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?
Another take on the old adage that writing the code is the easy part of software engineering. The real work is figuring out what has to be built and how. Once that is clear, the actual building can be done relatively quickly and linearly.
The low-latency user wants Bigtable’s request queues to be (almost always) empty so that the system can process each outstanding request immediately upon arrival. (Indeed, inefficient queuing is often a cause of high tail latency.) The user concerned with offline analysis is more interested in system throughput, so that user wants request queues to never be empty. To optimize for throughput, the Bigtable system should never need to idle while waiting for its next request.
I get to have a lot of conversations around compliance and this is as good a “SOC2 for tech people” guide as I could have asked for by the good people at Fly.
Something that Ed Zitron has already mentioned, internet users are being trained very rapidly to suspect everything to be a scam. In the case of honey, it’s a Paypal owned online shopping extension that lies and deceives.
I made the mistake of opening the desktop Spotify app which does not really work anymore. The UI is broken and there’s lots of irrelevant stuff going on.
Judging from this article, it will probably not be good for the acceptance of new technologies long term to build data centers in drought struck areas.
Postgres seems to reign as the database solution of choice but there are lots of new specialised databases that are worth looking at. All of these can be used in production at scale for the right application.
That’s an amazing overview of all the things that can and will go wrong in online PvP gaming. It covers the range from networking exploits to all the in-game ways that people try to grief or abuse others.
So I felt I couldn’t really bring myself to do Advent of Code this year since I have more than enough other things to do (and watch and play) and with work and the kids, it’s always pretty miserable to keep up.
Seeing if I can move from Arc to Vivaldi but there are half a dozen radical improvements in Arc that *make* the experience. It just shows how much innovation and solid thinking was packed in all of that frivolous design.
Old people’s brains have been entirely cooked by the slop feeds that Meta produces. No parent worth their salt would trust these people to protect their kids. The EU should follow suit.
Chuffed by the strength of my team that we have most of the easy decisions from these Node.js pillars in place and we are making headway on all of them to the extent that’s appropriate for us.
What China has done in industry after industry is to flatten the supply curve by subsidizing hordes of producers. This spurs innovation, increases output and crushes margins. Value is not being destroyed; it’s accruing to consumers as lower prices, higher quality and/or more innovative products and services.
Data centres shouldn’t be using water for cooling in the first place. In the summer many parts of Europe are under water strain. It’s not weird that locals would oppose having a huge data center built near them.
Nicolas from All About Berlin has done so much to make living in this administrative nightmare bearable for people. It’s a very clear example of what kind of 10-100x improvements are there to be had.
Hard work isn’t always the work that takes the most time, or the work that gets paid the most. The hardest work is the work that challenges, makes us uncomfortable, or requires change. If we actually value hard work — we have to do some of our own.
I painstakingly built a bespoke Rust web application to host the Cuppings venue data and to add Google place_ids to almost 2000 Foursquare location. That’s been done for a while now but now we have the announcement of Foursquare open sourcing their location dataset.
Cool to read this long view from the inside by Carlton Gibson of what has made Django work (and not work) for the past 20 years. Django has been a stellar achievement that’s been a cornerstone of my career and I look forward to see the project reach new heights.
Reading these database migration stories is usually interesting, but what I found especially noteworthy here is that all of the Django features they used to make it easy for themselves have been in there for more than a decade.
An interesting article to read about how the city botched renaming the Manteuffelstraße to Audrey-Lord-Straße. I cycle past this street every day and I don’t think it’s a bad change. Unfortunately, they’ve done it in such a bad way that it’ll poison every person who hears about it against the very concept of government:
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.
I don’t really know where to find a Honeycrisp apple locally, but since moving to Germany I have been eating tons of amazing juicy, sweet, crisp apples. It turns out that this is deliberate and these are not the apples of my childhood.
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).
Twitter’s ending is fine and can be the ending of more things as well as the beginning of other things. Delete all your stuff on that awful place and simply let go.