Site Index By Source

Rise of Worse Is Better

• Half the computers that exist at any point are worse than median (s...

The Promise and Distraction of Productivity and Note-Taking Systems

• the “art journal”/“improve your creative work” school of note-takin...

A Pipeline Made of Airbags

• The thing that stateless containers and kubernetes do is handle tha...

AI #83: The Mask Comes Off

• Also let that be the most important lesson to anyone who says that ...

How Key-Based Cache Expiration Works

• • The key is calculated in lock-step with the object that’s repre...

Charlottes Web

• ‘Why did you do all this for me?’ Wilbur asked. ‘I don’t deserve it...

Sarah Lazarovic

• The Buyerarchy of Needs FROM: Sarah Lazarovic Sarah Lazarovic Sou...

The Obsessive Details of My Custom Uniform

• Dressing like a worker serves me and serves others. Wherever I go, ...

Chapter 1 Introduction

• The field of psychology holds the view that trust is a personality ...

Quote by Calvin Coolidge: “Nothing in This World Can Take the Place of Per...”

• Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent wil...

10 Bullets. By Tom Sachs

• Be on time. Come prepared, and commit yourself entirely. Say:...

The Bitter Lesson

• We have to learn the bitter lesson that building in how we think we...

HOW TO SUCCEED IN MRBEAST PRODUCTION

• Unsurprisingly for this organization, video is a highly valued tool...
• It starts in the most on-brand MrBeast way possible: I genu...

No. 1 Storyteller: How to Become Unforgettable & Get Rich

• to maintain entertainment throughout it I’m always thinking: [[stak...
• [The thing about a good story is that] it doesn’t contain very many...
• I think we can start by thinking about what is a story and what isn...

Why Not Comments

• That’s the fundamental problem with self-documenting negative infor...

I Saw Someone Quip (On Twitter, I Think) Many Years Ago Something Like:

• A junior engineer writes comments that explain what the code does. ...

Money Stuff: Fake Songs Made Real Money

• Basically much of modern economics, and life, has the following cha...

A Pattern Language

• Create alternating areas of light and dark throughout the building,...
• Always place buildings to the north of the outdoor spaces that go w...
• A pattern language has the structure of a network. This is explaine...
• This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you buil...
• The elements of this language are entities called patterns. Each pa...

Heartbeats: Keeping Strategies Alive

• So even though defining the strategy from scratch is the hardest pa...

Michael Crichton - Wikipedia

• Crichton coined the term Gell-Mann amnesia effect to describe the p...

Do You Post or Do You RELEASE?

• Preparation: Posts are spontaneous. Releases are orchestrated throu...

Excellent Advice for Living

• Productivity is often a distraction. Don’t aim for better ways to g...

Keeping a Personal Changelog

• Repetition really helps. I believe that because I kept writing abou...

Studio Project #3: A House for Oneself

• The priority of circulation is another of those modern, convenience...
• In this process, we figure out the most beautiful and comfortable a...
• The Field of Centers analysis is a way of mapping out what has a st...

Reckoning: Part 3 — Caprock - Infrequently Noted

• JavaScript-based UIs are fundamentally more challenging to own and ...

Process Zero: The Anti-Intelligent Camera

• As cameras make more and more creative choices on your behalf, we t...

Is There a Sane Way to Follow This Election?

• The sources people diminish and dismiss - like campaign books writt...

AI #76: Six Shorts Stories About OpenAI

• A rhetorical innovation rambling attempt to ask if this is anything...
• Garry Kasparov: First they are funny toys, then they’re our competi...
• There are some whitepapaers showing that LLMs predict the results o...

One of the World's Most Famous Historians Has a Crucial Piece of Advice on Interviewing: 'Shut Up!'

• “Interviews: silence is the weapon, silence and people’s need to fi...

The Hook Grip: Why & How to Do It Correctly

• The hook grip is a pronated (palms facing the lifter) grip in which...

The Feeling of Something Waiting There for You

• Printing as an event that is funda­men­tally secret, unseeable: you...

James Baldwin Debates William F. Buckley

• it is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the not...

The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

• He noticed when a technician on a call began by examining copies th...

Patrick McKenzie - How a Discord Server Saved Thousands of Lives

• People in tech need to become radically more skilled at interfacing...

A Notebook for Seeing With Language Models

• documents aren’t a collection of words, but a collection of concept...

User Action Sequence Modeling: From Attention to Transformers and Beyond

• Another key distinction to Transformers is that the attention score...

Negotiating Bastardry

• This is one of the best pieces of media I’ve seen on negotiation in...

Why So Bad, AI Ads?

• Google’s mistake is surprising and kind of profound, and unbelievab...

Four Tet 'Skater' Ableton Session Breakdown

• it’s a way of doing things that I do quite a lot which is to come u...

Thoughts on Politics and Communities – Manu

• The problem with social media and politics is that way too many peo...

A Big Part of Ham Radio Today Is What Are Known as POTA (Parks on the Air) Activ... | Hacker News

• A big part of Ham radio today is what are known as POTA (Parks on t...

Git - Git-Worktree Documentation

• A git repository can support multiple working trees, allowing you t...

Four Tet Breaks Down Ableton Session for 'Looking at Your Pager' | KH

• so I had like - where’s the vocal - like, it’s been time stretched ...

Tolerance Is Not a Moral Precept

• Among the worst wars of tolerance were the religious wars which tor...

Understanding the Six Questions

• The questions are: Why do we exist? ...

Summer Prune and Spring Follow Up

• The signs of whether a cutting has rooted or not is to look for the...

Title Case: Capitalization of Titles, Headings, and Headlines

• Capitalize the first, last, and all major words in a book title, he...

The Folly of Certainty

• The rare person who in October 2022 correctly predicted that the Fe...

GitHub - Exo-Explore/Exo: Run Your Own AI Cluster at Home With Everyday Devices 📱💻 🖥️⌚

• exo optimally splits up models based on the current network topolog...

Epistemic Calibration and Searching the Space of Truth

• When we build a preference dataset, what we should actually be aski...
• recognizing this difference between base models and feedback-tuned ...

Rainbow Box - Wikipedia

• A rainbow box is a data visualization technique for overlapping set...

> Unix Timestamp, or Even Integer Based UTC Datetimes Work Perfectly Fine.

• Unix timestamp, or even integer based UTC datetimes work perfectly ...

Cyber Criminals Impersonating Brands Using Search Engine Advertisement Services to Defraud Users

• Use an ad blocking extension when performing internet searches. F...

Dont Have F-You Money? Build an F-You Network.

• Maybe you don’t have F-you money, but you can learn to build an F-y...

What Is Old Is New Again

• It’s likely the 2010s were a golden age for tech startups, due to t...

Digital Déjà Vu

• Here’s the crazy part though—each side doesn’t see the others’ comm...

PySkyWiFi: Completely Free, Unbelievably Stupid Wi-Fi on Long-Haul Flights

• Once you make your request it will hang for several minutes. If by ...

Board Meeting Suggestions

• Schedule 30-60 mins to go over the pre-read material with the board...

Geomys, a Blueprint for a Sustainable Open Source Maintenance Firm

• From the onset, I envisioned small firms of professional maintainer...

Turbopuffer: Fast Search on Object Storage

• In 2022, production-grade vector databases were relying on in-memor...

Building Search-Based RAG Using Claude, Datasette and Val.Town

• RAG is often implemented using vector search against embeddings, bu...

I’ve Stopped Using Box Plots. Should You?

• More to the point, they make more visual sense than box plots, so a...

I Will Fucking Piledrive You if You Mention AI Again

• Everyone is talking about Retrieval Augmented Generation, but most ...

Given That Devs Spend the Effort They Do on Testing, What Can We Do to Improve Testing?

• You’ll sometimes hear objections about how random testing can only ...

A Discussion of Discussions on AI Bias

• “Being visibly Vietnamese” seems like a fairly common cause of bugs...
• And say I used some standard non-AI scheduling software like Mindbo...

Like Rocks, Like Water

• the vast majority of intelligence supply in the future will be cons...

Research!rsc: What Is Software Engineering?

• Software engineering is what happens to programming when you add ti...

Hurl, the Exceptional Language

• a minimal language based around control flow via exception handling...

Building Personal and Organizational Prestige

• you should be lightly skeptical of following advice and patterns fr...

Test Driving ChatGPT-4o

• One modality Text-only prompt with zero-shot Chain-of-Thought pr...

Runtime Code Generation and Execution in Go: Part 1

• I intentionally stick to use the phrase “runtime code generation an...

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

• The way to resolve the conflict is to break down the barriers of du...
• Stuckness shouldn’t be avoided. It’s the psychic predecessor of all...
• Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right tho...
• The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The ma...
• You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence i...

Before the Soul Dawn - Helen Keller on Her Life Before Self-Consciousness

• As my experiences broadened and deepened, the indeterminate, poetic...

Feynman's Garden

• The conclusions must be written down. Not only because these insigh...

Mapping the Mind of a Large Language Model

• The features we found represent a small subset of all the concepts ...

John Schulman (OpenAI Cofounder) - Reasoning, RLHF, & Plan for 2027 AGI

• The other thing about chat was when we had these instruct models. T...

Performance Impact of the Memoization Idiom on Modern Ruby

• over-use of the memoization pattern can cause a degradation of perf...

The Psychology of Money

• When most people say they want to be a millionaire, what they might...
• Everyone has an incomplete view of the world. But we form a complet...

Thinking in Systems

• Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of e...
• There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to d...
• The information delivered by a feedback loop—even nonphysical feedb...
• Stocks allow inflows and outflows to be decoupled and to be indepen...

Is PERFECTIONISM a Form of COWARDICE?

• Aristotle said Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the w...
• I think I learned this in Tom Sach’s studio. He had this ethic: ...
• Perfectionism is a form of arrogance. Disruptive perfectionism is a...

Ruby Might Be Faster Than You Think

• I thought it was notable that by making some minor tweaks to Ruby c...

The Hunt for the Missing Data Type

• So, the reasons we don’t have widespread graph support: The...

A Man Passes Away Without a Word in the Mountains of North Carolina, and His Grandson Sets Out to Write About the Importance of a Seemingly Unimportant Life.

• “You done good,” I said because that’s how he would’ve said it, but...

Some Notes on for Loops

• Programming languages evolve to replace the all-powerful “low-level...

I Read Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty on August 21, 2020

• Taxes don’t have to be about revenue. You can institute a wealth ta...

Mario Meets Pareto: Multi-Objective Optimization of Mario Kart Builds

• Of course, if you already know the exact weights you want to assign...

Here Is Why Vim Uses HJKL Keys as Arrow Keys

• When Bill Joy created the vi text editor he used the ADM-3A termina...

Feeding Your Bonsai Trees

• what I wanted to show you is the chemical composition of this ferti...

The Harberger Tax

• Harberger taxation is a form of taxation for private goods (such as...

GIANT Crassula Bonsai

• As I always remind people: when you’re making Bonsai it’s the trunk...

Will the Next Scorsese Shoot With an iPhone? | Ft. Ryan Ng

• Nowadays, I try to find every way to not have to say things. If I c...

Software Is a Medium of Setbacks, but a Medium’s Limitations Don’t Define the Artist

• Software is a creative industry with more in common with media prod...
• In studies LLM-aided coding is not having a great effect on the qua...

Benford's Law - Wikipedia

• Benford’s law, also known as the Newcomb–Benford law, the law of an...

Suspicious Discontinuities

• As with p values, having a bright-line threshold, causes curious be...

Leadership Requires Taking Some Risk.

• In these environments, decisions aren’t solely the purview of execu...

Behind F1's Velvet Curtain

• In the last shootout, he drove differently than before. A great ver...
• When they set off, one by one, first in the sprint, then the first ...
• I learned more about myself on my trip to Austin than I did about F...

How Web Bloat Impacts Users With Slow Connections

• It’s fairly common for programmers to expect that hardware will sol...

Simon Wardley - X Marks the Spot

• code is all about rules, syntax, and style The map is all about ...
• well the difference between a map and a graph is: in a map space ha...

