Putting this receipt here about life in the DDR and its eventual downfall:
Een fragment uit Studio Tegengif “#87 Het nieuwe politieke pijnpunt: de Nederlandse vermogensongelijkheid” over vermogensongelijkheid en dat belastingen op vastgoed en grond veel te laag zijn.
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.
Some good insights in reading about Flipkart’s popularity in India and how they achieved that.
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 feel very seen by this.
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.”
I had a really bad time getting into #Nix but I used my onboarding experience to fork and update a well-known community resource so it can be used again.
“This was an act of self-defense.”
A large part of the movement back to the office is because a lot of commercial real estate is under water. That’s where all the opinion pieces in the FT are coming from.
I got nerd sniped pretty hard by somebody sharing a Django code challenge: “only touch views.py and optimize a page load to a time and memory budget in 60 minutes”.
Leuk en informatief interview over ICT-projecten bij de overheid met Cokky Hilhorst.
Frank Lantz has a well balanced take on the opportunities and perils of AI that is good (and if you didn’t think Harari was a grifter yet, you might after reading this).
In this podcast episode a court case is treated (with the public prosecutor) where during a fluke accident a girl riding along on a bike is killed by a bus in Amsterdam.
The last Oxide and Friends is very timely and covers what’s happening now between Mastodon and Bluesky in an incredibly thoughtful way.
Immensely bored with all the podcasts in my app but glad to see that the new podcast by David Runciman “Past Present Future” has now surfaced.
Ik weet nog dat bij elk bezoek aan Hilversum het duidelijk was dat de mensen daar geen idee hebben van wat er buiten Hilversum gebeurt. Grappig om te lezen dat dat nog steeds zo is.
Here’s an absolutely staggering number to take with you: four trillion dollars per annum
Looking back over my notes and reactions from Interaction16 where I gave a talk calling chat interfaces the “UI for AI”. Feels good to be right.
One of the most interesting applications of Rust is to take over after algorithms have been prototyped in Python and create dramatic performance improvements.
Because it’s twenty years old a crusty technology like Django is the fastest way to bootstrap something into production. Get yourself some engineers who are more interested in creating business impact than they are in sprucing up their resume.
Turborepo also has a well considered rationale about why they want to move to Rust. Go still has a relatively strong position on the server, but it’s weird design choices are ill-suited for client side tooling and file system work.
Ink & Switch is doing amazing work leveraging technology like CRDTs to create novel highly-interactive multiplayer interfaces. Here’s their work on Upswelling which is a git-like take on writing and editing.
After having programmed Go for a bit professionally, my experiences in switching to Rust for the backend have been very similar to what’s described here by @adam_chal@hachyderm.io.
Mensen die dit soort haatcampagnes de wereld in slingeren moeten strafbaar gesteld worden. De minste straf voor de aanjagers van dit soort haat zou een (social) media black-holing kunnen zijn; voor de komende zoveel jaar geen vertoon in media toegestaan.
What’s interesting about this write-up by Ferrous Systems of creating a real life visual demo with embedded #Rust is that the technology looks increasingly accessible.
A nice deep dive on algorithm design to speed up bracket pair colorization—one of the nicer innovations in code editing recently—in Visual Studio Code.
A nice deep dive into the lowest levels of #Rust programming just to be able to target the web browser (!). I’d like to use #wasm as soon as I have a good reason and project to do so.
“Meta is building the future of human connection.”
After the hysteria a bunch of VCs whipped up over the weekend around the SVB collapse, questioning whether they actually do what they claim is more than justified.
A brief English overview of the dizi Alev Alev which truly was very good and focused on empowering women. I still want to make a supercut at some point of all of Ömer and Ozan’s interactions.
Since the first time I saw when I was a kid, I loved Master and Commander. I had no idea that there were 20 books behind it or I would have probably read them.
A relatively detailed and quite damning account of what went wrong with Turkey’s earthquake response.
But these subjects of the Islamic Emirate could not be kept from watching Stranger Things or Game of Thrones or Japanese anime; they had a better knowledge of Breaking Bad than I did. On Twitter—they, like so many Afghans, were avid users—shared soyjack memes and called themselves “sigma males.”They talked about feminism, “LGBTQ,”and pronouns—strange things to complain about in a country where women can’t go to school. They were becoming Westerners: culture war, America’s most successful soft-power export, was their induction. The younger members of the Taliban, online enough to follow Andrew Tate, were not immune.
Finally got around to reading Elizabeth Sandifer’s essay and if there was any doubt, this makes it clear how much of an unserious and malicious person Scott Alexander/Siskind is. Siskind’s writing deliberately pretends to be respectable to provide ideological cover to some real evil.
Let the historians wring their hands about Foucault and power; off campus, numbers make you sound like you know what you’re talking about.
An amazing read about the first solo unsupported around the world sailing event and the maintenance that goes into doing something like that.
We have housing crises in many places and it’s remarkable how pernicious this issue is given the number of problems it would fix for us to have enough affordable homes for everybody.
What you need on day one is to ratchet up expectations, energy, urgency, and intensity.
The hype train around AI now should be very familiar if you paid any attention during the previous crypto cycle. It’s the same people pushing this technology in the world in the same overblown and damaging way.
A not too bad checklist of what makes an “Exceptional Engineer”. Have you ever worked with one?
“Success in knowledge isn’t about the facts we know, but by how good we are at judging the truth of uncertain things.”
A useful distinction between “code proofreading” and “code editing” by Hillel Wayne both of which are part of a standard PR process but neither is really a good fit there.