davidcarlton

[davidcarlton]

How to be a Principal Engineer/Senior Principal Engineer/Senior Architect/fancy-sounding-title Engineer, a thread:

James Cowling on X

Good advice here.  Here’s an unrolled version, if you prefer that: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1879984381785514083.html

[davidcarlton]

Interesting description of koan training, I’d never heard it talked about this way.

[davidcarlton]

...Okay, a quick introduction. The left pane is regular old Parchment, the Z-code interpreter, playing Zork 1. You type commands; the game responds. Just regular old Parchment? Not quite! This is Parchment exposed. The upper right pane shows the stack trace for the current turn. That's all the ZIL functions called, and all the text printed, when executing the most recent command. And the bottom right pane shows the ZIL source code -- the original text, written by Infocom folks in the 1980s. Click on any function or printed string; it'll show you that code in context.

Zarf Updates: The Visible Zorker

Neat!

[davidcarlton]

Long but good.

[davidcarlton]

Interesting (and plausible-sounding to me) take on employee performance.

[davidcarlton]

Nice example of what a physical card board could look like in an XP team.

[davidcarlton]

Interesting chemical history.

[davidcarlton]

This was a good series.  When I first started listening, I thought it was going to be mostly a tour through music plus personal anecdotes, and that would have been fine, but then they started covering aspects of Korean history (including intersections with American history, like the important role that one bar catering to Black American GIs in Korea played in the birth of K-Pop), and that added another layer of depth to it.

[davidcarlton]

A podcast about comparing the ancient greek pankration with Brazilian jiu-jitsu; I don’t know that it’s a particularly well done podcast, but there’s something in there that I find interesting.

[davidcarlton]

Huh.

[davidcarlton]

I linked to the cohost version of this earlier, but with cohost shutting down, I wanted to link to it in its new location.

[davidcarlton]

A good deal for good books.

[davidcarlton]

This makes Dubai and the United Arab Emirates sound pretty neat; I didn’t know basically any of this stuff.

[davidcarlton]

Neat - they use vibrations from the motion sensor in your phone to figure out when your train is moving and use that plus other information to figure out what station your train is arriving at or moving to.

[davidcarlton]

I mean, yeah, strictly speaking nature has no freaks; every species that exists, belongs; everything is a product of evolution and Life’s Rich Pageant, yadda yadda.  But the Portuguese man-o’-war  — Physalia physalis, for you biologists — is honestly kinda freaky.  Because Physalia is a colonial organism. What this means: a single Portuguese man-o’-war is composed of four or five separate animals.  (We’re not actually sure how many.)  One animal is the balloon-sail-thingy on top; another is the stinging tentacles; another is the digestive system; another is the gonads.  And they’re completely distinct organisms. How this happens: when a Physalia egg is fertilized, it starts dividing, like every other fertilized egg.  But pretty quickly it breaks apart into two and then more distinct embryos — genetically identical, but physically separate.  And those embryos develop into completely different creatures.  Then, later in development, those creatures re-attach to form a single Frankenstein organism.  The various parts have their own nervous systems, which don’t seem to connect. Here’s an analogy: imagine that before birth, you are identical twins.  But instead of growing into two babies, one twin grows into a bodiless head, the other into a headless body.  Then just before birth they stick together, but they don’t actually merge back into one.  No, going forward you are a bodiless head glued on top of a headless body, ever after.  It’s kind of like that.

Occasional Paper: Four Hidden Species of Portuguese man-o’-war — Crooked Timber

Wow.

[davidcarlton]

Identity has many components. For my part, I identify as an American, a Texan, a liberal, a rabbit keeper, a writer, a nerd, a PhD holder, a science fiction fan, a Jew, a white person, a Lithuanian-American, and so on.3 If politicians primarily spoke to me as part of the “Jewish community”, I would be annoyed, because I don’t necessarily want to be defined by that component of my identity. I don’t reject it, but I don’t want to be reduced to it either. And if politicians tried to appeal to me with policies targeted through Jewish organizations to benefit Jews, I would simply not care. In fact, I would be a little conflicted about accepting any of those benefits, since it would pigeonhole me into prioritizing an identity that exists as only one component among many. Even more fundamentally, being constantly minoritized — being told to think of myself as a Jew first and as an American second — would pressure me to shrink the circle of people that I consider part of my own in-group. Because I think of myself as an American first and foremost, I feel like there are 330 million other people who share my primary identity — 330 million people on my “team”. But if I were to think of myself first and foremost as a Jewish person, that would shrink my in-group to only 16 million, almost none of whom live near me. It would make me feel more isolated, and might even cause me to start questioning whether the 323 million non-Jewish Americans who live all around me have my best interests in mind. In other words, being set apart from your fellow countrymen and neighbors is generally not a desirable thing, even if the reason is to put you on a pedestal. I suspect many Hispanic Americans feel the same way. Talking to Hispanic folks (remember, I’ve lived most of my life in either Texas or California) and reading books like The Diversity Paradox, The New Americans?, and The Great Demographic Illusion, it seems clear that most would like to think of themselves as regular Americans — not to give up or forget their national origins or ethnic identity, but to prioritize their American-ness. The progressive movement of the 2010s told us that this was a bad thing. “Assimilation” became a dirty word in progressive circles, and the University of California told their faculty not to call the U.S. a “melting pot”. The implicit assumption was that given the choice, people would like to prioritize their racial and ethnic identities, and that only forcible conformity pressure from American institutions — or from White people — was preventing people of color doing that. The Democratic party’s embrace of identity politics — its habit of targeting racial “communities” with encouraging rhetoric and specific material benefits — was seen as a way to counteract the pressures of assimilation.

Identity politics isn't working - by Noah Smith

(Doing a longer quote because I think the full thing is behind a paywall?  Another interesting bit was where he talked about outsiders assigning labels for ethnic groups, with “Latinx” as the specific example there - so it’s not just that you’re being put in a box, you don’t even get to decide yourself what the label is for the box that you’re being put in.)