Cyclomatic Complexity - IBM Documentation

• Cyclomatic complexity is a measurement developed by Thomas McCabe t...

An Introduction to Robust-First Computation

• as we introduce the ability to be incorrect, we can trade off effic...

Introduction | Protagonist (ENFJ) Personality | 16Personalities

• A Protagonist (ENFJ) is a person with the Extraverted, Intuitive, F...

Use the SCARF Model to Understand Our Individual Triggers

• The SCARF model involves five domains of human social experience: s...

5 THE INVESTIGATOR Enneagram Type Five

• Fives are alert, insightful, and curious. They are able to concentr...

Inside the DETAILED Mind of @Vanneistat

• David Mamet said this, is that, “The ending has to be both a surpri...
• But you use silence. It seems, I don’t know why you’re doing it, bu...

Casey Neistat's SECRET to Filmmaking

• So the camera’s tilted at an angle. Is it because you’re not lookin...
• J.J. Abrams talks about withholding information. And releasing only...
• The reason why there’s no music here, is this is a reverential stat...
• I hate camera movement. Really? Sometimes it’s necess...
• You just say the first bit of the story, and then you change locati...

Chris Lattner: Future of Programming and AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #381

• Moore’s law has this idea that, like, computers for a long time - s...

Understanding Master Shots in Cinematography

• A master shot is the principal camera shot that a director and cine...

Air Safety Support International

• Safety culture consists of five elements: An informed cultur...

37 Pieces of Career Advice I Wish I’d Known Earlier

• There is a story about the manager of Iron Maiden, one of the great...

More (Self-)Publishing Thoughts.

• In general, on-demand print quality is variable because there are 1...

Trapped in a Values Oasis.

• In a sufficiently influential role within your organization, you ca...

Unix and Google

• so what really Google is trying to do is create an operating system...

CTI Summit Keynote - Cliff Stoll - (Still) Stalking the Wily Hacker

• Probably the most useful of these things and the one tool that I fi...

LAIR - Language as Intermediate Representation

• The possibilities for using language as an intermediate representat...

Everything | Gameplay Film

• It makes no difference whether it lasts a long time or whether it l...
• When we examine our bloodstreams under a microscope, we see there’s...

I Always Liked Anthony Bourdain's Take on 'Meez' From Kitchen Confidential: *Mis... | Hacker News

• I always liked Anthony Bourdain’s take on “Meez” from Kitchen Confi...

Mise-en-Place for Knowledge Workers: 6 Practices for Working Clean - Forte Labs

• There are 6 practices that mise-en-place has to offer us: S...
• In knowledge work we barely recognize the difference between immers...

Unnamed Document

• Note the obsessive use of abbreviations and avoidance of capital le...

Things Become Other Things

• The shop was supposed to close at five and I noticed it was five fi...

When Your Purpose Is 1-of-1

• Following your own ideas and instincts is how we create genuine con...

Effective ML

• It’s hard for me to overemphasize how how central this is. Like, ev...

Affordance for Errors, Part 2

• More often than not, when we use the language’s primitives, we give...

People Do Things for Reasons

• I apply the principle that [[people do things for reasons::highligh...

Conflict Is Not Abuse

• a key antagonist to liberation in our culture: that of an impulse t...

How to Get the Most Out of Your Wearable Tech

• He recommends focusing on the metrics labeled in green (below), und...
• For total sleep time, he recommends evaluating trends versus focusi...

Inside Stripe’s Engineering Culture: Part 2

• Stripe encourages engineering leaders to experience being an engine...

Exhalation

• Do you now understand why I say the future and the past are the sam...
• “How does writing help you think?” “That is a good question,” he sa...
• “We like the idea that there’s always someone responsible for any g...
• People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accu...
• We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology,...
• “Coincidence and intention are two sides of a tapestry, my lord. Yo...

Search and Replace in Multiple Buffers

• perform the same operation on all wanted files in the current direc...

Praise for Land Is a Big Deal by Lars A. Doucet

• Economists across the political spectrum are in near-universal agre...

A Pro-Worker Work Ethic the Gray Area With Sean Illing

• Americans have absorbed the “Protestant work ethic” — the idea that...

Lab Girl

• Veins bring water from the soil to the leaf, where it is torn apart...
• That whole summer in Colorado was a data-gathering bust, but it tau...
• And some of these things we do, and some of them we don’t (like the...
• There are a hundred species or so known as “resurrection plants.” T...
• A chilly autumn brings on the same hardening as a balmy one, becaus...
• Ask a science professor what she worries about. It won’t take long....
• Being paid to wonder seems like a heavy responsibility at times. ...
• When you are in the forest, for every tree that you see, there are ...
• Every species on Earth—past or present, from the single-celled micr...
• I wanted to be studying plant growth, but science for war will alwa...
• People are like plants: they grow toward the light. I chose science...
• My laboratory is like a church because it is where I figure out wha...
• Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we f...
• He taught me that there is no shame in breaking something, only in ...
• Working in the hospital teaches you that there are only two kinds o...

Bloom Filter - Wikipedia

• A Bloom filter is a space-efficient probabilistic data structure, c...

Shifting Approaches: From an Idea-Driven to a Problem-Driven Mindset. | by Daniela Castro | Medium

• As a born and raised Brazilian, I witnessed this huge getting thing...

Notational Intelligence | thesephist.com

• good notation helps us work with abstract, complex concepts using c...
• Math notation is a powerful demonstration of how good (and bad) des...

Notes on Time

• all of the time-aligned data in our lives. Time-aligning things ...
• [[If users don’t have simple access to past program states, then pr...

Working in Public

• Developers don’t not contribute to open source for lack of technica...
• Bigger projects often use a formal “request for comments” (RFC) pro...
• At minimum, open source projects hosted on GitHub can be broken int...
• MAINTAINERS are those who are responsible for the future of a proje...
• This innate duality—software visible as both a fixed point and a li...
• Code is not a product to be bought and sold so much as a living for...
• Paying a maintainer for their attention can also translate into ful...
• The cost of maintenance, coupled with a lack of intrinsic motivatio...
• As for subscriptions, paywalls might seem like a way to monetize co...
• Code, in static state, can be bought and sold at nearly zero margin...
• A few of the conditions that Benkler identifies as necessary to pul...

Building an Antilibrary: The Power of Unread Books

• The goal of an antilibrary is not to collect books you have read so...

Agentic Computing

• We could have: Countless local networks, many overlapping w...
• One of the most important factors as to what gives objects a felt s...

Robustness Principle

• “be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept”. ...

To Own the Future, Read Shakespeare

• At least art goes for the long game, you know? Poems are many thing...

The Goal of Data Analysis Is to Kill Time

• One of the foundations of what explanation means for us is that it ...

The World and the Machine

• In specification, the machine is the part of the system you have di...

Notes From “An Approach to Computing and Sustainability Inspired From Permaculture” by Devine LuLinvega

• systems that preserve transparency into the mechanisms of their inn...

Antifragile

• Hormesis, a word coined by pharmacologists, is when a small dose of...
• This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, tha...

The Principal Engineer's Handbook

• Solicit feedback and monitor lagging indicators to adjust your exec...

Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction

• Researching isn’t writing and vice-versa. When you come to a factua...

The Duty to Document

• I owe a debt of gratitude to those whose knowledge helped me debug ...

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

• Googling former rivals and games that had come out the same season ...
• “Promise me you’ll always forgive me, and I promise I’ll always for...
• “Darling, it may come out later, and it could hurt your friend’s fe...
• Use three programming languages for all I care. That’s how I do it....
• “Okay, fuck that, who cares if it’s fun? Did it feel like archery t...

Post From Erin Kissane

• An honest but ungenerous response is that I don’t want to contribut...

A Frivolous Feature

• There’s an impetus to hide the technical details of the world, but ...

In Fast Evolving Fields It’s Always All About Sociology, Not Canon or Pedagogy. Meaning in New Fields Is Created in Community (Constructionism).

• In fast evolving fields it’s always all about sociology, not canon ...

Notes on How Big Things Get Done

• Finally, the book also observes that learning happens not only with...

No Other Gods

• A state is its infrastructure. Once the infrastructure goes down, t...

Braiding Sweetgrass

• In an essay describing hunter-gatherer peoples with few possessions...
• As David Suzuki notes in The Wisdom of the Elders, the Mayan storie...
• Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise....
• Joanna Macy writes that until we can grieve for our planet we canno...
• Philosopher Joanna Macy writes of the oblivion we manufacture for o...
• Finally one elder said, “This sustainable development sounds to me ...
• I thanked her for her story and she said, “Please, take it as a gif...
• Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may tak...
• She taught me one of the cardinal rules of gathering plants: “Ne...
• In Indigenous agriculture, the practice is to modify the plants to ...
• Today we have gathered and when we look upon the faces around us we...
• We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us...
• The new leaves take up oxygen into the tightly packed air spaces of...
• as the ecotheologian Thomas Berry has written, “we must say of the ...
• A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is de...
• Among our Potawatomi people, there are public names and true names....
• The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. ...
• Lewis Hyde has made extensive studies of gift economies. He finds t...

Letter From New York

• The choice of meaning in the world today is here between the two si...

Unlocking Continuous Delivery

• Organise: Every 6 weeks, we reflect on the past 6 weeks, gaining va...

How Infrastructure Works

• Futures researcher Jamais Cascio has described a “pink collar futur...
• The six actionable principles for a new ultrastructure that follow ...
• For inspiration on ways to think about building new structures for ...
• But effectively using renewable sources also means capturing the el...
• Earth intercepts only a tiny fraction of all of the energy coming o...
• Because infrastructural systems are mostly about nonmonetary benefi...
• powering up the station and sending the electricity out to the nati...
• greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. dropped sharply in 2020, by ar...
• The first step is to break the connection between combustion and en...
• The engineers that spec out the heating and cooling systems for bui...
• In The Real World of Technology, Ursula Franklin describes such a p...
• In The Nature of Technology, W. Brian Arthur makes the case that al...
• Developed by the U.S. military, GPS was first opened to civilian us...
• In 1886, after months of planning and preparation, all of the broad...
• In late nineteenth-century Boston, this public health argument— tha...
• These visible markers show us not only the extent of these networks...
• On unpaved ground, I’ve spotted flags or feathery bundles of colore...

Post From Jacobian

• RFCs are written and discussed, but there’s no mechanism by which t...

A Guide to Ikebana Flower Arranging

• “Acknowledging and appreciating seasonal changes is fundamental to ...

Contemplating Calendars

• When I’m planning my tasks for the day, I block off the rough amoun...

Navigating Personal Information With Care

• Everyone agrees that passwords or secret access tokens require spec...

Take Your Pragmatism for a Unicycle Ride

• I say the critical resource is not developer time, it’s developer e...

The Bond Villain Compliance Strategy

• The U.S.’s point of view on the matter, elucidated at length in any...

A Fourth One-Off Never-to-Be-Etc Acts Not Facts Weeknote

• The Make Real prompt is pretty hilarious: You are an expert...

Money Stuff: OpenAI Is Still an $86 Billion Nonprofit

• “Without realizing it, we were gradually overmatched by a superior ...

Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System

• A distributed system can be described as a particular sequential st...

God Did the World a Favor by Destroying Twitter

• Our smarter, richer betters (in Babel times, the king’s name was Ni...

Should You Be Getting Botox? Welcome to Ask Ugly, Our New Beauty Column!

• Anti-ageing is a disappointing pursuit. It has been since Ponce de ...

It's About Time!

• Have you ever worked on something, then once you got it done you we...
• Leases are a nearly ubiquitous, go-to, mutual exclusion mechanism i...
• There’s something qualitative and important that happens when the e...

Fact vs. Delta Event Types | Events and Event Streaming

• “Is it possible to build a fact event with some sort of reason as t...
• You should avoid sharing event sourcing events, outside of your ser...
• Delta events are good at capturing the intent behind the creation o...
• “Why send all the data in a fact event if it hasn’t changed? Why no...

Reclaim Unreasonable Software.

