Bookmarks
- Panic! at the Tech Job Market
“I have the two qualities you require to see absolute truth: I am brilliant and unloved.” ready for another too-long article about personal failure while blaming the world for our faults? let’s see where we end up with 7,000 9,000 10,000 11,500 words this time this post is sponsored by me trying to not get evicted. funding appreciated: TOC: how are you doing, fellow unemployeds? enjoying riding your bikes midday past the three-piece suits? so, uh, what’s going on? Basically, all the “free money...
- A Git story: Not so fun this time | Brachiosoft Blog
Linus Torvalds once wrote in a 1998 was a big year for Linux. Major companies like Sun, IBM, and Oracle started getting involved with Linux. That spring, Linus’s second daughter was born. It had been almost a year since his family moved from Finland to California, settling into their new life. Even though Linux hadn’t brought Linus much financial gain yet, he was doing well in both his career and family life. On the other hand, the Linux kernel developer community was growing, and the existing ...
- Why doesn’t advice work?
In ancient India, there was a long-running feud between the Duryodhana refused to listen and launched his war. There were 4 million warriors at the start. After 18 days, all but 11 were dead. It’s unclear if Duryodhana knew Krishna was a god. Duryodhana may have been an atheist, despite having seen Krishna in his extremely multi-armed/multi-headed So why didn’t Duryodhana listen? It seems like this happens a lot. Someone has a problem, they ask you for advice, and you give it to them. Your adv...
- Effective altruism is stumbling. Can "moral ambition" replace it?
In 1785, a 25-year-old student at Cambridge University named Thomas Clarkson participated in a Latin essay competition about the immorality of slavery. Raised in a sheltered, upper-class environment, Clarkson knew little of the practice at the foundation of the British Empire’s wealth and power. But the more he read about the inhumanity African slaves endured both during and after their passage to the Americas, the more it affected him. Channeling his outrage into his writing, Clarkson ended up ...
- The manager’s unbearable lack of endorphins
I’ve been doing a lot of swimming over the past few weeks and I’ve regularly been hitting some new personal milestones over the past year. Each milestone brings with in a huge high, an endorphin rush, a personal satisfaction and, honestly, I walk around for the day feeling like It’s so viscerally satisfying to see myself making progress, sometimes huge leaps in performance, and feeling just so… I think we all need to feel that satisfaction, that competence at a skill, and those moments of leve...
- AI Doesn’t Kill Jobs? Tell That to Freelancers
349 Jennifer Kelly, a freelance copywriter in the picturesque New England town of Walpole, N.H., feels bad for any young people who might try to follow in her footsteps. Not long after OpenAI’s ChatGPT made its debut, financial advisers who had depended on her 30 years of experience writing about wealth management stopped calling. New clients failed to replace them. Her income dried up almost completely. When she asked, the clients she lost insisted they weren’t using artificial intelligence. Bu...
- Laziness is the source of Innovation and Creativity
A few days ago, I posted the following on Twitter. Lazy people innovate. The one who invented multiplication did not want to add numbers all life. I truly believe that this is true. The answer boils down to the fact that by doing all of that, we commit less mistakes and hence we have a more bug free code. Our job as programmers is not to churn out huge chunks of code everyday. Our job is to think innovative ways to solve a problem. Code is not the main product we are looking for. Code is not wha...
- How to create software quality.
I’ve been reading Steven Sinofsky’s If I wrote that in an internal memo, I imagine the engineering team would mutiny, but software quality is certainly an interesting topic where I continue to refine my thinking. There are so many software quality playbooks out there, and I increasingly believe that all these playbooks work For example, pretty much every startup has someone on an infrastructure team who believes that all quality problems can be solved with a sufficiently nuanced automated rol...
- Apple announced RCS with a whimper when it should have been a bang
Apple will finally adopt RCS in iOS 18, effectively ending a yearslong fight for feature parity between iMessage and Android. But the announcement wasn’t a celebration — you could’ve blinked and missed it. Instead of showing how RCS will make things better, Apple softly announced support for the standard and focused on all the great features coming to iMessage users — not RCS ones. Apple didn’t go over how RCS adoption will finally let iPhone and Android users send each other high-resolution pic...
- Don’t fix it just because it’s technical debt.
Many kinds of problems get classified as technical debt. Most generally it’s problems where: Engineers hate waste. Waste makes us want to barf. So it’s obvious to us that technical debt must be faced head-on and At least #1 is internally consistent. #2 is scatter-brained. Why should we only spend part of our time doing work that maximizes value, and the rest of our time doing other, less optimal work? A realistic manager would say, “If you have a proposed improvement that’ll reduce wasted effor...
- Promises From The Ground Up
Introduction There are a lot of speed bumps and potholes on the road to JavaScript proficiency. One of the biggest and most daunting is In order to understand Promises, we need a surprisingly deep understanding of how JavaScript works and what its limitations are. Without that context, Promises won’t really make much sense. It can be frustrating because the Promises API is So, in this tutorial, we’re going to learn about Promises, but we’ll start at the beginning. I’ll share all of the critica...
- A myopia epidemic is sweeping the globe. Here’s how to stop it
The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t just reshape how children learn and see the world. It transformed the shape of their eyeballs. As real-life classrooms and playgrounds gave way to virtual meetings and digital devices, the time that children spent focusing on screens and other nearby objects surged — and the Study after study, in regions ranging from Europe to Asia, documented this change. One analysis from Hong Kong even reported a near doubling in the incidence of pathologically stretched eyeballs...