Interesting how little has changed since this summary of AI use from roughly a year ago.
I feel this is an insightful look at the analysis gets done:
Finally, in most workplaces, incentive structures don’t exist for people to (a) reduce their workloads to such an extent that their role becomes vulnerable or (b) voluntarily accept more responsibility without also taking on more pay.
This day-2 operations post is a bit marketing heavy, but these are good suggestions:
Tip 1: Small Changes are the Best Changes Tip 2: Build, Then Follow, a Consistent Roll Out Sequence Tip 3: Ensure You Have One (Or Several) Canary Nodes Tip 5: Get Smarter About Configuration Management
Interesting insights into product engineering at Posthog. I liked:
why engineers are usually right – is they have the deepest understanding of what can be built. They understand the technical constraints, see patterns across features, and know exactly how to solve a problem.
And:
The PM, engineers and exec team then meet to discuss questions like: Are our 10 biggest customers happy users of the product? Do high ICP and non-ICP customers use the product differently? Why was churn high last month? Can we identify any reasons? Can we find leading indicators that predict long-term product usage? (e.g. Facebook’s 7 friends in 10 days) Where in the onboarding funnel do new users struggle?
I’m definitely happier being out of product, but posts like this remind me of the times when it worked well.
Interesting details on what Claude’s Plan Mode actually is.
An introduction to how Jubilant was designed by my manager, Ben Hoyt. I really like this approach, and copied it quite closely into another work project (ops.hookcmds).
A set of excellent questions at the end of this Python to JavaScript conversion by Simon Willison:
Does this library represent a legal violation of copyright of either the Rust library or the Python one? Even if this is legal, is it ethical to build a library in this way? Does this format of development hurt the open source ecosystem? Is it responsible to publish software libraries built in this way? How much better would this library be if an expert team hand crafted it over the course of several months?
Obviously, a lawyer (or court) needs to answer the first one (and potentially it differs by country). I don’t know what my answers to the other four are.
I’m also doing one of these conversions at the moment (with Claude Code), but it’s of a tool I maintain (for work) and not intended for outside use, so simpler.
Rules for modern life, that I entirely agree with (although tipping best practice varies by country). Two notes:
3/ Being good with names is a question of effort.
I’m sure there is some truth to this, but I do think some people are naturally good at this and others (like me) are not. I’d replace this with “Be tolerant if someone messes up or forgets your name”.
24/ Salary and rent are private matters (but be assured that most people feel one is too low and the other too high).
I think this is true, but I also feel society would be better if it was not.
Interesting reflections on life last year from Armin Ronacher.
I love “dare to commit”:
Life isn’t about sampling everything; it’s about making deliberate choices and committing to the ones that matter. You don’t need to date twenty people to find the right partner, nor do you need a network of hundred acquaintances to succeed. Similarly, you don’t need to work at ten different companies to build a meaningful career.
And on children:
You grow above yourself when all the sudden become fully responsible for another human being and you can’t opt out of it. It also invites you to reflect on yourself more and how you came to be the person that you are. I also don’t think it makes you any less ambitious, but it changes how you define success for yourself.
And his final note:
Whatever your journey may look like, I hope you find joy, purpose, and the courage to commit fully to it
A great summary of tips for writing a link blog from Simon Willison. I’m continually trying to move closer to his practice (other than the technology - I’m happy not running that myself, and would switch out my other site from WordPress before changing this away from micro.blog).
I’ve been remote working for 20 years (!) now, for companies that have had a range of approaches. Based on this post from Linear, they’re doing it pretty well. A lot (not the “how we work” section) is pretty similar to Canonical, who also have it mostly right (and at 10x the scale).
Good advice for reviewing documents.
Regarding this final aside:
II think the user experience around commenting on documents is fundamentally wrong in most document editors. … Ultimately, you want to collect all your comments into a bundle, then review that bundle for consistency and duplicates, and then submit that bundle as commentary, but editors don’t support that flow particularly well.
I’ve made this argument (and others!) against using Google Docs for this type of document and review before and have consistently lost the argument. What does have this flow? GitHub pull requests.
The subscription technology isn’t the issue here. The defining characteristic of email is that it’s open: anyone can add to your inbox if they have your address. With RSS, I have to explicitly allow new entries into my reader (a feed at a time). You can do that with email too: just add the sender to an allow list, and have that only work if the sender is verified (DMARC). Unfortunately, email client development stagnated and we don’t have good tooling for this.
RSS reader somewhat stagnated too, but seems to attract more indy love than email client development. Or more successful development, anyway.
(For what it’s worth, I do subscribe to his blog via RSS. My recommendation is NetNewsWire.)
Excellent, very detailed (slightly repetitive), write up of the punycode algorithm and why it is designed the way it is, including a nice step-by-step visualiser with examples.
Info on the CanadaSpends site - I’m not sure if government spending data is in the Aotearoa Data Explorer, but it would be nice if it was (it doesn’t seem to be in the list).
I wonder if ‘boring’ tech like sqlite with ‘simple’ tools like datasette would work better than whatever it is that ADE is using. I do like that stats.govt.nz offers CSV and other data types as well as the explorer, and offers and API.
A nice dive into different ways of checking if a vowel is in a string. Make sure to read to the very end for the best answers.
I would add to this: keep files small where possible. The agents won’t load above a certain size, and it’s simpler to have well defined files than for the agent to try to search through and file relevant parts.
I think sometimes people lose the scale of just how big a 10x improvement is. 10x is the difference between your mini-van and a record setting supersonic land jet. Imagine trying to drive your 10 minute commute down your city streets in a car that goes 600mph. Will you get to the other side of town in one tenth the time? No, because even a single 60 second stoplight will eat up your entire time budget. F1 cars slow down to mini-van speeds in basic turns. It turns out that most of any activity is not spent going at top speed.
This is why I’m still tepid on agentic pull requests. In my experience, agents still need a human in the loop to validate changes & unblock errors. PRs lengthen that loop, which slows you down (you now must check out a branch & build it to validate any changes).
Also my experience.