• Post-Apocalyptic [or bad] software is hard to modify because it doe...

Scaling People

• We recently did some team training where they said “you haven’t joi...

Notes on the Crux

• Art evolves through discussion (literal and figurative) among many ...
• Exploring the difference a bit: Challenge-based strategy is reas...
• the numbers always add up, which isn’t true on the business or engi...

Navigators

• Each Navigator is wholly accountable for the technical decisions ma...

Measure Twice, Vise Thrice.

• Nobody can do their best work on wobbly projects. Vises reduce m...

The Black Swan

• The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less ...
• The Platonic fold is the explosive boundary where the Platonic mind...

Why Veteran-Artists Don't Quit

• the veteran artist has been through this before. Many, many times. ...
• you have making the thing. then the probationary artist hits the wa...

Lone Star Ruby Conference 2010 Real Software Engineering by Glenn Vanderburg

• software engineering is the science and art of designing and making...
• The empirical process model provides and exercises control through ...

I Hereby Pardon All Junior Engineers

• Battleships can’t be berthed in backyards, but people build wonderf...
• When fewer than 5,000 programmers existed, they built Lisp (1960) a...

Knuth Airgaps & Knuth Buffers

• When I’m working on a research problem I generally begin by filling...

Edward Tufte Forum: Book Design: Advice and Examples

• It is also notable that the Feynman lectures (3 volumes) write abou...

Catnip for Perfectionists

• Library, yes, that’s the word. A workshop is personal library, pron...

A Grand Unified Theory of Buying Stuff

• Each thing, each unit of stuff, came with its own, pet stuff—a stan...

'Propositions as Types' by Philip Wadler

• I think informatics is a much better word to use, right? Compute...
• A lot of what we do day to day has arbitrary bits to it. This, I’ve...
• it takes a long time for good ideas to get out and so it’s worth ha...
• Propositions in logic correspond to types in a programming language...

LED Task Lamp Adjusted via Two Conductive Ball Joints. This Light Was Exhibited at the 2015 International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) in New York.

• Embodied energy is the energy consumed by all of the processes asso...

Does Sketching Work?

• In matrix computations, sketching is really a synonym for (linear) ...

Apple’s Blue Ocean

• Nintendo’s “blue ocean” strategy was to stake out a position where ...

How Do You Take the Average of Two Timestamps?

• it’s neat how adding affine measures is mathematically invalid but ...

Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement

• the best alternative to a negotiated agreement or BATNA (no deal op...

Bret Victor the Future of Programming

• Direct manipulation of data - something like sketch pad - where you...

The Value of Values With Rich Hickey

• facts incorporate time FROM: InfoQ The Value of Values With Rich ...

Week 315 – Blog – BERG

• manage three budgets: cash, attention, risk FROM: Matt Webb Week ...
• I attempt to run the company perpetually at medium-risk, with occas...

The Art of Working in Public / Robin

• Work in public. Reveal nothing. FROM: Robin The Art of Working in...

Gopherfest 2015 | Go Proverbs With Rob Pike

• the smaller the interface, is the more useful it is FROM: The Go ...
• errors are values FROM: The Go Programming Language Gopherfest 20...
• don’t communicate by sharing memory share memory by communicatin...

Street Life

• While parts of the designed world might be ugly at any speed, it is...

Oozy Intelligence in Slow Time

• Oozification is the process of recursively replacing systems based ...
• AI should be considered intelligence that’s simply learned for a ve...
• The reason tasks like looking up part numbers and data sheets is ha...

Systemantics. The Systems Bible

• However, the particular attributes that a given System fosters can ...
• JUST CALLING IT “FEEDBACK” DOESN’T MEAN THAT IT HAS ACTUALLY FED BA...
• Le Chatelier’s Principle. This Law states that any natural process,...
• The power of the Naming Effect should not be underestimated. It is ...
• BIG SYSTEMS EITHER WORK ON THEIR OWN OR THEY DON’T. 📕FROM: John ...
• No, students of Systemantics, Positive Feedback into a large System...
• A COMPLEX SYSTEM THAT WORKS IS INVARIABLY FOUND TO HAVE EVOLVED FRO...
• Charles Darwin made it a rule to write down immediately any observa...

Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming

• Pike’s rules 1 and 2 restate Tony Hoare’s famous maxim “Premature o...

Entity Component System - Wikipedia

• Entity: An entity represents a general-purpose object. In a game en...

The Slotted Counter Pattern

• The idea here is that instead of incrementing a single row for a co...

Software Disenchantment

• Windows 95 was 30MB. Today we have web pages heavier than that! Win...

Optimism vs Pessimism in Distributed Systems

• When we build systems that avoid coordinating, we end up building c...

A Journey to the Valley of the Chatbots

• ChatGPT, it turns out, lives off the same water I drank growing up ...

Making CRDTs 98% More Efficient

• The issue is that when you compress something, you need to add meta...

Manage Your Capacity, Not Your Time

• You owe it to yourself and your team to work on keeping your capaci...

Rails World 2023 Opening Keynote - David Heinemeier Hansson

• Progress is good. Complexity is a bridge. Simplicity is the goal. ...

The SUX Rule for Safer Code

• the SUX Rule: Sandbox-free – Unsafe – eXogenous. If our code runs w...

Import AI 343: Humanlike AI; LLaMa 2 Protests; The NSA's New AI Center

• What this work shows is that if you have the right input basic mate...

No Meat Required

• Being a locally minded vegetarian has been my compromise. I’m sure ...
• In Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle fo...
• It will never cease to shock me that people would rather spend mill...
• in our industrialized world that’s controlled by a handful of multi...
• the six illusions that Americans are living with regarding food: “c...
• There’s a sense in editorial, publishing, and TV spaces that, if yo...
• When vegetarians and vegans limit politics to the realm of animal r...
• Lappé famously called the American diet experimental, noting that n...

Why Everything Should Have a URL | Ben Balter

• “Everything must have a URL” does not necessarily mean that everyth...

Rain Lilies and Robots

• Erysichthon’s dominionist hubris may be how we got to this climate ...

TBM 242: The Simplicity Fetish

• What would it look like if we could ask, “how do I make this the ab...

Read Widely, Apply Selectively, Share Regardless

• I realised that writing isn’t about beating the competition, or bei...

George Orwell: The Freedom of the Press

• To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance...

I Remember an Old PhD Comics Strip Where a Professor Says “Remember Kids, the On...

• Remember kids, the only difference between fooling around and scien...

17th-Century Whaler Problems

• Instead, you should align the bar and dig it into that padding righ...

The Carrot Problem

• In World War II, the story goes, the British invented a new kind of...

Money Stuff: IRL’s Users Were Not IRL

• I used to be an investment banker, and I enjoy reading profiles of ...

Birth, Against Cynical Realism

• Totalitarianism thrives, she continued, in conditions where people ...

Manage Your Priorities and Energy.

• Rigid adherence to any prioritization model, even one that’s concep...

Ag-Gag

• Ag-gag laws are anti-whistleblower laws that apply within the agric...

Josh Thoughts

• You can give yourself back time by leaving meetings gracefully. ...
• Teams are productive when they’re sharing useful information. Te...
• Words matter, and the words you say about yourself and other people...
• Something I’ve been framing to myself and my team is ‘momentum’ on ...
• “Jobs to be done” is an attempt to identify demand without restrict...

Money Stuff: The Moon Emoji Is Securities Fraud

• Nobody is going to turn down getting their eyes scanned by a chrome...

Evolving Floorplans

• Original layout The original elementary school. Found somewh...

Matt Eich: “I Don’t Dress Loud, I Don’t Walk Loud, I Don’t Talk Loud”

• As a medium, photography is kind of intrinsically selfish. So I bri...

In Eliyahu M. Goldratt's 'Theory of Constraints', You Can't Increase the Throughput of a Factory by Making Each Step in the Manufacturing Process Faster [1,2].

• In Eliyahu M. Goldratt’s “Theory of Constraints”, you can’t increas...

This Reminds Me of the Story Where a Houston Airport Kept Getting Complaints Fro... | Hacker News

• This reminds me of the story where a Houston airport kept getting c...

The Psychology of Money

• History is mostly the study of surprising events. But it is often u...

Simplification Protocol

• Dependencies (coupling) is an important concern to address, but it’...

A Philosophy of Software Design

• Deep and shallow modules: The best modules are deep: they allow ...

Time Is Your Hands Cooling, Time Is Dust, Time Is Beans, Time Is the Literal Tree in Front of You

• Time is not money. Time is beans. It was as serious as many joke...

The Gardening of Frederick Douglass

• “The antislavery movement was, after all, an agricultural reform mo...
• recognize how fundamentally the political economy of plants structu...

2 Thoughts on “Resilience Requires Helping Each Other Out”

• the term homeostasis: it refers to how your body maintains factors ...
• In his paper The Theory of Graceful Extensibility: Basic rules that...

The Napkin Math Methodology for System Design

• It is far easier to collaborate on a first principle model. At this...
• If you are designing for 8 demands it’s likely that 6 are easy, 7 r...
• Good architecture is built incrementally, but not designed incremen...

Eternal Woodstock

• As people keep trying to make Twitter 2 happen, we are now in a per...

Money Stuff: It's Easy to Make Oil Companies ESG

• The optimal amount of meetings is not zero, even if you work alone....

In Defense of Slow Feedback Loops

• By replacing integration tests with unit tests, we’re losing alignm...

There Is No Number One Tip

• When you’re a new leader, your model won’t have much data to go on....

Note on Data Opposing Narrative

• Often, people who don’t have access to the raw data expect one narr...

Personal Machines and Portable Worlds

• If machines were designed to be more personal, we’d have very diffe...

We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Moat

• The upshot for the industry at large, is: the LLM-as-Moat model has...

Levels of Automation

• Level 1 The human operator does the task and turns it over to th...

Inclusiveness in Language for Outsiders Looking In

• Another useful concept is The Death of the Author, which is a part ...

Money Stuff: Small Banks Don’t Like High Rates

• If all the burghers of Small Town USA get together and say “we want...

I’m Looking Through All the Apollo Mission Photos, Starting at the End (Apollo 17) and Working Backwards. This Is Apollo

• The first image ever transmitted to Earth from another planet was r...

Wavelights and AIs as Strategic Amplifiers

• More things than you would think are dynamic strategic problems. If...

Everything I Know About Gardening

• There is an aliveness to fields that lawns do not have. Our small p...

On U.S. Cuisine

• in the U.S., there’s a false idea that certain choices around food ...

Allegory of the Long Spoons

• In the allegory of long spoons, there are people in hell and people...

Playing With ActivityPub

• What I built isn’t an ActivityPub system as much as a Mastodon-comp...

Ken Britton Thoughts

• To determine what actions you can take to drive meaningful change i...
• A great framework for delegating work or encouraging a team member ...

Jeff Bruton Thoughts

• If you’re debating a decision point and you find yourself in a stal...

Social Media and 'Parasocial Media'

• On traditional “social media” platforms, in particular YouTube, the...

Shuhari

• It is known that, when we learn or train in something, we pass thro...

Imaginary Problems Are the Root of Bad Software

• I propose that there is one problem chief among them, an impetus fo...

Embrace Complexity; Tighten Your Feedback Loops

• I used to try and weed my lawn a whole hell of a lot and pull the w...
• The only good advice I have here is to re-evaluate your metrics oft...

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

• A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accu...
• When software – or idea-ware for that matter – fails to be accessib...
• Organizing into services taught teams not to trust each other in mo...
• We’re talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many p...

Monitoring Is a Pain

• Now the real advantage of tracing to me is it comes out of the box ...
• My experience is companies do not anticipate that the cost of monit...

About Free Software

• Any software is considered free software so long as it upholds the ...

Money Stuff: Big Firms Want Normal Crypto Markets

• This, from last week, is one of the best stories you’ll ever read a...

Language Pragmatics Engineering

• The code that gets written is the code that’s easier to write. ...

Test Autodiscovery Is a Silver Bullet

• discipline doesn’t scale, and if you want people to use good practi...

