenient to management with little rationale provided; misleading customers on their refund rights at a time when those same customers were trapped at home suffering and Qantas was sitting on massive cash stockpiles; illegal union busting; and shedding large numbers of highly skilled staff which simply couldn’t be replaced in a timely manner when travel ramped back up again. That is, optimizing for this quarter’s numbers by completely ignoring the longer term impact of the decisions being made.

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Stumbling across a 5% performance increase in OpenStack Kolla-Ansible CI

I went on a side quest a couple of weekends ago which seems like it might have ended up being a big win. That win likely applies to other people running both OpenStack, but also other cloud orchestration systems using libvirt like oVirt, Proxmox, Shaken Fist, and so forth.

By way of back story, I have a stack of patches which I maintain on top of OpenStack’s Kolla and Kolla-Ansible. Most of those patches continue to progress the new “spice-direct” console type in OpenStack Nova, but I also occasionally find little bugs or CI regressions along the way that I want to clean up. One example of such a bug was Kolla’s failure to setup virtlogd to provide instance console log rotation, which is currently being backported to various releases. Another one is the topic of this post.

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It appears to be Debian’s stance that the behavior I experienced is completely normal

Unsurprisingly, I awoke to a disappointing response from the Debian bugs team. The email was sent privately so I wont post it here, but it boils down to “nah man, this is normal”. On a whim, I have therefore asked the Debian TC if they have a policy on quality and correctness review of patches inserted by Debian into upstream software:

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Platform Decay

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Platform Decay Book Cover Platform Decay
Martha Wells
The Murderbot Diaries
Tor Books
May 5, 2026
256
★★★☆☆

So I just finished reading the latest Murderbot book and I had caused me to realize I have questions, but we’ll get to those in a moment. This book is fairly standard Murderbot fare — Murderbot is doing something they think is dumb because their humans asked nicely. Very Bolo Tank if you will. The book is ok, for what I would call a “travel book”, but it does feel like the overall plot isn’t being progressed much in these recent books. Like I get it. Corporates bad, weird hippy dumb circle planet and university with mercenaries good — but shouldn’t there perhaps be something bigger happening here?

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Is this the standard of behavior we get from Debian now?

So… a really really long time ago I wrote a small set of PNG utilities called pngtools. They’re not particularly complicated or anything, but a few distros decided to package them, including Debian (and therefore Ubuntu), Gentoo, Mint, and so forth. I’ve talked previously here about resurrecting the old subversion commit history and attempting to modernize the code.

And then something weird happened. A couple of weeks ago a github issue was filed against pngtools. The entire bug report is a single sentence pointing to the Debian bug tracker where people are being… weird. I think perhaps I accidentally overlapped with two things — a slightly entitled user, and people who appear to “karma farm” by pushing bug reports from Debian upstream with the minimum possible level of detail. Certainly when I look at the github history for these users they do not have a good hit rate for reporting bugs which actually result in a fix upstream. I am unclear on why they would be doing this thing if their goal isn’t either to acquire a fix or to earn some sweet sweet made up internet points.

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Early assessment of Fable, Anthropic’s new “slightly safer” LLM model

This is obviously not a scientifically valid assessment, but it is my general early impressions. This started as a really really long slack message, but it became pretty clear that slack wasn’t the right place for something like this — so here it is as a blog post instead.

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System Collapse

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Once again a relatively short but enjoyable Murderbot book. I think its endearing that Murderbot continues to develop as a character, even if some of the tropes are feeling a little worn around the edges. Yes they get injured, yes they do some combat, yes they're sarcastic. On the other hand I think this story line is both unique compared to the previous ones, and builds reasonably upon the previous book. Honestly though, this and the previous book probably should have been one volume.

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