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Recently, I had two experiences within a few days that made me think regarding system dependability. In both situations, the systems acted detached from their surrounding reality and thus became confusing or even annoying – even if it would have been easy for them to detect their reality detachment.

About a decade ago, Jeffrey Dean and Luiz André Barroso published their IMO great article “The tail at scale” in the Communications of the ACM ¹. The article dives into the topic of latency tail-tolerance.

In the previous post, we identified time as our most precious resource. We saw that we are always confronted with a lot of tasks and expectations of other people. We also discussed that quite some of them turn out not to have any value for us or other people we care about. I call such tasks time killers.

This is my 100th blog post and the first post, I release in 2023. I would like to use this post to write about something more general for a change. I would like to write about time.

In this last post before the end of the year 2022, I would like to discuss a bit more general topic. I would like to discuss the problems of extreme positions in IT, why they are so popular – and why they are so harmful.