Software: It's a Gas

• Nathan’s four Laws of Software: Software is a gas So...

An Elegant Puzzle

• My favorite observation from The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin...
• The fact that something stops working at significantly increased sc...
• Lately, I’m increasingly hearing folks reference the idea of organi...
• The expected time to complete a new task approaches infinity as a t...
• When you read good, coherent actions, you think, “This is going to ...
• If strategies describe the harsh trade-offs necessary to overcome a...
• Good goals are a composition of four specific kinds of numbers: A t...
• An important property of teams is that they abstract the complexiti...
• Organizational design gets the right people in the right places, em...
• Strategies are grounded documents which explain the trade-offs and ...
• When I have a problem that I want to solve quickly and cheaply, I s...

CSS Boost

• The lesson is that, for those of us who live online, having a simpl...

More Than Interfaces. To Quote McLuhan: 'Man Becomes, as It Were, the Sex Organs... | Hacker News

• To quote McLuhan: “Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the m...

TDD - Outside in vs Inside Out

• Inside-Out and Outside-In are fairly rare terms, more often I have ...

Money Stuff: Don’t Insider Trade Drunk on the Squash Court

• It is funny to imagine an end state here in which markets are entir...

Some Tests Are Stronger Than Others

• If you already know there’s an error , a weaker test can be more us...

Money Stuff: Regional Banks Don’t Feel Loved

• After 2008, there was a perception that the government was implicit...

The Error Model

• the difference between recoverable errors and bugs: • A recove...

Perlis Thompson Principle

• Software with fewer concepts composes, scales, and evolves more eas...

Greenspun's Tenth Rule

• Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad ho...

Home

• we are creating more data than we can manage. The primary output...

Language Model Sketchbook, or Why I Hate Chatbots

• We don’t quite know what to do with language models yet. But we hav...

Parse, Don’t Validate

• Ad-hoc validation leads to a phenomenon that the language-theoretic...
• the difference between validation and parsing lies almost entirely ...
• Consider: what is a parser? Really, a parser is just a function tha...

OODA Loop

• The OODA loop is the cycle observe–orient–decide–act, developed by ...

DeVito on Life

• SCHWARZENEGGER: I said, “We don’t know what happens with the soul a...

The Dream of the Personal Machine

• Maybe the devices that we ended up with are too flat, too homogenou...

Money Stuff: The SEC Comes for Crypto

• much of the time, the crypto ecosystems seem to be built by pretty ...
• from the SEC’s perspective the important thing here is that the rul...

Intravenous Caffeine

• If there’s a hole in your body, you can put drugs into it. FROM: ...

Inside Shopify's Leveling Split: Exclusive

• At companies with slower headcount growth, promotions will usually ...

Agency and Schooling

• While there is so much focus on education, the bottleneck for flour...

Welcome to the Supercloud

• In distributed programming theory, granularity has been around for ...
• In the Supercloud both code and data are mobile and move around the...

Why Software Patents Are Bad, Period.

• Unlike simple machines, which cannot be copyrighted, software is au...
• People often start from the mistaken notion that patents are a righ...
• the assumption in a patent trial isn’t that you stole the idea. ...

How to Make a Difference: In People's Lives, the Community, & the World

• “What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind o...

The Respect of Personhood vs the Respect of Authority

• Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a per...

Extract the Kernel.

• I recommend that teams receiving executive feedback try to “extract...

Hand Talk

• For example, let’s take the simple question: “How old are you?” Fir...

Muscle–Organ Crosstalk: The Emerging Roles of Myokines - PMC

• Physical activity decreases the risk of a network of diseases, and ...

Resurfacing ‘Life’s Swell,’ the Story That Produced ‘Blue Crush’

• The Maui surfer girls love each other’s hair. It is awesome hair, l...

The Minimal Definition of User Agency

• • If you don’t own your content, you’re stuck. Owning your conten...

'Humanity’s Digital Public Square”

• combining search and AI chat is actually the wrong way to go and I ...
• As these stories pop up people act like they’re an incredible marve...

Tokyo’s Trash-Collecting Samurai Takes a Fun, Zany Approach to Cleanup | Hacker News

• Last year I moved onto a street that had a ton of litter. I lived w...
• I am reminded of one of Matt Mochary’s teaching: when you have to d...

Money Stuff: Can Markets Handle the Debt Ceiling?

• if the US government does default, that will probably cause the pri...

Design Is Commitment + Provisionality

• Strong commitment in design is good for dementia, where challenges ...

Gresham's Law - Wikipedia

• The law states that any circulating currency consisting of both “go...

Compiler Design

• One major purpose of dataflow analysis is observing safety constrai...
• The directed multigraph defined by interpreting basic blocks as ver...
• Subsequent branch-free instructions make up segments of linear code...

Protocol Fiction, Desire, and Belief

• I was taken with this cybernetic description of an aircraft factory...

Managing State With Signals

• “It’s interesting how every build system, frontend framework, progr...

Responsibility Assignment Matrix - Wikipedia

• A responsibility assignment matrix[1] (RAM), also known as RACI mat...

What Is the RAMBO Model?

• I designed the RAMBO Model as a simple framework to lead a great en...

Systems Design 2: What We Hope We Know

• Speaking from a systems design point of view, we say that all real-...
• much of science is straightforward, logical, almost rote. It’s easy...

Fast as a Service

• few days ago I did something that I never thought I’d do again, and...

Does the Number of Reps Matter? Yes. Why? I’ll Tell You

• And then along came Brad Schoenfeld and Co., who laid hands upon th...

Heaven Is a Truck

• Architect Albert Pope offers a better explanation in his excellent ...

'Keep Posting the Ronjak'

• But you can already see the idea of a “prompt” evolving into someth...

The Surprising Ease and Effectiveness of Looping AI

• the tech am I digging recently is a software framework called LangC...

How to Plan as an Engineering Executive.

• These constraints create better decisions both because constraints ...

Explaining Tech's Notion of Talent Scarcity

• many if not most software companies are probably Pareto-distributio...

When to Prefer Inheritance to Composition

• So here are the benefits of inheritance: • Unlike composition,...
• Elisa Baniassad and Alexander Summers have this great paper Reframi...

Money Stuff: First Republic Calls in a Favor

• The very most important thing to understand in finance and economic...

Google 'We Have No Moat, and Neither Does OpenAI'

• Paradoxically, the one clear winner in all of this is Meta. Because...
• Part of what makes LoRA so effective is that - like other forms of ...
• In many ways, this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. The current r...

The 14 Year Old Boy Alignment Problem, Future Shock, and AI Microscopes

• We’re building apps to surround and harness AI, but we need microsc...

Amdahl's Law - Wikipedia

• Amdahl’s law is often used in parallel computing to predict the the...

In Defense of Food

• Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what...

The Other Side of Egoism

• That, for me, is the big difference between altruism—or its close c...
• “Wise souls are not humane.” To that, Le Guin writes: The “...

Feynman’s Maze-Running Story

• there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of ...

Context Coloring

• Syntax coloring isn’t useless, it is childish, like training wheels...

The Afterlife of Go

• Just imagine if we rewound the clock back to 2016 and we were able ...

Lindy Effect

• The Lindy effect (also known as Lindy’s Law) is a theorized phenome...

Money Stuff: JPMorgan Got a Deal on First Republic

• Every so often the US government thinks about defaulting on its deb...

Why Chatbots Are Not the Future

• Text inputs have no affordances When I go up the mountain to ask...
• Good tools let the user choose when to switch between implementatio...

Good Hypergrowth/Curator Manager.

• In 2023, our universe has shifted. There’s little hiring happening,...

Unpacking Lares: Our 2 Minute Pitch for an AI-powered Slightly-Smarter-Home

• It’s using the ReAct pattern, which is straightforward and surprisi...

Evolution of Florida Vaccine Analysis

• The fact that this slight change in study design yielded opposite r...

Practical Frameworks for Beating Burnout

• THE PRIORITIZATION MATRIX All of the projects and activities on ...

Double Descent in Human Learning

• The way double descent is normally presented, increasing the number...
• In machine learning, double descent is a surprising phenomenon wher...

The GPT-3 Architecture, on a Napkin

• To encode the position of the current token in the sequence, the au...

This Is Where I’m at Too.

• From everything I can tell, there is no making it through, let alon...

Teams Should Be an MVP Feature!

• If you’re still wondering whether that resource you’re going to add...

Efficiency Trades Off Against Resiliency - Made of Bugs

• One of my favorite systems papers ever is the COST paper, which exa...

The Four Hobbies, and Apparent Expertise

• Observationally, I would say that there’s little correlation betwee...

Balancing Your CEO, Peers, and Engineering.

• When you run into a complex problem, slow down to bring many differ...
• There’s no status website to check your relationship with other par...

Staff Archetypes

• The four common archetypes of Staff-plus roles I encountered are: ...

I Liked This Simple Calculus Exercise

• The student who overcomes this problem might learn the following us...

In Praise of Pastiche

• If you look at a Greek temple, you will notice that the element tha...

The Creative Act

• The process and the practice: Sources and habits Seeds ...
• Ultimately, the act of self-expression isn’t really about you. 📕...
• Often, in making edits to a work: The ego comes in, saying: I wante...
• So when an artist creates a work that comes together by an unseen h...
• A river of material flows through us. When we share our works and o...
• Art doesn’t get made on the clock. But it can get finished on the c...
• If you know what you want to do and you do it, that’s the work of a...
• Believing a certain mood or state is necessary to do your best work...
• Just one habit, at the top of any field, can be enough to give an e...
• Discipline and freedom seem like opposites. In reality, they are pa...
• When meditating, as soon as the mind quiets, the sense of space can...
• Attuned choice by attuned choice, your entire life is a form of sel...

How to Do Hard Things

• Inaction → Committed Action Clarifying our values and learning a...
• Past/Future Preoccupation → Present Moment Contact Past/Future p...
• Fusion → Defusion When we’re caught in avoidance, we tend to see...
• Experiential Avoidance →Willingness When challenging thoughts an...
• The ultimate goal of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is to ...

We Need to Tell People ChatGPT Will Lie to Them, Not Debate Linguistics

• More capable models can better recognize the specific circumstances...

Avoidance Speech

• Avoidance speech is a group of sociolinguistic phenomena in which a...

Studio Project #1: Ornament

• Every change in scale is also a learning experience. In the physica...
• Every change in medium is a learning experience. Paint and clay hav...
• There’s a difference between personal and Personal. Between the idi...

Wholeness and Centers

• From the point of view of relationshps which appears in the design,...

Cheating Is All You Need

• All you crazy MFs are completely overlooking the fact that software...

Onboarding Peer Executives.

• Teasing out the distinction between onboarding engineers and execut...

Clocks and Causality - Ordering Events in Distributed Systems

• Topological sorting is the sorting of vertices of a directed acycli...
• Timestamps produced by a vector clock take the most amount of space...
• variant of Lamport Clock, hereafter referred to as Lamport Origin C...
• Timestamps produced by a Lamport clock take the least amount of spa...

The Shock and Awe of State-Sponsored Women’s Fashion

• But the thing about state-sponsored attacks is that they’re a bit l...

Ergonomic APIs, Channel Invariants, and Data Views

• Your choice of data layout/structure has two consequences: it makes...

When and How to Say No at Work

• First of all, if you’re talking to a manager, they will love you if...

Therac-25

• The Therac-25 was a computer-controlled radiation therapy machine p...

https://youtu.be/qUYvIAP3qQk

• GPT-3/4 is like a Meeseeks box for computer and internet tasks. Kee...

Money Stuff: SVB’s Depositors Weren’t Very Loyal

• But here is his best line: Taleb had been busy. He had alre...

Generative AI Is Just Productivity Software

• Adobe claims Firefly was trained on a data set that was built from ...

Glamorize Your Problem Domain

• There are useful mental analogies between pedestrian line-of-busine...

Door-in-the-Face Technique - Wikipedia

• The door-in-the-face technique is a compliance method commonly stud...

