jesselawson

Hi team--and hello Fred! You and I had some great conversations about Slack's direction--as well as its missed opportunities--back when we worked there together. I was leading developer education at the time, and frustrated with the decisions that were coming down that caused us to pivot away from what we agreed on was the "true core experience" of a collaborative messaging system: connecting users with the knowledge they need without having to parse through other knowledge that may be important in different contexts.

I'm genuinely excited that you're in this space now, too, as I myself have had my nose to the grindstone building out what the collaboration app for distributed teams that I've always wanted. We need options/competition in this space; just this year alone, I've had a little over a a dozen conversations with interested folks in teams across the United States working in industries from agricultural sensors manufacturing to game studios for hire, and the same pain points that you and I were reasoning about back at Slack are the same pain points that users still unwillingly tolerate.

See you around--and good luck out there!

PS. As an English major I'd be remiss to not share that I love the name emdash. :D

Perhaps others may make inferences about what a board appointment to a company with growing influence in government security matters means based on the appointee’s history in government security leadership.

I’m not sure I understand the analogy. To me there’s a difference between a former intelligence general being courted by a private company that sells services for rapidly and semi-autonomously generating content that bad actors have used and will likely continue to use for influencing geopolitical public sentiment, and a pharmaceutical company that does not sell similar technology.

Similar experience here, too. Virtually every time I have worked with, trained, or reported to someone with a CS degree from Stanford or Harvard, they have approached their work with a narrow mind and little empathy for others. This has been true in the military, public sector, and the private sector. I don’t know what it is about these places.

I read something a while back that did color my understanding of folks somewhat, and that was that there are a lot of people who come into the technology field for the money, not necessarily because of their lifelong interest in tinkering with computers. That to me is nuts, but I guess it’s to be expected. Maybe the sample size of my experience with these folks is overrepresented with people who are in it for the money and not curiosity and creativity. I don’t know.

Apple has consistently made laptops and development environments that creative types enjoy and admire. It’s too mad our economic system is setup to only care about infinite growth and monopolization at Apple’s size. It’s too bad just “being a great maker of great tools for great people” isn’t possible when you’re publicly traded.

All good and great but I think it’s a bit misleading. The participants were asked to do LeetCode—which limits this study to the suggested effects of cannabis on arbitrary and abstract programming tasks.

I got to the end of your post and realized I’d love to hear more about your thoughts around this. Also you must be proud of building something with so little bugs! Thats quite a feat.

Additionally, some problems have gone on for so long without any attention to solving them that they’ve created whole new problems—and then new problems, and then new problems… at jobs where you discover over time that management has kicked a lot of problems down the road, it can take a lot of words to walk people through the connection between a pattern of behavior (or a pattern of avoidance) and a myriad of seemingly unrelated issues faced by many.

Like remote work vs physically proximate work in software engineering, I’m hopeful that people will remember the value of human cognition so much so that it’s considered, like it is today for some people in some cases, a competitive advantage.

Sam, this is such a wonderful resource that you've put out into the world. Thank you for the time and care you've put into each paragraph and interactive component. You've not only given me a lot to think about in terms of my basic assumptions about memory, but also about how to write and teach better online. I'm really excited to start following you!

Honestly the best comment I've read on here in a long time. Cheers.

I'm sorry about all the negativity in the comments. What I see is something that was handcrafted with the careful touch of a craftsperson that represents your individual vision for a specific digital experience. I can tell you put a lot of time into making this. Thank you for sharing this!

I appreciate how optimistic people are about interesting tools like this. I personally am concerned about production use of models in any form that do not have strict oversight rules and accountability of training data -- especially in digital social spaces.

It feels like we need international, strict, transparent controls over the data used to train ML models and the algorithms through which content, recommendations, and inferences are provided to the general public, otherwise what is bound to happen is commercial interests (which a U.S. president has already admitted is more important than peace[1]) will create massive amounts of pseudo-signal in digital spaces, on the one hand capitalizing on psychological effects of exposure and social proof to sell products, and on the other hand, carrying out and exacerbating the outcomes of political disinformation campaigns.

But strict controls and transparency over training data wont be enough, since the general public is unlikely to ever have the requisite time and energy to inspect the data and recognize when models have been trained for lawful evil purposes and then petition their government for a redress of these grievances in a way that will lead to positive legislative action for healthy digital communities. (I think this task will be relegated to the fringes of society just like it is now, with journalists from big corporate outlets really only interested in these topics as a means of capitalizing on controversy.)

So what do we do? How do we prevent information pollution in digital spaces when commercial interests and state actors have both the means and motive to carry out widespread campaigns of social influence? Would we need to reconsider how we as people, corporations, and governments treat digital spaces -- perhaps considering them as "the means of connectedness" to drive home the distinction between human digital connectedness as a tool for interpersonal communication versus a tool for mass influence? (Is that even possible under our current socioeconomic systems?)

I've always wondered what would be different if we treated online public spaces like national parks. What would we allow and not allow? What could people count on -- and what could they trust (and why) about existing in that space and sharing information with each other?

