SoftBank, Robinhood, and a Margins Singularity. The best pop-finance you’ll read all week imo. This piece attempts to explain what the hell the stock market has been up to during these last few months that’s accessible for an everyman. I recommend it to anyone who’s curious about why everyone is talking about stonks.
Culture
Living in Someone Else’s Portland. I’m obsessed with AHP’s Culture Study , so forgive me if I post about it a lot. But this piece resonated with me because it interviewed actual people in Portland to get their perspective on what’s happening there, which (of course), is much mellower than entertainment media wants us to believe. As a Seattleite who dealt with this same overblown crap when CHOP was happening, this piece feels vindicating.
America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral. Another awesome COVID-19 piece from Ed Yong, this one focuses on the idea of why it’s so hard to feel like you have any stability in US (largely due to systemic gaslight by the institutions meant to protect the US citizens). Good read if you’re feeling helpless and you want to assign a mental model towards the helplessness.
Timeline of low-temperature technology. In a world that seems to be heating up constantly, it’s interesting to reflect on all the various times where humans moved to a place, set up shop to keep things cold, and innovated.
Tech
Incomplete List of Mistakes in the Design of CSS. I’m into language design and it’s cool to see the CSS working group being so transparent in sharing the mistakes that were made when developing the language. CSS is also a very different language than many other programming languages so the fact that many of the mistakes appear syntactic belies the fact that they are often related to the architecture. This list is also interesting to consider if you wanted to work on developing a DSL that transpiles to CSS, for example.
Generative Language Modeling for Automated Theorem Proving. This is a potentially seminal paper from OpenAI that lays the foundation of AI-driven automated theorem proving, which goes a long way towards training AI towards writing software. The ramifications are exciting and terrifying.
How can you not be romantic about programming? I love Thorsten’s writings and this blog is a great koan about how cool programming is. Say what you want about tech as an economic or social system, a lot of us got into the industry because of the pure joy of programming, and this read helped rekindle some of that love.
Lucid Dreaming with Neural Nets. My buddy Jack sent me this one and it’s a great little post that showcases what remains my favorite application of Neural Nets: making trippy art in a programmic way. I’m hopeless at fine motor skills but I love that programs like this help people like me make art with nothing but computers and a little creativity.
How to speed up the rust compiler. The last in a series of 10 posts dating back to 2016 from the principal engineer on the rust compiler. The whole list is worth reading if you’re the type of person who’s curious about compiler technical details and micro-optimizations.
Android build and the journey to the end game. This post is also on micro-optimizations, only this time on a higher-level: it outlines how to speed up an android gradle build. I recommend it to anyone who’s familiar with Android and gradle and is looking to improve the speed of their builds through a few accessible micro-optimizations.
Work
Vocational Awe. This piece discusses capitalism’s impact in devaluing essential services through the les of American libraries. I recommend it if you’re curious about how libraries work in the US and you want to get mad about how little they tend to be valued financially.
Why software projects take longer than you think: a statistical model. I read this a year ago but it came up again in my work Slack today and generated a lot of buzz. I like ErikBern’s writing in general and this is one of the few pieces with a “Why X is Y” title that, instead of being a puff piece, tackles an ambiguous problem (project planning) with statistics. I recommend it for any engineer, but especially an engineering manager who’s looking to improve their metrics around project planning.