Substrate

With his students, he was able to write a program capable of typesetting the entire 700-page revised volume of his book by 1978. The program, called TeX, revolutionized how scientific papers are formatted and printed. It’s also one of the oldest OSS projects still in use. The disconnect between technical or scientific and nontechnical authors is also fundamental to understanding TeX’s mainstream obscurity: In nontechnical publishing, typesetting is usually not essential for conveying the author’s intent. Typesetting is considered ornamental; authors of popular material are content to send a Word document to their publisher and let professionals do the rest. Technical authors, on the other hand, need to convey their meaning precisely through glyphs, sizes, and placement. TeX lets them do that, as well as exchange their documents in a widely understood format.

Antarctica has become one of the most widely cited examples of how law enforcement might operate on other worlds ​ Throughout history, frontiers have been where we experiment with innovative societal arrangements, but they are also where we most faithfully reproduce the most current version of our culture, unfettered by the historical customs that temper it back home. ​ but it will also feel like where we came from.

The real benefit of doing this is it gives your team a chance to learn something. It gives anyone on your team who’s reviewing the code a chance to learn about the issue you faced, how you figured it out, and how you implemented the feature or bugfix. Yes, all of that is in the code itself, but here you’ve just provided a natural language paragraph explaining it. You’ve now created a little artifact the team can refer to. In a good description, you need to tell the reviewer: What the pull request does. How to test it. Any notes or caveats.

We can be all of these things as we grow into adulthood, but I experienced them so much differently as a father, watching my girls live them. ​ I'm not sure how thinking about this distinction will affect future me. I hope that it will help me to appreciate everyone in my life, especially my daughters and my wife, a bit more for who they are and who they have been. Maybe it will even help me be more generous to 2019 me.

How to subscribe and observe on different threads

Everything is different now, but I am still at my desk. Except with the websites. They separate themselves from the others, because I don’t feel much better at making them after 20 years. My knowledge and skills develop a bit, then things change, and half of what I know becomes dead weight. This hardly happens with any of the other work I do. ​ I don’t bring this up to imply that the young are dumb or that the inexperienced are inept—of course they’re not. But remember: if you stick around in the industry long enough, you’ll get to feel all three situations. ​ Experience, on the other hand, creates two distinct struggles: the first is to identify and unlearn what is no longer necessary (that’s work, too). The second is to remain open-minded, patient, and willing to engage with what’s new, even if it resembles a new take on something you decided against a long time ago. ​ This situation is annoying to me, because my thoughts turn to that young designer I mentioned at the start of my talk. How many opportunities did I have to reproduce what I saw by having legible examples in front of me? And how detrimental is it to have that kind of information obfuscated for her? Before, the websites could explain themselves; now, someone needs to walk you through it.

This tide of packages is unlikely to recede. ​ If the arrival of automated delivery robots could lower the effort to sell or return goods to the minimal amount it now takes to buy them, users might exchange products through a new kind of logistical network that would make the process of acquiring and trading physical objects as frictionless as that of downloading and deleting digital files. Users might trade products among themselves through new kinds of logistical networks — a kind of peer-to-peer sharing for physical objects. ​ Minor physical annoyances that might have once subtly discouraged excess spending — such as the burden of carrying multiple items through stores — have been replaced with an interface that feels the same regardless of the quantities you buy.

Facebook’s deflection of responsibility is merely the latest instance common line of argument that social media companies like Facebook put forward is that their work exists on a different plane of reality. The digital realm ties into the analog, but the relationship is not a two-way street. Rather, they claim, it is a set of two one-way streets. One of these streets is from computers to the real world, where only the good stuff travels, enabling free speech, liberating the oppressed, democratizing the internet. The bad stuff, however, only goes the other way, where bad individuals misuse and abuse internet platforms. In other words, Facebook argues the good things happen on Facebook, but the bad things happen to Facebook. ​ Most other fields of engineering, like civil engineering, already have this built into their culture, but software engineering is lagging behind. Tech employees need to realize that their responsibility doesn’t end at the last line of code — that’s just where it starts.

