HalvarFlake

HalvarFlake, 9 months ago to random

This is the funniest thing I've seen in weeks.

HalvarFlake, 1 month ago to random

Next time management asks you to stack-rank the members of your team, buy an electrical motor assembly kit, drop it on their desk, and ask them to rank the parts by importance/performance.

HalvarFlake, 7 months ago to random

"Trade Bibi for the hostages" - a sign held by a protester in Tel Aviv, and probably the most sensible policy proposal I've seen in a while.

HalvarFlake, 7 months ago to random

The number of transistors on a high end GPU need to double twice more until you can buy more transistors in one GPU than Commodore sold in all Amigas ever sold.

HalvarFlake, 2 months ago to random

A very difficult, unfun, dark, but important read:

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

HalvarFlake, 1 month ago to random

The reason why McKinsey/MBA types like Sundar and his recruits ruin companies is that ultimately too much focus and belief in shareholder capitalism thinks that companies are devices that produce money.

But neither do employees go to work with the wish to produce money for their shareholders, nor do customers buy products with that intent.

Employees want to help the customers and get paid for that. Customers want the value of the product. Money to shareholders is a byproduct.

HalvarFlake, 7 months ago to random

Be nice to each other.

The person you are talking to is trapped on a small planet in environmental crisis, with 8 billion vicious, stressed, destructive, murderous and angry monkeys.

HalvarFlake, 11 months ago to random

In an industry where stimulant use is rampant, I sometimes quipped "my experience with working with people on stimulants is that they revert to being 20 year old: attacking the wrong problem with immense energy, often missing the forest for the trees".

This paper seems to confirm my quip:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add4165

HalvarFlake, 9 months ago to random

Downloading a YouTube video should be just as covered by "fair use" as recording a song from the radio onto cassette was.

Unfortunately, courts tend to continuously weaken society in the grand bargain between society and copyright holders.

https://torrentfreak.com/youtube-dl-site-goes-offline-as-hosting-provider-enforces-court-ordered-ban-230809/

HalvarFlake, 7 months ago to random

A quick thread on the intensity of Israel's invasion of Gaza. Language about "precision strikes" can distract from understanding just how intense the aerial campaign was.

Strategic bombing of civilian infrastructure was a staple of the Allied WW2 strategy. The estimated death toll among the civilian population was 350k-500k, on a population of 80m, so about 0.4-0.6% over a period of 3 years.

If the Gaza death toll is ballpark accurate, 8000 deaths on 2m inhabitants is 0.4% in three weeks.

HalvarFlake, 1 year ago to random

There's a lot of microservices hate, but there are also terrible balls of yarn. It reminds me that many orgs are not good at engineering.

A few rules that have served me well:

1. architect your software, have a diagram.
2. centralize responsibilities in the diagram.
3. not every box in that diagram needs to be a service, some boxes should be shared libraries
4. conversely, not every box should be a shared library
   ...

HalvarFlake, 3 months ago to random

I heard something today that is reasonably profound in analyzing communication failures:

Having thought something isn't having said something. Having said something isn't being heard. Being heard isn't being understood. Being understood isn't agreement. Agreement isn't change. Change isn't permanent change.

Keeping this list of possible failure points in mind is helpful in analyzing communication failures.

HalvarFlake, 6 months ago to random

"Eighty per cent of Gaza’s population have already been displaced, with the majority of homes totally or partially destroyed,"

Israeli forces in ‘most intense’ day of ground war as it enters Hamas strongholds - https://on.ft.com/3R9knKH via @ftworldnews

HalvarFlake, 10 months ago to random

"Updating your priors" is a fancy way to say "I changed my mind, but I'd like to sound mathy because I have the self-image of being rational - and difficulty accepting that I am a fearful angry hungry horny monkey with sophisticated sticks."

HalvarFlake, 4 months ago to random

https://addxorrol.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-end-of-my-elasticoptimyze-journey_31.html

Today is my last day at Elastic. I'll take an extended break and focus on rest, family, health, writing, a bit of startup mentoring/investing, and some research - at least for a while.

I'm thankful for my great colleagues and my leadership at Elastic - y'all are stellar, even if I was often grumbly about some technical or architectural issues. ...

HalvarFlake, 6 months ago to random

This is "highly targeted precision warfare". Don't be fooled, there's no such thing, and if y'all wait until the war is over to remove Bibi, the war will continue while he is alive.

HalvarFlake, 4 months ago to random

Advertisement, but of the unpaid type: If you're a parent of a kid approaching 4-5, and you have a lot of cardboard (from stuff like Amazon deliveries or random other sources) -- buy https://make.do. It's pretty damn versatile, and offers a lot of playtime for money.

HalvarFlake, 7 months ago to random

Attack surface reduction only implies attack volume reduction if your software retains the same shape through the process…

HalvarFlake, 4 months ago to random

https://github.com/open-telemetry/community/issues/1918

Elastic has filed a ticket to donate the eBPF based profiling agent that used to be called Prodfiler to OpenTelemetry. I am extremely psyched!!!

HalvarFlake, 4 months ago to random

There's a German series of short stories where the villain is a McKinsey-alumni penguin that wants to turn the entire world into one big airport mall, and the loss of post-security entire hams feels like the villain progressed.

HalvarFlake, 4 months ago to random

There is "alien technology" as in "tech so advanced it seems from the future", and there is "alien technology" as in "this was built for aliens with 9 arms whose eyes operate in deep UV spectrum and who have a different concept of time."

HalvarFlake, 4 months ago to random

Over on the bird site, an account called @mbateman wrote about agency in education, and it struck a chord:

"Running teacher training about agency this week.
Nothing is more important than agency. But most people get agency wrong, especially educators who lean progressive.
Some haphazard calibrations:
Traditional education kills agency by removing choice and interest. ...

HalvarFlake, 6 months ago to random

OH: "Wine tasting is essentially bourgeois beer pong".

HalvarFlake, 1 month ago to random

The person in front of me is an economist telling his neighbor, a pancreatic cancer drug researcher: How do you stay motivated to work on something so hopeless that the resources to do the research should be better spent elsewhere.

His job? Working for some investment fund.

A scholast in a largely political job telling a scientist that. Wow.

HalvarFlake, 10 days ago to random

Dear neurodivergent Twitterverse, I suspect one of my kids might have/be ADHD. I am suspicious of self-assessment tests, and would like to learn more about the SotA for testing (ideally quantitative tests without practice effects). What outside of TOVA exists? Anyone with experience with any such tests?

Also: while I think it's unlikely, I'd be interested to see what reliable tests for neurodivergent traits exist that are for adults?