nico λ

Replacing technology with household help is not a route to higher productivity. It seems more like a route out of the First World and into the Third.

Immanuel Kant, in the eighteenth century, said that the universe as it truly is must be unknowable, and all we ever know is the world through our senses: he made a clear distinction between phenomena , our perceptions of objects, and noumena , the things in themselves.5 More than that, he foreshadowed the Bayesian model of the brain: he argued that

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Decades later I'm tuning YAML files that trigger ansible runs on CIs that compile docker images in which we embed hundreds of npm packages that get transpiled from typescript. Which gets released to cloud serverless edge thingies that store stuff in a database and on some block storage. All to serve a page that's similar in information and... See more

Performance is about using resources efficiently to deliver fast, responsive software. Prioritizing performance early helps you design systems that meet or exceed user expectations.

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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In this world, with content as a supreme cultural value, it’s better for something to be interesting than ethically sound. Widespread attention bestows an aura; becoming content is how reality is made real.

We are living through the emergence of a new business category which I believe will become an important part of our digital lives: community-curated knowledge networks  (a thread on why) https://t.co/ZNg3FHiGUD

Noble intentions and lofty rhetoric about justice and equality are not enough. The kinds of policies and interventions that benefit people often sound bad. Those that hurt people often sound good.