There are a lot of obvious missing features from workplace tools to avoid bothering people when they're not online. Why can't I send calendar invites, assign tasks and send emails at any hour, but change recipient notifications or receipt to avoid interrupting off hrs? This is in line with the internet's idea that it's up to every individual to "protect" themselves with their own filters and settings I don't believe full responsibility should be on the receiving end. I wish our tools gave responsibility to senders for how they communicate. I work weird hours. We have team members in different time zones. My productivity is inhibited when I can't do anything that would notify my team. I find myself prepping tasks and setting calendar holds, alongside a list of who I need to add to things at a normal hr. I'm not even remotely surprised that considerate communication use cases haven't been accounted for. The people building these tools have been rewarded for "working so hard" – evidenced by cal invites and PRs submitted over the weekend. Doing work when it's productive for you is good. But if there's a consequence of negatively impacting another teammate's productivity then where does the team net out? I'd like to see tools be more thoughtful about that please.

Online writing is too didactic. Would like to recapture the feeling that not everything I read has to explicitly deliver information - feels like that's more frequently the case with stuff I've found offline My hunch is that digital writing evolves to be more responsive to measurable engagement, so there's an ever-present incentive to optimize what's written for utility (why internet content also gravitates toward self-helpyness)

please make more creative tools that 1) are not controlled by a publicly traded entity, 2) can be owned and used indefinitely instead of rented. artists having to rent their tools concentrates capital and ensures only certain people can create, concentrating *cultural* capital.

Sunday nights are all these confrontations, these dug-out trenches, and Sunday nights are prestige television. ​ and we watched the second season once a week every Sunday night, along with the rest of the world, unable to access the relief of that long lightless escape, but showing up every Sunday for a fractional hit of it, to sniff at the memory of the one time it had worked. ​ Game of Thrones has been a placeholder, an empty center. Its point has been to talk about it, to feel about it, to focus a Sunday around it. The noise and ritual around the show has been large enough that it was not necessary for the show to be good, and hardly necessary for it to exist at all.

You might suppose a great mathematician such as Kolmogorov would be writing about some very complicated piece of mathematics, but his subject was the humble equals sign: what made it a good piece of notation, and what its deficiencies were. ​ even great mathematicians – perhaps, especially, great mathematicians – thought it worth their time to engage in such deepening. ​ I’m still developing the heuristic, and my articulation will therefore be somewhat stumbling. ​ Every piece should become a comfortable part of your mental furniture, ideally something you start to really feel. That means understanding every idea in multiple ways, ​ People inexperienced at mathematics sometimes memorize proofs as linear lists of statements. A more useful way is to think of proofs is as interconnected networks of simple observations. ​ For someone who has done a lot of linear algebra these are very natural observations to make, and questions to ask. But I’m not sure they would be so natural for everyone. The ability to ask the “right” questions – insight-generating questions – is a limiting part of this whole process, and requires some experience. ​ Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will. ​ So, my informal pop-psychology explanation is that when I’m doing mathematics really well, in the deeply internalized state I described earlier, I’m mostly using such higher-level chunks, and that’s why it no longer seems symbolic or verbal or even visual. I’m not entirely conscious of what’s going on – it’s more a sense of just playing around a lot with the various objects, trying things out, trying to find unexpected connections. But, presumably, what’s underlying the process is these chunked patterns.

forget running for office if youve ever tweeted about, like, anything. ​ I cant remember at what point my posts started becoming a liability rather than a rich text of my life.

Even as we dream of abandoning social media, we search for ways to redeem it. ​ and it’s that quest for large-scale value extraction, they argue, that leads directly to the crises of compromised privacy and engineered addictiveness with which we’re currently grappling. ​ Jaron Lanier has called “multiple-choice identities.” According to this way of thinking, sites like Facebook and Instagram encourage conformism because it makes your data easier to process and monetize. This creates the exhausting sense that you’re a worker in a data factory rather than a three-dimensional individual trying to express yourself and connect with other real people in an organic way online. ​ free-form energy reminiscent of the Internet’s early days. ​ a human-scale environment ​ The Internet may work better when it’s spread out, as originally designed. ​ For the exhausted majority of social-media users, however, the appeal of the proverbial quiet bench might outweigh the lure of a better Facebook.

