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The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re copyi... See more

Another observation I’ve made is that starting with a performant core can ultimately drastically simplify the architecture of a software project, relative to a given level of functionality.

Backpressure is the signaling of failure from a serving system to the requesting system and how the requesting system handles those failures to prevent overloading itself and the serving system. Designing for backpressure means bounding resource use during times of overload and times of system failure. This is one of the basic building blocks of cr... See more

So no, I’m not required to be able to lift objects weighing up to fifty pounds. I traded that for the opportunity to trim Satan’s pubic hair while he dines out of my open skull so a few bits of the internet will continue to work for a few more days.

It is all love with me and this observation and I make it as a card-carrying member of the tribe to which it is directed, but here goes: there may be no cohort of professionals less qualified to assess barely-tangible socio-psychological attributes like “passion” and “confidence” than the modern software nerd.

Let me offer another generalization: any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it

If you find yourself in this situation, resist being driven by sunk costs. When dealing with the wrong abstraction, the fastest way forward is back . Do the following:

1. Re-introduce duplication by inlining the abstracted code back into every caller.


2. Within each caller, use the parameters being passed to determine the subset of the inlined code that th

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We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?

The computer scientist François Chollet has proposed the following distinction: skill is how well you perform at a task, while intelligence is how efficiently you gain new skills.