This resonates with me to a surprising extent. My perceived threshold for expressing an opinion is very high, and I also find that I don't really have any particularly _strong_ opinions to begin with.
The "hedge my answers extensively" bit is spot-on, as is the isolating nature of this "trait", unfortunately.
Interesting. I wonder if that choice would lead to a noticeable impact on perceived latency (from the perspective of a human end-user) under some high-load/pathological scenario.
The justification for using LIFO (vs FIFO) queues for requests is interesting: at no/low load it makes no difference, while at high load the requests least likely to time out get serviced first.
Is that a common architectural decision in reverse proxies or queuing systems in general?
Regarding your last point: this is an idea I first encountered a couple years ago in Taleb's "Fooled by Randomness", and it's been on my mind ever since.
Monetizing successful people's advice on how to become successful seems seems to be a pretty profitable endeavor.
Accepting that success, among many other things, is more random than post-hoc explanations make it seem is scary yet somewhat liberating at the same time.
Two Truths and a Take by Alex Danco (tech, VC, and broader topics): https://danco.substack.com/
The Uncertainty Mindset by Vaughn Tan: https://uncertaintymindset.substack.com/
The Diff by Byrne Hobart (finance, tech): https://diff.substack.com/
Kneeling Bus by Drew Austin (urbanism, tech): https://kneelingbus.substack.com/