This is Fine! A podcast about resilience engineering and software

Special thanks to John Allspaw, Sheeri Cabral, Martin Smith, and David Woods for joining us!

Ben Affleck’s been making the promo rounds, but the specific convo we reference is recapped here: https://www.moviemaker.com/ben-affleck-ai-explains/

The Messy 9 are:
congestion
cascade
conflict
lag
saturation
friction
tempo
surprise
tangles

Dave’s been doing a set of videos on Resilience Engineering, some of which have some crossover with the Messy 9 - you can find the first one here:
https://resiliencefoundations.github.io/video-1-introduction-pt-1-it's-all-about-viability.html

Previous TiF episode on the messy 9:
https://www.thisisfinepod.com/the-pod/complex-systems-and-the-messy-nine-wspecial-guests-dave-woods-and-john-allspaw

Richard Cook on Above the Line/Below the Line:
Written - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3379510
A good excerpt from a talk from John Allspaw on Above the Line/Below the Line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bxj-FLEi10&list=PLb1aZTnPf3-OMChMkrr6WsokRI6LOnuem

Colette mentioned the competence knowledge model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence

There’s a good argument based on the conversation here that AI makes it harder for Consciously Incompetent people to graduate to Conscious Competence. And, in Martin’s case, it makes Unconsciously Competent folks need to backtrack into Conscience Competence to “teach” it how to do things they don’t always think about.

We can reset the clock to 0 episodes since we’ve mentioned the Ironies of Automation: https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica.pdf

There is a good blog on Jamie Zawinski’s saying on regular expressions here: https://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247

Alex Gorbachev and The Battle Against Any Guess seems to have become a paper https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251255185_Battle_Against_Any_Guess

Dave talks about Robust Yet Fragile as part of Resilience Engineering here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFotUdLL2zs

Lorin Hochstein’s blog post that Dave is referencing is https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/01/19/amdahl-gustafson-coding-agents-and-you/

Fred writes a good one on the Law of Stretched Systems: ​​https://ferd.ca/the-law-of-stretched-cognitive-systems.html

The 1985 paper Dave keeps mentioning could be any number of things he released that year, but I have a hunch it’s this one: https://ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/511 or this one: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-50329-0_11

Dave references a lot of things around the economic sustainability around AI, and Ed Zitron has been writing quite a bit about that for the last year and change. See: https://www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-money/

https://www.wheresyoured.at/big-tech-2tr/

Among others.

If you’re feeling like you need to do more to respond to our moment:
Lots of place to donate to in the twin cities are listed here: https://mspmag.com/arts-and-culture/general-interest/ice-minnesota-support-immigrant-communities-fundraisers-food-drives-trainings/
You can always find mutual aid networks in your own area, including immigrant aid networks
https://immigrantdefensenetwork.org/ does good work, too

The Hometown Holler podcast with Tressie McMillan Cottom was a wonderful discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gr4mW8aR-g

The Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s interview that I quoted clumsily is here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition-ruth-wilson-gilmore.html

The paper itself: https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/14/2/130.short

If you haven’t seen The Pitt, you should, it’s super good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pitt

Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents has more definitions/examples of coupling: https://bookshop.org/p/books/normal-accidents-living-with-high-risk-technologies-updated-edition-professor-charles-perrow/cad38a43fcffa1f8?ean=9780691004129&next=t

Some stuff on microservices and coupling here: https://microservices.io/post/architecture/2023/03/28/microservice-architecture-essentials-loose-coupling.html

Colette’s #notanad endorsement for paper organizing is https://paperpile.com/

Rasmussen’s boundary model comes initially from his paper here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0925753597000520

And if you want a good writeup on Rasmussen’s boundary model explaining it, you can always read Lorin’s blog: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2021/05/31/transgressing-the-boundaries-rasmussen-and-woods/

Dr Cook’s talk at Velocity is a classic, and goes over Rasmussen’s boundary model really well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60

Fred does a great job writing about the Law of Stretched Systems and how it applies to his own work on his blog: https://ferd.ca/the-law-of-stretched-cognitive-systems.html

“Plans are nothing, but planning is everything” is a paraphrase of Eisenhower: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-national-defense-executive-reserve-conference

Want to chat about this paper with other folks? Come to the RISF live event for a Paper Party! https://resilienceinsoftware.org/events/157553

Seriously though, can’t wait to gtfo of this year.

