Slow progress on results Blamed on everything being difficult or complicated With a tendency to find artificial prerequisite activities that sound plausible, but on further examination aren’t. Things are as complex as we want to make them. Most of the time complexity is an excuse for either not wanting to do something or not knowing how to do something.
We can probably look forward to see more large American companies destabilize under a regime of financialization, deregulation and competitive pressure.
An roller coaster of an interview with a series of FizzBuzz extensions that are honestly not even that bad, but poor form from the interviewers’ side not to recognize the absolute balling brilliance on display here.
Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think ‘oh, the lawnmower hates me’ – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle.
What’s happening in Flint is a good example of how the social effects of institutional lapses are much more difficult to fix than just replacing a bunch of pipes. We’re seeing the same effects happening around COVID and its after effects and we’ll see many more examples of government distrust and chaotic confusion in the coming decades.
For those who want to introduce some whimsy into their programming and for whom using a variable width font in your code editor is a bit too far, there is now Comic Mono (via). It doesn’t even look all too terrible.
I love Github Projects for tracking work. It’s close to the code and engineers understand it natively. I feel you can deliver features of any size with it if you work with the tool.
I think Facebook rolled back their block of Pixelfed but they’re right to be spooked. Showing a bunch of pictures in a stream hardly seems like a technological challenge. And what are all the people working at Instagram doing other than figuring out novel ways to track you and serve you ads?
A lack of knowledge about queueing theory and a dash of wishful thinking make this a common trap for most developers to believe that as long as you add bigger queues you can wiggle your way out of any scaling problem.
Brazil still remembers that it’s a state with state power and has found a delightful habit of pouncing on social media sites. Other states should follow suit.
The Agents chapter from Chip Huyen’s book “AI Engineering” is clear and enjoyable to read. She’s right that “the concept of an agent is fairly simple” but building something functional still looks like a massive lift.
Maps for where you’ve been in Europe and the US (via). Stayed means having spent a night there which means the only places I’ve visited and not spent the night are Slovenia (went over the border to hike a mountain there) and the Vatican.
A live coding environment to create 3D graphics using signed distance functions written in the Janet programming language. Click through and edit some of the embedded examples to get a feel for how amazing this is.
A thought-provoking article about how to counteract car bloat. I would add that driving a SUV is even worse than smoking because it mostly harms others, not the person doing the driving themselves.
In Germany for many transactions you need a proof of address which a Personalausweis provides for German citizens. Us foreigners don’t get one however often we ask for it. In the Netherlands moving through the country without a battery of chip cards (OV chipkaart, Bonuskaart, OV-fiets etc.), apps and associated services is costly and annoying.
It’s rare to find writing in German as lithe and delightful as what Christoph Rauscher puts out. The monthly lists are one particularly good example. I’m learning new and interesting words still in most of his pieces.
I’ve had to spend more time than I like thinking about how datetimes are stored in databases and even the commonly accepted practice of storing UTC does not work for all cases.
The terminal I use daily (because it’s the best really), fish, has been rewritten entirely in Rust, because it’s nice and more fun: “For one, fish is a hobby project, and that means we want it to be fun for us. Nobody is being paid to work on fish, so we need it to be fun. Being fun and interesting also attracts contributors.”
There was a brief period where Foursquare based recommendations were good and drawn from your wider social graph. Now we’ve gone back to Yelp and Google Maps where reviews and ratings don’t mean anything. A lower than 4 star review on GMaps has netted me a cease-and-desist e-mail for defamation.
Musks’s attack on Wikipedia is another step in getting rid of information sources where they can’t control the narrative and the “truth”. Everything they’re doing is built on lies.
Hans de Zwart’s end of the year media overviews are one of the highlights of what still happens on personal blogs for me. He’s a voracious reader and one of the rare people who acts on his moral clarity. Also, Hans is a great guy and I had the chance to briefly catch-up with him last year.
The o3 AGI result looked so noteworthy that I dove into it. I read one of the papers that’s at the base of the approach and thought it was pretty interesting.
An overview of the year in databases by Andy Pavlo that does not pull any punches. I learned a bunch of things (and I somewhat keep up with this area).
I think for sure we’ve built an Erlang but even then again Erlang is such an esoteric environment that I would barely consider using it to be an alternative. Where would you start and how would you get other people onboarded?