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Simon Willison is one of the best engineering communicators out there and this podcast with him about LLMs and AI is one of the most insightful episodes I've heard on the topic.

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jan/17/oxide-and-friends/

I don't really buy this idea that Japan's urban environment has been the key factor to create its immense specialization in crafts. Compare it to Berlin where rents have been incredibly cheap and zoning mixed but without the necessary human capital the only thing those factors generated were cheap bars.

A good but not definitive guide of how to think about where to apply yourself in your career and how to be useful.

From this massive list of science-fiction books by Noah Smith I've read and liked half or so which means that I probably should read the other half.

what? none of ian m banks "culture" novels? the archetypal description of post-scarcity future, replete with super-human ai?

It's much healthier for Germany if digital issues have an answer that goes beyond "Let's see what the CCC has to say!" The CCC is a shady organization which is good at taking things apart but does not have that much constructive to offer.

A broader social discussion would reveal that security and privacy are not the only two dimensions on which digital solutions can or should be measured.

Here's a teardown of the way I have my Daily Note template setup in Obsidian to automatically pull together an information load-out I can work in.

Late to the party but I very much love this interview with Karri Saarinen, the co-founder of Linear. Their way of working, "The Linear Method", will be waved away by companies ("we can't do that because…") but with leadership with the right mentality and experience I don't think it's that far off at all. Ask your leadership how you can work like this.

Also I already know I'm going to use the term "side quest" a lot.

We don't use Linear but we recently moved all our stuff from Jira to Github Projects which—even though it is mostly abandoned—is Linear-enough.

Most importantly, it is right on top of our codebase which is where I believe all engineering work should happen anyway.

#Youtube

This article is a wild premise, a wild ride and a wild conclusion (also I'm increasingly warming to the idea of htmx).

"Every cloud-pilled, react-vue-braindead, click-to-deploy developer actually thinks web views require 7 minutes to “compile for production,” then when live require 5-15 second “skeleton loaders” on entry is just a fact of life nobody can question or ever improve on modern 5 GHz machines with 5 Gbps network connections. Developers, at the median, have been getting less capable and more focused on made up silo/cult/trendy dead-end fads for 10 years and the entire world suffers daily."

Dropbox, a famously private file storage service, has shared files from people with OpenAI. I'd normally say this was a dumb move, but this is far far beyond just dumb.

If you've used any of Dropbox's AI tools, some of your documents and files may have been shared with OpenAI.

A strong analysis of the AI concept by Emily Bender who proposes we just call it “automation” instead. Which is fair because if you use these systems, it becomes incredibly obvious how they work and what their limitations are.

#Youtube

Notion has formulas now (!) and here's a formula to calculate a Cost of Delay column based on two other columns: if(Value=="Killer" && Urgency=="ASAP", "1 Very High", if(Value=="Killer" && Urgency=="Soon" || Value=="Bonus" && Urgency == "ASAP", "2 High", if(Value=="Killer"&&Urgency=="Whenever"||Value=="Bonus"&&Urgency=="Soon"||Value=="Meh"&&Urgency=="ASAP", "3 Medium", if(Value=="Bonus"&&Urgency=="Whenever"||Value=="Meh"&&Urgency=="Soon", "4 Low", "5 Very Low"))))

Listening to the TF 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.

https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/e/waltz-with-the-sims/ (minute 23 and on)

"Squashing destroys this information. I'll take a merge with 1000 +50/-50 commits over 1 squash every. single. day."

I've been hammering on this fact as well that it's silly to use git and then throw away so much information that you could use later. But then again most people don't know git bisect exists.

Merge vs. Rebase vs. Squash. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

There was this bit of Ones and Tooze that I wanted to clip that's become extra relevant given the current German debt crisis.

Adam Tooze correctly predicted that having Christian Lindner as the finance minister would not be a good idea and wrote a big piece about it in FT. The response from the German economic establishment was very harsh.

He recounts it in this clip and episode: https://alper.nl/dingen/2023/11/fragment-ones-and-tooze-live-from-berlin-lindner/

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 mark) talks about Zuckerberg's fascination with August and how leadership then and now has not changed that much.

This week David asks Mary Beard what the Roman Empire can tell us about the nature of unaccountable power, then and now. How did Roman emper

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.

It turns out that Deming was way ahead of me there, he says: "Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership."

Leadership is always the key.

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.

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