Yang Wenli has a very particular approach to leadership. It’s exemplified in this sequence where he embodies the thing that Jocko always calls ‘The Dichotomy of Leadership’. The leader is always in conflict needing to reconcile the demands from above with the realities and attitudes below.
The current Berlin government has as its Chief Digital Officer, Martina Klement a woman from Bavaria who’s overhauling large parts of the city administration.
Psychedelics being responsible for humans developing quicker and smarter than other species is a delightful notion. The proof isn’t very solid, but that’s fine for a “notion”.
Let me take note of some highlights for each episode. We’re already pretty far in and it’s easy to forget all the things that happened since the episodes are long and the cast of characters continuously rotates.
An interesting if somewhat rambling history of containers and their effect on software engineering by Justin Cormack who as head of Docker was a key player in this development.
Based also on what Schneier recently wrote about AI security, there’s no real way to secure against these kind of attacks without restricting LLMs to the point of making them much less useful.
This Tokyo last train (終電) visualizer is a fun concept but given that all the trains disappear at roughly the same time, it’s usefulness is somewhat limited.
A great video about Postgres scaling at OpenAI and nice to see that we have run into many of the same problems as they have and are using similar approaches to solving them.
Not sure what part of this are worth mentioning because I find it so obvious how to build software quickly. Apparently, this is not obvious to everybody.
Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.
Instead of being able to carry my digital ID in my phone wallet as is long overdue, here in Europe we just get lots of people going on and on about these or those privacy minutiae.
Ai Weiwei is right to be angry and lashes out in this barrage of scathing statements. That Zeit would not publish this is curious given the garbage that they’ve been wont to put out over the past year. However undirected, criticism of Germany is not appreciated by the Germans.
It’s not just Mamdani, it’s also Jewish leaders like Rabbi Moishe Indig who make me ashamed to live in Berlin. In comparison, our local political and religious leaders are so very bad.
His father is a university professor. His mother is a physician. Farritor seems to have been a child prodigy whose talents were recognized, encouraged, and incubated almost from the moment he hit puberty. He was supported by both his well-to-do family, his community, and a number of institutions that exist to identify and elevate gifted children.
A somewhat comprehensive suite of benchmarks show that for real workloads you don’t need anything like async Django. Most of the response time in your requests will be used somewhere else.
Bruce Schneier1 looks at agentic AI here as an OODA loop problem which is an interesting way to look at the fundamental limitations of security and decision making in this context.
One of my bigger issues and the reason I’m not bought into the Nix ecosystem: If anything does not work (and many things do not work), you’re going to be hours/days deep into various inscrutable abstractions, trying to fix it yourself.
I missed out on the entire NeoVIM movement and found the entire thing somewhat difficult to get into. Not so much with Helix which just works and is pleasant to use.
After having kicked out Wordpress and moved to a Hugo generated static site, next up are two other useless subscriptions that aren’t doing anything other than costing me money:
