Quotes

Redis streams aren’t exciting for their innovativeness, but rather than they bring building a unified log architecture within reach of a small and/or inexpensive app. Kafka is infamously difficult to configure and get running, and is expensive to operate once you do. [...] Redis on the other hand is probably already in your stack.

By far the most important lesson I took out of this game is that whenever there's behavior that needs to be repeated around to multiple types of entities, it's better to default to copypasting it than to abstracting/generalizing it too early. This is a very very hard thing to do in practice. As programmers we're sort of wired to see repetition and want to get rid of it as fast as possible, but I've found that that impulse generally creates more problems than it solves. The main problem it creates is that early generalizations are often wrong, and when a generalization is wrong it ossifies the structure of the code around it in a way that is harder to fix and change than if it wasn't there in the first place.

When Drury was in his first period of hospital residence he was dismayed by his ignorance and clumsiness. He said to Wittgenstein that perhaps it was a mistake for him to have become a doctor. The next day he received a letter: 'You didn't make a mistake because there was nothing at the time you knew or ought to have known that you overlooked...The thing now is to live in the world in which you are in, not to think or dream about the world you would like to be in. Look at people's sufferings, physical and mental, you have them close at hand, and this ought to be a good remedy for your troubles...Look at your patients more closely as human beings in trouble and enjoy more the opportunity you have to say 'good night' to so many people. This alone is a gift from heaven which many people would envy you.' Drury served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the war and in 1941 was posted to the Middle East. Wittgenstein came from Cambridge to Liverpool to say goodbye to him, and presented him with a silver drinking-cup, saying: 'Water tastes so much nicer out of silver. There is only one condition attached to this gift: you are not to worry if it gets lost.'

If your only way of making a painting is to actually dab paint laboriously onto a canvas, then the result might be bad or good, but at least it’s the result of a whole lot of micro-decisions you made as an artist. You were exercising editorial judgment with every paint stroke. That is absent in the output of these programs.

The statement that all of us are purportedly able to coherently conceive or imagine a certain situation—for instance, an imitation man or a zombie—is rather trivial from a philosophical point of view because ultimately it is just an empirical claim about the history of the brain and its functional architecture. It is a statement about a world that is phenomenally possible for human beings. It is not a statement about the modal strength of the relationship between physical and phenomenal properties; logical possibility (or necessity) is not implied by phenomenological possibility (or necessity). From the simple fact that beings like ourselves are able to phenomenally simulate a certain apparently possible world, it does not follow that a consistent or even only an empirically plausible description of this world exists.

77. The cybernetic exchange between man, computer and algorithm is like a game of musical chairs: The frantic search for balance always leaves one of the 3 standing ill at ease.…\&79. A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.…\&84. Motto for a research laboratory: What we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.

My own favorites were Cuba voting "yes" to the fast-tracking of OOXML, even though Microsoft is prohibited by the US Government from selling any software on the island that might even be able to read and write the new format, and Azerbaijan's "yes" vote, even though OOXML as defined isn't able to express a Web URL address in Azeri, their official language.

This tutorial exists because of a particular quirk of mine: I love to write tutorials about things as I learn them. This is the backstory of TRPL, of which an ancient draft was "Rust for Rubyists." You only get to look at a problem as a beginner once, and so I think writing this stuff down is interesting. It also helps me clarify what I'm learning to myself.

Blogging is small-p political again, today. It’s come back round. It’s a statement to put your words in a place where they are not subject to someone else’s algorithm telling you what success looks like; when you blog, your words are not a vote for the values of someone else’s platform.

llama.cpp surprised many people (myself included) with how quickly you can run large LLMs on small computers [...] TLDR at batch_size=1 (i.e. just generating a single stream of prediction on your computer), the inference is super duper memory-bound. The on-chip compute units are twiddling their thumbs while sucking model weights through a straw from DRAM. [...] A100: 1935 GB/s memory bandwidth, 1248 TOPS. MacBook M2: 100 GB/s, 7 TFLOPS. The compute is ~200X but the memory bandwidth only ~20X. So the little M2 chip that could will only be about ~20X slower than a mighty A100.

