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Title: I Am Constantly Stashing⊠Authors: @mipsytipsy on Twitter Category:tweets Number of Highlights: 5 Source URL: https://twitter.com/mipsytipsy/status/1615971253860401153 Date: 2023-01-19 Last Highlighted: 2023-01-19
Highlights
The original source for that anecdote about âthe average hue of Starry Nightâ turns out to be @jrauser, at Velocity 2011. đđ„łđ„ O glorious day!
Iâve been googling and searching for this for YEARS. And itâs even better than I remembered!!
Itâs easy to shit on averages. But then he turns to Moby Dick. âMoves awe in the soul.â But if you lowercase & sort the words:
min word: a max: zoroaster 99th %: ye avg: ljklk
(The average of a sample is often a value that doesnât even exist in the sample.)

âSummary statistics are useful, but very lossy compression algorithms. Thousands of intricate stories went into the making of this one number: 295ms.
But no one would argue that number teaches you much about those stories, just like no one goes to the museum to see4c5c6dâ
Tags:data,favorite,technology,work
âThe problem only affected any one customer for a short period of time, and so the size of the impact was probably less than a pixel on a time series plot of our average latencies, but these were the worst-performing hits on the site.â
âBecause if you arenât looking at your data at least occasionally in its âšrawest possible formâš, then you donât understand your business, and you almost certainly donât understand your customers.â â @jrauser
Raw events: you canât have observability without them. Period.
Tags:technology,work