links

Article argues that we should value maintainers as guardians, and that maintaining is an unappreciated job, because if maintaining is done right, nothing happens.

A big part of the skill in building software is understanding what’s possible and what isn’t, and having at least a rough idea of how those things can be accomplished.

At some point, I will release my post on why I think, regardless of LLM-assisted coding (but even more because of LLM-assisted coding), taste is one of the most important skills a Software Engineer can hone.

These “reforms” have predictably eroded the capacity of governments to carry out basic functions while increasing their dependence on profit-driven companies and contractors that often cost significantly more than government employees. […] contractors now outnumber federal employees by more than two to one (the size of the federal workforce has remained largely unchanged over the last half century, […])

Romania has its own version of this problem. The consultancy and contracting ecosystem around EU fund absorption in Romania is enormous, and there’s well-documented waste in how procurement operates at the local level.

The Bolojan government decided instead to cut teachers’ salaries and plunge a country that has been in permanent austerity since 1989 into even more austerity.

Again, not fully Bolojan’s fault, as adherence to EU’s strict Excessive Deficit Procedure is not optional (unless for war spending lmao), and Bolo’s top priority was avoiding EU sanctions and a sovereign credit downgrade to junk.

Regardless, I’m not surprised that Euroscepticism is blooming in Eastern Europe, with citizens being told they have to tighten the belt, but the state is allowed to boost defence spending only.

I love this format, I like to see more human curation of content.

I haven’t watched any of the Marvel movies, the last Disney movie I enjoyed was the 1998 version of Mulan. However, I feel like I’ve watched all the Avengers movies by just seeing the billboard ads that appeared in Taipei, as well as through the plastic slop that gets shipped to movie theatres with the release.

I’m not sure about Hollywood, but for STEM disciplines, a lot of brilliant individuals get poached by finance, even though their degrees are in theoretical physics. It’s hard to say no to the bag, especially when you see the number of 0s on your first paycheck, and your brain hasn’t fully developed yet. From there, most brilliant minds fall to lifestyle creep, to the point where they can’t downgrade their lives to work on something more noble, because their kids now go to private school and they’re paying mortgage on a house that’s way bigger than they need.

If AI art makes Hollywood slop so disgusting that truly creative minds can’t stomach going into Hollywood, and if AI actually makes churning Marvel slop so cheap that there’s no high paying slop-nimator job anymore, we might actually end up with a renaissance of good art, not just content.

Age verification is obviously a “casus belli” that a bunch of (mostly Western, mostly European) leaders adopt because they realise the next 10-20 years will be marked by having to lead from positions of deep unpopularity.

Brussels though, chooses the path of authoritarianism and crushing dissent, to unite in a “totalitarian war union” (to borrow from Varoufakis), instead of understanding the reason for their deep unpopularity and reforming.

Moreover, Europe needs a post-EU future.

What if instead of measuring AI by the standard of human intelligence, we measured human intelligence by the standard of AI. We have a clearer understanding of how AI works, than how the human brain works. Could this exercise actually help us derive some insights into ourselves?

The paper argues that we’ve been actually doing this for decades, starting with how superhuman abilities demonstrated by Deep Blue made us reconsider what it means to be “good at chess”, and more recently reconsidering the most intimate parts of human existence, language.

The main question raised by this paper is, since we derive so much of our self-image from language, and the task of language generation can be automated, then what are we, as humanity, still contributing?

It might be the case that currently, LLMs are just parroting us, but we’ve also seen an exponential increase in the ability of LLMs to solve problems which require compositional generalisation way outside of the patterns and combinations of concepts represented in their training data.

One conclusion this paper draws is that much of the success of LLMs comes from our own autopilot approach to language. We also are often too quick to give a standard response rather than pay attention to the details of a question, we too, often follow a very rote, algorithmic way of learning foreign languages.

Long read about how the reading revolution of the 18th century was “a catastrophe for the ultra-privileged and exploitative aristocrats of the European aristocratic ancient regime”, how the rapid expansion of literacy helped destroy the old system of government with kings at the top, lords and clergy underneath and peasants squirming at the very bottom, and how our modern loss of literacy is incompatible with democracy.

Google Maps is not a directory, it’s a market maker. A lot of interesting findings in this one, including that Google Maps is surprisingly bad at categorising cuisines and restaurants (I’ve seen this as well in Taiwan), as well as the author’s own algorithm for finding underrated gems (and avoiding overrated restaurants) in London.

KPIs for digital products trend upwards and to the right when they provide us with the cloth mother to comfort our monkey brains. Despite the internet ridiculing Punch-kun’s use of a stuffed orangutan to comfort itself when being rejected by other macaques, this behaviour shows a socially positive way of dealing with loneliness and rejection.

I’m treating this blog as future self-reference first. I consider keeping this digital garden well kept for myself will make it useful for others too.

I make use of RETURNING heavily when writing Postgres-based worker queues. It allows me to claim a job and immediately scan the returned row into a struct, unmarshall the payload based on the operation type, and dispatch it without a second round-trip to the database.

ThePrimeagen gloated about buying Micron stock when he learned that AI is very memory hungry, I didn’t really have my finger on the pulse to that degree.

As someone that appreciates digital sovereignty, moving back to thin clients is something I fear. We can play around in the FOSS inflatable pool, but unless we manage to open source fabbing our own silicon, it’s nothing more than LARP-ing as tech autarkists.

I own a Framework laptop, which is predicated on the idea of upgradability and repairabilty, but even they’ve stopped selling separate DDR5 modules

Also, Luke from LTT on RAM pricing:

1. DDR5 was mostly built with corporate clients in mind
2. A lot of manufacturers see the “bag” from selling to enterprise
3. Intel, Nvidia, etc. rerouting their capacity for enterprise instead of the consumer market
4. “Why deal with us annoying lowly people that don’t have money, when you can deal with the hyperscaler bros that have all of the money”

Get ready to bow down and sing praises to CXMT and YMTC (both Chinese manufacturers), cause they’re probably the only salvation you have for your homelab.

My second day without AI, it took me 4 hours to write a simple Express API

Most software engineering involves plumbing together the same 4 SaaS tools that corporate approved and negotiated contracts with. Most software engineers are mercenaries, typing away for cash. Most of the frustration software engineers face in the industry comes from the deadly impression that they’re actually artists.

Good balance between hype and doom in this article responding a NYT’s op-ed calling AI ‘mid’.

A piece stuck out to me is how the author describes AI changing the constraint landscape, especially around how we interact with information:

Transformer-based AI has fundamentally changed how we interact with information […]. Being able to skip, summarize and compare content - we’re no longer bound to consume information in the packages it was created.

I found myself throwing Varoufakis’ content into Claude to try to spit out points that I could use to argue against people on Mastodon. I’m unsure if I learned something from what Varoufakis was trying to say, or I was just molding his content and tone to the argument I wanted to make. I fear it was actually the latter.

I find a lot of links, many of them end up in Linkhut, which is quite nice for social sharing, but I’d like to surface them here too.

Mike Carney leading with Thucydides’ quote on “strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must”. Thucydides does not offer the line, “The strong do what they can,” as a neutral analysis of how international affairs operate. He offers it as an expression of the reckless arrogance that brought about the destruction of the Athenian Empire.

Impressive seeing western world leaders challenging the “international rules-based order”, and embracing quite Third Worldist talking points related to “middle powers uniting”.