World is changing rapidly and what is true today won’t be so in a few decades. “It’s difficult to state just how stark and catastrophic of a collapse this is. The number of births in China fell by 17% in… Read More »Let’s save the human species!
You cannot avoid politics. “The most brilliant technical solution is worthless if you can’t get the people around you to adopt it.” https://hodgkins.io/blog/quiet-influence-a-guide-to-nemawashi-in-engineering/
Time isinear because we decided it is, not because it is. “Humans perceive three spatial dimensions: length, width, and depth. But mathematicians have long theorised there were more. In the 1880s, the mathematician Charles Hinton popularised these ideas, and went… Read More »When we turned time into a line, we reimagined past and future | Aeon Essays
Estimates help but are hard. “the majority of software work is not like this. We work on poorly-understood systems and cannot predict exactly what must be done in advance. Most programming in large systems is research: identifying prior art, mapping… Read More »How I estimate work as a staff software engineer
New Rome is in trouble. “Empires do not end because they want to. They end because the numbers leave no alternative.” https://nitishastra.substack.com/p/how-debt-bankrupted-the-british-empire
States are something different. “States tend to have a relatively rigidly defined territory, whereas non-state societies do not. States tend to have more complex social stratification with both a greater degree of labor specialization and a greater degree of social… Read More »Collections: How to Raise a Tribal Army in Pre-Roman Europe, Part II: Government Without States
The basics, also for managers. “Dashboards provide numbers, but numbers alone do not explain the system. Averages, CPU, and throughput plots are misleading if you do not know the math behind them. At One2N, our SRE practice has seen this… Read More »SRE math every engineer should know: a practical guide
I like having a beer with one particular friend every month. We talk about life and I am free to talk aloud and think as I go. Every time I figure something new about myself or my situation and am… Read More »Talking With Friends
How people get food dictates structure of a society in a major way. “one of the best ways to start thinking about any historical society is to begin with the subsistence foundation it is built on, because how people get… Read More »Collections: How to Raise a Tribal Army in Pre-Roman Europe, Part I: Aristocrats, Retainers and Clients
Slow mo is cool not only on screen.