Sounds like double ungood day for Linode

Posted Jul 28, 2025 21:02 UTC (Mon) by smurf (subscriber, #17840)
In reply to: Sounds like double ungood day for Linode by farnz
Parent article: LWN is back

This is why reasonable badge systems have an offline mode which knows the cards of a few senior DC operators, along with the card that's in the locker which the fire brigade has access to.

The interesting part about cyclic dependencies is that you have customers, which need to be notified when their servers go belly-up for some reason (including when the router they're behind blows a fuse). Thus you need dependency tracking anyway. Which presumably should alert you when there's any cycles in that graph. Which should prevent this from happening. Famous last words …

Sounds like double ungood day for Linode

Posted Jul 29, 2025 0:08 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (3 responses)

Something that LLMs might actually be useful at helping to spot assuming you have things written down in a LLM-consumable medium (i.e., not only stored in meatspace).

Sounds like double ungood day for Linode

Posted Jul 29, 2025 7:33 UTC (Tue) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (2 responses)

Why would you ever entrust something like that to an LLM? Here you want reliable answers and algorithms exist to get reliable answers.

Sounds like double ungood day for Linode

Posted Jul 29, 2025 11:02 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm not saying to just blindly hand it to an LLM and call it a day on its first response. But you can use it to ask if it notices anything like a dependency cycle, implicit knowledge, or steps lacking clarification.

It's obviously not going to know about problems like "Bob has the key, but it is lost on his 100-key keyring", but it (hopefully) can notice things like "it says to get the key, but not where the key lives" that might be implicit knowledge in the author's eyes but these instructions are those that really should have a thorough once-over by someone *not* intimately familiar with the process to help rid it of such implicit assumptions.

LLMs looking over your recovery plan

Posted Jul 29, 2025 11:29 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

It can also do things like decide that certain job titles imply particular people (not reliably, but often enough to be useful), and then highlight that your recovery plans depend on Chris being present at site, because Chris is the Site Manager, the Health and Safety Lead, and the Chief Electrician, and your plans depend on the Site Manager, the Health and Safety Lead, the Chief Electrician, or the Deputy Chief Electrician being on site.

While the LLM made a mistake here (since there's two people you rely on, not one), it's still highlighted that a document saying that 1 of 4 roles is needed to recover has, in fact, become 1 of 2 people.