Travelling to work ‘is work’, European court rules - BBC News (Sep. 2015) Time spent travelling to and from first and last appointments by workers without a fixed office should be regarded as working time, the European Court of Justice has ruled. “Employers may have to organise work schedules to ensure workers’ first and last appointments are close to their homes,” he added. [BBC legal correspondent Clive Coleman]
Work Is Work | codahale.com (Jan. 2020) The Ceiling Is Low The work capacity of an organization scales, at most, linearly as new members are added. … The ceaseless pursuit of force multipliers is the only possible route to superlinear productivity improvements as an organization grows. The Floor Is Lava Contention costs grow superlinearly as new members are added. … Staffing highly sequential efforts as if they were entirely parallel leads to catastrophe....
Not Just Scale - Marc’s Blog One Machine Is All You Need? … It’s Not Just Scale Availability. … Durability. … Utilization. … Latency. … Specialization. … Isolation. … Changes. … … Simplicity is a System Property … Scaling Organizations Just like computer systems, organizations scale by avoiding coordination. The more the organization needs different pieces to coordinate with one another to work, the less it is going to be able to grow....
We tend to regret things we didn’t do over things we did do. — Several different authors in Wisdom Trove Ask “What if?” and follow through…
“Little Billy Ignore Instructions” by Philippe Schrettenbrunner (LinkedIn) Remember Little Bobby Tables? I think he has a sibling. Just some iPad doodles. Stay safe, sanitize all inputs. (Original xkcd comic: Exploits of a Mom) [aka “Little Bobby Tables”] School: Hi, this is your son’s school. We’re having some computer trouble. Parent: Oh dear - did he break something? School: In a way…. Did you really name your son “William Ignore All Previous Instructions....
How to write a cold email Here are a few things I’ve learned about powerful/wealthy/interesting people. This is almost universally true. They read their own email. Moreover, they’re good at responding to email. They’re very, very curious people. They have very little time. Anything with friction gets sorted into a “later” bucket. The perfect cold email is Short and grabs attention. Super clear on who you are. Value prop for the receiver....
Essays on programming I think about a lot | benkuhn.net Every so often I read an essay that I end up thinking about, and citing in conversation, over and over again. Here’s my index of all the ones of those I can remember! Nelson Elhage, Computers can be understood Dan McKinley, Choose Boring Technology Sandy Metz, The Wrong Abstraction Patrick McKenzie, Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names Thomas Ptacek, The Hiring Post...
How LLMs Work, Explained Without Math - miguelgrinberg.com In this article, I’m going to attempt to explain in simple terms and without using advanced math how generative text models work, to help you think about them as computer algorithms and not as magic.
GitHub - azet/community_bash_style_guide: Community Bash Style Guide: writing useful and modern bash scripts, seriously. When to use bash and when to avoid bash it’s rather simple: does it need to glue userland utilities together? use bash. does it need to do complex tasks (e.g. database queries)? use something else. Why? … It consumes a lot of time and is often very difficult to debug in comparison to dynamic programming languages such as python, ruby or even perl....
Rule of Silence definition by The Linux Information Project The rule of silence, also referred to as the silence is golden rule, is an important part of the Unix philosophy that states that when a program has nothing surprising, interesting or useful to say, it should say nothing. It means that well-behaved programs should treat their users’ attention and concentration as being valuable and thus perform their tasks as unobtrusively as possible....