Skip to content

Charity Majors: Observability

Talk Charity Majors
researcher practitioner
Open resource →

Charity Majors, co-founder of Honeycomb, discusses with interviewer Benat (Venkatesh Rao) how observability emerged from her and co-founder Christine's experience with Facebook's Scuba tool, defining it via control theory as understanding internal system state from outputs, and distinguishing it from traditional monitoring through high-cardinality, high-dimensionality data capture. They explore how this concept applies beyond software to protocol governance broadly, using examples like tsunami warning networks and the LEAF Coalition's use of satellite data plus chainsaw-detecting microphones to monitor Amazon deforestation compliance, with Majors emphasizing that the key is capturing enough high-cardinality data to ask novel questions later and tailoring the 'story' to the audience's capacity for action.

Related resources

Talk

A Protocol Fiction Protocol

Venkatesh Rao presents a theory of 'protocol fiction' as a genre distinct from both heroic fantasy (Ted Chiang's 'special people') and science fiction (Chiang's 'strange rules'), arguing it uniquely captures how humans transform alongside technological/institutional change rather than merely reacting to it or resisting it collectively (per Ursula Le Guin's 'carrier bag' model). He traces this through modernist literature, detective fiction, and Asimov/Dick/cyberpunk eras, then outlines three ways protocols appear in fiction (authorial process, central theme, background device), before Travis Van Epps and Sachin Benny discuss their own protocol-fiction writing experiments, including LLM ping-pong drafting techniques and story ideas drawn from DAO governance and care-package logistics in Venezuela.

agency-in-system-vs-agency-in-protagonist-bechdel-test-for-protocol-fiction fiction llm-assisted-co-writing-techniques-claudechatgpt-ping-pong

Venkatesh Rao, Travis, Sachin Benny, Timber

Talk

AI as Normal Technology

Arvind Narayanan presents his paper/book 'AI as Normal Technology,' arguing against superintelligence narratives by applying innovation-diffusion theory (invention, innovation, diffusion stages) to AI, contending that societal adoption is bottlenecked by slow organizational, business-model, and institutional adaptation rather than by the pace of capability gains. In discussion with Venkatesh Rao, they connect this to protocol theory, framing workflows, business models, and context engineering practices as new 'protocols' that must be invented, while Rao draws analogies to naval warfare tactics, printing-press literacy, and the hardness/mud distinction from Josh Stark's work to explain why protocol adoption is inherently slow but durable.

ai-as-normal-technology-vs-superintelligence context-engineering institutionaltechnological-hardness-crystals-and-mud

Arvind Narayanan, Venkatesh Rao

Talk

AI as the Anti-product – Guest Talk with Peter Wang

Peter Wang (Anaconda co-founder, now Chief AI Officer, and founder of the Sky Seed fund) argues that modern software/AI development is best understood through a complexity-versus-complication lens: tool stacks like CUDA and PyTorch remain complicated (Boeing-747-style, decomposable) while the models and ecosystems they produce are genuinely complex and emergent, and 'vibe coding' represents a quasi-religious third mode of engaging code beyond craftsmanship and managerial industrialization. He traces how Anaconda/NumPy's open-source success came from humble, itch-scratching human ecologies (e.g. Travis Oliphant merging numeric and numarray into NumPy) rather than top-down design, and warns that protocols like AT Protocol/Blue Sky must avoid centralized 'technocratic' forced upgrades, instead preserving pluralistic values across nodes the way open source avoided forced EOL upgrades.

complexity-vs-complication forced-upgrades-and-coherent-pluralism-in-decentralized-systems governance

Peter Wang

Topics

durable-vs-disposable-code feedback-loops-in-distributed-systems high-cardinality-data observability-vs-monitoring protocol-watching protocols technology testing-in-production town-hall