oofnik

41,481. Nice. That was a fun time waster.

For fellow fans of Crawford's writing, he publishes on Substack at mcrawford.substack.com.

I had a similar experience just today when trying to debug a script that serves as a connector between AWS Athena and our internal log querying platform. I got fed up with trying to understand a bunch of arcane logic and asked ChatGPT to write me a new one.

After a couple of back-and-forth rounds of copying and pasting error messages and sample data, I got the ChatGPT script working as a drop-in replacement. The new script is more readable, the logic is simpler, it took me less time to complete than either debugging the old script or writing a new one from scratch, and it was an overall more enjoyable experience.

There is little doubt in my mind that in the not so distant future we will gawk at the thought that humans used to write production code by hand. Sure, the artisans and the enthusiasts among us will still be around to keep the flame, but day coding will be a mostly automated endeavor.

If you don’t work somewhere that rewards curiosity, find somewhere else to work.

I wish everyone had this privilege.

This was delightful. Thank you for the reminder that a simple hobby driven by curiosity can be the source of so much joy.

Inside, a 47-year-old man struggled to mix ashy heroin with fragments of crystal crack, crushing both into a souped-up speedball. Observed by a nurse, he took the needle and jabbed it into a vein in his neck. “The veins on his hands have all dried up,” the nurse said matter-of-factly.

I don't really understand how anybody sensible can read a sentence like that and think to themselves, "yes, this is fine."

If individual bodily autonomy is the god you have chosen to worship above all other paths painstakingly eked out over the ages through much trial and error toward human flourishing, I guess it makes sense, but for those of us who ascribe to more, dare I say, traditional ideas about what constitutes good human life, the thinking that underlies the kinds of policies which lead to the outcomes detailed in this article seem utterly abhorrent.

It's astonishing how much human misery and suffering some people are willing to put up with and justify when wearing ideological blinders.

How we perceive the world and how we act in it are intertwined in ways we are only beginning to understand, upending centuries of philosophical assumptions about human cognition.

Matt Crawford discusses this theme at length in "The World Beyond your Head" which I highly recommend:

This brings up another uncanny fact about motorcycle steering: the bike goes wherever your gaze is focused. Most important, if your eyes lock on some hazard in the road, you will surely hit it. This is not a superstitious motorcyclist’s version of Murphy’s Law; it is a reliable fact, and it reveals something deep about the “intentionality” of our prereflective sensorimotor negotiation of the world. Inhabiting the kind of bodies that we do, our gaze and our locomotion are connected in ways that work for us, and we don’t have to think about it. But this accomplished integration becomes a liability when riding a motorcycle, and must be deliberately short-circuited. You have to learn to unlock your eyes as quickly as possible from every hazard, and instead look where you want to go.

What you have to understand about the contemporary media industry is that their primary business objective is to sell advertisements. Your attention is the product now; the more of it they can sell to advertisers, the more profitable the business becomes. It's much easier to present positive quarterly earnings reports by selling eyeballs and clicks than it is selling pretty much anything else. In the before times, when media companies were primarily in the business of selling content for a monthly or yearly subscription fee, this was much less of an issue.

You can't block access to their most profitable raw material and expect them to just sit and take it.

Closed ecosystem? Sealed environment? Prison? What do you suggest to use instead? The last term would seem apt given the term "jailbreaking"

I find it really interesting that until ten minutes ago, historically speaking, there was an implicit assumption that there exists a moral dimension to drug and alcohol consumption. I mean, referring to such substances as "stupifiers" really drives the point home - Tolstoy says these are things you consume when you wish to act in a way you know is morally questionable, or after the act to dull your conscience.

The overwhelming shift in the social sciences from the political to the personal, and the related shift from the moral to the psychological over the course of the twentieth century, has led us to the point where we are no longer able to even conjure up language necessary to condemn excessive drug and alcohol consumption in terms of moral failure without sounding like a religious lunatic.

It makes one wonder what Tolstoy would have to say about harm reduction.

I bought a copy.

Thanks, Jeff, for being interminably helpful.

Many command-line CSV parsing tools mentioned here, adding my choice to the list:

http://harelba.github.io/q/

Markdown is a markup language. Google Docs is a WYSIWYG document editor. These are two fundamentally different approaches to the creation of written content.

This question is kind of like asking why you can't edit Illustrator projects in Photoshop.

We create systems designed to drain the jobs of bureaucrats, especially low-level bureaucrats, of any opportunity to exercise judgment. When things go wrong, we find new ways to constrain, and we make the hierarchy more and more rigid.

This is the crux of the article, and it is an excellent point.

I believe that there is a fundamental difference between a being a rule-follower and being a judgment-exerciser. Situational awareness can provide clues as to what mode of operation is appropriate. However, choosing a mode of operation is itself an exercise in judgment.

If you design a rule-based system, and hire people based exclusively on their ability to follow and enforce rules, you should not be surprised when that system selects for the kind of people who copy job postings verbatim into their resumes and proclaims them to be "most qualified".

Here's the thing about buzzwords - they are a useful abstraction for grouping together a set of concepts for non-tech people to make decisions with tech impact.

