cityhash64

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.

What sets distributed systems engineering apart is the probability of failure and, worse, the probability of partial failure. If a well-formed mutex unlock fails with an error, we can assume the process is unstable and crash it. But the failure of a distributed mutex’s unlock must be built into the lock protocol.

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.

I have lured my friends into some extraordinary picnics, for I hold with the French that to eat out of doors in congenial surroundings is sensible. In Afghanistan we ate high on a hill outside Kabul and watched as tribesmen moved in to attack the city; at Edfu along the Nile we spread our blankets inside that most serene of Egypt's temples; in Bali... See more

How to be a -10x Engineer

+10x engineers may be mythical, but -10x engineers exist.

To become a -10x engineer, simply waste 400 engineering hours per week. Combine the following strategies:

Nullify the output of 10 engineers.

Change requirements as far into development as possible. To avoid blame, obfuscate requirements from the start.

Create 400 hour... See more

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

For the last several years, work-sample were our most important hiring decision factor.

We relied on them almost completely, and in doing so, we multiplied the size of our team and retained every single person we hired

fastly was not a culture fit for me and it was dimming my shine