Skip to content

Charity Majors: Observability

TalkCharity Majors
researcherpractitioner
Charity Majors: Observability
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.

Topics

durable-vs-disposable-codefeedback-loops-in-distributed-systemshigh-cardinality-dataobservability-vs-monitoringprotocol-watchingprotocolstechnologytesting-in-productiontown-hall

Related resources

Talk

S04E01 - New Nature

Timber, managing director of the newly formed Protocol Institute, opens Season 4 ('New Nature') by outlining the season's focus on AI and protocols, previewing upcoming guests (Denise Hearn, Sriram Krishnan, Kyle Matthews, Danny Ryan, Rohit Krishnan, Tanya). He then argues for a distinction between Safety-1 (minimizing accidents to zero) and Safety-2 (maximizing successful operations per accident, per Erik Hollnagel), applying Hollnagel's 'dynamic non-event' and efficiency-thoroughness trade-off (ETTO) concepts to critique mainstream AI alignment discourse as overly focused on existential risk rather than practical, bottom-up safety protocols.

Timber

Article

Disentangling the State of Climate

Cory Levinson surveys the current landscape of climate protocols, tracing how carbon markets and DeFi have collided since 2023, with projects like KlimaDAO absorbing millions of carbon credits into blockchain form and Regen Network expanding into biodiversity markets. The piece examines how these protocols are attempting to create durable market mechanisms for environmental assets despite fundamental challenges in traditional carbon crediting.

Cory Levinson

Talk

Beyond Consensus: Protocols as Digital Institutions

Martin Harrahan (a teaching fellow at Southeast Technological University in Ireland) presents a protocol school workshop demonstrating an LLM-powered pipeline that transcribes and clusters the Summer of Protocols YouTube corpus into 'foundational' and 'aggregated' ideas, which can then be loaded as context to get chatbots to answer in protocol-studies terms rather than narrow computer-science definitions. He then walks participants through using an LLM persona ('Kevin the dinner host') to roleplay a chosen protocol and test it against the ten properties from Josh Stark's 'Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols' framework (e.g. defensibility, mortality, hardness), showing how conversational steering can reveal whether a protocol resists capture or can gracefully die out.

Martin Harrahan