bambataa

It occurs to me that I've never seen a startup try to tackle runbooks. There must be lots of interesting things you could do here.

Common problems:

- really disorganised

- information frequently gets out of date

- missing relevant information

I wonder if some kind of literate programming approach might help?

> Do not pitch your stuff, let him speak. Find out his infrastructure, software and such, and the contract renewal times. Ask how frequently they replace servers, ask them if they are happy with the hypervisor ware etc.

Do heads of IT really give all this information out to a rando on the phone?

Oh thanks, I didn’t realise things had migrated. It’s been years since I was on the forum but I remember it being very helpful and pretty active so I’m glad it’s still going in another form.

I recommend the content and especially the forums on http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/index.html. Different languages have different best resources.

Assimil are normally a good bet in my experience.

I do the same and agree, though I’m trying to push myself to be a little more sophisticated. The beauty of doing it that way is that it takes no thought.

I want to select from here to just after that letter P. With hjkl and visual mode I’m already halfway there. Whenever I try something clever I always find myself thinking “is that the end of a block? Or maybe I should cut directly to P but oh there’s another one on the line above so it’s the second, need to amend” etc etc etc.

> Japan had a "Fifth Generation" project, trying to do AI with Prolog. All that stuff hit the upper limit of what you can do with that technology, and it wasn't a very high upper limit.

What was the limiting factor of the expert system approach? Something like the size of the search space or that the number of rules you’d have to write was just infeasibly large?

I had the exact same reaction.

I did a bit of reading about Datalog and I get that it’s useful in things like static analysis where you get the fixed point analysis for free, but apart from that I am not really sure why I’d use it.

I wonder about this too.

The UK has lower salaries than west coast US and a large pool of suitable workers.

Big tech has a presence but why haven’t they moved their main operations to the UK?

Are we conflating “cool” with “high status”?

I really don’t think they’re the same thing, even for a type-A MBA grad. They know that living in a warehouse and making art is cool, they’d just rather make money and have a socially-acceptable profession.

Yes, that complaint just tells me they’d probably enjoy the book! I especially liked the section on Discordianism.

What I Learned This Week had an interesting paper a few months ago about this. It seems inevitable that freezing other countries’ assets will prompt them to create alternatives.

At one point I had the idea to tag each section or paragraph with a topic ID and list the topic IDs directly referenced. Then you could build a graph with the referenced topics as edges. After refactoring it into a DAG, you could do a topological sort to get a linear sequence of topics And chop it into chapters.

I took that as an indication I was procrastinating, but I think it would be a fun way to structure a book!

The Leanpub link provides a DRM PDF.

Email me if it’s unaffordable for you.

Author here! Thank you to whoever posted this. My 2023 resolution was to market it better so this is a great help :).

The overall intent was to create a single, fairly concise volume sketching out the main areas of computer science so that developers from non-traditional backgrounds (boot camps etc) have at least some kind of map of the territory.

When I started working as a dev I really struggled with the idea that there were so many things that I should know about but I wasn’t even aware of until they blew up in my face in some way.

agomez314’s comment is very valid — my framing was “CS stuff that you will encounter as a developer”.

Happy to answer any questions.

I’ve been taking it too. How quickly did you start seeing that effect? I guess I have felt better but also coincides with taking time off at the end of the year etc.

Actually the author has another post about dealing with negative self-talk: https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/how-i-attained-persistent...

And later posted about jhanas.

Having read those, I do think his understanding of meditation is deeper than it might appear from reading this article alone. I don’t think his position is really that different from what a lot of critics here are arguing.

Relatively few do, but for those who make use of it, the compounding benefits are immense.

Sometimes I think whether someone makes profitable use of the internet is the real social division these days.

Interesting insight into the life of a spam writer.

I despise SaaS companies that funnel me into some kind of 30 day email journey when I’m just registering with things my company uses.

To be fair though the hippies were the counterculture. Reagan voters were the silent majority.

There’s a great documentary available on YouTube just called “Hippies” or similar. One of the main things I took from it was how earnest those young people were about trying to find a better way of living than their parents. They’d seen how neurotic and stressed the typical 50s existence had made their family and wanted something better for themselves.

We brush over how remarkable it was that they even recognised that and tried to do something different. Even those who didn’t take part got at least some sense of it through the music and art of the time.

What are you using for full stack Typescript? I’m not aware of anything as batteries included as Rails.

I haven’t tried Copilot but I’ve used ChatGPT to help with doing Advent of Code in Python (which I don’t use regularly so I forget bits of syntax).

At first I found it very useful to ask it to parse the input. Much faster than looking up three separate docs to piece together what I had in mind.

But then I asked it to parse a more complex input and it just kept failing badly even when I gave it sample inputs and outputs.

I’d say it definitely offers some productivity gains and is worth trying.

Another way of phrasing it is “sharp STEM grass with strong interpersonal skills”, which seems like a good thing?

He really doesn’t seem to get it, does he?

I’ve seen colleagues share this or link to it in their Slack status. It feels a bit… odd to me.

Yeah it’s maybe a bit annoying when people do this, but does it really need a whole campaign website? Not everyone is going to communicate in exactly the way you like.

The Times Literay Supplement is high quality and always interesting. Everything is through the prism of book reviews so perhaps not as much current affairs as you’d like. But still worth looking at.

Once I read an article about a guy who got arrested because he’d put child porn on his Dropbox. I had assumed he’d been caught by some more sophisticated means and that was just the public story. I’m amazed that anyone would be stupid enough to distribute CSAM through an account linked to their own name.

> Single common thread has to be poor governance. Certainly in politics and the civil service and also, from what I hear, amongst business leaders.

Strongly agree. I used to work in the civil service and there are many good individuals but the management structure is poor (though I think generally very effective at line management) and plenty of duffers get promoted. Many ministers are really very mediocre.

Good ideas and techniques are very slowly adopted, but then things like Agile are cargo-culted in an inappropriate way. To be fair, plenty of tech firms do this.

Dominic Cummings has lots of interesting ideas on this on his Substack. When Truss’ mini budget nearly broke pension funds, he pointed out that not only No 10 not know how leveraged they were, but nobody seems to care that they didn’t know. Surely central government should be able to pull together all the data it gathers?

Unfortunately he turned out to be not very good at governing.

An ageing population and a pensioner class that vote solely for their interests are definitely problems. Notice that pensioners were, once again, the only group protected in the recent statement. They don’t even seem to be aware/grateful for this.

We could avoided a lot of the economic cost of Covid by asking the over-65s to shield and kept the wider economy more or less going, but that was unacceptable to them and instead we shut down everything for their benefit and now they aren’t even willing to contribute to the cost.

I’m very skeptical that Brexit’s negative consequences will ever be so unambiguous that people admit them. There will always be some non-Brexit excuse. Equally, remainers are too keen to blame everything on Brexit.

Reading the UK personal finance subreddit is really sobering. Most people’s idea of a high salary (even in good industries) is less than a mediocre junior dev salary in the US.

I feel extremely fortunate to have moved into tech when I did, but even there only American companies offer top tier wages. Are there any British companies competing with FAANGs on salary?

On the plus side, maybe inflation is good for indebtedness?