these two things don’t really have anything to do with each other, and the article just restates the same two facts over and over again. they have held this BTC since 2024, this year thru lost a bunch of money trying to integrate xAI. so… what?
There are some clear parallels to me here from task scheduling algorithms, which I suppose businesses have been reinventing and tweaking for many years. For instance, emergency rooms often use something like priority scheduling, where high priority tasks get scheduled first, but can classically lead to starvation of low-priority tasks such as sitting in the waiting room for a long time with a minor injury. Starbucks wants to maximize throughput while minimizing wait time, but up until now they were just placing all orders into the same FIFO queue and popping them off one at a time? With occasional Shortest-Job-First exceptions (ex. just a black coffee). That seems fairly naive. Something that feels like a slight improvement to me would be having 2 queues (in-person and online, no reason to separate walk-up and drive-through), and alternate popping off from each of them. Or a priority queue? Maybe there is more you could do to maximize throughput, such as batching together food that needs to be heated, or surfacing to the barista how many pending shots need to be pulled for the entire queue so they can just crank out espresso during busy times. Curious if anyone with more experience in the domain has better ideas.
Thank you for the clarification and insight, with that context it does make more sense to me. Is there anything you think can be done to improve the ability to identify issues like this more quickly in the future?
The most surprising thing to me here is that it took 3 hours to root cause, and points to a glaring hole in the platform observability. Even taking into account the fact that the service was failing intermittently at first, it still took 1.5 hours after it started failing consistently to root cause. But the service was crashing on startup. If a core service is throwing a panic at startup like that, it should be raising alerts or at least easily findable via log aggregation. It seems like maybe there was some significant time lost in assuming it was an attack, but it also seems strange to me that nobody was asking "what just changed?", which is usually the first question I ask during an incident.
You might want to check out Old World. It was created by Soren Johnson, lead designer on Civ4, and shares many similarities to that era of Civ while bringing in some new ideas as well.