Notes

I’m reading AI Snake Oil, and the authors intro by saying they will focus on the examples of AI that harm and they will not include the ones that benefit society. But it is not straightforward to create a list of the good examples. I think one of their examples in the good column was autocorrect. But auto orrect is a good example of where you can’t just sprinkle AI on a problem to solve it. You need to put a lot of effort to get the UX right. ...

Listening Nate B Jones here1 to the end. Thought I heard him refer to productivity gains. Had to rewind that to hear it again. every single agent you can run in parallel, multiplies your productivity. But does that translate to value? Recently, I’ve been reading the Healthcare Handbook2, where I (re)learned that “productivity” has a specific meaning to labor economists. Productivity is your output given your input. HH authors further cite this piece4. But informally, “productivity” is just, “hey I got more stuff done”, “I checked off more to-do list items!” ...

Notes, reading this article. Has some zingers in here , hah! The iron cross, maybe without one leg? You can’t cheat the scope–time–quality triangle. If we try to fix time and scope, quality takes the hit. In a developer-facing product, degraded quality means support escalations, technical debt, and broken trust. Like any debt, technical debt must be paid back, and its interest compounds over time. I have heard many variations of this. The one I like, maybe most, forget precisely where heard it maybe Shane de la Moore, is to not even consider quality as a degree of freedom, just consider that a non-negotiable. ...

No flag no country Steve Huynh (aka A Life Engineered ), discusses1, a few career concepts he says he had to unlearn about self promotion. I generally follow his sentiment, but I would diverge slightly too. Steve talks about how early in his career, he hoped if he did good work, it will surely get noticed. But he points out that’s highly unlikely to happen. His alternative is to get better at self promoting, starting gently if you’re not a natural braggart, highlighting the work of others and then slipping in alongside something you did too, in some email say or chat message. ...

Here are some of my notes on adding Cloudflare AI search as the endpoint for my hugo site’s search. Summary The other weekend, I randomly looked into some minimal ways to set up RAG search on my hugo site. A year prior, I had tried out3 TypeSense as a hosted vector embedding store for a several million row many gigabyte dataset but a hugo text site is pretty small so I was wondering what the price might be for this. Cloudflare AI Search came up, incidentally as not only a vector store alternative but a self contained store with indexing and a small RAG layer on top. ...

My friend asks me, in reference to a Goggins interview, what do I think about doing things you don’t want to do? Let me write out my thoughts here since I have been thinking on this topic for a long time! There are many ways of thinking about this topic and depending on which frame of reference you are wearing at any one time, you will form a totally different point of view. ...

Started reading, preview, AI Snake Oil. Reading retelling of what a developer Thomad Ptacek received from ChatGPT about how a biblical verse would explain removing a peanut buttee sandwich from a VCR. The below makes me think of the Russel Peters standup routine where he demonstrates how a particular man would stereotype explain how to bake a cake. “Fear not, my child, for I shall guide thy hand and show thee the way. Take thy butter knife, and carefully insert it between the sandwich and the VCR, and gently pry them apart. And with patience and perseverance, the sandwich shall be removed, and thy VCR shall be saved.” ...

It doesn’t feel great when you get a feeling those closest to you are not giving you credit for your ideas but maybe that is usually not the whole picture. There is Fundamental Attribution Error1, where one attributes behavior to character traits that are perhaps more easily explained by circumstances. This is similar to Hanlon’s Razor2 as far as attribution errors go. But what if there is a different kind of attribution error, a mis-attribution error? ...

Sometimes the experience of overwhelm looks like bouncing between, actively being in the weeds doing a thing, but suddenly, thinking, “hmm is this the right thing to be doing? Maybe I should do more big picture thinking”, and then doing some big picture thinking, but getting kind of caught up in some details of a priority that comes up, and thinking, “oh wow this looks important, I should probably stop planning and thinking and just do this thing now because all this strategic thinking just feels like a waste of time” . 😂 ...