49 / The opportunity will find you

Hey, how was your week? ✌🏻

Tweet of the Week

me, age 7: I want to be an adult so I can eat as many pickles as I want me, age 30, eating pickles: haha hell yeah — @hauntedlatte

Favourites

• Have iPhone Cameras Become Too Smart? (newyorker.com)

  Kyle Chayka about the iPhone camera system and how it takes away creative control to produce sometimes unrealistic images.

• What you give up when moving into engineering management (stackoverflow.blog)

  Karl Hughes about the differences and difficulties that individual contributors face when they move into management.

Culture

• The opportunity will find you (thoughtbot.com)

  Matheus Richard about opportunity and pro-active action.

• Why is it so hard to buy things that work well? (danluu.com)

  Dan Luu about they reasons why people buy things and how it affects the decisions companies take.

  Mongo’s decision to loudly repeat demonstrably bogus performance claims and making demonstrably false correctness claims was, from a business standpoint, superior to focusing on actual correctness and performance

Software Engineering

• Metastable Failures in Distributed Systems (paper, 2021) (sigops.org)

  Nathan Bronson, Abutalib Aghayev, Aleksey Charapko and Timothy Zhu describe how distributed systems can enter a state in which it can only recover with a strong corrective push and how to detect them.

• I built a receipt printer for GitHub issues (aschmelyun.com)

  Andrew Schmelyun prints a physical receipt for every GitHub issue on one of their repositories.

• An Introduction To Generics (go.dev)

  Robert Griesemer and Ian Lance Taylor wrote an introduction to Go generics on the Go blog, based on a 30-minute talk at GopherCon 2021.

• Probably Are Gonna Need It: Application Security Edition (2021) (jacobian.org)

  Jacob Kaplan-Moss about the opposite of YAGNI (You Ain’t Gonna Need It) for application security.

Cutting Room Floor

• The (Edited) Latecomers Guide to Crypto (mollywhite.net)

  Molly White and 14+ cryptocurrency researchers and critics have annotated the New York Times article, which reads more like an ad.

• Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch covid. None of them helped. (2021) (technologyreview.com)

  Will Douglas Heaven about the shortcomings of almost all AI systems developed to detect covid and how a bit more co-operation could have made a huge difference.

  Many unwittingly used a data set that contained chest scans of children who did not have covid as their examples of what non-covid cases looked like. But as a result, the AIs learned to identify kids, not covid.

• Web3 is centralized (and inefficient!) (neelc.org)

  Neel Chauhan about decentralised systems like Tor or Folding@Home and why “Blockchain Sucks, Period”.