Palisades fire links: https://www.nbclosangeles.com/investigations/anonymous-letter-demands-independent-palisades-fire-investigations/3800442/

https://internationalfireandsafetyjournal.com/palisades-fire-report/

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-12-20/lafd-report-on-palisades-fire-was-watered-down-in-editing-process-records-show

Corey Quinn’s commentary on the AWS outage in October is here: https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/aws_outage_amazon_brain_drain_corey_quinn/

Time to reset the clock on how many episodes it’s been since we’ve mentioned the Ironies of Automation: https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica.pdf

Also on Rasmussen’s Boundary Model, which Lorin does a great write up on: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2021/05/31/transgressing-the-boundaries-rasmussen-and-woods/

Lorin’s Law is our favorite law: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2017/06/24/a-conjecture-on-why-reliable-systems-fail/

You can ask us questions or write to us using our form linked from our website: thisisfinepod.com

Resilience in Software Foundation is at resilienceinsoftware.org

Mentioned multiple times, Em Ruppe’s amazing talk on incident severity: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon24americas/presentation/ruppe

We talk about the RIS Slack sometimes - you can join us in the slack, by joining the Foundation here: https://resilienceinsoftware.org/

Please ask us a question at thisisfinepod.com

The writeup on the AWS outage from AWS themselves, if you haven’t seen it: https://aws.amazon.com/message/101925/

Dave’s department at OSU, Cognitive Systems Engineering: https://ise.osu.edu/human-systems-integration/cognitive-systems-engineering is a part of the larger Integrated Systems Engineering school: https://ise.osu.edu/human-systems-integration

Dave was talking early on about the discussion on the war on expertise, it was this webinar through the NDM association: https://vimeo.com/1129606494?fl=pl&fe=sh&mc_cid=c807a504fb

Dave was a part of the

Paul Feltovich got a shout out - he wrote a lot, but one of the best is with Gary Klein on Common Ground and Coordination in Joint Activity: https://www.academia.edu/download/31764257/Common_Ground_Single.pdf

And Studies of Expertise from Psychological Perspectives: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Paul-J-Feltovich/publication/200772882_Studies_of_expertise_from_psychological_perspectives/links/58bd18b2aca27261e528de07/Studies-of-Expertise-from-Psychological-Perspectives.pdf

Dave mentions his “Command-Adapt Paradox chapter” - you can find that here: https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/88327/1/978-3-031-45055-6.pdf#page=77

Shout out to Norbert Weiner, the godfather of cybernetics: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24945913

For just two studies on how private equity in hospitals causes worse outcomes for patients you can see: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/private-equitys-appetite-for-hospitals-may-put-patients-at-risk/
And
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304405X25001151

Dave talks a bit about saturation and crossing boundaries towards failure - it’s worth familiarizing yourself with Rasmussen’s boundary model - Lorin Hochstein writes a good summary over at his blog: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2021/05/31/transgressing-the-boundaries-rasmussen-and-woods/

Dave also mentions graceful extensibility - this is a concept he’s written quite a bit about, you can start here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10669-018-9708-3

Shout out to Slight Reliability: https://slightreliability.com/

One of the great Woods/Cook write ups on anticipation in anesthesiology: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0952818096900094

In case you’re unfamiliar with the Chicago Seven: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Seven

The Messy 9 are:
congestion
cascade
conflict
lag
saturation
friction
tempo
surprise
tangles

Keep an eye on the merch store over at https://www.bonfire.com/store/risf/ if you want the t-shirt.