One of the most thoughtful pieces I’ve read about looking forward and the changes coming from AI. Treybig doesn’t focus on societal changes, but changes to the production of software systems themselves. Programming languages, development frameworks, and libraries are tools built to make it easier for humans to read and write code. Soon we’ll start seeing new ideas popping up here to make it easier for LLMs to read and write code, too.
A 14 line python script with 0 parameters that can outperform a bunch of the deep transformer-based LLM models everyone is so crazy about.
A post pointing out problems with one of the most popular frameworks in AI-land these days, and the perils of picking the wrong abstraction.
In this piece, Albert explains an unresolved with smart contracts. He asks, “will a new smart contract cause any existing smart contract to misbehave?” This is a problem I hadn’t thought about until now, and it made me wonder, what are some blockchain projects trying to solve for this?
A play on the usual “free as in beer” of open source software, denouncing the tragedy of the commons implied by the organization system as it is today. “Let’s own up to the absurdity of talking about a personal freedom that depends mainly on hidden people working for free.”
I’ve been interviewing a lot of people, and a few weeks ago I was asked to cover architecture for the first time. I had never built a distributed system until I started working at Apple. Sure, I’d used Heroku with a Redis instance and a Postgres DB, but all of that was totally abstracted away from me. Reading this was an eye-opener as to how much I’ve learned in the past few years, and it made me reflect on some of the interviews I had while switching teams - even two years ago I already felt skilled at systems design, and that experience is rare. Working at a place like Apple can really distort your perception of what’s normal.
This isn’t a link to a single article, but to 24. Through this advent calendar, these three decided to tell the stories of 24 women who, as they explain, “made today’s computing industry as amazing as it is.” The whole set is awesome, but I especially enjoyed reading about Kathleen Booth and Wendy Carlos.