alt Hacker News> The real core of infrastructure monitoring isn’t dashboards. It’s the alerts.
“it’s not X it’s Y”
at this point when I see this pattern in writing I assume most if not all of it is AI generated - same with em-dashes.
This is not to discount the idea that alerts are more important than dashboards (I work directly in observability) - but just to say that I personally shut off reading anything else with these patterns because, generally speaking, the rest of the content is just not original or interesting.
Replies
I'm not sure in this case it's AI per se so much as a change over time.
At the first role I ever had 10+ years ago, we had a TV in our team's office space constantly showing our dashboard for our critical services and health. We still had alerting monitors but it felt like those alarms were for important issues (like sev-2 or worse).
the last couple roles I've had we don't constantly look at our dashboards unless our monitors keep ringing us with alerts. We have also had more monitors in general than the first role I mentioned. Occasionally if another team asks us if we're affected by something we'll look at the dashboards we have to make sure we don't have a monitoring gap.
I think that this is sad, because it is a useful pattern.
It is very frequent to find things about which a majority of the people wrongly believe that they are X, but in fact they are Y.
In such cases, you must point to them that "it's not X it's Y".
There are a few alternative ways to formulate this, but the alternatives are typically longer and more complex.
The same happens with em-dashes, which have valid uses and one should not care that there exist some people who are not familiar with the classic ways of using punctuation.
I do not believe that the right solution is to attempt to use more convoluted expressions or inappropriate punctuation in order to avoid to be accused of being a clanker.