The Most Interesting Reads in September 2022
History of Computing, Charles Bukowski’s poetry, and more
The History of Computing: The Evolution Of Unix, Mac, and Chrome OS Shells
- https://thehistoryofcomputing.net/the-evolution-of-unix-mac-and-chrome-os-shells
- Learnt that the variety of shells is possible due to the fact that it is decoupled from the OS
Brian Fox then added on to the Bourne shell with bash. He was working with the Free Software Foundation with Richard Stallman, and they wanted a shell that could do more advanced scripting but whose source code was open source. They started the project in 1988 and shipped bash in 1989. Bash then went on to become the most widely used and distributed shell in the arsenal of the Unix programmer. Bash stands for Bourne Again Shell and so was backward compatible with bourne shell but also added features from tcsh, korn, and C shell, staying mostly backward compatible with other shells. Due to the licensing, bash became the de facto standard (and often default shell) for GNU/Linux distributions and serves as the standard interactive shell for users, located at /bin/bash location. Now we had command history, tabbed auto-completion, command-line editing, multiple paths, multiple options for interpreters, a directory stack, full environment variables, and the modern command line environment.
How to discover Indian classical music — Marginal REVOLUTION
- https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/09/how-to-discover-indian-classical-music.html
- Bildungsroman-redux. Infatuation with Indian Classical music is a really weird hobby. Aesthetic mind sharpener of a lover of Indian culture. The thesis that orchestral music can only be fully experienced with live performance is repeatedly stressed and, who knows, maybe even Metaverse will not change this one.
you are looking to hear world-class performers in a live concert, there is no substitute for that, most of all for the percussion, but also for the overall sense of energy
So You Want to be a Writer… — Hugh Howey
- https://hughhowey.com/so-you-want-to-be-a-writer/
- The Decalogue for Aspiring Professionals
Look around. What are other aspiring writers doing? That’s your ground floor. Your minimum. That’s where you begin. Double that. I promise you, this is the easiest path to success. What follows is specifics.
Too Many Parameters
- http://wiki.c2.com/?TooManyParameters
- This is the famous encyclopedia of programming knowledge and the very first wiki ever created.
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Constraints are a gift
- https://seths.blog/2022/09/constraints-are-a-gift/
- On Constraints as a prerequisite for creativity
If the constraints went away, you’d be playing a totally different game, because your competitors would see their constraints lifted as well.
The Services iPhone — Stratechery by Ben Thompson
- https://stratechery.com/2022/the-services-iphone/
- Apple treats itself like a fancy club with quite high entry and quite high margins on services that it provides. Since it all works out of the box, my impression is that it makes mostly kids uninterested in ways how computers actually function. Something I was stuck with when the first 386DX/40 arrived and someone showed me how to start Goblins from the command line or even installed Norton Commander.
The most surprising announcement of all, though, was the prices. Everything stayed the same! This was not what I, or close followers of Apple like John Gruber, expected at all. After all, Apple’s strategy the past several years seemed to be focused on wringing more revenue out of existing customers. More importantly, the last year has seen a big increase in inflation — What this means is that in real terms Apple’s products actually got cheaper.
But first, we need to talk about it
- https://seths.blog/2022/09/but-first-we-need-to-talk-about-it/
- Stressing the fact that none of the tools will help — if you keep avoiding confronting the problem. As John Bradshaw said in Homecoming, life can be framed as a series of confrontations with problems.
People don’t talk about end-of-life suffering or the cost of healthcare in the last year of life, so it never gets better. Instead, we pretend it isn’t an issue and the problem persists.
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 8
- https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-8
- The notion of “information space control” and the “establishment of the desired narrative” keeps popping up in ISW daily updates on the situation in Ukraine. There must be an initiative purpose and truthfulness of the narratives permeating the confrontations of problems in general.
The Russian MoD repeated its Bilohorivka information mistake by failing to acknowledge the situation around Kharkiv Oblast and establish a desired narrative, leaving milbloggers to fill this gap with criticism of Russian forces. The Russian MoD only claimed to have destroyed a Ukrainian ammunition depot in Balakliya.[7] Some milbloggers complained that the Russian MoD did not seize the information space in a timely manner to prevent the spread of Ukrainian social media on Russian Telegram channels, leading to distrust among Russian audiences.[8] Milbloggers largely supported the Russian MoD’s narratives that the Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kherson Oblast had completely failed just days prior to Ukrainian breakthroughs in Kharkiv Oblast.[9] Such a shift in milblogger perceptions of Russian progress in Ukraine can be partially attributed to the flaws in the Russian war-time information strategy…
Organizations need to deliberately create data
- https://datacreation.substack.com/p/organizations-need-to-deliberately
- In 2017, Economist published The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data | The Economist. Yali (my boss/co-founder) takes an issue of the core metaphor driving not only the value of Big Data, but also the names of the tools (data pipelines, mining, extraction, exhaust). In my reading, he is saying “Data is Software, too”, in other words, he repeats the old functional programming insight that the difference between code and data is more complicated than meets the eye (that code == data and data == code?)