Banking in Very Uncertain Times

• You can buy a bank’s attention to bespoke needs by bringing it depo...
• Infrastructure undergirds society; failures of it are a per se emer...
• Regulators then heard the numbers, did a bit of modeling in Excel, ...
• The three bank runs which already happened had idiosyncratic causes...
• The decision to sharply manage down the price of eggs was, indirect...
• All prices embed an interest rate derivative FROM: Patrick McKenz...
• when interest rates rise, all asset prices must fall FROM: Patric...

Systems Design Explains the World: Volume 1

• CAP theorem is perhaps the best-known statement of the tradeoffs in...
• The truth is, nearly every attempt to design a hierarchy-free, “fla...

Why Is Finance So Complex?

• Financial systems help us overcome a collective action problem. In ...
• Nick Rowe memorably described finance as magic. The analogy I would...

Money Stuff: Big Banks Trust First Republic With Their Money

• Thompson’s argument in that post is that Silicon Valley used to be ...

Making Memes

• I’ve been thinking of a kind of article I commonly write: H...

Why You Need a Project, a Phrase I Will 100% Use, and a Great List of the Best People in PR

• To write about something hard to explain, write a detailed letter t...
• Separate the processes of creating from improving. You can’t write ...
• What we are trying to do influences what becomes salient to us. If ...

28: Out of the Valley - By Nadia - Monomythical

• Philanthropy is often conflated with charity, a sort of blank-minde...

Using Cultural Survey Data.

• Most organizations run these twice a year, which is a reasonable am...
• Executives are rarely held accountable unless they expose themselve...

Lean Into Your Imposter Syndrome

• Once you acknowledge that leadership is inherently non-deterministi...

Money Stuff: SVB Took the Wrong Risks

• But I think the modern bank-regulatory view is that the point of a ...

Implementing SLOs

• Potential SLIs for different types of components Request-driven ...
• Types of components The easiest way to get started with setting ...

An Infinite Number of Monkeys Eventually Wrote This Blog Post

• The gag is that we know the answer. Could infinite monkeys event...

The Design of Everyday Things

• Dealing with Error: • Put the knowledge required to operate the ...
• Poka-yoke is another Japanese method, this one invented by Shigeo S...
• the Toyota Production System. Among its many key principles is a ph...
• Errors have two major forms. Slips occur when the goal is correct, ...
• Forcing functions are the extreme case of strong constraints that c...
• Physical constraints are made more effective and useful if they are...
• These four classes of constraints-physical, cultural, semantic, and...
• It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and...
• Here are three levels of mapping, arranged in decreasing effectiven...
• insights from the seven stages of action lead us to seven fundament...
• Seven stages of action: one for goals, three for execution, and thr...
• How do we form an appropriate conceptual model for the devices we i...
• Affordances determine what actions are possible. Signifiers communi...
• The presence of an affordance is jointly determined by the qualitie...
• An affordance is a relationship between the properties of an object...
• When we interact with a product, we need to figure out how to work ...

Maybe Treating Housing as an Investment Was a Colossal, Society-Shattering Mistake

• the true nature of housing prices. It’s not about the house, it’s a...

Talon Is Amazing

• Something interesting about using voice for this means that you are...

Sacred Talk

• Construal level theory says that we think more concretely, as oppos...

What Is Art?

• But art is not a handicraft; it is the transmission of feeling that...

Understanding Power

• The point is, it doesn’t matter what you read, what matters is how ...
• Actually, it reminds me in some ways of things that you find in non...
• Instead, the basic principle I would like to see communicated to pe...
• You just keep being struck by the marvels of what you’re discoverin...
• Well, the drive to “advance”—I think you have to ask exactly what t...
• But the point is, for classical liberals in the eighteenth century,...

Good Decision-Making Is Good Process

• We all bring cognitive biases. The explicit ones we love to cast as...

There Are Just Bodies, Just Us

• Separating out the well and worthy workers from the sick and unprod...
• to meet a future full of catastrophe, we need to think and act like...

Building Your Executive Network.

• Inverse relationship between ease of access and quality of advice: ...
• That said, much like internal communication, networking is a relati...

> a Lot of Colleagues Don't Know How to Give Good Situation Reports.

• One thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of colleagues don’t know how t...

Money Stuff: Wirecard Had a Wild Run

• in practice the answer is that some companies create negative exter...

The VC's Customer

• The entrepreneur is the customer and the LP is the shareholder. Tha...

They/Them NATO

• It’s not like survival, resilience, perseverance and strength in th...

🕵️‍♂️ the Case for Integrity Workers

• For the Integrity Institute, the label “integrity worker” applies t...

Notes on Creative Context

• A challenge with big projects is that what you’re working on locall...
• solo creative work is about a combination of maintaining a strong e...
• A few desirable qualities for creative contexts: Note that very few...

KYC and AML: Beyond the Acronyms

• this is the first important non-intuitive thing about KYC and AML r...

How Io_uring and eBPF Will Revolutionize Programming in Linux

• The bottom line is this; in modern multicore, multi-CPU devices, th...
• The io_uring interface works through two main data structures: the ...
• as devices get extremely fast, interrupt-driven work is no longer a...

Eiswein for Entwives

• brown lands , a semi-obsolete urban planning term that encompasses ...

Josh's Thoughts

• These are qualities of a good system that we should strive to fulfi...

What Is Apache Flink? — Architecture

• Data can be processed as unbounded or bounded streams. ...

Consistent Hashing Algorithm

• Consistent hashing is a distributed systems technique that operates...

Dispatches From Childhood

• Nothing is unimportant to a little child. He might cry if the wrong...
• When you see the world as magical, it meets you as a magical place....

Tinkering With Hyperlinks

• “Scenius” is Brian Eno’s term meaning communal genius and last time...

Responsible AI Pair Programming With GitHub Copilot

• Cognitive load is the amount of working memory needed to complete a...

How Should You Talk to ChatGPT? A User’s Guide

• If you are talking to a human and he or she doesn’t understand you,...

The Complete Guide to the Kano Model

• Noriaki Kano, a Japanese researcher and consultant, published a pap...
• In order to uncover our customer’s perceptions towards our product’...
• The takeaway here is that any analysis we do at a given point in ti...
• Kano classifies features into four categories, depending on how cus...

Conjuring an Evolution to Serve You

• Enron was applying selection at the individual level according to m...
• Selecting the hen who lays the most eggs doesn’t necessarily get yo...

Data and Reality

• So, does the creation and destruction of information have any direc...

South Park

• pot makes you feel fine with being bored, and it’s when you’re bore...

So Many Books

• With more education, more and more people want to be published. Mor...

On Martinis 🍸

• It’s a cocktail not of judgment, but of analysis and perception. Th...
• A martini is supposed to be made to the drinkers’ preferences; a ma...

How Box Breathing Can Help You Destress

• We can use breathwork to move out of the fight-or-flight state and ...
• It’s also known as sama vritti pranayama, born of the yogic practic...

How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking (For Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers) – Sönke Ahrens

• what the chemical industry calls “verbund.” This is a setup in whic...
• mere-exposure effect: doing something many times makes us believe w...
• The promotion of brainstorming as a starting point is all the more ...
• Many students and academic writers think like the early ship owners...
• An idea kept private is as good as one you never had. FROM: Sebas...

Six Tips on Writing From John Steinbeck

• Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless,...

Writing, Riffs & Relationships

• The unit of blogging isn’t pageviews, it’s conversations. Don’t wor...

The Wisdom of James Mickens

• I am also constantly disappointed by the weather, but at least the ...

High Output Management

• Today’s gap represents a failure of planning sometime in the past ...
• What decision needs to be made? When? Who will decide? Who will nee...
• any decision [should] be worked out and reached at the lowest compo...
• Task-relevant maturity: How senior someone is for the task at hand....
• the real sign of malorganization is when people spend more than 25%...
• managers do not talk to their subordinates about their problems but...
• two basic kinds of meetings: process-oriented meeting, knowl...
• The point is to impose a pattern on the way a manager copes with pr...
• Anyone who spends about a half day per week as a member of a planni...
• Delegation without follow-through is abdication 📕FROM: Andrew S....
• productivity can be increased in three ways: Increasing the ...
• Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communic...
• Inventory should be kept at the lowest-value stage possible 📕FRO...
• A common rule […] is to detect and fix any problem in a production ...
• CEOs always act on leading indicators of good news, but only act on...

How Buildings Learn

• All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong. Most buil...

Systemantics. The Systems Bible

• ANY LARGE SYSTEM IS GOING TO BE OPERATING MOST OF THE TIME IN FAILU...

The Umami Theory of Value: Autopsy of the Experience Economy

• Cultural umami is the vague sense that yes, for some reason, it is....

The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial

• Premium mediocre is the finest bottle of wine at Olive Garden. Prem...

Ice Watching: Lake Michigan's Spiritual Practice

• For me, ICEWATCH is a deeply spiritual practice: I want to build re...

The Gift of It's Your Problem Now

• If free software gifts are communism and open source is cynically c...
• [[Here’s the thing about gifts: the sender chooses them, not the re...
• Authoritarianism is about taking things from me. Communism, in its ...
• This story archetype is the Hero’s Journey that inspires all softwa...

Money Stuff: The SEC Comes for Crypto Custody

• Really finance is the study of human behavior and I guess signing y...

Move Past Incident Response to Reliability

• I’ve often seen teams leading reliability efforts respond to the qu...
• As incidents continue to occur, teams generally respond by starting...

Text Is All You Need

• Pareidolia — our tendency to see “faces” in everything from power o...

An Expertise Acceleration Experiment in Judo

• Loss in Judo is more personal than in other sports. Defeat in a spo...

Nadia Asparouhova

• Screenshotting as one of the essential underrated tools of the digi...

Key Words for Use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels

• MAY This word, or the adjective “OPTIONAL”, mean that an item is tr...
• MUST This word, or the terms “REQUIRED” or “SHALL”, mean that the d...

People Can Read Their Manager's Mind

• If something is rotten in an org, the root cause is a manager who d...
• The people whose compensation depends on your opinion have ample ti...

# Core Concepts

• Design an obstacle course, not a syllabus. One thing that we have v...

Letters From a Self-Made Merchant to His Son Being the Letters Written by John Graham, Head of the House of Graham & Company, Pork-Packers in Chicago, ... Known to His Intimates as 'Piggy.'

• That was where I caught the connection between a college education ...
• You’ve got to get up every morning with determination if you’re goi...
• Remember that when you’re in the right you can afford to keep your ...

Athletes and Musicians Pursue Virtuosity in Fundamental Skills Much More Rigorously Than Knowledge Workers Do

• Top-tier athletes are fanatically disciplined about improving their...

Knowledge Work Rarely Involves Deliberate Practice

• Athletes and musicians pursue virtuosity in fundamental skills much...

Writing an Engineering Strategy.

• Strategy can only be employed top-down, so it’s not a question of t...
• To ensure your strategy is operating at the right altitude, ask if ...
• As an engineering executive, it’s particularly important to think a...
• Are you confident the strategy will create leverage? Strategies req...
• Are you willing and able to enforce the strategy? If you think that...
• Are you either confident in your diagnosis or do you trust the wide...
• I recommend sharing the full document with the group, then spending...
• In Staff Engineer, I argued that writing an engineering strategies ...
• A strategy is composed of three parts: Diagnosis: a theory ...

Please Don't Trust Twitter With Your Credit Card Info

• Imperfect social media tools gave anyone the ability to publish the...

Soup, Then Prayers

• I used to start my lecture on dictionaries in Python by explaining ...

Bing AI Can't Be Trusted

• We are so amazed by its ability to babble in a confident manner tha...
• So people are going to be even more blindsided when someone develop...

Repetition Makes Lies Seem True, but Repetition Also Makes Truth Seem True. All Persuasion (And Indoctrination) Happens Through Repetition, Whether in a Classroom Setting, a Forum Like This One, or in Sales.

• Repetition makes lies seem true, but repetition also makes truth se...

Napkin Math

• Hashing, crypto-safe (64 bytes) 500 ns 200 MiB/s FROM: sirupsen N...
• Random Memory R/W (64 bytes) 50 ns 1 GiB/s FROM: sirupsen Napkin ...

The Secret Ingredient: Lion's Mane

• The way he talks about foraging in this conversation reminds me tha...
• This guy Eric invited us over for dinner one time. He marinated som...

Christopher Alexander: A Primer

• Project-Specific Pattern Languages Efficiency is not the problem...
• A pattern as a form/context pair and a generic set of centers FRO...
• Centers and generative process: Any structure is some elements i...
• Beyond Fitness: Life and a Better World Life (a quality) is the ...
• Form, Context, and Fit Form, in Context, evaluated against Fit. ...

Notes From Pennsylvania

• As long as people think that government (as an ideal and an imperfe...

Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens

• Gardens - This is the wiki layer Michael references above and I don...
• Campfires - mostly blogging for me, though I know some folks gather...
• Streams - mostly Twitter for me, this is where fast twitch informat...

Max Pain

• To expand the term beyond its original scope, Max Pain punishes peo...
• Max Pain is an urban legend-slash-theory from the options market, i...
• As a subset of contrarianism, Hot Sauce Behavior became especially ...
• Starting in the summer of 2020 and peaking in late 2021, various fa...
• In The Umami Theory of Value, we discussed how, in the absence of m...

Why Not Mars

• No exploration without contamination FROM: idlewords.com Why Not ...
• But fifty years of progress in miniaturization and software changed...

How It Started / How It's Going

• The best things in life are free. The second best things are very, ...

Money Stuff: Bed Bath & Beyond Got Its Deal Done

• In general, the chief compliance officer at any company has a dial ...

Cultivating Depth and Stillness in Research

• I make a practice of regularly checking in about whether I have a d...
• Bill Thurston writes: Mathematics is a process of staring h...

Programmable Notes

• the questions my favourite writing professor would ask. Do ...
• Programmable notes are note-taking systems that allow you to write ...

Folk Interfaces

• The Japanese philosophy of Mingei was another movement we sho...
• This scavenging in the SaaS landscape is how people express agency ...
• Folk interfaces are when users reappropriate existing software to s...

Epistemic Disclosure

• Epistemology is the study of knowledge – how we know things, the me...

Focal Point

• the New York City question: if you are to meet a stranger in New Yo...
• In game theory, a focal point (or Schelling point) is a solution th...

Fwd: Import AI 317: DeepMind Speeds Up Language Model Sampling; Voice Cloning Tech Gets Abused; More Scaling Laws for RL

• The discovery of scaling laws has typically preceded a boomtime for...
• Use a small model to generate a ‘draft’ output, then use a larger a...

*Elon Musk Voice* Concerning

• lol c’mon, if this wasn’t from an A.I., this would just be one of t...
• But I’ve also noticed a creeping desire among A.I. evangelists to s...

Better to Micromanage Than Be Disengaged.

• leaders work on the system, not in the system FROM: lethain.com B...

The Technology Behind GitHub’s New Code Search

• The next problem we have is how to build this index in a reasonable...

Tools for Thought Rocks: April 2022 - Maggie Appleton, Hunter Clarke

• computing can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium ...
• exactly the same thing goes for spaced repetition right you can loo...

Pluralistic: Tiktok's Enshittification

• “Monetize” is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no ...
• This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; th...
• Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; the...

Crossing the Sunshine Skyway

• Interlace is “the device of interweaving of a number of different t...
• When you start a creative project but don’t finish, the expe­ri­enc...

Memberships Work

• I’ve been mainly “hiring” members for permission. Not in a “please ...
• Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsib...
• As I’ve written in past reviews, “permission” seems to be my bigges...

#200: All Tomorrow's Parties

• AI, with its perceived threat to automate a vast array of jobs, see...

Culture vs Systems.

• whenever folks talk about failed cultural change, I believe they’re...

Unlocking the Commons

• The most economically powerful thing you can do is to buy something...
• I call this “unlocking the commons,” and it’s the same approach I’v...

Sisyphus Got That Dawg in Him

• Columnist Brian Merchant touched on this fuzzy connection between t...

A New New Year

• i thought, or hoped, that not caring would protect me, keep me invu...

Estimating Square Roots in Your Head

• Let’s demonstrate the method with an example. Consider computing th...
• Let’s demonstrate the method with an example. Consider computing th...
• Imagine we want to compute the square root of a number n. The basic...

Most Recent Posts

• Okay, so habits are good: they free the mind for important things. ...

The Dream of “End-User Programming” Is Still Too Far Away. Let’s Set Our Sights on “End-Programmer Programming” First.

• [End-user programming is] a vision for empowered computing pursued ...

I’m Now a Full-Time Professional Open Source Maintainer

• Incentives are well aligned with the success of the open-source pro...
• Concretely, I exclusively offer ongoing retainer agreements, withou...
• if the effort required to replace or fork a dependency should it go...
• Virtually all maintainers are either volunteers or full-time employ...

Money Stuff: The SEC Wants to See More Phones

• But in modern financial markets, you can get an economic benefit fr...

Are We Still in a COVID-19 Emergency?

• Today, roughly 500 Americans are dying each day from COVID-19. At t...

Unlocking the Commons and Collective Micropatronage

• The most economically powerful thing you can do is to buy something...

Money Stuff: AMC Has Some Clever APEs

• Just like regular investment funds can either be actively managed o...

Should Private Platforms Engage in Censorship?

• When someone (or some entity such as business) enjoys a particular ...

Money Stuff: Johnson & Johnson’s Bankruptcy Didn’t Work

• No chief executive officer of a big company wants to file for bankr...

The AI CFO

• The answer, of course, is that the competitiveness of unaided indiv...
• Finance, like its cousin Poetry, is the use of precise language to ...

Attention Router

• We feel rather than know (and many of us refuse to acknowledge) tha...
• This first lab newsletter of 2023 is very link-y, perhaps a bit raw...

Queueing Theory

• We have built many projects, and we believe the most valuable summa...
• The most important notation that summarizes a queue: • ρ: util...
• • λ: arrival rate. This measures how fast new items are coming in...

The Sin of Indifference

• Give considered thought to what is “worth our attention in any give...

Tag Systems

• Tags are primarily used for both querying , or discovering informat...

Setting Engineering Org Values.

• Create capacity (rather than capture it). This value focuses leader...
• Default to vendors unless it’s our core competency. You can also wr...
• Follow existing patterns unless there’s an order of magnitude impro...
• Optimize for the {whole, business unit, team}. Pick one of these op...
• Approach conflict with curiosity. One of my foundational beliefs is...
• As described in Rumelt’s Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, a strategy is...

Programming Paradigms for Dummies: What Every Programmer Should Know

• For large-scale software systems, Van Roy believes we need to embra...
• More generally, Van Roy sees a layered language design with four co...
• State introduces an abstract notion of time in programs. In func...

Mature Optimization: An Introduction

• The trickiest part of speeding up a program is not doing it, but de...

Should We “Resist Trying to Make Things Better” When It Comes to Online Misinformation?

• The fundamental problem is that there’s a fundamental disagreement ...
• I think what has happened is there was a massive overestimation of ...

Alternative Epistemic Agents for Restaurant Menus Etc

• Many years ago I got obsessed with habit-breaking days. We live our...
• Triadic closure is a concept in network theory which is when a netw...

Tonight's Rabbit Hole: Time Math and 32 Bit Longs

• On a 32 bit machine, a long is 4 bytes, and it’s still going to be ...

Code Lifespan

• Surely (no one/everyone) will (recognize how flexible and useful th...

AI-generated Code Helps Me Learn and Makes Experimenting Faster

• Now, none of that Copilot-supplied code remains in my app. What ...

Money Stuff: ChatGPT Is Not Much of a Pitch Robot

• Also another, related point is that as far as I can tell every dece...

Tax and/or Eat the Rich

• The report said that for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a ...

The Tyranny of the Churn Equation

• input the number of daily trials I have, and then my retention rate...
• I will say that based on playing around with lots of configurations...

Rinse, Wash, Like and Subscribe, Repeat

• The dark irony here is that corporatized communication is what made...
• Of course, OpenAI does offer a “social” feature, but the thing you’...

[TTT2] — Day 7: The Rainy Unknown Kissa Walk

• Yes. To me, the essence of the third place is that it is one where ...

You Need to Stop Doing Your Old Job and Start Doing Your New Job. That Sounds Ob...

• Related, if you can see a better way to do it, strongly consider ke...

Queuing Rule of Thumb

• The Queuing Rule of Thumb (QROT) is a mathematical formula, known a...

Cyclic Sighing Most Effective at Improving Mood and Reducing Respiratory Rate | Hacker News

• Participants were informed they should sit down in a chair or, if t...

Internal Comms for Executives.

• A surprising amount of executive time is spent cleaning up messes. ...
• updates establish a persistent drip of information from you to the ...
• you can significant improve the quality of internal communcations w...

Sent Items #136: Monday, January 23, 2023

• Amazon thought that if they could force users to go straight to Ama...

Dumb and Shameful Until It's Not

• The main issue here is that, at least when it comes to online platf...
• If you don’t know the difference between something like DALL-E 2 an...
• The term was “Web 2.0” was first coined in 1999 by technologist Dar...

Why We All Need Subtitles Now

• Dialogue from movies and TV shows has become more difficult to hear...

Class Reductionist

• Life (and intersectionality) are complex, but money is, relatively ...

Meetings for an Effective Eng Organization.

• Use the Q&A as an opportunity to highlight individuals doin...
• I start every Q&A by saying, “I’m glad to talk about anythi...
• Many engineers won’t get to work with you directly, and they will l...
• Good reviews are anchored in feedback from the audience, and discus...
• The most effective communication within an organization is between ...

AI and the Macroeconomics of Brains

• We can summarize the difference between the micro- and macroeconomi...

Reduce Anxiety & Stress With the Physiological Sigh | Huberman Lab Quantal Clip

• In other words, feel more calm in real time, meaning without having...

The Secret Ingredient: Vinegar

• I think my favorite activity ever is cooking for people in my own h...

Shaping Your Authenticity

• Because going against our natural inclinations can make us feel lik...

Setting a New Focus for My Blog

• The applicability of software to the just advancement of society, i...

The Map Room Is a Physical Room-Size Wiki for Collaboration From the 1950s

• Accretive tools build over time. Developer tools tend to work like ...
• Ephemeral tools are about the conversation. Slack is one. Zoom is a...
• The room is architected for discussions and decisions, not just vis...

The Science (And Business) Behind COVID-19 Disinformation. And What to Do About It.

• Analyses have found that 12 people—coined the “disinformation dozen...

What Does It Mean to Be a Cost Center?

• Disproportionately impactful engineering teams are distinguished by...
• A cost center is a function that is operated by optimizing its exis...

Money Stuff: Slicing Cash Flows for Better Ratings

• At least sometimes, it seems, there is more demand for a very safe ...
• This is one of the main things that happens in finance. It describe...

Funny Programming Languages

• If a swear ever fails, the function is deleted from the source code...

Money Stuff: SEC Comes for Gemini Too Late

• Around here I often quote the most important thing I learned at Gol...
• Another lesson is that, when junior investment bankers work all nig...
• the Howey test of what makes an “investment contract” a security is...

Sound Tracking

• Bakker introduced me to the term biophony to refer to sounds of liv...

[TTT2] — Day 2: Rainbow Bridge, Odaiba, Toyosu, Tsukishima

• We should be so fortunate to greet each other as we greet each othe...

Ruby 3.2’s YJIT Is Production-Ready

• One of the challenges with JIT compilers is that they always incur ...

Import AI 315: Generative Antibody Design; RL’s ImageNet Moment; RL Breaks Rocket League

• A standard way to poison a code model is to inject insecure code in...

The 'Scooby Doo' Psyop

• In October of last year, YouTube creator and fandom expert Sarah Z ...

21 Comments on Canarytokens.org – Quick, Free, Detection for the Masses

• Canary tokens are a free, quick, painless way to help defenders dis...

