Readit Newsdelocalized commented on Atop an Underwater Hot Spring, an ‘Octopus Garden’ Thrives nytimes.com/2023/08/23/sc... · Posted by u/Petiver
Really interesting, feels reminiscent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopolis_and_Octlantis (my favorite non-human settlements, if they can be called that).
delocalized commented on Amazon Honeycode Shutting Down honeycodecommunity.aws/c/... · Posted by u/navels
I wonder how long no-code is going to stay relevant in the age of AI. It feels like the segment of "what a novice with no-code can do that a novice with an appropriate AI tool can't" is ever-shrinking and the tail of "what specialized use cases AI can cover that no-code can't" continues to grow.
delocalized commented on Against Automaticity carcinisation.com/2023/08... · Posted by u/simonsarris
I appreciate the flaws pointed out in specific studies in this article, but the detour into phenomenology at the end (a philosophy on the subjectiveness of reality) gave me a bit of whiplash. It seems that the author here writes "we are not so irrational that a little nudge suddenly changes our whole character" and derives "so everyone's own reality is their definition of rational."
A more logical antecedent in my opinion is "we are influenced mostly by concrete priors, rather than minute nudges in behavior."
delocalized commented on An Old Conjecture Falls, Making Spheres a Lot More Complicated quantamagazine.org/an-old... · Posted by u/spekcular
The gossipy narrative style of the article is kind of jarring for an article on a topic like this. It took several paragraphs before it touched on the matter.
I always wonder what a popular science/math magazine would look like if it were oriented towards hackers. In this I mean people who have little background in the field but also the type of person who is used to bluntness and knows to RTFM.
I would subscribe to one. Journal articles are often opaque to people who aren't already in the field, and popular science falls too often into the storytelling trap seen here.
I've been working hard to up skill on the consistency and distributed systems sides of things. General recommendations:
- Designing Data Intensive Applicatons. Great overview of... basically everything, and every chapter has dozens of references. Can't recommend it enough.
- Read papers. I've had lots of a-ha moments going to wikipedia and looking up the oldest paper on a topic (wtf was in the water in Massachusetts in the 70s..). Yes they're challenging, no they're not impossible if you have a compsci undergrad equivalent level of knowledge.
- Try and build toy systems. Built out some small and trivial implementations of CRDTs here https://lewiscampbell.tech/sync.html, mainly be reading the papers. They're subtle but they're not rocket science - mere mortals can do this if they apply themselves!
- Follow cool people in the field. Tigerbeetle stands out to me despite sitting at the opposite end of the consistency/availability corner where I've made my nest. They really are poring over applied dist sys papers and implementing it. I joke that Joran is a dangerous man to listen to because his talks can send you down rabbit-holes and you begin to think maybe he isn't insane for writing his own storage layer..
- Did I mention read papers? Seriously, the research of the smartest people on planet earth are on the internet, available for your consumption, for free. Take a moment to reflect in how incredible that is. Anyone anywhere on planet earth can git gud if they apply themselves.
I was gifted Designing Data-Intensive Applications in high school and it changed the course of my CS education. Beautiful, beautiful book.
Maybe there's something I'm missing, but I don't really understand the author's focus on monetary value here. The question I would be asking is: how is the capability of the individual changing? There is little point in comparing the value of a journey by horse four hundred years ago to the same journey by aeroplane today. To reduce each to a numerical value feels like a conflation that makes this argument deeply flawed at minimum.
delocalized commented on Oral History of Shang-Yi Chiang [pdf] archive.computerhistory.o... · Posted by u/dudzik
I spent a few high school years facilitating oral history interviews and curating a podcast for my school's social studies program in collaboration with a local radio station (WILL). One thing that always struck me then, as it strikes me here, is how such a format draws deep humanity out of a person. Thank you for sharing this here and opening a window into the soul of a computer-science pioneer.