cbare

What would it look like if social media were optimized for flourishing rather then engagement?

Bring your own filter/ranking algorith?

I wonder if there's not a fundamental conflict. Social media is essentially _addictive_ media. The most pro-flourishing move you can make is to disengage from social media.

One of the beautiful things about coding is the immediacy of the feedback. Screw up and your program crashes. Get it right and the machine does what you want. Tests turn green - that's nice. Subtle bugs can be deceptive, you might be thinking. True, but lots of bugs are not at all subtle.

When you get good at coding, you get a lot of positive reinforcement coming from a machine rather than other people. What that does to our psychology seems worth considering. Might we also have the same feeling of "I'm usually right!" and might that feeling transfer to domains where it's not backed up by any real learning?

My favorites that I read this year were:

- Playground by Richard Powers: the ocean reminds us that we, along with our obsessions and rivalries, are small - Orbital by Samantha Harvey: a book were not much happens, but a lot goes on below the surface - Hum by Helen Phillips: looks at an AI controlled near future through a different lens - Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow: sex, lies, and video games

Ha, I think that happens regardless of the tech you use. Just blame time.

It's very plausible that anxiety causes heart disease, anxiety causes insomnia, and insomnia leads people to use melatonin. Same with diphenhydramine, overactive inflammatory response causes allergies, allergic people take allergy meds, and too much inflammation contributes to dementia.

Association studies too easily get interpreted as X causes Y. Maybe that's true, but not necessarily.

Yep, I agree with ya. Whoever moderated that away is lame.

The US has the strongest university and research system in the world. Wrecking that will be one of the worst acts of self-harm ever.

Yeah, sounds like the problems are more due to monorepos rather than with GitHub actions. Seems like the pendulum always swings too far. Overdoing microservices results in redundant code and interservice spaghetti. Monorepos have their own set of issues. The only solution is to think carefully about a what size chunk of functionality you want to build, test, and deploy as a unit.

I found it quite worthwhile to ask GPT4o to give an english summary of the paper linked in the Wikipedia article, _Bekräftartekniker och motstrategier - sätt att bemöta maktstrukturer och förändra sociala klimat_, which translates to _Techniques of Suppression and Counterstrategies: Addressing Power Structures and Changing Social Climates_.

Recognizing and pushing back against the dark patterns of group dynamics is super important.

That this resonates with a bunch of hackers is kinda funny - code is such an ephemeral medium.

I also view coding as essentially creative.

Programming was mostly a hobby in the days of 8-bit PCs. It was a profession for some decades. Maybe it will be a hobby again in 5 years. Like gardening, sailing, fishing - professions at one time, now hobbies.

On the other hand, the arrival of futuristic capabilities like computers speaking human languages is what drew me to technology in the first place. Luckily, you can choose to look forward and backward. You don't have to pick only one.

...also, great scrabble word.

I don't know what the optimal population is, but here are a couple of arguments against the "ever greater" thesis. Diminishing returns kicks in at some point. The economic value of human life is subject to supply and demand. Where there excess supply, life is cheap and not in a good way.

I tried to do a similar thing, but in New Zealand, for engineering or ML engineering roles, without success. The folks I know of that pulled it off either knew people from previously working together in-person or were special in some way - PhD in valuable niche, wrote a book.

Fuck that guy Marl.

...by this website!

It will be interesting to see what happens, as the tools for remote/async work keep getting better, workers get better at doing it, and employers get more used to it. To the extent that distributed teams compete well with single-location teams, wages should tend to even out.

Looks to me like this is already happening for high-end skills. And once those PhDs and 10x folks blaze the trail, it'll get easier for the rest of us.

The echoes are there. Reason vs. loyalty to a known falsehood.

Every article about SOC2 should be illustrated with a Hieronymus Bosch-like hellscape.

This project has the best possible name for a port of Clojure.

The desktop client is really buggy and reflects poorly on Apple. Some say, an all-you-can-eat buffet of a big chunk of all published music is just too good to be true and can't last. But, then wasn't that the promise? Too cheap to meter? To have at your fingertips the accumulated product of hundreds of years of culture, millions of hours of practice...

Currently streaming: JS Bach, Sonatas for Viola da Gamba, Sergei Istomin and Viviana Sofronitsky which I had to type 'cause you can't even cut-n-paste out that piece of junk.

genius

Early career devs need to accumulate a few things, roughly in this order of importance: - projects where you made a key contribution, where you "owned" something - senior people who will be mentors / boosters - a portfolio of skills, technologies, domain areas, engineering practices, soft skills - maybe a fancy name? A FAANG or a startup that hits big.

It sounds like you're getting a couple of these. Jobs that hit all these points at once don't grow on trees. But, always have your feelers out. Keep in touch with former colleagues and schoolmates.

Don't assume that senior people know what they're doing. They've probably been promoted to a role in which they're just trying to figure it out. It sounds like your manager and her boss are struggling. Have empathy, but don't get stuck paying for their mistakes. Managing up is a skill. I wish I had it.

Expect requirements to change. They usually do. You can't beat direct contact with end-users and rapid iteration based on their feedback. Serving real users is fun and even the most clueless and back-stabbing of bosses will respect it.

- Don't assume management cares about your best interest. Some will. Most won't. - Don't think you can change a dysfunctional org from below. You can't. - Don't beat yourself up. Look for lessons and keep on keepin' on. - Don't stay in a bad situation. Everybody's hiring.

I love our very knobby Korg SV-2.

A rainy day at a beachside café, lofi beats float on the breeze. Distantly, church bells ring, alien spacecraft hover ominously over a crowd of hungry zombies. The nuclear air-raid sirens sound. Brilliant. So 2021.

YT music is a downgrade from Google Play Music. The web player for YT music is missing a bunch of features:

- clear queue - multi-select in queue - save queue as playlist - high resolution album covers - play count

It's great to consolidate overlapping products. But, why can't a company with 20,000 engineers bring YT music up to feature parity before killing off the better product?

This thread critiques this article in a way I find convincing: https://twitter.com/DiseaseEcology/status/125122527387113472...

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/194417/the-master-s...

A great book on history of the information economy over the periods of Radio, Telephone, and cable TV that has a lot to say about how the longer cycles of technology play out.

Ha, image how much Nature Publishing Group are crying in their coffee while they write that headline! Open science has the same free-rider problems as open source, but also, the same network effects with huge benefits.

I'll second the recommendation for The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. It lays out a systematic way of thinking about political development and decay.

I wrote a review here: http://pragmaticpoliticaleconomy.blogspot.com/2011/09/im-rea...