Actually liked this writeup on “big” data - more insights than the somewhat stale (though mostly accurate) “your data isn’t big”-type article.

https://motherduck.com/blog/big-data-is-dead/

An alternate definition of Big Data is “when the cost of keeping data around is less than the cost of figuring out what to throw away.” I like this definition because it encapsulates why people end up with Big Data. It isn’t because they need it; they just haven’t bothered to delete it.

Me, as aspiring staff eng: I want to be in the room where decisions are made

Me in the room where decisions are made: I wonder if the window is locked and how far the drop would be if I climbed out

Funny how few highly resourced and profitable companies do counter-cyclical hiring. Instead, they almost all tried to hire heavily in the most overheated market of all time (https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1461134957036769284); now, in the best hiring market since '01, they've cut back.

It would be one thing if these event were unpredictable, but the bubbly-ness of hiring was predicted with correct reasoning by most senior ICs I knew; the people who disagreed were obviously wrong, not just in retrospect, but at the time.

I must be getting old now since I’m starting to prefer light themes to dark themes. Is it time to try out a light theme in my terminal? 😱

These signs arrived at work today to go out to a job.

They were not proofed prior to production.

"QUICK. WHAT ARE THE 128 MOST IMPORTANT INSTRUMENTS? WE NEED TO HAVE THE GENERAL MIDI SPEC IN TOMORROW!"

"UH FUCK, PIANO 1 PIANO 2 PIANO 3 FLUTE OBOE GUN"

"GUN???"

"HELICOPTER"

Dropped my NYTXW streak, and really for no good reason than I kind of forgot to finish the Sunday before going to sleep yesterday, whoops.

I don’t do iOS development anymore, but it’s always fascinating to see how big tech companies have the most warped development needs due to their unique constraints.

I really hope no one takes these posts as inspiration, though.

RE: https://mastodon.social/users/steipete/statuses/109818879826624367

it occurs to me there may be some people on this webbed site who are unaware of the greatest forum thread of all time, where bodybuilding.com users get in a heated argument about how many days there are in a week

https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=107926751

I need to remember that I shouldn’t futz with my Pi-Hole during lunch, since it’s set as the default DNS server for my home network, and it’s too easy to break the internet by accident.

Though I largely agree with the thrust of this post, I do think it misses one pretty significant piece of DX change in web technology that React, etc. shifted, which was the move from stringly-templated HTML to templating as code instead. (Also the rhetoric of the post is a bit much for me, but it still mostly hits home.)

https://infrequently.org/2023/02/the-market-for-lemons/

oh you program computers? name something

Weekends should be three days:

Day 1: Be lazy af. Recoup from the work week. Binge watch TV. Play video games.

Day 2: Go outside. Be active. Climb a mountain. Have beers with friends on a boat.

Day 3: Chores. Put on some good podcasts, do your laundry. Get groceries. Prepare.

This series on profiling various bits of the JS ecosystem is so interesting.

https://marvinh.dev/blog/speeding-up-javascript-ecosystem-part-3/

So many libraries in our ecosystem suffer from this issue. I really wish there was a way to update them all with one click. Maybe we need a reverse transpiler which detects down transpilation patterns and converts it back to modern code again.

The post goes deeper into this further on, but it’s amazing how much is lost in translating between layers, and makes one think about how much perf is gained simply from discarding out-of-date assumptions in rewrites rather than other improvements that are more technical in nature.

$ touch grass
touch: cannot touch 'grass': Permission denied

This is a fascinating FTC blog post by Alex Gaynor:
https://www.ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-research/tech-at-ftc/2023/02/security-principles-addressing-underlying-causes-risk-complex-systems

"Of these, only security keys are resistant to phishing and other social engineering attacks: If a user can be tricked into typing in their username and password, they can be tricked into typing in a code from their phone."

"Therefore, recent FTC orders have included provisions that:
1. Require companies to offer consumers the ability to enable MFA for their accounts
2. Require companies to use phishing-resistant MFA, such as security keys, for their own employees."

This last part is important. On a regular basis I'm shocked that in 2023 companies have not yet mandated FIDO security keys for 100% staff, when accessing 100% of company resources. I recognize that it's a (potentially long) journey, but too few organizations have made meaningful progress on such an important control.

Wikis, unless you have someone whose job it is to maintain the wiki, is where knowledge goes to die