Apache Airflow

Apache Airflow is a popular tool with data engineers.  

With it you can programmatically create, schedule and monitor workflows. It's kind of "workflow-as-code". 

Pipelines are defined in Python, can can be built dynamically. There is good cloud integration.

Airflow also makes use of the Jinja templating engine.

It also has a command-line interface (Apache Airflow CTL, or airflowctl) that interacts exclusively with the Airflow REST API.

Incautious Experiments of the AI Labs

Cal Newport (of "Deep Work" fame) makes the excellent point of AI labs being guilty of "incautious experiments" to trump up the significance of their work - specifically a "narrow band of incautious experiments" which the "frontier labs" have executed.  

He argues for specificity on what experiments they are running and move away from thinking of AI as a "singular technology on an inevitable, fixed trajectory".

He covers this in the blog post "It's time to investigate the AI Labs".

P99 Latency and its Significance

P99 latency (or 99th percentile response time) - refers to the 99th percentile of request response times - in other words, the "slowest  1% of requests".

Programming "In the Large"

This term (coined in 1975 in a paper "Programming in the large versus programming in the small") refers to programming large-scale software systems.

It embodies principles like modularization, high cohesion and loose coupling, as well as formal project management.

The Browser As Sandbox

A "browser sandbox" isolates pages and scripts in a restricted environment. This can prevent malicious sites from accessing your files and doing other dangerous things on your machine.

Modern browsers run rendering and JavaScript execution in low privilege processes, with a separate "broker process" (or "mediator process") controlling access to system resources (process isolation)  Renderer processes cannot read files, launch programs or interact with other applications.

Types of browser sandboxing include local sandboxing - where the sandbox is built into browsers (Chromium, Firefox, Safari), remote/cloud sandboxing where websites are run in isolated VMs streamed to your machine, and online URL sandboxes (services like Browserling which allow you to open URLs in disposable remote browsers).

Browser sandboxing is a foundational security layer in modern browsers and remote isolation platforms.

One Billion Bytes - It's Not "Big Data"

One billion bytes is not big data.  But it is a big number.  A number equal to 10^9. 

A short form for one billion is giga- in the International System of Units (SI). 

The unit symbol for the gigabyte is GB.

Code 43

Code 43 means Windows disabled a device because its firmware reported a fault. 

You may see it presented thus.

"Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems (Code 43)".

In fact, the device in question may be perfectly fine.