📖 Power: Why Some People Have It—and Others Don't by Jeffrey Pfeffer (2010; via Robin Hanson). A blend of anecdotes and social science experiments that didn't replicate. The networking bits seemed fine. Everything else was kinda meh.
📖 Remote: Office Not Required by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson (2013; via Iridescent Learning). It's interesting to see how work from home policies have ebbed and flowed since 2013.
📝 Why 98.5% of organizations have slow actions/checkout (Chris Goller / depot; via Changelog News). I'm hesitant to fiddle with the git internals, but the sparse checkout and partial clone sound like easy things to try. (Most of GitHub Actions were sped up by using uv.)
📝 Deploying to Amazon's cloud is a pain in the AWS younger devs won't tolerate (Corey Quinn / The Register; via Changelog News). Hilarious take, but so true. It took me 7 years to be able to close a handful of student accounts (who had inactive emails after graduation) that were still charging my billing account, but whose EC2 instances were not visible to me because of AWS permissions issues.
📝 Game design is simple, actually (Raph Koster). Clickbait title aside, there are twelve compact and useful design lessons each of which is a whole world unto itself.
📝 The Algorithmic Turn: The Emerging Evidence On AI Tutoring That's Hard to Ignore (Carl Hendrick / The Learning Dispatch). Long post covers many questions about the material properties of learning and teaching. Also covers both the disappointment of various EdTech approaches and the possibility of surpassing them.
📝 Making XML human-readable without XSLT (Jake Archibald; via Simon Willison). I have always found XSLT to be both impressive and horrifying. Makes sense that it's a security nightmare for browsers.
📝 The Case Against pgvector (Alex Jacobs; via Simon Willison). I actually got questions about picking an index for pgvector; the options aren't great and this article explains why.
📝 Claude Agent Skills: A First Principles Deep Dive (Han Lee). Very long, but informative break down of how Claude's Agent Skills works and how its different from function calling. I was particularly impressed by how the UI has to adapt between information being fed back to the LLM and information for the user.
📝 SQLite concurrency and why you should care about it (Jean-Pierre Bachmann / Jellyfin). In all the times I've gotten a SQLite locking issue, the solution has always been to retry a few times (until some other process releases the lock). But this article suggests a few other ways to solve the problem.
📖 The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss (2011; via Shalev NessAiver). Sequel to The Name of the Wind. Patrick Rothfuss joins the ranks of several other fantasy authors in having an unfinished series. I ended up reading the rants of his fans and editors as well as counter points that authors don't owe readers books. This book was a fine sequel; not as great and a bit graphic at times.
📖 The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (2007; via Shalev NessAiver). It's got stories-within-stories, sympathetic magic-as-physics, and a prodigy for a main character. What more could you want?
📖 The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss (2009). Took me 16 years to finally read the book that bootstrapped Tim's takeoff. Turns out all of his books are in the same action-packed-encyclopedia style.
📝 Side project advice (Ned Batchelder). This reads like short & simple advice, but it is clearly hard-won and I should re-read this several times a year.
📝 Three tough truths about climate (Bill Gates). One of the more grounded perspectives on cost-benefit analysis as applied to climate change.
📝 AI isn't replacing radiologists (Deena Mousa / Works in Progress; via Benj Azose). How long do we think the islands of automation will last?
📝 You already have a git server (maurycyz; via Changelog News). I'm so tempted to do this, but it feels wrong.
📝 Battling Infectious Diseases in the 20th Century: The Impact of Vaccines (Tynan DeBold & Dov Friedman / WSJ). Some of my favorite graphics depicting the impact of vaccines on mortality after being introduced. These are about a decade old and, unfortunately, vaccine hesitancy / avoidance is going to make mortality go up again.
📝 Will AI displace humans in the economy and culture? (Andrew Mayne). A thoughtful take, although I don't know how to rate the predictions.
🐦 Simon Maechling on microplastics (Simon Maechling).
You’ve been told microplastics are everywhere.
In your food. In your blood. Even in your brain.
You should panic. You should rage.
But what if most of it was junk science?
Worth reading the whole thread.
📝 You Aren’t In The DSM (Awais Aftab / Asterisk). From record-keeping to people's self-concept.
📝 Memorization, Trivia and Atomic Units for Creativity (Edward Nevraumont). Edwards is the second-place winner of the Astral Codex Ten Non-Book Review Contest for his review of Alpha School.
📝 Late Night is Dying Because of the Format Not The Hosts (thinkinganddata). Goes back to vaudeville to describe changes in entertainment formats.
📝 I Am Out Of Data Hell (Nikhil Suresh; via Josh Vogel). Agency does a body good.
📝 The Continual Learning Problem (Jessy Lin). Interesting take.
📝 What Went Wrong with Math Instruction in New York? (Benjamin Solomon / Center for Educational Progress). Quite a bit it would seem.
📝 Rearchitecting GitHub Pages (Hailey Somerville / GitHub Blog; via Sam Lambert). Sam's tweet says it all:
Until ~2015, GitHub Pages hosted over 2 million websites on 2 servers with a multi-million-line nginx.conf, edited and reloaded per deploy. This worked incredibly well, with github.io ranking as the 140th most visited domain on the web at the time.
📝 How the World’s Most Famous Code Was Cracked (Jack Murtagh & Jeanna Bryner / Scientific American). Reminds me of the relevant XKCD.
📝 When is it better to think without words? (Henrik Karlsson / Escaping Flatland). I think I only do this rarely.
📝 I Figured Out How to Engineer Emergence (Erik Hoel / The Intrinsic Perspective). This is a follow-up to Erik's concept of how high-level features emerge from lower-level descriptions.