nico λ

If you can’t easily explain why something is difficult, then it’s incidental complexity, which is probably worth addressing

My favorite manager in my career had a habit of pressing me when I would claim something was difficult to implement. Often his response was something along the lines of “isn’t this just a matter of sending up X when we Y”, or... See more

Anyone who’s spent a few months at a sizable tech company can tell you that a lot of software seems to exist primarily because companies have hired people to write and maintain them. In some ways, the software serves not the business, but the people who have written it, and then those who need to maintain it. This is stupid, but also very, very... See more

In information theory, entropy measures the average unpredictability of characters in a string, expressed in bits per character. The formula to calculate entropy is straightforward: for each unique character, multiply its probability by its surprisal4, then sum this product across all characters.

Try to solve bugs one layer deeper

Imagine you have a React component in a dashboard, that deals with a User object retrieved from state, of the currently logged in user. You see a bug report in Sentry, where user was null during render. You could add a quick if (!user) return null . Or you could investigate a bit more, and find that your logout... See more

This probability of obtaining another data set as extreme as the one collected is known as the P value. The P value is often criticized for being misunderstood and misused in the field of medicine.2,3 For example, in contrast to popular belief, the P value is not a measure of how correct a hypothesis is, nor is it a measure of the size or... See more

Fentanyl laced weed has been endlessly debunked. So where does the claim come from? Who keeps on believing that weed is laced with fent? Police do. Politicians do. People who want to believe it keep on believing it. It’s confirmation bias. It sails right through their tunnel vision. Of course fent is in weed! Because there’s a plot by nefarious... See more

Just think about how much effort you have to put into maintaining the facade of being an Expert — how much effort it takes to always appear as “the one who knows”… and compare that to the freedom and flow and playfulness that can open up when you really allow yourself to sink into not knowing, when you no longer care if you make mistakes or if you... See more

IFS illuminates the mind's landscape as a mosaic of distinct parts, each with its own voice, identity, and role to play. This concept resonates with our daily experiences; we often catch ourselves saying, "A part of me wants this, but another part of me wants that." Addiction can amplify this internal dialogue, making it feel like an alien force... See more