Pinboard (chriskrycho) https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/public/ recent bookmarks from chriskrycho Why We Are Restless 2021-09-20T13:27:11+00:00 https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-we-are-restless/ chriskrychohttps://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:448324e3f003/ Learning to build conviction —benkuhn.net “People sometimes tell me that they want to join a startup, so that they can learn how it works, and eventually start one themselves.” 2020-05-17T04:24:17+00:00 https://www.benkuhn.net/conviction/ chriskrychohttps://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:2baa71015097/ Weakening Cycles So That Turing Can Halt —Programming Linguistics “It is notable how often paradoxes arose in the historical journey that led to the Rise of Type Theory.” 2020-05-15T13:57:20+00:00 http://pling.jondgoodwin.com/post/weakening-cycles/ chriskrychohttps://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:9795e2dab68d/ t.co 2020-04-11T04:55:56+00:00 https://t.co/ZbkBihzwmf chriskrychohttps://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:67078de2cd0b/ In Defense of Nationalism: Notes on Yoram Hazony and His Critics —Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture “You didn’t have to be a close follower of contemporary political theory to know that Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism w 2019-07-04T12:25:50+00:00 https://mereorthodoxy.com/defense-nationalism-notes-yoram-hazony-critics/ chriskrychohttps://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:62e3634a09fc/ [REPOST] Epistemic Learned Helplessness —Slate Star Codex “[This is a slightly edited repost of an essay from my old LiveJournal] A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments.” 2019-06-04T11:20:58+00:00 https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/ chriskrychohttps://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:96a4be53a697/ What David French and Sohrab Ahmari Each Got Right - The Atlantic 2019-06-03T14:20:41+00:00 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/conservative-christians-need-stay-civil/590866/ chriskrychohttps://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:de14ec0527f3/ Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston | The New Yorker 2019-05-31T12:28:06+00:00 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/27/losing-religion-and-finding-ecstasy-in-houston#%23I+wonder+if+I+would+have+stayed+religious+if+I+had+grown+up+in+a+place+other+than+Houston+and+a+time+other+than+now.+I+wonder+how+different+I+would+be+if+I+had+been+able+to+find+the+feeling+of+devoted+self-destruction+only+through+God.+Instead,+I+have+confused+religion+with+drugs,+drugs+with+music,+music+with+religion.+I+can%E2%80%99t+tell+whether+my+inclination+toward+ecstasy+is+a+sign+that+I+still+believe+in+God,+or+if+it+was+only+because+of+that+ecstatic+tendency+that+I+ever+believed+at+all.+The+first+time+I+did+mushrooms,+the+summer+after+my+freshman+year+of+college,+I+felt+vulnerable+and+rescued,+as+if+someone+had+just+told+me+that+I+was+going+to+Heaven.+I+walked+down+a+beach+and+everything+coalesced+with+the+cheesy,+psychotic+logic+of+%E2%80%9CFootprints+in+the+Sand.%E2%80%9D+The+first+time+I+did+acid,+I+saw+God+again%E2%80%94the+trees+and+clouds+around+me+blazing+with+presence,+like+Moses%E2%80%99+burning+bush.+Completely+out+of+my+mind,+I+wrote+on+a+napkin,+%E2%80%9CI+can+process+nothing+right+now+that+does+not+terminate+in+God%E2%80%99s+presence%E2%80%94this+revelation+I+seem+ready+to+have+forever+in+degraded+forms.%E2%80%9D chriskrychohttps://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:1a28d4dbcf43/ Paper Animals 2019-05-31T12:13:31+00:00 https://logicmag.io/07-paper-animals/#%23Why+do+you+think+that+China+is+such+an+interesting+place+to+write+science+fiction+right+now?+I+don't+know+that+it+actually+is+any+more+interesting+than+anywhere+else.+It's+very+common+for+Western+observers+to+focus+on+the+Chineseness+of+Chinese+science+fiction.+But+I've+always+been+very+resistant+to+the+idea+that+Chineseness+is+a+meaningful+analytical+category.+The+writers+I+know+are+as+diverse+and+varied+in+their+goals+and+means+and+interests+as+writers+anywhere.+Han+Song+for+instance,+is+a+very+surreal+kind+of+writer.+He+writes+like+Philip+K.+Dick.+If+you+read+him+next+to+Liu+Cixin,+who%E2%80%99s+more+like+Arthur+C.+Clarke,+it+would+be+hard+to+identify+many+useful+commonalities+even+though+they're+both+Chinese+science+fiction+writers. chriskrychohttps://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:28ded2e89abc/ Walker Percy's problems of reentry - Austin Kleon 2019-05-27T02:39:19+00:00 https://austinkleon.com/2019/02/08/walker-percys-problems-of-reentry/ chriskrychohttps://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:4f96a1370457/ Facebook’s Work With Phone Carriers Alarms Legal Experts 2019-05-21T03:24:34+00:00 https://theintercept.com/2019/05/20/facebook-data-phone-carriers-ads-credit-score/ chriskrychoThe thought of seeing fewer ads from Facebook might strike some as an unalloyed good — it certainly seems to beat the alternative. But credit reporting, profoundly dull as it might sound, is an enormously sensitive practice with profound economic consequences, determining who can and can’t, say, own or rent a home, or get easy financial access to a new cellphone. Facebook here seems to be allowing companies to reach you on the basis of a sort of unofficial credit score, a gray market determination of whether you’re a good consumer based on how much you and your habits resemble a vast pool of strangers.]]