You have arrived at the mid-week hump. Have a $container of $beverage and enjoy some reading before you speed along with the rest of your life.

New articles

Survival Analysis of the Supreme Court

There is a lot of speculation on whether any of the serving justices of the Supreme Court of the US will retire this year. Based on survival analysis of the past 60 years of the Supreme Court, I think there's an 18 % probability.

Full article (9–20 minute read): Survival Analysis of the Supreme Court

Flashcard of the week

I briefly worked at a place where they were big on the microservices thing. It was also an employer that wanted me to take a couple courses on paid time, so I attended the Linux Foundation's LFS158x class on Kubernetes. It was actually really good and I recommend it if you want to get into Kubernetes.

Unfortunately, much of Kubernetes-specific knowledge is perishable, because there's somewhat high turnover in that technology space. Some flashcards from the class are still relevant, though. We'll see for how long. Here's one:

What should we do when someone suggests we create a ReplicaSet?

ReplicaSets are objects that tell Kubernetes to run a particular number of Pods (collections of containers) of a specific type in the cluster. However, there's a higher level of abstraction available on top of the ReplicaSet which is even more convenient to manage.

Make a Deployment instead.

Deployments manage ReplicaSets, and add rolling updates, rollbacks, etc. to automate slightly more of the process.

Longest premium newsletter ever

The newest premium newsletter went out this weekend to great fanfare. It was so long it had to be split into three emails for deliverability reasons. This is what it contained:

• Part 1:
  • A brief review of 2025 for the blog (2 minute read)
  • Some personal notes on ZFS mirroring (3 minute read)
  • Book recommendation: Vitön by Uusma (1 minute read)
• Part 2:
  • Pathfinding using multi-criteria shortest path (25 minute read)
• Part 3:
  • Forecasts for the ACX 2026 prediction contest (35 minute read)

Subscribers also get access to all past newsletters containing various guides, book recommendations, and links to fun games. (Did you know I have three times now managed to copy the daily Morsle word at 40 WPM? Insane!)

You might not think any of the above is interesting, but you'd still like to support the blog. You can do so for $4 per month, cancelable any time with no questions asked. To upgrade, find the appropriate link below.

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