This may sound harsh, but it’s a lot fairer than they deserve: “But since the product is no longer jumping exponentially in capabilities, they will need to fall back on proper product development if they want to be competitive. They need to accept that they are software—plain old software—and that means people need to be able to use it.”
This is the kind of deep and rational thinking we should expect to see from the billionaires who own most of the world. Jeff Bezos, one of the richest people in the world, got so demonised that he had to have a cry about it.
A very cool and simple introduction into Lean and what makes it interesting. I’m not sure exactly what draws people in this direction but it’s cool to see the progress that’s being made here.
Perplexity lost its momentum almost a year ago and everything they’ve been doing since has been stuff like this. It takes some effort to stand out as a bad actor in a field like this, but here they are.
I had a very similar mediocre experience using LLMs with Python/Rust/Typescript where I didn’t really see the point. Only when I started using Go for a recent hackathon project did I get the fully hands off experience where I didn’t have to write any code.
Solvers are very annoying to setup and plug your problem into if you’re using them regularly. That’s why hooking them into LLMs to do the annoying manipulation work is an amazing idea.
I’ve found it very useful to use jj to continuously and automatically snapshot the changes that Claude makes. This way if it does anything that I didn’t want, it’s incredibly easy to undo it and still keep a clean history.
At scale you will be slapped in the face by this tail or that all the time. It’s a clear and simple argument to rehabilitate the mean as the measurement we should be looking at.
For the many people who may not be intimately familiar with the workings of Turing machines, this visual and interactive guide should get them up to speed really nicely.
A very informative write-up of how you would squeeze out the last bits of performance out of a Rust port. Not sure if I’d ever apply this but I’m happy enough that I can mostly follow along.
To hearken back to the previous comparison of Java versus compiled languages, AWS has a case here where a naive rewrite of their JVM database in Rust created massive performance wins.
It’s relevant to my interests to read how others have massively scaled the systems we use. Discord has a solid write-up here of how to deal with Elastic Search.
A twofer on software estimation that also tallies with my intuition. People are really great at estimating the median which is impossible to communicate to people without deep intuition for software engineering and statistics.
I fully agree with Paolo Scanferla here that very complex typing (“hyper-typing”) is an impediment to get anything done but besides the technical aspects, here are some ratchets here that are very pernicious.
Using the same Github account for work that you also use to do anything and everything else with is not particularly secure. That’s why I split my presence on the platform, but getting everything to work that way has been somewhat annoying.
The Return To Office debate has been very contentious and hardly productive. Here in HBR is an ethics based approach to create solutions here that work for everybody. A lot of it is common sense but this is coherent and a useful lens.
A dive into Stafford Beer’s systems thinking that uncovers the ANT-style depth that’s often glossed over. That notwithstanding, I still think the glib and reductive POSIWID has its uses.
Something that I also need to try. The rise of overlay networks that can create private networks and make all your devices and servers internet addressable is a huge convenience.
Here’s a topic over at Lobsters of what a bunch of software engineers would like to see programmed out in the world. Every ask gets a bunch of suggestions of things out there that could fill that gap.
A thought provoking attack on SQL with a bunch of pointers and hints as to what could come next. I’m pretty competent with SQL but that is exactly the point where you should become interested in what the limitations are and in what situations it makes sense to break out of the paradigm.
The amount of positive things happening around Python packaging and performance is really cool to see. Here’s a way to compile Python directly to Webassembly and get much better performance.
I’ve never used a tool that supports interdiff code reviews, but seeing it described here, it makes intuitive sense and I would love to have this. Instead we are–as is pretty much everybody else–stuck on Github.
All of those things listen above are in support of your primary goal: ensuring that you are getting shit done. You cannot get shit done to a world-class level by leaving all of the details to other people.
A weird coincidence how a media campaign would lead to double digit billions in extra revenues for fossil fuel providers (and to worse outcomes for everybody wanting to heat their homes in Germany). Nothing behind this probably.
“When you have a more well-rounded life, it doesn’t take away, it doesn’t distract you as an athlete,” Courtney told him. “It makes you stronger and better. And able to have a clear head when you get the opportunity to line up…I bring who I am to the bike. But the bike does not make me who I am.”
We liked to pretend that it was possible to use American cloud providers with any measure of sovereignty, but that pretence is going to drop very soon now. Not sure what the alternatives are, but everybody should be planning for some drastic changes here.