Designing User Interfaces With Bots Not Buttons

• as users becomes accustomed to agents and NPCs, we’ll see more inte...
• Laurel suggests that we see the computer screen as a stage on which...
• the computer interface has always been a multiplayer environment fo...
• Next we bring in creative divergence. How? Geists! Geists will be l...

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering

• Lastly, in a sense this is a religious course: I am preaching the m...
• In a lifetime of many, many independent choices, small and large, a...
• Education is what, when, and why to do things. Training is how to d...

Wolfram|Alpha as the Way to Bring Computational Knowledge Superpowers to ChatGPT

• And yes, there’ll be plenty of cases where “raw ChatGPT” can help w...

In the Black and White Woods

• But if you use the trick I learned twenty years ago from a Subaru s...

The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

• And when you’re afraid of someone’s judgment, you can’t connect wit...
• Asking for help with shame says: You have the power over me. Ask...

This Is Fine

• TikTok’s entire strategy is to turn viral content into public domai...

How We Could Stumble Into AI Catastrophe

• Maybe they’re just creating massive amounts of “digital representat...
• The lab mice problem Today’s “subhuman” AIs are safe.What about fut...
• The King Lear problem The AI is (actually) well-behaved when hum...
• The Lance Armstrong problem Did we get the AI to be actually safe o...

Conspiracies of Cognition, Conspiracies of Emotion

• If only they were literally raping children and then eating their b...

How Not to Play the Game

• But, paradoxically, crypto is much more reliant on trust than the r...
• It was like a fantastical version of their old jobs, a new financia...

Can 'Radioactive Data' Save the Internet From AI's Influence?

• Influence operations can take many shapes; most such operations are...

A Holistic Approach to Computing and Sustainability Inspired From Permaculture.

• Scavenge-friendly electronics are parts that are no longer manufact...
• Designing for Disassembly ensures that all elements of a product ca...
• Utilizing what has survived the collapse of industrial production o...
• Utilizing only already available computational resources, to be lim...
• Utilizing computational resources as finite and precious, to be uti...
• The abundance of digital storage and processing power has caused an...
• A post-collapse society that has eventually lost all of its artific...
• Collapse informatics prioritizes community needs and aims to contri...
• Designing for Descent ensures that a system is resilient to intermi...
• Asking for the most suitable programming language for permacomputin...

Money Stuff: JPMorgan Says Frank Was Fraud

• His only real hope of avoiding many years in prison is to convince ...
• Yeah I mean a general lesson here is that you want to be in the sor...

A Brief Rant on Converging Compliance Regimes.

• I’d argue that field-level encryption should be a starting place fo...
• From the perspective of non-mega-platform companies, I think this i...
• While today there’s a wide distance between GDPR, CCPA, HITRUST, Fe...

I Wish My Web Server Were in the Corner of My Room

• Seeing your website’s actual server is the virtual equiv of the Ove...

The Infrastructure Behind ATMs

• Many people believe that cash, the paper printed by the government,...

The Doomscrolling Is the Point

• The seemingly earnest popularity of these videos, especially among ...

Import AI 313: Smarter Robots via Foundation Models; Stanford Trains a Small Best-in-Class Medical LM; Baidu Builds a Multilingual Coding Dataset

• Modern generative models are generic data transformation engines, a...

Money Stuff: Crypto Banks Owe Themselves Money

• One interesting and possibly even true thing that I learned in law ...

Import AI 314: Language Models + Text-to-Speech; Emergent Cooperation in Wargames; ICML Bans LLM-written Papers

• This is an example of the ‘capability overhang’ phenomenon I’ve bee...

Taking Over a Dead IoT Company

• A bill of materials or BOM is a list of the raw components that go ...

The William Langewiesche Aviation Reader

• Like the orbits of all other satellites, and of the Space Station, ...
• Weightlessness is bad for the bones, but good for the soul. FROM:...

Memberships

• The IRS says: “To be deductible, a business expense must be both or...
• you can pay me money, and I will continue writing. If you (in aggre...

Fwd: ⦿ Roden: 075 — Archetypes Revisited

• Self-worth, the unexpected corollary of having positive archetypes ...
• The world is mostly shaped by wealth, more so than ever as technolo...

Ask HN: What Are the Foundational Texts for Learning About AI/ML/NN?

• You are approaching this like an established natural sciences field...

What Is an Optimum Degree of LLM Hallucination?

• Ideally you could adjust a dial and and set the degree of hallucina...

On ‘The Menu’

• This is a new food culture, where the chef is not speaking from on ...

BAM Is Now Reader-Supported

• And so when one wonders why newsletters “came out of nowhere” just ...
• The single biggest thing Substack accomplished was legitimizing a S...
• One publication well-known enough by cognoscenti to get namechecked...

Edge Cities With and Without Historic Cores

• An edge city is a dense, auto-oriented job center arising from near...

Nathan Labenz on AI Pricing

• pruning for sparsity – turns out some LLMs work just as well if you...
• distillation – a technique by which larger, more capable models can...

There’s Room for Everybody

• Skeptics of solar feasibility pantomime a kind of technical realism...
• We live on a sun-drenched blue marble hanging in space, and for all...

Erasure Coding Versus Tail Latency

• Erasure Coding is a ubiquitous technique in storage and physical ne...
• Let’s think about that cache again: when that one node is down, ove...
• Erasure coding is the idea that we can take a blob of data, break i...

Fwd: #198: Motion Suggests Itself

• The fact that I had never been on the ghost kitchen’s block despite...

MKBHD Claims That Post-Processing Is Ruining iPhone Photos – And I Agree With That

• Every year, the company adds even more steps to the camera post-pro...

INDIGNITY VOL. 3, NO 2: There's Always Another Round of Losing for Kevin McCarthy

• this is the problem when your sole governing ideals are destroying ...

Effective Political Giving

• So to summarize–downballot races are cheap, cost-effective, and bec...
• Even in a normal year, early money is many times more effective tha...

Money Stuff: CoinDeal’s Bentleys Weren’t Real

• In conditions of uncertainty, you might be tempted to use a low mar...
• If you run a mutual fund, a high mark is good for investors who tak...

Fwd: Money Stuff: Private Markets Don’t Like to Go Down

• The attraction of private investments is that they don’t have to go...

Fwd: Money Stuff: Crypto Manipulation Has Consequences

• One imperfect but useful way to think about crypto,” I wrote, “is t...

Resources for Climate Nihilism

• As a religion, social justice works. It works not merely in the sen...
• What is the alternative to naïve cynicism? An active response to wh...
• But the hyperobject that is climate change requires the very kind o...

'Weathering Software Winter', Handmade Seattle 2022

• one of the realization that I hadworking on something like this was...
• and so all Apple products broke almost instantly and all the tools ...
• our philosophy is that to make fast software you need slow computer...

A Bridge Over a River Never Crossed

• traditional arch bridges were built by first having a wood framing ...

COVID in China, the U.S., and Everything in-Between

• Officials estimate between 5,000-10,000 people are dying per day . ...

Six Seasons

• There is no need to cut croutons into perfect little squares! Just ...
• Before using dried fruit I rehydrate it in a bowl of water with a s...
• because nuts like all fatty ingredients will absorb odors. 📕FROM...
• Cheese is a living thing that needs to breathe. Waxed paper or spec...
• Buy them in small quantities and replenish them often instead of ha...
• What will keep beans tough, though, is acid, so never cook beans in...
• Don’t store in plastic containers, because the plastic can absorb t...
• Never buy preground or precracked pepper, ever! You want the fresh,...
• Those little shakers on the table are of no help when you cook; you...
• Build layers into your dish, like you’re making nachos. Hide things...
• All roots have edible greens, so catch them early when they’re tend...
• when grilling or charring, skip the oil. Cook your vegetables naked...

On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computing Science

• the programmer’s task is not just to write down a program, but that...
• the program is an abstract symbol manipulator, which can be turned ...
• The vast majority of our mechanisms are viewed as analogue devices ...
• It is probably more illuminating to go a little bit further back, t...
• My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we shoul...

In Essence, Journalling Is Similar to a Psychotherapy Session.

• In essence, journalling is similar to a psychotherapy session. T...

Digital Gardening in Obsidian

• I summarize these daily notes into a weekly digest. These have more...

Cartesian Theater

• “Cartesian theater” is a derisive term coined by philosopher and co...

Unbundling Tools for Thought

• in the web, it makes sense that links should reflect potential, sin...
• Most of our thoughts appear and pass away instantly, for good reaso...

How We Slowed the Subway Down

• Eventually, you reach this list’s conclusion, which lies in an unas...
• To achieve that braking safety, the subway’s signal architecture wo...

Recursion

• “Their sensory volume increased, since light travels farther in air...
• He has wondered lately if that’s all living really is—one long good...

Lessons Not Worth Learning.

• My general view on beliefs is that we get to choose them, so we sho...
• Ultimately, I decided not to, and developed the idea that I should ...

AIs as Societal Zero-Day Exploits

• There’s a third impact of AI harder to spot and even harder to sell...
• Essentially, the use of AI as a technology has less of a meta-strat...
• using AI to design products is more powerful than using AI as a pro...

The Law of Stretched [Cognitive] Systems

• As far as I can tell, cognitive bandwidth and network bandwidth bot...
• the Law of stretched systems: Every system is stretched to ...

Occultations, Chiltipineros, and a Ringtail

• The fruits are so small that the red doesn’t jump out at you in the...

Just Taste

• Sonali had told us about Annaprashana, which is a Hindu ceremony in...

How Kaytranada Produced Glowed Up

• Stereo width is a big part of the Glowed Up mix, with the 808 and s...
• Sidechain compression listens to a second track to decide when to b...

The Compassionate Programmer

• When we say, “If you’re going to read one thing about programming, ...

Fwd: Money Stuff: The SEC Wants More Stock Auctions

• During the summer of 2021, Canadian researchers … found that the un...

Fwd: Money Stuff: FTX Had Some Luna Trouble

• if you are talking about “numerous black swans” then you have made ...
• In the glory days, Olympus enthusiasts dressed up this insight in t...

Dowsing Is a Technology for Intuition Amplification

• Stochastic resonance is the phenomenon in which random noise can am...

2022 in Review.

• “Advancing the industry.” I believe that I can improve practice in ...

A Year of New Avenues

• The cotton gin, a canonical example of automation, perversely incre...
• In most places, the olive harvest is mechanized, but that’s only po...

Be Wary of Imitating High-Status People Who Can Afford to Countersignal

• A three second warning can’t compete against 45 minutes of seeing c...

Writing Is Magic

• Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinkin...

Fwd: Money Stuff: Crypto Had a Credit Bubble

• the crypto industry in 2022 rediscovered the 2008 financial crisis....
• He is making multi-year, illiquid, unhedgeable speculative investme...

Unlike Most People on Twitter, I’m Actually Using GPT3 In...

• I’m actually using GPT3 in a production system. The mistake people ...

Stuff the Internet Says on Scalability for December 2nd, 2022

• because a service is running with a dependency down does not mean i...

The Demanding Work of Analyzing Incidents

• something called the Hermeneutic circle, which Ryan Kitchens descri...

Fwd: The Dawn of Mediocre Computing

• Mediocre computing is computing that aims for parity with mediocre ...

How Food Powers Your Body

• series of reactions strips its highest-energy electrons and uses th...

Fwd: #196: I Care Because You Do

• the Gruen Transfer, a phenomenon that architecture theorist Sanford...

A People's History of the United States

• In one of his finer moments, President Dwight Eisenhower had said: ...

The Undoing Project

• The Gestalists showed that there was no obvious relationship betwee...
• It confirmed Biederman’s sense that “most advances in science come ...

An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

• This is one reason why we continually grasp for the latest get-rich...
• Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change ...
• Sometimes a habit will be hard to remember and you’ll need to make ...
• Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the w...
• When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, ‘My God...
• it’s not always about what happens during the workout. It’s about b...
• Similarly, if your reward for exercising is eating a bowl of ice cr...
• We imitate the habits of three groups in particular: The cl...
• Stop thinking about your environment as filled with objects. Start ...
• In this way, the most common form of change is not internal, but ex...
• The 1st Law of Behavior Change is to make it obvious. Strategies li...
• Whenever you want to change your behavior, you can simply ask yours...
• your habits are how you embody your identity 📕FROM: James Clear ...
• Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about ...

