Suppose you’re a well-known journalists hosting a weekly rather left podcast around topics such as migration, the climate and criticism of right-wing frames in the media. And then suppose you let yourself get baited majorly by an American alt-right activist.
Listening to the Trash Future team describe CulturePulse.ai and the digital twin profile created for entire populations seems very very reminiscent of “The Red Men” by Matthew de Abaitua which didn’t get the attention it deserved but was quite prescient.
Given the current developments around the German debt brake, I think it’s good to refer to this bit about German financial politics and Adam Tooze’s initial prediction (FT, Zeit) that Christian Lindner as finance minister would not be good.
I don’t think about the Roman Empire that much, but when I do it’s great to have it be because of Mary Beard who in this podcast (from the 18:48) talks about Zuckerberg’s fascination with August and how leadership then and now has not changed that much.
Last week I was making a presentation and I came across Deming and his principles. I have often gotten the question: “If you don’t measure X, then how will you know we’re doing well or improving?” which I always felt was misguided.
After reading this I get to appreciate a lot more how big of a problem Python packaging is (mostly because Python is so big and diverse) and what kind of a miracle it is that these systems work and keep working at all.
An unexpected deep dive on the problem of unaffordable and underutilized land as it relates to Berlin. It manages to even sneak in some mentions of land reform and land value taxes (which would solve this problem pretty much instantaneously).
Finding time for side projects and putting out new versions of Cuppings is difficult as always, but I’m glad we have a new version out this week again.
SOMETIME IN THE 2000S, a group of mostly Turkish women from an immigrant group called Neighborhood Mothers began meeting in the Neukölln district of Berlin to learn about the Holocaust. Their history lessons were part of a program facilitated by members of the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, a Christian organization dedicated to German atonement for the Shoah. The Neighborhood Mothers were terrified by what they learned in these sessions. “How could a society turn so fanatical?”a group member named Nazmiye later recalled thinking. “We began to ask ourselves if they could do such a thing to us as well . . . whether we would find ourselves in the same position as the Jews.”But when they expressed this fear on a church visit organized by the program, their German hosts became apoplectic. “They told us to go back to our countries if this is how we think,”Nazmiye said. The session was abruptly ended and the women were asked to leave.
I can stop thinking about the Roman Empire, but this piece that draws an analogy between the Fall of the Romans and the End of Twitter is long overdue to be shared and still really good.
As much as it pains me, I’m teaching myself Helix and trying out the Jetbrains IDEs. Code has been the first editor that really clicked for me but as with all free things, there’s a hidden price to pay for it.
Lots of people (including me) were saying that more or less all of crypto was a scam but it was too convenient to ignore us for the people who were making bank stealing other people’s money.
In 2020 on the World Bank’s Human Capital Index — which measures countries’ education and health outcomes on a scale of 0 to 1 — India achieved a score of 0.49, below Nepal and Kenya, both poorer countries. China scored 0.65, putting it on par with Chile and Slovakia, which have higher GDP per capita. Most dramatically disadvantaged are India’s women. Since 1990, Indian women’s labour market participation has fallen from 32 per cent to about 25 per cent. And behind them come hundreds of millions of underskilled youngsters. In 2019 less than half of India’s 10-year-olds could read a simple story, compared with more than 80 per cent of Chinese children and 96 per cent of Americans. In the coming decade, 200mn of these poorly educated young people will reach working age. A large share of them will probably end up eking out a living in the informal sector and getting by on handouts. Unemployment amongst the under-25s already runs at more than 45 per cent.
After trying so many note taking apps coming in back from nvAlt and friends, it’s fine to have found one that sticks with Obsidian. I have a relatively tricked out Obsidian setup (which I’ll maybe write about at some point) and for personal notes I’ve been using Bear also for years now.
There’s a lot of conversation happening around async Rust which is why I found this article a good primer on the terrain and history of that part of the language.
The best thing about this return-to-office model is that it is differential and contextual. Whether the exact categories make sense and who falls in which is something that you can debate ad infinitum.
A clear write-up of why the GDPR is bad actually (entrenchment of power, illusion of freedom) and everybody who thinks they’re progressive should stop pushing it. At its very base the GDPR is a bullshit jobs programme for lawyers.
The post makes it look simple but pulling off a database migration project like this is very difficult to get right and incredibly costly in terms of time and attention that it requires.
A handy overview of how to hire for developer tooling and how to improve the developer experience at companies from a perspective that recognizes these are socio-technical issues but also needs to get stuff done.
I prefer to use contributing factors over the concept of a “root cause” and if people believe an incident has a single cause, usually that also means that they’re not very serious about reliability engineering.
We’re seeing a bunch of these posts come around serverless around the time that we too are reconsidering our investment in this area. Lambda has a lot of operational benefits but at larger scales the developer experience just does not keep up.
A long post that builds up to async Rust from the ground up and explains how the various bits and pieces work. Really quite the tour de force with a simple conclusion: use Tokio.
With our re-evaluation of Lambda as a platform and after talking to some people, I’d say that Rust is the most (maybe the only) viable language on Lambda mostly because it’s negligible cold start times, high performance and the amazing developer experience of aws-lambda-rust-runtime.
A comparison of the sustainability of different kinds of bikes and how progress in cycling has often come at the price of sustainability. Still however you spin it, electric cycling is much more efficient and sustainable than driving.
Life before there were mobile phones and internet was really totally different and simple and laid back. I got a bit of this but I think I got my first iBook during university and my first iPhone shortly after I got out of university.
Your browser does not support the audio element. Tooze talking for five minutes about the difference between European and American academic traditions. Excuse the low quality but my Wordpress has a 2MB file limit.
Once in a while they knock them out of the park in this podcast. In this episode Friedemann Karig goes out and asks for people to understand the necessity and reasons behind violent antifascism in the void left behind when the state fails to protect its citizens.
The multiplier you get working with people who practice rigorous thinking is huge. Most of the work is getting everybody to this point as Wes Kao explains here.
The examples are hugely exaggerated for effect but the explanation of why so many people in software engineering keep themselves busy with solving imaginary problems is worth it.
Every time I mention slack time as one of the most important things for healthy engineering teams people look at me as if they’re seeing water burning.
Doing the things listed here as a VP by Emily Nakashima sounds all nice and well (maybe fun even for some people), but the core deliverables of alignment and focus are the real test: both are impossibly hard to achieve and worth their weight in gold.
Nice to see both the scale of the problems that Discord is attacking and the detail of the write-up of how they go about it. I always wondered whether migrating from Cassandra to Scylla would be worth it and it turns out that it is.
Extremely cool conceptual work around the CLI and how it could be possible to pry things apart, create proper primitives and communications channels, and make this an infinitely more powerful interface.
Grateful that Hillel Wayne wrote down here that the 4doc model is not the alpha and omega of documentation and that—like with everything—you should keep thinking while you use it.
After using all kinds of note taking tools (eg. Notational Velocity) at some point some years ago I moved all my personal notes to Bear and it has been my secret productivity boost ever since.
I started my show and tell at work yesterday with: “Every company has a crazy person talking about #Nix. I never imagine that one day I would be that person but here we are.”