š a linked post to
youtu.be »
—
originally shared here on
Leave it to Cal Newport to show up in my algorithm and give terminology to part of the struggle Iāve faced for several years now: deep procrastination.
Deep procrastination is when youāre physically unable to work up the motivation to do work that needs to be done. Even with external pressures like deadlines, your body is unable to find the drive to do the thing.
This is different from depression because deep procrastinators were still able to feel joy in other areas of their lives, but not work.
He also mentions dopamine sickness, an effect from being constantly rewarded by quick hits of dopamine for an extended period of time.
If you are dopamine sick, you are unable to focus for long periods of time because your brain is literally wired for short term wins, not for deep, difficult thinking.
His solutions to both of these problems are infuriatingly simple: use an organizational system to handle doing these tasks, make hard tasks easier, use time boxing, remember your vision for your life and aim your work toward that.
In the video, Cal says, āwe appreciate hard things when we know why weāre doing them.ā It reminds of the episode of Bluey called āRagdollā where Bandit agrees to buy the kids ice cream only if they are able to physically put his body into the car to drive them to the ice cream place.
After a series of mighty struggles, Bluey is finally able to take a lick of an ice cream cone and is instantly greeted with a moment of euphoria, made possible only after all that hard work.
There are several pieces of content that Iāve consumed today which are all colliding into one potential blog post about how Iām deciding to be done with my crippling anxiety. Maybe after this video, Iāll pull out my laptop and start some deeper writing.
All I Need to Know About Engineering Leadership I Learned From Leave No Trace
š a linked post to
jacobian.org »
—
originally shared here on
I saw Simon Willison share this article and thought it was too good not to share it myself.
We respect wildlife in the wilderness because weāre in their house. We donāt fully understand the complexity of most ecosystems, so we seek to minimize our impact on those ecosystems since we canāt always predict what outcomes our interactions with nature might have.
In software, many disastrous mistakes stem from not understanding why a system was built the way it was, but changing it anyway. Itās super common for a new leader to come in, see something they see as āuselessā, and get rid of it ā without understanding the implications. Good leaders make sure they understand before they mess around.
Or, as the footnote succinctly puts it: āfind out, then fuck around.ā
This article also taught me about Chestertonās fence, a principle that says ādonāt destroy what you donāt understandā.
npm install everything, and the complete and utter chaos that follows
š a linked post to
boehs.org »
—
originally shared here on
We tried to hang a pretty picture on a wall, but accidentally opened a small hole. This hole caused the entire building to collapse. While we did not intend to create a hole, and feel terrible for all the people impacted by the collapse, we believe itās also worth investigating what failures of compliance testing & building design could allow such a small hole to cause such big damage.
Multiple parties involved, myself included, are still students and/or do not code professionally. How could we have been allowed to do this by accident?
Itās certainly no laughing matter, neither to the people who rely on npm nor the kids who did this.
But man, it is comical to see the Law of Unintended Consequences when it decides to rear its ugly head.
I applaud the students who had the original idea and decided to see what would happen if you installed every single npm package at once. Itās a good question, to which the answer is: uncover a fairly significant issue with how npm maintains integrity across all of its packages.
But I guess the main reason Iām sharing this article is as a case study on how hard it is to moderate a system.
Iām still a recovering perfectionist, and the older I get, the more I come across examples (both online like this and also in my real life) where you can do everything right and still end up losing big.
The best thing you can do when you see something like this is to pat your fellow human on the back and say, āman, that really sucks, Iām sorry.ā
The worst thing you can do, as evidenced in this story, is to cuss out some teenagers.
Anti-AI sentiment gets big applause at SXSW 2024 as moviemaker dubs AI cheerleading as āterrifying bullsh**ā
š a linked post to
techcrunch.com »
—
originally shared here on
I gotta find the video from this and watch it myself, because essentially every single thing mentioned in this article is what I wanna build a podcast around.
Letās start with this:
As Kwan first explained, modern capitalism only worked because we compelled people to work, rather than forced them to do so.
āWe had to change the story we told ourselves and say that āyour value is your job,ā he told the audience. āYou are only worth what you can do, and we are no longer beings with an inherent worth. And this is why itās so hard to find fulfillment in this current system. The system works best when youāre not fulfilled.ā
Boy, this cuts to the heart of the depressive conversations Iāve had with myself this past year.
Finding a job sucks because you have to basically find a way to prove to someone that you are worth something. It can be empowering to some, sure, but I am finding the whole process to be extremely demoralizing and dehumanizing.
āAre you trying to use [AI] to create the world you want to live in? Are you trying to use it to increase value in your life and focus on the things that you really care about? Or are you just trying to, like, make some money for the billionaires, you know?āĀ Scheinert asked the audience. āAnd if someone tells you, thereās no side effect. Itās totally great, āget on boardā ā I just want to go on the record and say thatās terrifying bullshit. Thatās not true. And we should be talking really deeply about how to carefully, carefully deploy this stuff,ā he said.
