Just like I also wrote more than a year ago, there’s a lot to be gained from using jj as the version control harness for your LLM. It removes a lot of the cruft of git and simplifies concepts and flows.
Man denkt oft: ‘Alles was auf Deutsch geschrieben wird ist zwangsläufig öde.’ Nur dann gibt es Leute wie Christoph die das widerlegen, wie hier zum Beispiel:
Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.
I read this paper right after I read the book by Piketty thinking that there would be some interesting economic debate. Unfortunately I was proved wrong and this seems to be exemplary of the stagnation of the economic field.
He is a Marxist who understands the importance of money and markets; without Marx, you cannot understand the movement of history, but without money, you can’t do anything about it.
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.
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.
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.
In modern justice and on the part of those who dispense it there is a shame in punishing, which does not always preclude zeal. This sense of shame is constantly growing: the psychologists and the minor civil servants of moral orthopaedics proliferate on the wound it leaves.
We’ll say nothing when we should speak up. We’ll quarrel when we should inquire. We’ll remain reticent when we should be resolved. We’ll be closed-minded and critical when we should be open-minded and curious.
Ribbonfarm retiring is another such ending in a time rife with them. I can’t overstate how influential it has been on my (our) thinking and practice. Tremendously impressive to think all of that was thought up by one person (who I still haven’t met).
I’ve been waiting for an updated edition of “Designing Data-Intensive Applications” and now I see that Kleppmann is working on it. Reading the first edition has given me such an outsized advantage when architecting and building systems.
Wer täglich, manchmal mehrmals die Stunde, die Verdammten belächelt, ist wohl zu Recht in der Hölle. Twitter, so mussten wir uns eingestehen, war der Ort, den wir bewohnten, weil wir sehr schlechte Menschen waren.
Of course it takes a Dutch guy, an outsider, to blow the lid off Germany’s Nazi Bilionaires. David de Jong is doing great work and the German establishment tries to bury that as much as possible (because they know which side their bread is buttered on).
A third truth is that we have a generation in crisis and in desperate need of the best of what science and evidence-based solutions can offer. Unfortunately, our time is being spent telling stories that are unsupported by research and that do little to support young people who need, and deserve, more.
Herbert believed that progress was an illusion because he was an ideologically motivated reactionary who hated the New Deal, the welfare state, the Civil Rights Movement, and any political leader who promised to help the oppressed.
“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
Listening to the Trash Future 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.
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 18:48) talks about Zuckerberg’s fascination with August and how leadership then and now has not changed that much.
I can stop thinking about the Roman Empire, but this piece that draws an analogy between the Fall of the Romans and the End of Twitter is long overdue to be shared and still really good.
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.
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.
You need to use your time differently. You need to rise above the work. You need to figure out how to make yourself less busy with your current workload to make room to do higher-value work. No one will do this for you.
Good programmers will naturally start to abstract and develop a model that can do more work. But when this happens only in a technical setting, without collaboration with domain experts, the concepts are naive. That shallowness of knowledge produces software that does a basic job but lacks a deep connection to the domain expert’s way of thinking.
In dealing with the poverty that still plagued so much of the Indian populace, the Indian government had had to create electricity as fast as they could, and also, since they existed in a world run by the market, as cheaply as they could. Otherwise outside investors would not invest, because the rate of return would not be high enough. So they had burned coal, yes. Like everyone else had up until just a few years before. Now India was being told not to burn coal, when everyone else had finished burning enough of it to build up the capital to afford to shift to cleaner sources of power. India had been told to get better without any financial help to do so whatsoever. Told to tighten the belt and embrace austerity, and be the working class for the bourgeoisie of the developed world, and suffer in silence until better times came— but the better times could never come, that plan was shot. The deck had been stacked, the game was over. And now twenty million people were dead.
