Q. Why did you create this newsletter?
Because I’m fed up with degrading service quality that’s fueled by AI overdose and AI overuse which is incentivized by gullible leaders.
Primary objective: raise awareness about AI’s flaws and offer practical approaches to improve reliability, safety and security of systems with AI components.
Secondary objective: provide a high signal to noise ratio in the age of AI generated and curated content.
Every time someone makes benevolent or altruistic claims you should be suspicious. For me this free newsletter is a way to fight back against the product degradation that's impacting me.
The service degradation of two companies motivated me to do this: GitHub and Google. I'm sure there are others but these are the two that pissed me off enough to create this newsletter.
Q. What’s up with the name?
The “AI” part is obvious but the “5 nines” part is a short hand for 99.999% service level objective (SLO). The idea is to communicate the scope as:
AI services that are highly available, reliable, aligned and safe.
The number 5 in the name also has a secondary meaning: the batch size. Each issue contains exactly 5 links.
Q. Who are you?
My name is Alex Ewerlöf and I’m an author, and founder based in Stockholm, Sweden. I primarily focus on the intersection of Reliability Engineering, Language Models, and Platform engineering. You can read more about me here.
Q. How do I contact you?
See the contact information on my personal site.
Q. Who is the target audience?
Primarily senior engineers who build and/or maintain systems with one or more AI components.
The secondary audience are product managers and engineering managers who want to get a solid understanding about what it takes to make those AI-powered services more reliable, secure, and profitable.
Q. Why is there no fixed cadence?
Because in the era of mass produced synthetic content and agent-picked links, the signal/noise ratio should be extremely high for a distraction to be worthy of your attention.
Q. What is the value proposition of this newsletter?
The primary value of this newsletter is that it’s hand-picked and briefed by a senior engineer and technical leader who works in these areas. The secondary value is its brevity and optimization for busy audience who want to maximize actionable insight in the shortest time.
Q. Why is this free?
My primary objective is to lift our industry. Open knowledge sharing builds resilient systems. If you want to support my work, you can subscribe to my blog.
Going through a bunch of links to find signal in a sea of noise is the most time-consuming part of this newsletter, but I have to do it for my own relevance anyway. I figured it’s relatively cheap to share the learning because the gain of lifting our industry, and having access to higher quality products is worth the effort.
Q. Why do you have a SLA?
Although Service Level Agreement makes sense for paid services where the consumer has leverage, in the age of mass produced synthetic content, human attention is a scarce resource and the SLA is primarily to hold myself accountable.
Yes, it takes 3-5 hours to prepare every issue and although my time is not free, your attention isn’t free either. Your leverage is to vote with your feet and unsubscribe, and I’m very aware of it. The SLA sets clear expectations on both sides.
Q. Who designed the logo?
I did. In Boxy-SVG on Linux. It took like half an hour. I may update it later, but I’m strict about not using AI. Goes with the theme of this newsletter.
Q. Do you really hand pick and review all links?
Yes. If you rather have an LLM do it for you, then this newsletter is probably not for you. The primary reason I do this manually is because:
As the ambitious title of this newsletter suggests, AI reliability is nowhere near 99.999% so I don’t want to miss anything that’s important but the LLMs don’t want to hide.
As a senior engineer and tech lead, I know exactly what interests me. This is more of an easy way to share the content with readers that resonate with my work.
AI can explain it to you but cannot understand it for you. I read a bunch in this area anyway. I figured sharing the top 5 links is the least I can do.
Q. Do you accept sponsorship?
Any future partnerships will be strictly vetted and put at the bottom of the posts because of my promise to the audience to keep it primarily focused on them and not burning their attention. If that works for you, get in touch.
Q. Can you recommend my newsletter, promote our products, conferences, or courses?
No! I’m extremely rigid with this newsletter and don’t want to ruin the promise I’ve made to my audience for not distracting their attention and ruining their trust. If you’ve written something that is related to my audience, get in touch. I will read it and see if it makes the top 5 (can’t promise).