As these models mature and grow in utility, I'm both excited and hesitant about what is possible -- because I know good people with great imaginations and I also know really bad people with great imaginations.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC0VTbGqioM

PLT and implementing languages is something that's always fascinated me, so I enjoy hearing everyone's experiences in this domain. What makes you call it a "dark unhappy path"?

Hello! In a previous thread[0], I had shared my online book "Getting Started with Rust by building a Tiny Markdown Compiler." Many folks provided great feedback, and I'm thankful for all the positive energy I've received from both writing and sharing this.

Since then I've completed many updates to this resource, including incorporating many suggestions[1], breaking out the content into more palpable chunks, and publishing it as a Github pages site[2].

I hope this introductory experience with the Rust programming language is fun and engaging, and I'm excited to see where people go from here.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23206660

[1] https://github.com/jesselawson/getting-started-with-rust/iss...

[2] https://jesselawson.github.io/getting-started-with-rust

My favorite front-end framework is [VanillaJs](http://vanilla-js.com/).

I write science fiction and also work in technology. My days are spent glued to a screen so much that it's hard to want to write on my computer when I have time to write. So I do everything longhand, then wait for long weekends to translate things from my notebook into a word processor. I wish I could do my drafts on my computer; I used to be able to work all day and night in front of a screen, but lately I've been realizing that I'm a lot less anxious overall when I (try to) stop interacting with computers after a certain time.

One thing I've been thinking about is having a computer hooked up to a rudimentary word processor app on my kindle. The kindle's display doesn't bother me after I'm done working on screens. It feels different enough that it doesn't interrupt my reading, so I've posited that I would be okay writing on one.

I'm excited to see technology like this come out, and I'm excited to see how this little industry grows.

Maybe not empires per se, but many fiction publications are using Patreon as a revenue-generating tool.

Hi Dan, I'm Jesse. I work in the public sector and have seen the pains of trying to get regular folk to learn even basic SOQL for Salesforce, let alone the struggles of folks trying to change the way they think to write a SQL query.

I believe there's a huge market for bridging the power of a structured query language with non-"techy" folks, much like how we see no-code solutions popular among folks who would have (self-admittedly) never been able to figure out how to wire up two RESTful APIs.

My approach to solving this in the past was to create a custom syntax with a transpiler that took a type of English language grammar and converted it into workable SQL. Where I branched from your intention was actually for my book on data science in higher education -- I wanted to have a language where a researcher could say something like this:

"Who is more likely to drop: a student with circumstance_a or a student with circumstance_b?"

That's a rough approximation, but I think you can see what I am talking about.

Are you looking at the text-to-speech space for people to babble at their computers? Or are you looking for some kind of GUI system where people can plug things together? Or are you looking for a grammar (like my approach)? Would love to chat.

Thank you!

The way I describe it to people is like this: some folks like to feel a nicely sanded handle, and other folks like to sand down a handle so that it feels nicely sanded.

In your last sentence you mentioned that it's unheard of to go from software to anything you'd be interested in.

What are you interested in?

Hey I know you're feeling like giving up, but you have to realize that you've only taken the first step--and the good news is, it's a step that only 10% of people ever make! So congratulations! You published your first novel! Only 10% of people ever finish "that novel" they have in their head that they feel the urge to write. I'm proud of you!

Now for the next part, which no one like's to hear: the easy part is over. Yep, you heard that right: getting your first work finished and out there was relatively easy compared to the mountain you have set yourself on to climb. Yes, only 10% of people dare climb that mountain, and here you are--among the 10%. Now, as you look forward, I can tell you that at every major step, every major obstacle, and every major setback, only 10% of people keep going.

You might think there's a secret to this writing thing, but there isn't. Just like when we're hiking up a mountain, the only thing that matters is putting one foot in front of the other. That's the only way you climb. So you HAVE to get back in there (mentally) and keep going!

You just started on an amazingly difficult and frustrating and beautiful journey in life. You made it to where only 10% of people get to--and now you want to stop the journey?

My friend, your journey has only just begun.

Calbright College | Oakland, CA | REMOTE (Must live in California) | Full-Time | Technical Solutions Engineer | https://calbright.org/about/careers

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^^ Most underrated comment here lol

California's FTB charges $800 minimum annually regardless of whether you made a profit or not.

Thank you for saying this. It's always so strange to me that there are people obsessed with prolonging the inevitable, as if immortality itself could be an end-state.

Randy I think that's a great take. I can tell you put a lot into it, Randy. That's great. Books are great resource for learning--I agree, Randy!

I love this state but man, it is so hard to start a company when you're poor. The FTB alone will gut you, and god forbid you're just a tiny Etsy shop trying to grow. You really can't afford to try to make more money on the side when you're poor unless it's slaving away in the gig economy.

I wish there was a threshold of ARR that you can stay under and not have to pay the FTB fees. That would really help tiny businesses.

This should probably be the banner message when you arrive on this site. Well said.