August 24–30, 2020

Business

• Capitalists Or Cronyists. If you’re looking for some well-reasoned words on why you think the US is bungling things on a massive scale but are pro-capitalism and you can’t understand why it’s not working in the US, you might find this piece insightful.
• Is WFH affecting the S&P;? I recommend this article if you’re curious about the affect that WFH has on the stock market

Culture

• United States Corona Corps.
• GPT-3, Bloviator: OpenAI’s language generator has no idea what it’s talking about. If you’re super over GPT-3 FUD and want to read an empirical study about GPT-3 that isn’t just full of bombastic takes, this is a good read. Despite the title, it’s not really a hit piece on GPT-3 – but it does lay out some specific edge cases where GPT-3 fails.
• between fked and a hard place. This article interviews a bunch of higher education workers across the country to paint a worrying picture of higher education’s response to COVID-19 in the US. Solid doomscrolling content.
• The Friendship that made Google Huge. The story of Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat at Google. The least gloomy thing I’ve read in the last 5 months.
• Insane Story about the Kidnapping of Sultan bin Turki II.
• Shadows. Chilling piece on the state of political discourse in the US.
• Just quit your job at Facebook already.

Tech

• Formal methods intro. I recommend this for anybody who wants to learn more about Formal Verification but is intimidated by some of the methodologies and jargon (i.e. me).
• But does it help you ship?. Fun read on the actual cost of adding automations.
• Parser Combinators. Technical deep dive on writing a parse combinator in Rust from scratch. I recommend it to anyone who’s into parsers, programming language, Rust, or any combination of the three.
• Reachability Modulo Theories and A Solver for Reachability Modulo Theories.
• Empirical Investigation into Programming Language Syntax. A cool read that attempts to answer the question of “which parts programming language syntax is good and which ones are bad?”
• Why Efficiency is Dangerous and Slowing Down Makes Life Better. Click bait title aside, this post makes a compelling case for being cautious about aiming for efficiency at all costs.

Work

• Don’t Ask to Ask, Just Ask. This piece speaks to my soul: it’s a quick read on a best practice for async communication. Reminds me of nohello.com.
• Questions. Patrick Collison writes some great posts on the big questions he’s chewing on. Inspirational stuff.
• Hack Your Career by Troy Hunt. As an aspiring independent consultant this is a great watch.
• Building a Digital Garden. This post inspired me to set up automated processes to share my learning publicly in a consolidated location.