dalanmendonca

[dalanmendonca]

Rare candid blog post going against common advice/social norms. And to be fair, Halle stopped when her returns got crushed :) So another good example of survivorship bias here.

[dalanmendonca]

Loved this post by Tim O'Reilly and hard agree.

AI will not lead to programmer extinction but reinvention. Seems obvious when you place it in historical context, programming was once punch cards! People who think AI will automate everything forget that someone has to tell the AI what to automate!

Lot of invention to do. Exciting times.

[dalanmendonca]

"None of the ways by which we’re taught to make sense of the world still live up to their billing. The grand liberal faith in a future of limitless betterment, in which economic abundance and moral improvement would someday turn the world into Utopia, has shattered on the rocks of reality. Its equivalent on the other end of the spectrum, the conservative faith in the enduring wisdom of traditional social arrangements, was quietly strangled by its supposed friends a long time ago, and functions now the way Lenin’s corpse functioned in the late and unlamented Soviet Union, as the mummified icon of an ideology long since replaced by straightforward kleptocratic mania. Neither liberalism as currently practiced, nor conservatism as currently practiced, have answers for the spiraling questions of the present day. Neither, for that matter, do their self-consciously avant-garde offshoots, social-justice faux-liberalism or alt-right pseudoconservatism; nor does what passes for a moderate stance these days, which usually amounts to blind commitment to business as usual at a time when business as usual has definitively passed its pull date."

Source: https://www.ecosophia.net/babbitt-fallacy-ways-lose/

[dalanmendonca]

[dalanmendonca]

Good comment, LLMs are a useful for a lot of things; but they are not search engines++ aka knowledge oracles yet.

[dalanmendonca]

Hat's off to the folks at 37 Signals. They just published Writebook - a free self-hostable and (quite importantly) elegant way to publish books online.

Be it HEY (their take on email) or Campfire (their take on office messaging), I think they are masters at making products.

Both the products above were in decently mature categories. They've addressed meaningful problems and applied creativity to come up with novel solutions. And they've been doing this for decades!

And they're kings at marketing too! 🫡

"Writebook is free for real. It’s our way to give back and encourage people to publish independently on the web."

I think this is very thoughtful. As people grew reliant on services, we forgot about the fundamental property of the internet that everyone with an IP address is equal and you can and should host your own stuff.

Another one to my list of images to host!

[dalanmendonca]

The tech industry is in a rough spot. Continuous layoffs and increasing data pointing to a decrease in salaries. New grads are struggling to get jobs. The layoffs mean even there is an oversupply of candidates at all levels. So, getting hired is a slog of sending hundreds of applications. Multiple US based firms have decided to move jobs to cheaper locations. The Technology industry remained a bright spot in a topsy turvy post Covid world. But looks like it's time for correction is here too.

Original post

[dalanmendonca]

Felt therapeutic reading this

[dalanmendonca]

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's wrote a post on "How I Write".

"That was the period when I very badly wanted to satisfy my failed childhood dream to produce literature"

We have one thing in common, or rather had; since Taleb is a published author!

"Predictably, I refused to be edited, feeling that it disrupts the inner harmony of the text; the manuscript showed a fiercely stubborn personality, which editors easily confirmed upon meeting its author."

Taleb's idiosyncracy defines his work and is to be cherished.

[dalanmendonca]

I think Indi hits the nail on the head here. The evolution of internet video has just been a big dance to reinvent cable. Minor counterpoint being Internet video platform (Youtube, TikTok, Reels, etc.) which are genuinely a new thing. Apart from Youtube none of these platforms give creators a good revenue share to live.

And the overarching point about creating a new model based on sharing and torrents stands strong. The existing media industry largely co-opted the new technology.

The dust never really settles and maybe we'll genuinely have shared media in the future.

🏴‍☠️

[dalanmendonca]

Fast Crimes at Lambda School (sandofsky.com)

Hat tip to Ben Sandofsky for this post

[dalanmendonca]

This is a great article on the state of tech journalism and an explainer why we get bad things like clickbait. It even offers solutions! I would love if we awarded people for best technology communication artifacts like blogs, video, interactive games, etc. I would catch-up on the best ones during the Christmas holidays :D

[dalanmendonca]

Back here after 10 years or so? I think the last time I installed Linux on a personal machine was when I had to rescue a Windows laptop that failed to boot in 2013/2014.

[dalanmendonca]

It's been awhile since I read a book without an ISBN. This one was damn funny and really good!

