Links
Notable essays and books
Markus Strasser - The Business of Extracting Knowledge from Academic Publications
A naive system will weigh the insights extracted from a useless publication equally to a seminal work. You can correct for that by normalizing on citations and other tricks but that will just mimic and propagate existing biases and issues with current scientific publishing.
For example, if I design a system that mimics the practices of an expert reader, it would result in biases towards institutions, countries, the spelling of names, clout of authors and so on. That’s either unfair, biased and unequal or it is efficient, resourceful and a reasonable response based on the reader’s priors. In the end, there is no technological solution.
To push this point: if you believe in the great man theory of scientific progress, which has more merit than most want to admit, then why waste time making the other 99%+ of “unimportant” publications more searchable and discoverable? The “greats” (of your niche) will show up in your feed anyway, right? Shouldn’t you just follow the best institutions and ~50 top individuals and be done with your research feed?
Beware signal/noise problems. It’s very tempting to believe that there are great technologies out there that don’t meet the filter criteria of the tastemakers and the experts (came from the wrong lab, went into the wrong journal, written in a language they can’t read, was published before its time, etc.) and so if you could automate the search of all the noise, you’ll fish out the great tech that everyone missed. This doesn’t work, at least not today, and this article will tell you why. I think maybe the machine learning era made us think that if you just put enough noise into a computer, signal comes out, but noise in = noise out, unfortunately. This article is also a really excellent retrospective writeup of something that didn’t work out, which is a useful type of article that I wish got written more often.
ProPublica - Millions of Americans’ Medical Images and Data Are Available on the Internet
“ProPublica independently determined how many patients could be affected in America, and found some servers ran outdated operating systems with known security vulnerabilities. Schrader said that data from more than 13.7 million medical tests in the U.S. were available online, including more than 400,000 in which X-rays and other images could be downloaded. The privacy problem traces back to the medical profession’s shift from analog to digital technology. Long gone are the days when film X-rays were displayed on fluorescent light boards. Today, imaging studies can be instantly uploaded to servers and viewed over the internet by doctors in their offices. In the early days of this technology, as with much of the internet, little thought was given to security.”
This is an example I think about often when I consider the gap between how tech feels in a tech company and how it feels as an average human walking around in America. You can spend all the time you want at work worrying about how to lock down an MCP server to protect against prompt injection attacks, but the medical data storage server at your doctor’s office still has the password set to “password” (if you’re lucky).
Paul Graham — The Acceleration of Addictiveness
“Which means that as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of “normal” is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.
These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don’t think you’re weird, you’re living badly.”
I see this most in my life with technology and spending. When I really think about what I need to be happy, many of the things you’re “supposed” to have at my age are extraneous, especially nice cars and phones. Going into debt for those things feels much more normal than not, and it can be very uncomfortable to choose the “weird” path, but essays like this one remind me that choosing the default settings can’t guarantee your individual happiness.
Matt Chapman — That Time the City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for 40 Dollars
“Fast forward to August 22, when I randomly added that email account back to my phone. Unexpectedly, it turned out they actually finished the request! And without a bill for millions of dollars! Sure enough, their public records request portal had about 400 files available to download, which all in all contained metadata for about 32 million emails. Neat!
Problem though… they accidentally included the first 256 characters of all 32 million emails.Here are some things I found in the emails:
Usernames and passwords.
Credit card numbers.
Social security numbers and drivers licenses.
Ongoing police investigations and arrest reports.
Texts of cheating husbands to their lovers.
FBI Investigations.
Zabbix alerts.In other words… they just leaked to me a massive dataset filled with intimately private information. In the process, they very likely broke many laws, including the Privacy Act of 1974 and many of WA’s own public records laws. Frankly, I’m still at a loss of words.”
This is one of my favorite data blogs. I’m not sure if Matt Chapman is the hero we need, the hero we deserve, or both? Tech moves fast and makes a lot of things easy, but government systems (especially the more local you get) seem to lag behind. As we make more government stuff digital, is someone making sure that we’re complying with the need for both accessibility (compliance with sunshine laws, etc.) and security? Is anyone checking? Matt Chapman is, and that feels to me like important work.
Sean Goedeke — How I Ship Projects at Big Tech Companies
“The most common error I see is to assume that shipping is easy. The default state of a project is to not ship: to be delayed indefinitely, cancelled, or to go out half-baked and burst into flames.”
Felt this deep in my bones when I read it. How do so many projects sit unused when we had so many kickoff meetings and demos and MVPs and POCs? I had like five VPs in these meetings talking about how much they wanted this…?
(Goedeke’s book, Software Coding After the Vibe Shift, is great.)
grugbrain.dev
“grug understand all programmer platonists at some level wish music of spheres perfection in code. but danger is here, world is ugly and gronky many times and so also must code be
humility not often come big brained or think big brained easily or grug even, but grug often find “oh, grug no like look of this, grug fix” lead many hours pain grug and no better or system worse even
grug early on in career often charge into code base waving club wildly and smash up everything, learn not good
grug not say no improve system ever, quite foolish, but recommend take time understand system first especially bigger system is and is respect code working today even if not perfect”
I can’t explain it but this and Sean Goedeke’s essay go together.
Henrik Karlsson — Relationships Are Coevolutionary Loops
“When I think about it, the speed at which we updated early on was probably more important than anything else. Iteration speed is key when you deal with feedback loops of this kind, when you want to figure out how to best understand and interact with an emergent reality. The best scientists aren’t those who are the most intelligent; they are the ones who tweak their theories further than others, in close contact with experimental reality. The most valuable startups didn’t start with product-market fit. They kept learning and adjusting at a faster pace than those who fell behind. The same can be said of relationships. You need to keep a certain rate of improvement for things not to break. If you are too slow in adapting to each other, you grow apart. If you speed up your iteration speed, you can go places you wouldn’t have guessed possible a priori. My life, at least, turned out much weirder than I had planned.”
This beautifully written essay is about primary romantic relationships, but the broader point is about how if things are important to you, you should iterate on them quickly. This mindset helps me escape the guilty feelings about how I should be waking up early or coding every day or working out six days a week, and instead Brownian motion my way towards something that works for me.