> social-media privacy technocracy credit-scores facebook technology https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:4ced1f4a59d2/ Gene Wolfe Turned Science Fiction Into High Art - The Ringer 2019-05-01T04:13:44+00:00 https://www.theringer.com/2019/4/25/18515675/gene-wolfe-science-fiction-author chriskrycho fiction sci-fi gene-wolf brian-phillips https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:7d8de163fd65/ scale is the enemy —Snakes and Ladders “Jeffrey Zeldman: Along those same lines, can the IndieWeb, and products of IndieWeb thinking like Micro.blog, save us?” 2019-04-12T11:52:21+00:00 https://blog.ayjay.org/scale-is-the-enemy/ chriskrychohttps://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:568a7c29b00c/ A proposal for an Alternative Green New Deal 2019-03-03T17:55:10+00:00 https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2019/02/a-proposal-for-alternative-green-new.html chriskrycho economics green-new-deal https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:e02a19d17cc8/ Preying on teens: More than 100 Southern Baptist youth pastors convicted or charged in sex crimes 2019-02-16T02:26:36+00:00 https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/investigations/article/All-too-often-Southern-Baptist-youth-pastors-13588292.php chriskrychosexual-abuse SBC https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:39c4a17dcb92/ Offend, then repeat: Southern Baptist churches hired dozens of leaders previously accused of sex offenses 2019-02-16T02:26:06+00:00 https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/investigations/article/Southern-Baptist-churches-hired-ministers-accused-13588233.php chriskrychosexual-abuse SBC https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:6a4d3d255271/ 20 years, 700 victims: Southern Baptist sexual abuse spreads as leaders resist reforms - Houston Chronicle 2019-02-13T04:58:17+00:00 https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/investigations/article/Southern-Baptist-sexual-abuse-spreads-as-leaders-13588038.php chriskrycho sexual-abuse SBC https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:0f345b43d56e/ A promising new metric to track maintainability 2019-02-04T19:14:21+00:00 https://jaxenter.com/promising-new-metric-track-maintainability-154195.html chriskrycho software-development complexity https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:278dcaa99ceb/ 10,000 Original Copies · Klim Type Foundry 2018-12-06T03:06:17+00:00 https://klim.co.nz/blog/10000-original-copies/ chriskrychoOver the last 10 years or so I redrew National, one of my first typefaces, as National 2. It’s completely redrawn, no two letterforms are exactly the same, and I added a bunch of new styles. But to me it is still National. It’s what I wanted to draw 10 years ago, but didn’t have the skill, time or patience. While I was writing this talk I realised that, in effect, I had torn down my own shrine and rebuilt it. I’m doing the same thing with Futura, Helvetica, the types of Van Den Keere, with Akzidenz Grotesk and Plantin. I am not going to let them die in the museums. I’m going to take what I want, and remake them in my own voice, style and accent. It’s taken me a long time to become comfortable with this idea. Because we all seem to worship in the church of originality, whether we are aware of it or not.]]> typography ethics art creativity https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:99b137820f66/ Programming Language and Compilers Reading List 2018-12-02T21:07:40+00:00 http://www.jonathanturner.org/2016/10/programming-language-and-compilers-reading-list.html chriskrychofp computer-science jonathan-turner compilers software-development education plt https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:b4e11a1df22c/ Tadashi Tokieda Collects Math and Physics Surprises | Quanta Magazine 2018-12-02T19:31:09+00:00 https://www.quantamagazine.org/tadashi-tokieda-collects-math-and-physics-surprises-20181127/ chriskrychoOne very common question that comes up at the end of a lecture is, “Does all this have any practical applications?” It’s really intriguing because this question is asked in almost exactly the same words wherever I go. It’s like listening to a prerecorded message. I ask them, what do you think constitutes a practical application? It’s very surprising. Roughly speaking, people converge within five to 10 minutes onto two categories of practical applications. One is, if you manage to make several million dollars instantly. The other is, if you manage to kill millions of people instantly. Many people are actually kind of shocked by their own answers. Then I tell them that, well, I don’t know about other people, but I have a practical application for my toys. When I show my toys to some children, they seem to be happy. If that’s not a practical application, what is?]]> joy physics wonder https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:d051e5000612/ Your Political Mental Map | The American Conservative 2018-11-09T03:42:55+00:00 https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/political-mental-map/ chriskrychoThe paradox here, as I wrote about in my book The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming, is that the same tight communal bonds that made small-town life very hard for outsiders and marginalized people like me were what made things so beautiful and loving for my late sister as she suffered from cancer. That is, the things that held me down when I was a teenager living there were not all that different from the things that held her up when she was terminally ill. I don’t know what to do with that. Still don’t.]]