Upon his death man must leave everything behind...and depart forever from the world he has known. He must of necessity go to that foul land of death, a fact which makes death the most sorrowful of all events...Some foreign doctrines, however, teach that death should not be regarded as profoundly sorrowful...These are all gross deceptions contrary to human sentiment and fundamental truths. Not to be happy over happy events, not to be saddened by sorrowful events, not to show surprise at astonishing events, in a word, to consider it proper not to be moved by whatever happens, are all foreign types of deception and falsehood. They are contrary to human nature and extremely repugnant to me.

I was thinking the other day how long it had been since I used the acronym "IRL" or the expanded phrase "In Real Life." It used to be the thing we'd say when we meant "not on the internet", and I'm glad that it has become gradually obsolete over the years, now that the internet is accepted as part of life.

God has lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are to come after us, and whose names are already written in the book of creation, as to us; and we have no right, by anything that we do or neglect, to involve them in unnecessary penalties, or deprive them of benefits which it was in our power to bequeath. And this the more, because it is one of the appointed conditions of the labour of men that, in proportion to the time between the seed-sowing and the harvest, is the fullness of the fruit; and that generally, therefore, the farther off we place our aim, and the less we desire to be ourselves the witnesses of what we have laboured for, the more wide and rich will be the measure of our success. Men cannot benefit those that are with them as they can benefit those who come after them; and of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave. §\&10. Nor is there, indeed, any present loss, in such respect, for futurity. Every human action gains in honour, in grace, in all true magnificence, by its regard to things that are to come. It is the far sight, the quiet and confident patience, that, above all other attributes, separate man from man, and near him to his Maker; and there is no action nor art, whose majesty we may not measure by this test. Therefore, when we build, let us think that we build for ever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labour and wrought substance of them, “See! this our fathers did for us.”: For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, or in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity. It is in their lasting witness against men, in their quiet contrast with the transitional character of all things, in the strength which, through the lapse of seasons and times, and the decline and birth of dynasties, and the changing of the face of the earth, and of the limits of the sea, maintains its sculptured shapeliness for a time insuperable, connects forgotten and following ages with each other, and half constitutes the identity, as it concentrates the sympathy, of nations: it is in that golden stain of time, that we are to look for the real light, and color, and preciousness of architecture; and it is not until a building has assumed this character, till it has been entrusted with the fame, and hallowed by the deeds of men, till its walls have been witnesses of suffering, and its pillars rise out of the shadows of death, that its existence, more lasting as it is than that of the natural objects of the world around it, can be gifted with even so much as these possess, of language and of life.

Permissions have three moving parts, who wants to do it, what do they want to do, and on what object. Any good permission system has to be able to efficiently answer any permutation of those variables. Given this person and this object, what can they do? Given this object and this action, who can do it? Given this person and this action, which objects can they act upon?

The greatest improvements in the productive powers of labour seem to have been the effects of the division of labour... To take an example of the trade of pin-making: a workman not educated in it could scarce make one pin in a day. But this business is divided into a number of peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it; to whiten the pins is another trade; it is even a trade to put them into the paper. I have seen a small manufactory where ten men only could make upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. If they had all wrought independently, they certainly could not each of them have made the four thousand eight hundredth part of that. This great increase in the quantity of work consequence of the division of labour, is owing to three different circumstances; first, to the increase of dexterity in every particular workman; secondly, to the saving of the time which is commonly lost in passing from one species of work to another; and, lastly, to the invention of machines.

We respect wildlife in the wilderness because we’re in their house. We don’t fully understand the complexity of most ecosystems, so we seek to minimize our impact on those ecosystems since we can’t 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. It’s super common for a new leader to come in, see something they see as “useless”, and get rid of it – without understanding the implications. Good leaders make sure they understand before they mess around.

LLMs are like a trained circus bear that can make you porridge in your kitchen. It's a miracle that it's able to do it at all, but watch out because no matter how well they can act like a human on some tasks, they're still a wild animal. They might ransack your kitchen, and they could kill you, accidentally or intentionally!

