nico λ

"I think in life we can get used to particular circumstances, we can get used to results, maybe getting rejected or failing at something or getting paid a low wage and we can internalise that . . . . . . and we keep updating our beliefs to a point of near certainty that we think that is basically the way nature is, it's the way the world is and... See more

But I think perhaps the main element in Musk’s radicalization is simply the feedback loop of the internet - Musk has millions of fan-boys cheering on his every lurch to the right, every tweet about immigration or Anthony Fauci or the ‘woke mind virus’. He’s a transhumanist enslaved by his own machine, a wizard deceived by the demon algorithm which... See more

When working on a team, you should usually ask the question

There’s a spectrum of “trying to figure out everything for yourself” to “bugging your coworkers with every little question”, and I think most people starting their careers are too far on the former side. There’s always someone around that has been in the codebase longer, or knows... See more

Don’t underestimate the value of digging into history to investigate some bugs

I’ve always been pretty good at debugging weird issues, with the usual toolkit of println and the debugger. So I never really looked at git much to figure out the history of a bug. But for some bugs it’s crucial.

I recently had an issue with my server where it was leaking... See more

You might wonder: why bother with this, when we could call len(user_db.users) ? One answer is that len(user_db.users) is more tightly coupled, which is usually undesirable. Coupling is when one part of the system depends on another part.

Assess the trade-off you’re making between quality and pace, make sure it’s appropriate for your context

There’s always a trade-off between implementation speed and how confident you are about correctness. So you should ask yourself: how okay is it to ship bugs in my current context? If the answer to this doesn’t affect the way you work, you’re... See more

Science may be the pursuit of truth, but scientific language is adept at dressing up insidious ideologies as fundamental truths.

At some point you will discover the Right Way to program, the thing which makes this all make sense , and you'll be convinced that the whole field would be so much better off if everybody else programmed the Right Way, too. For me the Right Way was test-driven development; for you it might be functional programming, lisp, formal methods or one of a

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The same is true for any assumption that holds the mind or its pathologies to be inexplicable in some fundamental sense: it can only lead to extremely bad explanations. We have no choice but to treat mental illness as unknown but knowable .