A Burglar's Guide to the City

• In a 2003 memoir called Where the Money Is: True Tales from the Ban...
• Today, nearly 150 years later, burglary and architecture still go h...
• Recall Bernard Tschumi’s point that architecture is constantly maki...

The Color of Law

• Forty-eight percent of African American families, at all income lev...
• There is generally no judicial remedy for a policy that the Supreme...
• The full cycle went like this: when a neighborhood first integrated...
• African Americans cannot await rectification of past wrongs as a gi...
• The core argument of this book is that African Americans were uncon...

Broad Band

• Sometimes we love to grandstand to an audience of strangers at a pa...

300 Arguments

• At faculty meetings I sat next to people whose books had sold two m...
• Instead of pathologizing every human quirk, we should say, By the g...

Rootin' Tootin' Charcutin' - By Kathryn Jezer-Morton

• Party food before social media was not prepared with photographic r...

Permutation City

• Durham said, “Do you know what a Garden-of-Eden configuration is?” ...

When Good AI Ethics Is Just Good AI Engineering - blog.rinesi.com

• There’s the implicit expectation in AI and data science that if we ...

2021-12-27 — The Prepared

• When we deal with buildings we deal with decisions taken long ago f...

Passages Saved From iOS

• most people “take far too much pleasure in their beliefs to give th...
• One of the consequences of demateralisation is that things that “re...
• What we call history is, in practice, what we can bear to think abo...
• A general heuristic I’ve come to use to ascribe “value” to (a porti...
• Find the best teachers and take all their classes, no matter the su...
• Census figures show there are 40,000 more Latinos in Chicago than a...
• Chicago remains the third largest city in the country with a popula...
• I’m personally convinced that these companies are selling products ...
• although as with all plastic recycling, “downcycling” is the more a...
• At Maggie Daley Park, one of the project’s defining challenges was ...
• This sort of knowledge is what Dan Wang calls process knowledge - t...
• Jingu is famous for its tradition of periodic reconstruction, known...
• The four elements of credible neutrality are: (1) Don’t write speci...
• But just as the gig economy mode of work brought about negative con...

Plato's Dashboards

• THE MEANING OF A COMMUNICATION IS THE BEHAVIOUR THAT RESULTS. FRO...
• The classification scheme used here is possibly the clearest one I’...

Inspection and the Limits of Trust. | Irrational Exuberance

• Trust on its own isn’t much of a management technique. Trust cannot...

> *A Team in Hong Kong Has Announced That in Their Cell Assays the Omicron Varia... | Hacker News

• An immediate hypothesis was that Omicron may have developed in a si...

Rai Stones - Wikipedia

• Although the ownership of a particular stone might change, the ston...

Quick Passages

• “But the point is… this infestation, SCP-4051, is a snowflake. I do...

Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering • Buttondown

• And regulations are written in blood, so we’ll only get enforced le...
• TDD/FP/Agile zealots are probably zealots because adopting TDD/FP/A...

Monitoring SRE's Golden Signals

• these are the three main lists of golden signals today: From the Go...

Ask HN: How Did You Build Up Your Personal Knowledge Base? | Hacker News

• Human memory is squishy, and that’s great. You retain facts + feeli...

Playing the Believing Game - By Sara Hendren

• In the lab or studio, the hardest question to answer is What shall ...

Sharing in the Presence of Computers and Corporations - macwright.com

• But the community feels different now, now that many of its partici...

The Second and a Half Dimension

• The term 2.5-D was coined by anime fans in Japan in the 1980s to re...

The Particular Power of the Lancing Celebrity Profile

• Part of what makes for a really good profile — and this is certainl...

My 3 Greatest Revelations - Issue 102: Hidden Truths - Nautilus

• It’s a nice fantasy to think about future singularity. But that’s j...

The Truth Behind Finland's 'Catgirl' Prime Minster

• I hope the history books written about this moment in American hist...
• In a now-deleted tweet, a friend recently remarked on how she was s...

Glass Act: The Coanda Effect and Why We Transform Nuclear Waste Into Borosilicate Glass. — The Prepared

• the Coanda effect - the tendency of a fluid jet to stay attached to...

100 Years of Whatever This Will Be - Apenwarr

• Here’s what everyone peddling the new trendy systems is so desperat...

Hallmark Cards From Dystopia - By Christopher Brown

• The next day I encountered a more novel creature in the process of ...

#173: Experimental Jet Set - By Drew Austin - Kneeling Bus

• Like climate change, COVID is settling into its status as a “permac...
• when Netflix drops a big new show “it feels like a software update ...

Forecast: Wild & Well | the Future of Urban Tech

• The pandemic highlighted our intimate relationship with biology. Ur...

Phillips Curve Definition

• The Phillips curve is an economic concept developed by A. W. Philli...

THERE SHOULD BE a GUY - By Max Lavergne - Infinite Gossip

• There should be a guy who every morning rides his bicycle down to t...

Passages Saved From iOS From Kneeling Bus

• Sacasas describes the concept of “reality privilege” to which Andre...

Where Do Eels Come From? | the New Yorker

• The truth emerged only slowly, and was, in its own slippery way, st...

Notes Are Conversations Across Time - By Gordon Brander - Subconscious

• A conversation can happen between yourself and yourself, across tim...

Fancy

• Alice Waters had this incredibly boss move at Chez Panisse where, f...
• Luxury always boils down to time: someone is paying a lot of money ...

The Surprising Effectiveness of Writing and Rewriting

• In your head, ideas expand until they max out “working memory” – an...

John Swartzwelder, Sage of “The Simpsons” | the New Yorker

• Since writing is very hard and rewriting is comparatively easy and ...

The Case for 'Developer Experience' - Future

• A lot of developer tools also assume a developer will switch to an ...
• If our notion of “what is supposed to happen” is getting weaker, th...
• most of the conversations around developer experience are about how...
• With developers spending less than a third of their time actually w...

Dana Fried on Twitter: 'This Is an Easy Statistical Mistake for Tech Companies to Make - And One We Try to Avoid in Chrome: It's Easy to Look at Pregnancy (For Example) as Something Which Affects Only 2% of Your Users. But It's Really Something That Affects 40% of Your Users 5% of the Time.' / Twitter

• It’s easy to look at pregnancy (for example) as something which aff...

Code Runs on People

• Code runs on people. Please keep it simple. “Everyone knows” tha...

How Extreme Abortion Bans in Alabama and Georgia Happened

• never again let anyone tell you that the fury or determination to f...
• I have seethed as generations of Democrats have argued that if we c...

Oh No, Your Pyramid Scheme Is on Strike - By Ryan Broderick - Garbage Day

• It’s seems obvious that collective action from internet creators is...

Matt Klein on Twitter: 'Last Week I Sat for an Internal Interview About My Career Progression to High Level IC Engineer, With a Focus on How I've Never Felt I Needed to Become a Manager to Gain Influence. I Thought I Would Share Some of My Career Advice for Aspiring IC 'Lifers.' Thread!' / Twitter

• When asked for IC career advice the first thing I always say is: YO...

“Rewilding Your Attention”. To Find Truly Interesting Ideas, Step… | by Clive Thompson | Aug, 2021 | Medium

• Rewild your attention” — that’s a wonderful way of putting it! (Or ...

Why I Hate the Phrase “Breaking Down Silos” – charity.wtf

• CLICHES ARE A SUBSTITUTE FOR CRITICAL THINKING FROM: charity.wtf ...

Responsible Monkeypatching in Ruby | AppSignal Blog

• Instead, it’s much better to wrap your patch in a module and apply ...

Bobos in Ikea - By Brandon - Sweater Weather

• A life that is cosmopolitan, which is to say, a life that belongs t...

Massachusetts Holy Ghost - By Brandon - Sweater Weather

• There have always been people who have had to censor themselves and...

A Pandemic of Apathy - By Sarah Mock - Big Team Farms

• Why is that a hard message to communicate through marketing, especi...
• A few months ago, I was at an event that asked this question of par...
• Consumers want perfection, but farmers want commodity,” he said. ...
• The process [of regenerative ag] is expensive, since farmers who em...

Officials and Activists Advocate for Red Tide Solutions

• Bryan Beckman is a Clearwater environmentalist whose daily life has...

The Web Browser as a Tool of Thought | thesephist.com

• Recollection is such a small, basic part of thinking! There is so m...
• A tool is something that takes an existing workflow, and makes it m...

Your Own Harriet - By Anne Helen Petersen - Culture Study

• We’ve somehow managed to create a societal scenario where the most ...

Collecting My Thoughts About Notation and User Interfaces

• To summarise those desirable qualities, a good notation is: Comp...
• Or to be more specific, urbanist Kevin Lynch’s city maps from his 1...

My Heroku Values · GitHub

• Everything has an interface. A platform has an API. A computer has ...
• The value of a product is the number of problems it can solve divid...

What Are Domain Events? | DDD | Serialized

• One of the most common mistakes when starting with Domain Events an...
• Examples of things that happen that might not be suitable to model ...

Prepper Dreams of Edgeland Wine - By Christopher Brown - Field Notes

• There are articles about how to drive like a real-world road warrio...

Major System | Art of Memory

• The Harold Mangum System uses phonetic sounds for 0 to 9 based on t...

Latency Sneaks Up on You - Marc's Blog

• the system grows for a while (increasing λ), or we reduce the numbe...
• As we think about it this way, we realize that the closer ⍴ gets to...
• We can then define the Utilization of the server (calling it ⍴ for ...

Imagining the First Global Simulation War

• Then the big parks, which are beautiful and well maintained. Great ...

Apple’s Photo Scanning and Our State of Forced Collective Paranoia

• And it was this work that really opened my eyes to the pervasive se...

Men Explain Things to Me

• My friend Chip Ward speaks of “the tyranny of the quantifiable,” of...

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

• The central thesis of this book is precisely that an apparently sma...

Designing Data-Intensive Applications

• Although we generally prefer tolerating faults over preventing faul...
• The things that can go wrong are called faults, and systems that an...

Production Ready GraphQL

• All in all, I don’t think service communication is the sweet spot f...
• GraphQL is purposefully transport/protocol agnostic. Nothing is sto...
• build a GraphQL API server that is resolved by many underlying serv...
• Airbnb’s approach of wiring up different schemas together to form t...
• My advice would be for GraphQL APIs to rely on conventions as much ...
• A lot has to be reinvented with a GraphQL API. Errors, caching, rat...
• The trade-off, though, is that a uniform interface degrades efficie...
• We can often categorize APIs in three broad categories: Private API...
• Compiled queries are a very exciting area of GraphQL that I hope to...
• Some would even say field ordering should be normalized, but that c...
• The generation of a cache key is always important, but even more so...
• It’s often very useful to provide inline performance information in...
• I like to think of the lifecycle of a GraphQL query in 3 broad step...
• Once the client has the identifier for a particular query, it can s...
• Persisted queries are a must for all internal APIs, and I suspect t...

DDD Quickly

• Context Maps where contexts have clear roles and their relationship...
• Another way this is noted is that Factories are “pure domain”, but ...
• The Factory should create new objects, while the Repository should ...
• For immutable Value Objects it means that all attributes are initia...
• Choose one Entity to be the root of each Aggregate, and control all...
• An Aggregate is a group of associated objects which are considered ...
• There are three characteristics of a Service: The operation perf...
• For example, to transfer money from one account to another; should ...
• Concentrate all the code related to the domain model in one layer a...

Linchpin

• It’s not a surprise when a scientist is surprised. That’s what happ...
• For the last five hundred years, the best way to succeed has been t...
• understand that the path is neither short nor easy. That means you ...
• The hard part is distinguishing between quitting because the resist...
• Volunteering to do emotional labor—even when you don’t feel like it...
• If your organization wanted to replace you with someone far better ...