The ideas presented here are a good summary of the day-to-day issues I experience as a "DevOps engineer." I wish I had the pull to instigate a shift in mindset towards a more platform-oriented mode of work, but unfortunately for me, that is not the case. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but forwarding articles and presentations like this to senior directors can be a way to influence the direction of their thinking to align more with what you believe to be in the best interest of the organization.

I'm happy to see someone really trying to color outside the lines with deployment tooling. I think we've fallen into a number of paradigms for system operations that we know are kind of bad, but we tell ourselves about how much more awful it used to be to numb the pain. That sort of attitude is the real killer of innovation.

I say bring it on; more variance and more disruption in this space as people try new approaches might be what we need to get us out of the rut we've been stuck in for too long. No idea if it will work, but good luck to Adam and his team.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=5lPa2U239C4

I recommend reading "Liberal Parents, Radical Children" by Midge Decter.

https://www.abebooks.com/9780698106758/Liberal-parents-radic...

DevOps was supposed to be about accelerating the software development lifecycle. In my current role as a "DevOps Engineer", a significant portion of my time is spent being a roadblock. This is mostly due to misaligned incentives and incompetent management. It's debilitating for both the devs and myself.

If platform engineering can fix it, fine, but I'm not holding my breath.

Is everyone in charge of hiring at major tech companies just in a big whatsapp group exchanging dirt on employees they didn't like?

Yes.

Source: family member who works in HR

Wow, it's rare to have American hubris summed up in one article so succinctly. The total absence of self-awareness almost convinced me that this was satire.

I think the author tried to pack a little too much into this article, but it's an interesting topic and his observations ring true.

As far as I'm concerned, anyone who successfully climbed the social hierarchy from dysfunctional foster childhood to Ivy league deserves every ounce prestige he earned.

What does race have to do with any of this?

We can use AI to help us design and build a functional fusion plant, which we can then use to power more datacenters running ever bigger LLMs to help us design more efficient datacenters to run bigger LLMs to help us build ... yeah this is going to be one hell of a century.

SWEs who are able to wring better performance out of less hardware resources are going to become more valuable in the future.

As much as I'd like for this prediction to come true, I think it's wishful thinking. Compute capacity continues to increase exponentially while (human) cognitive resources, for all practical purposes, do not, which means less efficient code will continue to be the more economically viable option as far as I can tell.

Even with AI, where we're essentially trading compute (used for running code) for extended cognitive resources (used for writing code), what incentive exists to channel those resources into writing faster code rather than writing the same code faster?

Child sacrifice hooks into some very deep and dark aspects of human psychology that we have yet to unpack. There is a reason that this practice crops up in various civilizations seemingly independently, and it is not a pretty one - at least not by contemporary moral sensibilities.

It is impossible to understand the biblical narrative of the binding of Isaac, for example, without addressing the context in which such a narrative was popularized and eventually codified into a sacred text.

One of my most memorable courses in undergraduate was taught by a spritely lecturer who must've been in his 80s. He'd make a statement or proposition, write it on the board, then quickly turn around, point at a student somewhere in the classroom with an open palm, and shout, "do you believe this?"

It was partly theatrical, but it seemed genuine. It was very engaging and it really prodded me to consider whether what he was telling us was true. It piqued my curiosity and motivated me to do my homework to watch someone so filled with energy trying to get a bunch of undergrads excited about multivariate calculus, especially at his age.

I think I speak for many here when I say that I'm more motivated to learn stuff when I can clearly articulate what benefit I will derive from having mastered the material. "Because it's going to be on the exam" never cut it for me. Unfortunately, I found that I was in a tiny minority of intellectually engaged students for the majority of my undergraduate years; the rest of my peers were much more interested in all-night cramming for the exam followed by a weekend of binge-drinking.

I don't know how well the approach in this essay would work for the general population, but it certainly sounds much more interesting to people who actually find studying mathematics enjoyable.

At the beginning of my career when I was out to prove myself, I took my job so seriously that my sense of personal self-worth was intricately tied up with the quality of my work. After a particularly disappointing experience that knocked me off my horse for a while, I concluded that putting some distance between my career and the subjective experience of my place in the world was essential to my mental health.

I try to be mindful that the relationship between my work and my person / identity is one of many such relationships in life, and maybe even not the most important one. I think that mindset makes it easier to accept criticism or even to reject it when I think it is irrelevant, misguided, or malicious, as unfortunately workplace criticism can sometimes be.

If your work is being fairly criticized, it's an opportunity to learn and grow. Take it as a compliment that someone actually cared enough about your professional development to offer advice on how to be better. It means they already think that you're good and worthy of improvement. On the other hand, be willing to accept the possibility that that criticism is not actually constructive but intended specifically to make you feel guilty or ashamed. Unfortunately, some people are just petty, small-minded, and manipulative, and will do anything to make you feel small in order for them to feel big.

Thank you for writing and sharing this.

I think the world is fundamentally divided between people who want to be heard, and people who want to be right.

With all due respect to the editors of n+1, people who do well in media are almost always, with very few exceptions, of the former category.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man-Made_River 1,600 km vs. 114 km. And elsewhere in North Africa, no less.

Come on, Egypt, do better.