Like sharks getting the scent of reorganization blood, upper management wasted no time in restructuring the Red team into 4 Captains, led by 2 Managers, reporting to 1 Senior Director with a dotted line to the rower. Besides that, in … Read more
Fear of AI disruption spreads in concentric circles. Outright frenzy inside the labs becomes intense distress in San Francisco becomes palpable anxiety on the East Coast — and once the sentiment has crossed an ocean, there’s only mild discomfort left … Read more
Just a note of warning from personal experience. Companies don’t really need non-competes anymore. Some companies take an extremely broad interpretation of IP confidentiality, where they consider doing any work in the industry during your lifetime an inevitable confidentiality violation. … Read more
Sponsor: Do you build complex software systems? See how NServiceBus makes it easier to design, build, and manage software systems that use message queues to achieve loose coupling. Get started for free. Event-driven architecture has patterns and common practices that are solutions for various problems. The issue arises when you apply … Read more
Beware of the Turing Tar-Pit …in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy. What is the Turing tar-pit? It’s the place where a program has become so powerful, so general, that the effort to configure it … Read more
I just encountered a fun little bug that I thought is worth sharing. TL;DR: the base64 util breaks lines after a certain number of columns. Use a flag to specify “don’t break”. Here’s the commit that fixes the issue: It … Read more
In 2014, Scott Alexander penned a post that has been widely-cited ever since. He described something everyone can agree is a problem: placing too much trust in singular studies instead of the results of literatures. In turn, he emphasized the … Read more
1-6-2023 Some months ago, I created a new social network. Let’s call it “Xnet”. When the code grew to a little over 2000 lines, I did not put it on GitHub. Instead, I put Xnet live on the Internet and … Read more
AI research is poor. Many of their claims will be proven wrong. AI software vendors have financial incentive to exaggerate the capabilities of their tools and make them hard to disprove. This undermines attempts at scientific rigour. Many of AI’s … Read more
Blurb is a funny sounding word. It’s phonetically unappealing, beginning and ending with unattractive voiced bilabial stops, and its definition—an advertisement or announcement, especially a laudatory one—carries some of the same meaning as another unattractive word, blubber, which evokes excess … Read more