These assumptions are fundamentally wrong. Organizations can deliberately create the data that data scientists and other data consumers need, data that today those organizations simply do not have. More than that, organizations should deliberately create the data that they need: as Peter Norvig observed many years ago — “more data beats clever algorithms, and better data beats more data”: so it makes sense to spend at least as much time creating better data as developing better algorithms.
Artificial Intelligence Will Be a Great Equalizer — Bloomberg
- https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-09-09/artificial-intelligence-will-be-a-great-equalizer
- 2022 is the year of AI and mainly via progress in image generation — a few places offer this much excitement for me.
The people who least need AI are the super-rich. They already can hire armies of servants to manage their obligations, schedules, and so on. They do not need to economize on the use of human labor. The rest of us do, whether directly or indirectly through the businesses we patronize…On average, better-educated individuals are more skilled at retraining. So increasing the importance of retraining will have some significant inegalitarian effects, namely that the lesser educated may fall behind or be re-employed at lower wages. This is the real worry about AI, which is not the same as “the robots taking all our jobs.”
The Birth of UNIX With Brian Kernighan — CoRecursive Podcast
- https://corecursive.com/brian-kernighan-unix-bell-labs1/
- One of my favorite podcast episodes ever. The contextualization and side comments are amazing as well as the guest.
The History of Computing: The History Of Android
- https://thehistoryofcomputing.net/the-history-of-android
- On the beginnings of Android and the smartphone revolution kicked off in 2007/8 with the release of the first iPhone.
The first iPhone was released in 2007. I think we sometimes think that along came the iPhone and Blackberries started to disappear. It took years. But the fall was fast. While the iPhone was also impactful, the Android-based devices were probably more-so. That release of the iPhone kicked Andy Rubin in the keister and he pivoted over from the Blackberry-styled keyboard to a touch screen, which changed… everything. Suddenly this weird innovation wasn’t yet another frivolous expensive Apple extravagance. The logo helped grow the popularity as well, I think. Internally at Google Dan Morrill started creating what were known as Dandroids. But the bugdroid as it’s known was designed by Irina Blok on the Android launch team. It was eventually licensed under Creative Commons, which resulted in lots of different variations of the logo; a sharp contrast to the control Apple puts around the usage of their own logo. The first version of the shipping Android code came along in 2008.
What Makes a Senior Engineer? Writing Software vs Building Systems — codewithstyle.info
- https://codewithstyle.info/software-vs-systems/
- Seniority means business (professionality). It should not mean less coding, though.
Junior Engineers care about writing Software. They value code quality, employ best practices, try to adopt cutting-edge technologies. They invest a lot of time into learning new technologies. To them, the ultimate goal is to create elegant, performant, maintainable software.
Open Source is Broken — Xe
- https://xeiaso.net/blog/open-source-broken-2021-12-11
- Great Summary of the vulnerabilities of open source paradigm.
or: Why I Don’t Write Useful Software Unless You Pay Me
Clean Code — How to Write Amazing Functions
- https://www.codingblocks.net/podcast/how-to-write-amazing-functions/
- I keep revisiting this chapter and this episode over and over. Also the little “cock fight” between the two host about the virtues of a correction that one has done to another is hilarious. And Alan says that his functions just follow this chapter e2e and he’s really happy about that. Highly recommended.
1st rule — Functions should be small; 2nd rule — Functions should be smaller than that!
Launch HN: Spinach.io (YC W22) — Better daily standups
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32911232
- I like this because it smoothens context switches. In my experience, context switching has cognitive costs mainly when the switch is done by the mind — not because the mind is switched in itself. When the music stops automatically or the movie ends automatically that is drastically different than when I have to stop it in the middle. Similar to rotating who is speaking when and when and how to prep for the meeting.
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so you want to be a writer? by Charles Bukowski — Poems
- https://poets.org/poem/so-you-want-be-writer
- Found this gem upon returning to the wonderful https://hughhowey.com/so-you-want-to-be-a-writer/
when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. and there never was.