[dalanmendonca]

Yesterday I was on I was live on the radio with Kalyan Kattamuri from Virijallu. I was promoting BITSync - our annual conference in the Bay Area. First time being a live caller!

[dalanmendonca]

Social resets and friend formation

It's February, it's raining in San Francisco and I'm thinking about friend circles.

When a person migrates, their social context doesn't migrate with them. And without your social context you are a different person.

I think it's taken me a while to feel less like a fish out of water and feel comfortable in my own skin. I'm not bothered too much anymore when someone doesn't understand my accent. I'm not worried if I am fitting in or looking different when I walk down the street. I am overall much less self-conscious and much more self-confident.

I feel like moving to the US made me introverted again. Why again? Because I used to be ultra introverted and shy in college. That changed over the course of my first job; and a few years later I had learned enough social skills to be indistinguishable from normal. That comfort evaporated when I moved to the US. I don't know if it was the new context, different accents or some sort of immigrant anxiety; I was initially very shy at the office cafeteria and wasn't comfortable enough to sit with strangers or strike up conversations. Would often eat alone and feel bad about it. Slowly I started to have meals with a few folks, built up courage to chat up strangers, and now I have some sort of a social circle in the office. It took time. No lesson here except that an uprooted tree needs time to grow roots again. But I think my ramp up from introvert to normal person is going faster here, given the skills I built up earlier.

Semi-relatedly, there's this sad topic of new friend formation dropping off drastically in your 30s. But I think most of us frame the issue incorrectly. We don't stop forming friends, we stop spending time in shared activities where we can form friends.

In life until our 20s, most of our friends came from school, sports, clubs, the locality, etc. and we formed friends because we just went along and did stuff with random strangers for hours on end. That I feel is the clue to friend formation. I bet anyone putting themselves in places where they repeatedly interact with a fixed set of folks is likely to find friends and community through it.

The change in our 30s is mix of:

Genuinely having less time (and energy)

Being comfortable being alone

Being less open minded about people

You can't counter this with a one-off trip or a networking events; unless you're really lucky! These encounters tend to be so brief that you're unlikely to get the superficial parts of a person and see their goodness in action. Playing a sport with consistent group of people, joining a scene (music, comedy, theatre), participating in a religious community, volunteering, etc. seem like activities that can counter this.

I think the most shameless hack you can do is co-opt capitalism into your service. I was pleasantly surprised when I was running a "side-hustle" and ended up becoming friends with my co-founders and some customers. Some really good conversations I've had are from a podcast that me and some friends are trying to start. Their economic impact isn't much, but I had a lot of fun! Go forth and conquer lonesomeness with shared activities!

[dalanmendonca]

Supplying our light

"For any given topic, there is a gap between the supply of what we actually know and the demand for what we feel we need to know. Everything that fills this gap is bullshit" For the longest time, humanity didn't have any answers to some big questions - why are we here, what should we do with our lives, how do we know what is right and wrong? Back then, philosophy was science was mostly religion. In hindsight we know that we desperately felt the need for some answers, so we made them up. We made frameworks centered around omnipotent omniscient beings who had laid down rules for us. These frameworks structured our lives and explained the world to us. Our desire to meet these heavenly beings eventually led to study the skies and jump into outer space where we found ... nothing. This has troubled many. Some want to go back to the comfort of made-up answers, some want to pretend science has all the answers. Neither is a sensible path. No matter how hard you pray, serious sicknesses will be better cured with a doctor's visit. And no matter how much you read about cognitive biases; it won't heal your from feeling envious about your neighbour. “The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with this indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”

Well modern problems need modern solutions. It's starts with understanding your values. It starts using our knowledge to set some sensible rules of co-operation.

When I saw the Prisoner's Dilemma video from Veritasium and saw the qualities of successful algorithms, it felt like receiving the Ten Commandments. Most delightful was how well these rules gel with human intuition. Mature individuals strive to be nice and forgiving to strangers. And when we experience behaviour we don't like. We usually avoid the person, or (ideally) make our needs clear and retaliate. Only immature individuals start fights or hold grudges - but everyone has their moment of weakness! He who hasn't felt the need to take an eye for an eye may raise their hand🤚

The meta-point here is we didn't need to make up this "answer". We as a species have gained enough knowledge to discover this truth about co-operation. So, we are on a quest to keep asking questions and trying our best to discover, not make up answers. It's a long quest and will need patience. Of course, then comes the hard part of respecting and acting in accordance with the wisdom of the answers. A whole different ball game.