OpenID is particularly appealing to OLPC, because it can be used to perpetuate passwordless access even on sites that normally require authentication [...] With an OpenID provider service running on the school server (or other trusted servers), logins to OpenID-enabled sites will simply succeed transparently, because the child's machine has been authenticated in the background

"I will tell you what I am talking about", he said. "Most kinds of power require a substantial sacrifice by whoever wants the power. There is an apprenticeship, a discipline lasting many years. Whatever kind of power you want. President of the company. Black belt in karate. Spiritual guru. Whatever it is you seek, you have to put in the time, the practice, the effort. You must give up a lot to get it. It has to be very important to you. And once you have attained it, it’s your power. It can’t be given away: it resides in you. It is literally the result of your discipline. Now what is interesting about this process is that, by the time someone has acquired the ability to kill with his bare hands, he has also matured to the point where he won’t use it unwisely. So that kind of power has a built-in control. The discipline of getting the you so that you won’t abuse it. But scientific power is like inherited wealth: attained without discipline. You read what others have done, and you take the next step. You can do it very young. You can make progress very fast."

An AI tool that gets gold on the IMO is obviously immensely impressive. Does it mean math is “solved”? Is an AI-generated proof of the Riemann hypothesis clearly on the horizon? Obviously not. Worth keeping timescales in mind here: IMO competitors spend an average of 1.5 hrs on each problem. High-quality math research, by contrast, takes month or years. What are the obstructions to AI performing high-quality autonomous math research? I don’t claim to know for sure, but I think they include many of the same obstructions that prevent it from doing many jobs: Long context, long-term planning, consistency, unclear rewards, lack of training data, etc. It’s possible that some or all of these will be solved soon (or have been solved) but I think it’s worth being cautious about over-indexing on recent (amazing) progress.

Scoble writes something - 6,800 writes are kicked off, 1 for each follower. Michael Arrington replies - another 6,600 writes. Jason Calacanis jumps in - another 6,500 writes. Beyond the 19,900 writes, there's a lot of additional overhead too. You have to hit a DB to figure out who the 19,900 followers are. [...] And here's the kicker: that giant processing and delivery effort - possibly a combined 100K disk IOs - was caused by 3 users, each just sending one, tiny, 140 char message. How innocent it all seemed.

We saw a ghost one day, while we were playing. All the children from our street had come together to run in and out of the bushes and trees, a chaotic chasing sort of game, everyone sweaty and pine-scratched. Someone up a tree saw a boy in a blue shirt standing by a mail box on the far side of the road, just standing there with a strange face. We ran to see who it was but he was gone. We raced up and down the houses, we dove into the leaves, we caught snatches of his shirt, flutters in our eye-corners, but never found the boy. We talked about the ghost for weeks—the glimpses we'd all had. What color will the fire be when these ridiculous things burn?

I’ve seen two different start-ups now, who hold personal data about customers in their “immutable log”. “How are you planning to handle GDPR requirements and removal of data?” – turns out the answer is often “Er – we haven’t thought about that.” Cue a sad face when I tell them that if they don’t modify their immutable log they’re automatically out of compliance.

The operations team is the one place with access to data and traffic that is "real-time enough" to detect business issues before they manifest in significant monetary loss. Traffic anomalies, chargeback rates, visitor retention… all these translate into money. This is what ops does; they make things work; they make the business work. And they spend a lot more time trending, investigating and analyzing than they do replacing hard drives and network cards.

Scientific results today are as often as not found with the help of computers. That’s because the ideas are complex, dynamic, hard to grab ahold of in your mind’s eye. And yet by far the most popular tool we have for communicating these results is the PDF—literally a simulation of a piece of paper. Maybe we can do better.

Most people think that we format Go code with `gofmt` to make code look nicer or to end debates among team members about program layout. But the most important reason for gofmt is that if an algorithm defines how Go source code is formatted, then programs, like `goimports` or `gorename` or `go fix`, can edit the source code more easily, without introducing spurious formatting changes when writing the code back. This helps you maintain code over time.