Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true. Ring out the grief that saps the mind For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring…
We often talk about computer programs purely as collections of “code”. Lately I’ve been thinking about it a bit differently: a computer program is the encoding of a huge series of nested decisions, made intentionally or otherwise. Let’s say we’ve decided to build a calculator app. That overall goal is the first decision, but there are many more decisions nested underneath it. What features does…
This is a good summary of the state of AI takes right now I think No one knows anything about AI AI is important. But we don’t yet fully know why. AI currently has all the “noise” and incentives to hype that crypto had a few years ago, but underneath that is clearly much more “real”. It makes things hard to evaluate for now.
Something I worry about with generative AI in business and commercial use: almost no one fully reads anything in those environments. Now imagine when even the author hasn’t read what was written… yikes. How does AI writing and reading impact this reality? Steven Sinofski has an interesting post here about “slop” at work . I think about this in terms of heuristics. Our brains are lazy…
After a frustrating second year of consistent lifting , 2024 brought much better progress, though mostly along some different directions than I’d been focused on the first 2 years. My goals were more focused on health/consistency/functional strength and less on pure powerlifting strength and I read/ran a lot of stuff from Dan John and Pavel and it took my training in a different direction.…
The first great fact which emerges from our civilization is that today everything has become “means.” There is no longer an “end”; we do not know whither we are going. We have forgotten our collective ends, and we possess great means: we set huge machines in motion in order to arrive nowhere. Jacque Sellul This quote has been haunting me all weekend. It describes and explains so much of the…
I spent the last 2 months running Dan Jon and Pavel Tsatsouline’s Easy Strength Program. It’s a fundamentally very simple program that Dan still managed to write a huge ~200 page book about . The high level goal is to pick 5 exercises and to run them every workout for 40 workouts without doing more than 10 reps on any of the individual exercises. The idea is that it is a minimalist…
I ran a mix of 5/3/1 and Easy Strength from January to June and while I continued to work through a shoulder injury in Q1 I did set some new PRs: Squat: 350 -> 375 1RM DL: 400 -> 435 1(and 2)RM Chins: Max of 3 with poor ROM -> 8 clean Shoulder health is significantly improved but still bothering me on bench press and pushups. Overall made minimal pressing progress so far this year even though…
Being trusted is a superpower at work and in life. When we’re trusted things move faster. Communication is more open, people become more cooperative, and work becomes more enjoyable as relationships can grow deeper. I’ve found that there’s a very simple 1 formula to building people’s trust. Here’s the formula: Identify a need Say you will meet the need. Say when…
The intended takeaway from all this is exactly where we started in the introduction: creating quality is context specific. Be wary of following the playbook you’ve seen before, even if those playbook were tremendously successful. They might work extremely well, but they often don’t unless you have a useful model for reasoning about why they worked in the former environment. Loved the thoughts on…
Over a year old, but new to me – I thought this series of posts was a great roundup of some of the issues that make tech a less happy place to work than in the previous decade: Software and its Discontents
Very helpful writeup on LLMs in production: What We’ve Learned From A Year of Building with LLMs
Reality Has A Surprising Amount Of Detail This is an old piece, but new to me. What a great turn of phrase, and accurate insight about doing hard things.
2022 was the year I began lifting at home , and it was a year of consistent progress and wins. 2023 was… different. I switched from a Starting Strength based Linear Progression to a 5/3/1 based program , and was also fully self-programming with no coach, and it was a year of ups and downs. In the end I learned that I had a lot to learn, and feel ready to get better in 2024. My quantifiable…
Last year when I started powerlifting as my main form of exercise I set goals of being able to do 5x325 High bar squat 5x400 Deadlift 5x150 Overhead Press 5x250 Bench Press 10x body weight pull-ups (I’d never been able to do more than 2) BP and Pull-ups are still struggling, but I’ve now managed 3/5
Diving back into (Neo)Vim this week for the first time in a few years (have done my core work with VS Code for a while). Telescope Plugin + Language Server Providers are nice additions to the landscape, and it all feels so powerful, but everything is still so fiddly to setup :/
Really enjoyed these reflections on LLMs: medium.learningbyshipping.com AI, ChatGPT, and Bing…Oh My
Performance management processes have been different at every company I’ve worked in, ranging from “basically non-existent” at a 15 person startup to “months of work for managers each review period followed by clear expectations that growth feedback will be given throughout the year” in big tech world. Some of these differences are good and bad, most are more about the context of the company. I’ve…
“I am human; and nothing human is alien to me” - Terence
Really enjoyed The Narnian by @ayjay — left contemplating what I find delight in. 📚
There are 3 primary reasons why one human may be more effective than another in a given work situation. Caring - All things being equal, somebody who cares more about a problem / product will generally be more effective 1 . Caring can range from “startup founder” level obsession to being completely checked out, and effectiveness will vary on that spectrum. Capacity - The amount of time…
Basically from a “quality triangle” perspective – execs can control costs or time, but holding the line on a minimum quality bar is essentially a core piece of my job, and nobody wins when you try to promise impossible combinations of scope/quality/dates.
In an ideal world, org leaders define goals and teams figure out what to do. But top down asks happen. How I decide whether to push back on top down asks as an EM: It’s fine to be asked for a date or a scope (not both) Never ship something likely to cause an incident
Reread The Hobbit for the first time in a few years. It’s a charming tale – and a good reminder that the movies were a complete misinterpretation of the tale – this is a much more innocent story than LOTR.
The idea that things become hits mostly due to a small number of large audiences rather than point to point viral sharing seems intuitively correct to me: www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/viralit… Or at least the large audiences “seed” the viral behavior