Sarah Butt

@sarahbutt.bsky.social

Systems thinker. Student of complexity. “Like a moth to the incident flame”. Normally accompanied by 🦮 (she/her)

Tell me you got paged after hours without telling me you got paged. I’ll go first: There is a half-assembled bowl of cereal on the counter, the milk is sitting out, and somehow the dog lost her collar (I think from playing with our other dog, but honestly who knows what happened in the last 15 min)

become a systems thinker, they said you'll have a better understanding of how the world works, they said yeah and you'll also spend every waking moment in despair

The number of people who didn’t know what us-east-1 was on Sunday and are suddenly experts in running multi-region distributed systems at scale today is truly remarkable.

Parentheses! Em dashes! Comma splices! Semicolons! Welcome to ADHD Grammar (since every thought comes with exciting bonus content), friends!

My dog believes, completely and without hesitation, that we can both exist in the exact same spot on the couch. I envy her faith in a reality unburdened by physics. To be fair, she’s correct… as long as “don’t squish your human” isn’t a requirement.

I do not know anything about this drug or the reasons for its nonapproval, but this is the exact kind of scenario that shows the failure of making sweeping policy generalizations about evidence that simply cannot account for some scenarios and rare diseases :(

Anna Bower@annabower.bsky.social · last yr.

To be sure, the pathway to FDA approval for elamipretide has been challenging. Because MLS and related conditions are so rare, the patient population is tiny. That makes it extremely difficult to conduct robust, controlled clinical trials—the kind the FDA usually requires for approval.

Schrödinger’s Incident: that brief moment when you wake up knowing you’re about to take on-call handover, but haven’t checked your work phone yet. The incident both exists and doesn’t— until you unlock your phone and open the handover thread.

My thoughts are like race cars today. Bless my husband, who intercepted me physically vibrating on 4 hrs sleep, took my half-full Dr Pepper and said, “Maybe don’t finish this today?” while I rapid-fired through tasks and lectured the dogs on how systemic failure meant no clean spoons.

It’s 2:25 a.m. I’m trying to finish a work project. An armadillo has somehow climbed onto our front porch, stranded itself, and is now frantically scratching to get inside. I’m about to wake up my sick husband because he’s the vet in this relationship, and I am not equipped for this. Texas, y’all.

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve had to flee my house due to a multi-day power outage combined with extreme temps in the last 5 years, I’d have $3. Not enough to buy my favorite Starbucks drink, but up from $2 earlier this week. Which feel like a lot for someone who lives in a major city.

Turbulence: an excellent case study in safety vs. perception. The data says I’m safe. I trust the system. I trust my friends in aviation who tell me I’m safe. But my body still braces. Heart races. Panic hits. Being safe is not necessarily the same as feeling safe. I’m fascinated by this.

Just one more day of pushing the limits of chronic illness and back-to-back activity. Just one more. “What’s the worst that could happen?” I ask myself, reaching for the Ibuprofen. (Rasmussen’s dynamic safety model and Dekker’s drift into failure quietly join the group chat.)

Potential 🔥 take: the fact that you’d make a different judgement call now doesn’t mean the original decision was bad. Decisions are made in context, with the information and constraints and signals available then. Judgement is a timestamped event and the past didn’t have your present

Post conference vibes: - I’m inspired and want to do several hundred things all at once— also I want to do nothing at all please let me sleep - oh thank goodness introvert quiet time— also oh wait my friends are scattered around the globe again, this feels lonely - Dogs! I’m home with my dogs!