Iāve literally said the words, āI donāt want to make rich people richerā no fewer than a hundred times since January.
There is so much to unpack around this article, but I think Iām sharing it now as a stand in for a thesis around the podcast I am going to start in the next month.
We need to be having this conversation more often and with as many people as possible. Letās do our best right now at the precipice of these new technologies to make them useful for ourselves, and not just perpetuate the worst parts of our current systems.
According to the just-published 2020 U.S. Census data, Monowi now had 2 residents, doubling its population.
This came as a surprise to Elsie, who told a local newspaper, āThen someoneās been hiding from me, and thereās nowhere to live but my house.ā
It turns out that nobody new had actually moved to Monowi without Elsie realizing. And the census bureau didnāt make a mistake. They intentionally changed the census data, adding one resident.
Today, I learned about the concept of differential privacy.
Taken literally, a bureaucracy is just an organization tasked with ensuring some outcome. In the public sector, OSHA ensures worker safety, FDA ensures drug safety, EPA ensures environmental protection; in the private sector, HR ensures legal compliance, IT ensures trade secrets and data privacy, and so on. Yet even if people agree with the outcome, they often disagree with the implementation. Bureaucracies have an endless talent for finding wasteful and ineffective solutions.
Bureaucracies are ineffective due to a lack of accountability. If a bureaucrat imposes a wasteful policy, what are the consequences? Well, as long as they are achieving their desired outcome, they are doing their job, regardless of the pain they inflict on others. They can wield legal, technical, or financial penalties to force compliance. And paradoxically, when bureaucrats fail to achieve their desired outcome, they often get a bigger budget or a bigger stick to wield, rather than being fired for incompetence. The inability to recognize failure goes hand in hand with the inability to recognize success: competent and ambitious people avoid working for bureaucracies because their efforts go unrewarded. Bureaucracies end up staffed with middling managers, and we have learned to hate them.
I donāt know how to solve this problem in the public sector, but I think itās solvable in the private sector, because there is theoretically a CEO who is incentivized to maximize the overall effectiveness of the company; they just need the right tactics. The solution is simple: hold bureaucracy accountable by forcing them to do the actual work.
I feel like thereās a counter argument to be made in here about the role of competition in the work produced for external entities to do.
In a functioning capitalistic system, you have several competing entrepreneurs who are testing all kinds of novel ideas against the rules established by the government to ensure a safe, fair playing field.
The role of a bureaucracy is not to get to the end goal faster. The role of bureaucracy is to make sure we get to the end goal without taking harmful shortcuts.
Regardless, there is something to be said about being thoughtful in imposing burdensome policies, and I think this concept of bureaucratic leverage is an interesting way to consider the role of the public sector in optimizing our systems.
Dependencies seem to be all around us, both in the real world, and in programming. And they are perniciously distracting in just this way. Have you ever noticed how rare it is for you to just do something?
If so, you might have been worrying, up front, about dependencies.
Being a senior developer means you spend most of your time stressed out about the optimal way to get something shipped.
But I donāt just see that stress manifest in my professional life. Ask my wife how many side projects around the house she wants me to do that have not even been started.
Itās why I admire people who just start projects with no fear.
And itās a trait I find myself trying to instill in my children, who will naturally jump into a task with both feet and zero regrets while Iām impatiently hovering over them, fretting about āsafetyā and messes thatāll need to be cleaned up.
š a linked post to
lesswrong.com »
—
originally shared here on
If you're trying to pass the class, then pass it with minimum effort. Anything else is wasted motion.
If you're trying to ace the class, then ace it with minimum effort. Anything else is wasted motion.
If you're trying to learn the material to the fullest, then mine the assignment for all its knowledge, and don't fret about your grade. Anything else is wasted motion.
If you're trying to do achieve some combination of good grades (for signalling purposes), respect (for social reasons), and knowledge (for various effects), then pinpoint the minimum quality target that gets a good grade, impresses the teacher, and allows you to learn the material, and hit that as efficiently as you can. Anything more is wasted motion.
Ah, an engineerās approach to optimizing life.
There is a good section in here as well about how to deal with the associated guilt when you take this approach.
Rugged individualism is still deeply enmeshed in American culture.
And its myth is one of our biggest exports to the rest of the world.
What could happen if we replaced the philosophy of rugged individualism with a philosophy of rugged cooperation? What if we swapped out the scripts weāve learned in an individualist culture with the curiosity and care of a collaborative culture?
And how would your business or career shift if you approached it not as your best way to climb to the top in a flawed system but as a laboratory for experimenting with ruggedly cooperative systems?
Everything I learned about concurrency and reliability I learned at the Waffle House
š a linked post to
youtu.be »
—
originally shared here on
A friend recommended this video to me while I was out with Covid a few months back and I just got to watch it.
Now I get to recommend it to you!
If you are a nerd for process, you will love this. Just one small fact to entice you to watch this: did you know Waffle House employs their own meteorological staff?