In truth, much of this “are we, aren’t we in a bubble” talk isn’t actually useful if you are operating in our current environment. What is more important to ask is “what should I do?” and “what are some of the things to watch out for?” and “how do I make sense of our current moment?”

What starts out as a response to a comment on the importance of reading business biography transforms into an excellent commentary on why tech is where it currently is, and how the reader can take the time to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors.

If we want to build robust systems in which humans play a part, we cannot write off human decisions as random. We must investigate what made the human act that way because that’s the only way we can improve system robustness. I’m not making a philosophical statement by saying human behaviour isn’t random – it’s a practical standpoint for the purpose of safety engineering. Human decision-making never fails. Instead, human error is a symptom of a system that needs to be redesigned.

Firstly, you need to hold in your head the knowledge that you will probably–no, almost certainly–fail. You will need to hold that uncomfortableness in your heart and carry it with you always. Never to share, but always to hold. Ground yourself in the impossibilities of what you’ll attempt, lest your hubris lead you to ruin.

Secondly, you will need to hold firm and irrationally deep conviction. Unshakable. Unshatterable. Conviction that you will succeed. This is the conviction that you have to share, that you have to use to lead people along with you, that you have to embody fully and without reservation.

Like, ohmigosh, you really gotta work hard to meet people where they are and get them on your side.

Anyone who’s the target of punishment will see what is happening. They don’t want to feel anxious all the time, and they especially don’t want to feel anxious about doing what to them are normal, everyday things. If you try to change their behavior in this way, they will find you annoying and do their best to avoid you, so you can’t create so much conflict inside them. Imagine how much less effective this strategy is, compared to finding a method of convincing that people don’t avoid, or that they might even actively seek out.

Excellent work here! Goblins is ready for local-first. Kinda makes me wonder if the work of the Beehive team at Ink and Switch is a bit redundant.

Recent discussion about the perils of doors in gamedev reminded me of a bug caused by a door in a game you may have heard of called “Half Life 2”. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin.

It’s always floating point precision.

This talk is an extension of my earlier Data Replication Design Spectrum blog post. The blog post was the analysis of the various replication algorithms, which concludes with showing that Raft has no particular advantage along any easy analyze/theoretical dimension. This builds on that argument to try and persuade you out of using Raft and to supply suggestions on how to work around the downsides of quorum-based or reconfiguration-based replication which makes people shy away from them.

The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) is a heuristic in systems thinking coined by the British management consultant Stafford Beer, who stated that there is “no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do”.

via: https://www.are.na/block/36987735

The Right’s pronatalism movement is darker than you think.

Conover of Adam Ruins Everything fame has a monologue series on his YT channel; excellent stuff.

How can we build large self-healing scalable systems?In this talk I will outline the architectural principles needed for building scalable fault-tolerant sys…

We’ll learn about different frameworks for composing dynamical systems, and conjecture about what this has to do with “thing-y-ness”.

Clear applications to processor design, concurrency, and, surprisingly, Smalltalk (i.e. actor programming).

I am using a very simple system for remembering commands and procedures, and for tracking what I work on. I have two plain text files called notes.txt and worktime.txt. In the notes file, I write down things that are important to remember. This blog post outlines the author’s personal, simple system for knowledge management and time tracking, detailing the tools and processes used to organize information and monitor work activities efficiently.

This article explores the mathematical and geometric relationships between musical intervals, scales (like the Chromatic Circle and Circle of Fifths), and esoteric concepts such as the Pythagorean Tetractys.

Excellent set of talks.

Engineers and category theorists take their analogies very seriously. The many tables seen in this article are regularly referred to in categorical spaces as “Rosetta stones.” The fact that people have found strong connections between classical mechanics and electromagnetism is quite astounding; clearly, differential equations are not to be underestimated.

via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAGJw7YBy8E

via: https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/networks_santa_fe/

Here, the goals of category theory are made clear:

The dream: each different kind of network or open system should be a morphism in a different monoidal category. Relationships between different kinds should be given by monoidal functors.

Algo a great introduction to Petri nets. Very interesting that Petri nets, which clearly themselves are categories (via the free category of a directed graph) become morphisms instead of objects, as it usually goes in higher category theory.

via: https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/rosetta/