Events: LCA Talks and ChefConf 2020 CFP
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The dark side of expertise
Everyone has expertise in some things, which is normally seen as a good thing to have. But Dr. Sean Brady gave some examples of ways that our expertise can lead us astray, and actually cause us to make worse decisions, in a keynote at the 2020 linux.conf.au. Brady is a forensic engineer who specializes in analyzing engineering failures to try to discover the root causes behind them. The talk gave real-world examples of expertise gone wrong, as well as looking at some of the psychological research that demonstrates the problem. It was an interesting view into the ways that our brains work—and fail to work—in situations where our expertise may be sending our thoughts down the wrong path.
Brady began his talk by going back to 1971 and a project to build a civic center arena in Hartford, Connecticut in the US. The building was meant to hold 10,000 seats; it had a large roof that was a "spiderweb of steel members". That roof would be sitting on four columns; it was to be built on the ground and then lifted into place.
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Poker and FOSS
He introduced poker with a definition: "Poker is a gambling game of strategy played by people for money, using cards". The order of the terms in that definition is important, he said. In online poker, though, the "people" element is weakened because you can't see and directly interact with the other people you are playing with. So, unlike real-life poker, online poker is more about sociology than psychology; serious players track the trends of the player base as a whole, rather than trying to recognize the quirks of a particular person.
That means online poker is "really about money". In order to succeed, one has to develop some weird views of the value of money. Even in games with relatively small stakes, players can win or lose a few thousand dollars in a session; in games with "nosebleed stakes", a player could be up or down by a million dollars in an evening. The game is particularly popular in the US, UK, and Australia, he said; it is played online and in face-to-face games in people's homes or at casinos.
Poker became mainstream in the late 1990s, largely due to the "Late Night Poker" television series in the UK. There are a lot of different kinds of poker games, but the show focused on no-limit Texas hold 'em, which is the most "high drama of poker games" so it was well-suited to television. The show pioneered the use of a hole-card camera, so that viewers could see the two unseen cards each player was dealt. That innovation allowed viewers and commentators to analyze the choices that the players were making; without seeing the hole cards, watching other people play poker is about as interesting as "watching paint dry", Kuhn said.
He did not go into the rules of poker much in the talk; a lot of it is not really germane to his topic. The important things to note are that it is a zero-sum, partial-information game where players are playing against each other and not the house (as they are in most other gambling games). It is a game of skill—better players win more over time—but there is a huge element of chance. In order for the house to make any money (casinos are not charities after all), a small percentage of the bets are kept by the house, which is usually called the "rake".
All of that made poker an ideal candidate for online play. He put up a screen shot of a online poker game from 1999 and noted that all of today's poker sites have a similar look. It features a simple user interface that allows players to quickly and easily see the cards and make their bets. Most online poker players do not want sophisticated graphics and the like.
So poker is relatively easy to write an online system for; there are a few "tricky bits", but in comparison to, say, an online multiplayer role-playing game, there are only minimal timing or network-delay issues to handle. It is completely turn-based and the state of the game is easily maintained on the server side. In addition, the client does not need any secret information, so the ability to cheat by extracting secrets from the data sent back and forth is eliminated—or, at least, it should be. The main problem for these systems is scaling them to accommodate as many tables as there is demand for. Serious players want to play in multiple games at once and the house maximizes its revenue by the number of games it can run.
The "watershed moment" for online poker came in 2003 when Chris Moneymaker—his actual birth name, as has been documented—joined into a "satellite tournament" for the World Series of Poker (WSoP). Moneymaker paid $86 to enter the tournament and ended up winning the $10,000 entry into the main WSoP event in Las Vegas; he won that tournament and received $2.5 million for doing so. That created a huge boom in online poker, Kuhn said.
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ChefConf 2020 CFP – Make the Work Flow
So hopefully you’ve taken the time to submit something. Lots of folks have, and thank you! Maybe you’re still not sure what you could talk about at ChefConf? Maybe you’ve got some interesting people stories from your time in the automation mines.
Over the years we’ve categorized these talks as “DevOps” or “People, Processes, and Teams”, but the real guts of the discussion centers on how tooling helps people get their jobs done better, as well as how new theories in teamwork and product delivery impact technical teams. How we work together sets the stage for how we succeed together.
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