98 / The Most Valuable Programmer

Hi ✌🏻

Toot of the Week

i heard someone say "ladies, gentlemen, and people who've defeated gender in hand to hand combat" and i think that's just neat — @annieversary@trans.enby.town

Favourites

• MVP: The Most Valuable Programmer (arendjr.nl)

  Arend van Beelen jr. writes one of the best articles I’ve read this year, speaking from my heart about the value of code.

• How to rest well (psyche.co)

  Alex Soojung-Kim Pang shared advice for god rest and explains why it’s “at essential to a good life, and career, as work”.

• Effective Spaced Repetition (borretti.me)

  Fernando Borretti gives an introduction and concrete rules for doing spaced repetition — I‘ve already found an Obsidian plug-in and will start creating cards for some recent books I‘ve read.

• 50 Ideas That Changed My Life (perell.com)

  David Perell lists ideas and concepts, lots of good things in there.

Software

• Two types of software engineers (registerspill.thorstenball.com)

  Thorsten Ball has a theory of two types of engineers: one that thinks a problem is easy because it’s not technical, the other thinks it’s hard because it involves people.

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

  Karl Hughes describes the tradeoffs of moving from an IC role to a manager.

• My Emacs eye candy (xenodium.com)

  Álvaro Ramírez document their Emacs visual configuration. I recently switched to Neovim, but this makes me want to give Emacs another shot.

AI

• How to use AI to do practical stuff: A new guide (oneusefulthing.org)

  Ethan Mollick describes how a lot of people use AI wrong and shows use cases where it shines.

• Behind the curtain: what it feels like to work in AI right now (robotic.substack.com)

  Nathan Lambert the state of AI companies and why it can feel like “the candle that burns bright and short”.

• The Coming of Local LLMs (nickarner.com)

  Nick Arner about the future of LLMs on local devices and how they could be embedded into the OS.

• Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500,000 group chat messages (izzy.co)

  Izzy Miller trained an LLM on almost 500k messages from a group chat and build built something replicating the real dynamics.

Cutting Room Floor

• Make Something Wonderful (book.stevejobsarchive.com)

  A fascinating online book that paints the character of Steve Jobs in his own words—through interviews, emails and speeches. Thanks Jan & Dan!

• Expiring vs. Long-Term Knowledge (collabfund.com)

  Morgan Housel about the relevance of short-term vs. long-term knowledge.

• There’s a new form of keyless car theft that works in under 2 minutes (arstechnica.com)

  Dan Goodin about a new way of stealing cars: CAN-injectors. Thanks, Lukas!

• A Number System Invented by Inuit Schoolchildren Will Make Its Silicon Valley Debut (scientificamerican.com)

  Amory Tillinghast-Raby about Kaktovik Numerals, an alternative to Arabic numbers that was invented by the Inuit.