It was always obvious that trying to see without being seen — to know without being known — was a dead end. Through a screen, personal information is cheap, and unseen seeing is the default. My finger hovers over the icon before I decide that saying “awww,” to myself, alone in my office, seems least likely to cause any unanticipated harm. traded in a problematic status as unpaid content creators for another troublesome status as ambivalent consumers.

I never thought this waning of curiosity would happen to me, but now that is another lost illusion from youth. ​ But it seems one of the main effects of abundance is to shift the frame of reference to larger units, from songs and albums to artists and genres. ​ But rather than be taken with the ephemeral singularity of a performance (these can be instigated on demand with a generative AI), we can consume the model’s learning process as the composition, and not the particular sounds it makes at any given time. It could be like listening to birdsong that becomes progressively more complex and interpretable. Its emerging capabilities are more interesting as a trajectory, much in the same way our own emerging tastes can be to ourselves. ​ she laments how many AI music projects attempt to re-create already existing styles: “It gets us in kind of a feedback loop culturally which does not move us forward,” she says. “It doesn’t respond to what’s happening now and music should be responsive to the politic and the material world around it.” ​ This feels like a way of taming the threat of abundance, not by rejecting it exactly but by converting it into a set of rules. It is a way to navigate the infinite without sailing over the edge.

A+ thread IMO private spaces feel more conducive to conversations that get closer to the truth, allowing for misunderstandings & developing ideas. No matter how real you think you are or you try to be, we are all engaging in some kind of performance for a larger crowd on here. The internet is less fun when people move from public to private thinking. Whether due to change of job, status, or competitive landscape, it's noticeable. Have had to do this for certain areas & it feels limiting at times, & mostly leads to less discourse/diversity of thought. The counterpoint is that when you find your braintrust, you can let things fly at a faster pace and with higher variance on quality and reasoned judgment. This leads to *different* discourse but in reality, personally building a diverse braintrust is harder than we like to admit Not to go on an "intellectual dark web"-toned tangent but final point: I sometimes worry that the attractiveness of public thinking that seemed to dominate for past 7-10 years has eroded recently because of 2 core forces that create a cycle of withdrawal or dilution of thought. 1) Widespread hate on social media today across all groups and how it's nearly impossible to make a fringe point without it being hated on. And related, our industry deals with confrontation *horribly*, specifically in the co-opetition world of VC. 2a) A widespread exhaustion & recognition of what is the over-intellectualization of thought & simple content. This leads to a ton of dilution in our feeds filled with abstract tweets, 9 min reads that should be 2, historical allegories for things happening in 2019, & book thread 2 b) Further explained: Many now take simple concepts, abstract them away to much more complex language/narrative as they recognize the arbitrage in doing so due to the value it brings to personal brand (IMO this is 90% of people) 2 c) OR they are so wrapped up in their own rhetoric they think communicating this way is dominant. In this case, I think we can cycle back to the difficulty of building a personal braintrust that is diverse and truly challenging.

the point of algorithmically sorted feeds is to re-create the experience of channel flipping; to institute the logic of TV consumption to phones and other screens algorithmic feeds seek to replace the desire to experience something specific (that you search for) with a desire for a rhythm of flipping/scrolling itself this rewards the consumer for exercising choice, but choice is no longer selecting something they like but a matter of saying “nope“ over and over again without settling on anything it’s a kind negative consumer sovereignty, in which we avoid ever being disappointed by what we’ve chosen, because we just choose “something else” over and over again, as much as we need to

United's latest experiment with the boarding procedure could make things better—but it's no revolution.

Trying to come up with a grand theory about what makes a good pet name. What are your favorites? (Recently, I met a Pomeranian named Potato and it was ideal for reasons I can't fully identify.)— Rowan Hisayo Buchanan (@RowanHLB) May 16, 2019

Learning starts with metacognition, and in order to metacognify (it’s a word) well, your students need you to be transparent in your pedagogical choices. ​ Be honest with yourself about how much time you spend working and how much time you need to work.

