This excellent essay from Karolina was the best I’ve read this year. I can related with many of her point on why friendship muscle looks different for every person. Abroad, I meet local people who don’t hang out with expats because they have their Martas. Every time I hear a Dutch or British person say “we’ve known each other since we were little”, I can’t help but feel a pang of regret....
Philip writes about how small cost saving policies at Microsoft irritated him as an employee: We used to get Dove Bars and beers all the time. It felt like free food was on offer at least once a week, usually with a pretense of some small milestone to celebrate. Why did we cut stuff like this? (I know the boring fiscal reasons why. I’m asking the deeper why, as in, “Was it worth the savings?...
I’m an aspiring photographer , and I love taking photos of moments of life on streets. Since I take my camera wherever I go, it was important to me to know the legal requirements of taking and publishing of such photos. I recently came across this nice table on Wikimedia, which categorizes countries on if a consent is required to take photos of identifiable people, and to publish them, and to use them commercially....
I’ve been using Home Assistant to control many things at my smart home, including a couple of lights which are toggled on and off with motion sensors. I have one of these in the bathroom, so the motion sensor detects when I enter the bathroom and its light turns on, and the light turns back off if the motion sensor doesn’t detect any motion in a specific period (60 seconds). Setting this automation is very easy using the motion-activated light blueprint , you just need to choose the entities for the motion sensor and the light, and Home Assistant handles all the hassle of figuring out the logic for when to turn the light on or off, and what to do when a motion is detected in the cool off period....
I like this emphasis on the impact of health on productivity: Biological health is upstream of mental health and mental health is upstream of productivity. Adding to this, I believe engaging in physical activities and working on improving one’s fitness has tremendous effect on productivity in long term. I play tennis regularly, the fact that I make progress in the court and I improve and become a better amateur player increases my confidence in me....
Interesting point about various types of content a creator can focus on: A surprising learning is that content funnels do not work. In theory, you produce entertaining, shortform content to get attention. Then once people are hooked they start consuming your deeper, educational, longform content. Except that this doesn’t happen. People who consume entertaining, shortform content are not interested in longform content. They just want more entertaining, shortform content. source
In his excellent write up on state of the art embedding models, Aapo Tanskanen compares the retrieval score for when the source documents are split into chunks and when they’re not: Transformer-based single embedding models have traditionally had 512 token context windows because of the usage of the original BERT encoder. Newer models, like the BGE-M3, have expanded the token window to much larger scales. It could be tempting to forget chunking and just embed long texts as they are....
Do you have an idea for a new business or product? In his excellent blog post, Jason provides a useful diagram for differentiating between ideas and problems that worth pursuing vs the ones that don’t: He explains each part of the diagram in details in the post. I highly recommend reading it. source
Ken writes about the lessons they’ve learned building new LLM-based features into their product. When it comes to prompts, less is more Not enumerating an exact list or instructions in the prompt produces better results, if that thing was already common knowledge. GPT is not dumb, and it actually gets confused if you over-specify. This has been my experience as well. For a recent project, I first started with a very long and detailed prompt, asking the LLM to classify a text and produce a summary....
“Luck” is one of the most interesting topics to me, and I always find myself paying extra attention to anyone talking about what “luck” is and how it can be somehow controlled. Morgen makes a useful distinction between “lucky” and “repeatable” traits: … a better way to frame luck is by asking: what isn’t repeatable? Did Jeff Bezos get lucky creating Amazon? Not in the same way a lottery winner is lucky, of course....
This is a fantastic reminder from Herbert: If you want to do something, like really want to do it, you need to prove it. That starts with you proving it to yourself. In difficult circumstances, do you make excuses? Or do you face your problem head on? Are you willing to make difficult decisions to do what you’ve committed to? Are you willing to put out bad work in order to improve?...
Them: Can you just quickly pull this data for me? Me: Sure, let me just: SELECT * FROM some_ideal_clean_and_pristine.table_that_you_think_exists source
Melody is basically describing me: Many introverts value depth and thoughtfulness in their work over noise and showmanship. They’re content to contribute without constant recognition or the spotlight. And the consequences part also checks out: While this tendency is admirable, it comes with pitfalls, especially in the modern, remote-first work world where being “out of sight” often equates to being “out of mind.” Perhaps you’ve been overlooked for a promotion because a senior leader wasn’t aware of you or your accomplishments....
After reading this post from Lara, I finally understand why I’ve been feeling strangely uncomfortable whenever my work desks have been moved in the past. Here are humans’ core needs in the BICEPS model: Belonging Community: A feeling of friendship and closeness with a group, or being part of a tight community of any size. Community well-being: People are cared for, the whole group feels happy and healthy. Connection: Feeling kinship and understanding with Improvement/Progress Progress towards purpose: You are helping make progress towards an important goal for the company, your team or your own career/life....
Every day a new tools pops out claiming “Throw the data analysts and data scientists of your company away, you don’t need to write SQL anymore, everyone can use data with our groundbreaking ’talk to your data’ tool”, and Benn discusses this: There are thousands of computational devils in details like how to handle nulls. For analysts, describing these specifics in English is inefficient and inexact. For everyone else, they wouldn’t know they need to describe them at all....
From a hackernews thread on dealing with spammers on your platform: … one of the most effective ways of dealing with spammers is to “shadowban” them. Allow them to use your service, but don’t indicate to them that you’ve identified them as malicious. For instance, when dealing with chat spammers, allow them to chat, but do not show their chats to other users. Another level would be to allow them to chat, but only show their chat to other shadowbanned users....
A few days ago a question was asked on Hackernews on how slow thinkers compensate for their lack of quick-wittedness . Some people have responded that preparation is key: Sometimes what people think is quickness is actually extensive prep. I had a 30 minute meeting the other day to ask a team to do something I didn’t think they would want to do. It ended up going really smoothly and they just took my word for it, but had they not, I spend several hours preparing for that meeting, gathering data, preparing charts to illustrate the data, thinking of the possible objections and responses to said objections....
Many companies are integrating LLM question answering tools into their DevEx toolchain. If you’re writing documentation and you’d like to assist these tools to serve people with proper responses to the questions related to what you own, kapa.ai has a few practical tips on optimizing the technical docs for LLMs: A clear hierarchy of headings and subheadings on a page helps LLMs understand the relationships between different sections of your documentation....
This post from Dan is one of the best reads in the past few months for me. He openly talks about instances that he might look like a stupid person, and how it’s benefiting him. I highly recommend reading the full blog post . … I frequently ask questions when there’s something I don’t understand or know, from basic stuff, “what does [some word] mean?” to more subtle stuff. On the flip side, one of the most common failure modes I see with junior engineers is when someone will be too afraid to look stupid to ask questions and then learn very slowly as a result; in some cases, this is so severe it results in them being put on a PIP and then getting fired....
If you’re into either Alfred or Raycast , Josh has a nice comparison of these tools from his experience using them: … for me, in the era of paid subscription software overtaking everything, I don’t need yet another $8–10/month siphon on my bank account. By the time you’ve paid for Raycast Pro for a year, you could’ve paid for Alfred for a lifetime. I absolutely agree. Due to Alfred being a one-time purchase and its wonderful speed and performance, I tend to agree with Josh that:...