Substrate

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.

Give yourself permission to feel your feelings, even if they are crappy. Feeling less than positive and then beating yourself up for not being positive enough helps nobody. ​ Accept the gifts, you’re not a drain on anybody, you’re not failing at anything, you’re just sick right now, there are people who love you and value you who are rooting for you to get better and who will gladly take up the work of helping you do that if it means they get more “you” in the world, not just You, The Great Scholar, With So Much Potential but the present Januaryish you who is in a shitty mood, feeling pessimistic about credit scores and summer jobs. Let the people in your life give you what they can, stop telling yourself you don’t deserve it. When you can, you will pay it forward. Right now, eat the love sandwich. ​ Another step: Practice turning “I’m sorry” into “Thank you” as much as you can. “I’m so sorry I’m behind on this conference paper draft” = “Thank you for reading my draft.” “I’m so sorry this is costing you a fortune” = “Thank you for the help.” “I’m so sorry I’m falling behind in my dissertation” = “Thank you for giving me permission to take the time to heal.”

it’s reassuring to know that the folks driving changes in Swift have a solid background in language design, and that they’re thinking about all manner of hard problems in order to make our lives easier. However, it makes me worry that people might be missing out on a truly exciting conversation about what might be coming in a future Swift version. The reason for the label “reverse generics” is that the flow of information is backwards from the existing system. Where right now, the caller binds generic types as it calls a function, the proposal would have the function itself bind the return types and pass concrete values back out.

who did our laundry, cleaned our apartment, paid for our groceries and more.

Laziness is the taboo of our generation. I hope future cultures will look back and see that we were obsessed with working all the time. Anyone who wasn’t working enough felt ashamed. Be more productive! Your worth as a person is only as good as your job title / how much money you make / however you fit in to the production-consumption system. ​ If you think this would be a better way for all of us to live, I think the key to realizing it is finding an alternative value system other than identifying our human worth based on the work we do. This is difficult. Most people have no idea how to understand their place in the world except in relation to their job. Who am I? I’m a role at institution.

He talk about the deaths of his wife and daughter, and how “the best move on the board” is often figuring out how to spend more time with those you love and finding the balance between work and the life you want to live. I’m getting choked up just writing about it.

The long-term effects of GDPR is yet to be seen, but it also did have a slight Balkanizing effect where some US firms like LATimes and Instapaper simply stopping to operate in Europe.

It was entirely possible to go all four days of XOXO without seeing a friend you knew was there, unless you actively sought them out.

Being willing to ignore the weird appearance of AirPods makes a statement: if you’re okay with overlooking how strange-looking they are, then you must be somewhat proud to be wearing them. ​ Commodities like AirPods are social products. AirPods display the social message of wealth because AirPods derive their value from the invisible, social chain of production that’s necessary to make them in the first place. Thus, AirPods strategically glue together an ecosystem of luxury products. They are only so “convenient” because, by eliminating the headphone jack, Apple made the iPhone less user-friendly. ​ AirPods are disposable products that are also impossible to throw away. ​ On a global scale, our economic system is predicated on a disregard for longevity, because it’s more profitable for companies to make products that die than it is to make products that last. ​ They’re physical manifestations of a global economic system that allows some people to buy and easily lose $160 headphones, and leaves other people at risk of death to produce those products. If AirPods are anything, they’re future fossils of capitalism.

I like structure. This is probably an understatement. I love overarching themes, identifying and creating patterns. I look for narratives. I want to know how each piece fits into an arc, has meaning and significance. I use a lot of anaphora in my poetry. ​ I thought a vacation would be the end of my exhaustion. I went to Alaska very tired, and I came back less tired.

Learn about the updated and changes in RxSwift 5, the latest major release of the Reactive Programming library.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0VaIKK2ijM

Personal site for John Feminella: software engineer · enthusiastic technologist · curiosity advocate

There are good mornings, goodnights, how y’all doings, and head nods and smiles and eye contact. There are neighbors who walk out on their front porch to give treats to my dog. There is polite chit-chat even if we don’t know each other. There are waves from car windows. There is communication. ​ That is where my money went. To rent, and to these women. I relied on all of them to keep me feeling safe, attractive, and emotionally healthy. I believed I could not have survived without them. And possibly I was right. ​ I was putting Band-Aids on myself for years. To survive life. I occasionally described myself as “good at New York.” I was able to maintain a life there. But that’s just it. I was only maintaining. ​ But that is what I left behind when I left New York, more than anything else. Eighteen years of building friendships. Those people are irreplaceable in my heart. I was waiting for a friend to join me, but I was content on my own, too. ​ She yelled to me, “Neighbor, come get in the picture, come on now.” She insisted on it. I did not know how to say no to her, and I did not want to. And so, I rose and joined them.