No one is ridiculing tech startups for their insincerity. Their honest desire to change the world (in awful ways) is universally acknowledged. Moreover, for a powerful person to call journalists cynical is a pretty classless thing to do in 2019. People are getting killed. Paul Graham's pattern of impugning the motives of anyone who disagrees with him is really starting to piss me off. Lastly I would say to any tech person trying to change the world—we already changed it quite a bit. Maybe take your foot off the gas and look around first. The tech startups that came up in the 1990s and 2000s had really excellent intentions and pure motives. It's not enough.

“Don’t confuse motion with progress” is my favorite business aphorism. It’s so easy to fill time and feel productive. It’s not merely about being “busy” in the individual sense. It’s terrifyingly simple to have, say, 100 people all with specific titles, showing up to the office, doing “productive” stuff with set goals, and ultimately be doing the wrong thing as a collective. There really isn’t a happy ending to this. You have to be paranoid all of the time, no matter how large or small your company is. And, sometimes the ability to see what’s truly important is out of sight. I’m sure there were ants building a hill somewhere on the Titanic.

Buttondown doesn’t have a strict design system and as the surface area of the application increases, UI drift becomes more and more of an issue. but “hope someone with influence likes the product” isn’t a sustainable way of growing. (Knowing me, I’m not going to do this. But maybe blogging about it will push me in the right direction.)

The leadership track shows up so that communication and decisions can be sensibly organized. ​ In Toxic Title Douchebag World, titles are designed to document the value of an individual sans proof. ​ A title has no business attempting to capture the seemingly infinite ways by which individuals evolve. ​ To allow leadership to bucket individuals into convenient chunks so they can award compensation and measure seniority while also serving as labels that are somehow expected to give us an idea about expected ability. This is an impossibly tall order and at the root of title toxicity. ​ the reality is that you are a collection of skills of varying ability. ​ Titles, I believe, are an artifact of the same age that gave us business cards and resumes. They came from a time when information was scarce. When there was no other way to discover who you were other than what you shared via a resume. Where the title of Senior Software Engineer was intended to define your entire career to date.

That thought — Do I like who I am while I’m doing this? — has visited me a few times a year ever since, and I’m finally seeing how crucial a question it is. ​ Years can pass before you notice something’s wrong ​ This deficit only intensifies the need for comfort and gratification, and you gravitate towards more of it, when what you really need is more of the alternative. ​ We all have those moments where we feel like we’ve gotten away from our best selves. We might not know what’s gone wrong, but it’s clear something’s gone off, and we know we have to step back and reassess what’s important. ​ Self-esteem seems inextricably linked to the specific feelings of identity we get from the activities that make up our days. ​ Often, the healthy, fulfilling things we’ve drifted away from are things whose significance probably wouldn’t occur to us, until we start doing them again and see how much they contributed to our well-being ​ Compared to admonishing yourself to smarten up or try harder, this is like navigating life with a map and compass, rather than simply moving toward whatever terrain looks most inviting from where you are.

Managers should support 6-8 engineers. ​ Tech Lead Managers (TLMs). Managers supporting less than four engineers tend to function as TLMs, taking on a share of design and implementation work. For some folks this role can uniquely leverage their strengths, but it's a role with limited career opportunities. To progress as a manager, they'll want more time to focus developing their management skills. Alternatively to progress towards staff engineering roles, they'll find it difficult to spend enough time in the technical details. ​ Most folks find being oncall for components they're unfamiliar with to be disproportionately stressful. ​ An important property of teams is that they abstract the complexities of the individuals that compose them. ​ and avoid creating a two-tiered class system of innovators and maintainers.

As I do less development, I am thinking more as stakeholder and less as an engineer. ​ I also pay special attention to more introvert people and encourage them to share their opinion on the subject. ​ I am a believer that a great manager is the one that, if absent, no one will notice, because they have created such an environment where everyone can do a great job without being blocked by them. ​ I now tend to be careful when I ask something, by making sure the person understands the why.