> small-towns ruralism rod-dreher urbanism community https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:db8b5b2fc878/ Questions for prospective employers 2018-10-22T02:41:42+00:00 https://www.drmaciver.com/2013/02/questions-for-prospective-employers/ chriskrycho The one non-developer and one developer thing is very important. I want to see how different their answers are and how they interact. The actual questions I’m planning to ask are as follows: What do you personally like about working here? What do you dislike? What’s your office culture like? Can you describe the typical sense of humour? What’s your racial and gender diversity like in the company? Does this vary from team to team? If it’s not good, do you know why and is it something you’re trying to change? How? What is your company doing to have a positive impact on society? (question suggested by my friend Alex White) What’s your staff turnover rate like? Is it different from team to team? If it’s high, do you know why people typically leave and is it something you’re trying to change? (question suggested by Jamie MacIver, my brother) How do you deal with failure? When something goes wrong, what do you do to make sure it doesn’t happen again? (question suggested by my friend Kat Matfield) Who in your company is completely indispensable? Tell me about them (question suggested by my friend Elisabeth) How much technical debt do you have? What are you doing to address it? Is it working? Can you tell me about a change you’ve made in your development process recently? What prompted it? (question suggested by Michael Chermside) How do you decide and manage what to work on next? Suppose it is decided that a feature is needed and should be part of the current work priorities. What happens between now and the point where that feature hits production? What’s your business model like? Is it working? How would you know if it wasn’t working, and how would you go about fixing it? ]]> interviewing career-advice david-r-maciver https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:0152595557e8/ Investigating ad transparency mechanisms in social media: a case study of Facebook’s explanations 2018-10-16T03:48:17+00:00 https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/03/07/investigating-ad-transparency-mechanisms-in-social-media-a-case-study-of-facebooks-explanations/ chriskrycho When examining ad explanations provided by Facebook, the key finding is that explanations are often incomplete, and sometimes misleading. Suppose that an advertiser uses several attributes for targeting, the explanations will include at most one of those attributes. If you were going to pick just one attribute of course, then the one with the most explanatory power would probably be the one with the smallest population (i.e., fewer Facebook users with that attribute). But Facebook’s explanations appear to show only the most prevalent attribute (e.g., ‘people in the millennials audience’). This makes the explanations incomplete in a very unhelpful way. ]]> lying facebook adrian-colyer social-media algorithmism advertising the-morning-paper https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:86bfe82326d3/ Capturing and enhancing in situ system observability for failure detection 2018-10-16T03:42:25+00:00 https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/10/15/capturing-and-enhancing-in-situ-system-observability-for-failure-detection/ chriskrycho Panorama proposes a new way of building a failure detecting service by constructing in-situ observers. The evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of leveraging observability for detecting complex production failures. Panorama looks to be the perfect complement to any chaos engineering initiative. ]]> software-development chaos-engineering adrian-colyer observability the-morning-paper https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:b68b3e8412a9/ The future’s so bright, I gotta wear blinders 2018-10-15T17:00:59+00:00 http://www.roughtype.com/?p=8557 chriskrycho In his books Empire and Communication (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951), the Canadian historian Harold Innis argued that all communication systems incorporate biases, which shape how people communicate and hence how they think. These biases can, in the long run, exert a profound influence over the organization of society and the course of history. “Bias,” it seems to me, is exactly the right word. The media we use to communicate push us to communicate in certain ways, reflecting, among other things, the workings of the underlying technologies and the financial and political interests of the businesses or governments that promulgate the technologies. (For a simple but important example, think of the way personal correspondence has been changed by the shift from letters delivered through the mail to emails delivered via the internet to messages delivered through smartphones.) A bias is an inclination. Its effects are not inevitable, but they can be strong. To temper them requires awareness and, yes, resistance.]]> futurism technology technologism nick-carr technique bias l-m-sacasas winning-slowly-season-6 https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:27e9092d632f/ Protocol aware recovery for consensus based storage 2018-10-14T20:13:23+00:00 https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/02/27/protocol-aware-recovery-for-consensus-based-storage/ chriskrycho Within a replicated state machine system, there are three critical persistent data structures: the log, the snapshots, and the metainfo. The log maintains the history of commands, snapshots are used to allow garbage collection of the log and prevent it from growing indefinitely, and the metainfo contains critical metadata such as the log start index. Any of these could be corrupted due to storage faults. None of the current approaches analysed by the authors could correctly recover from such faults. ]]> software-development the-morning-paper distributed-systems adrian-colyer computer-science raft paxos https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:dcaa19ce6a62/ Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design | Web design news and insights since 1995 2018-10-12T03:40:32+00:00 http://www.zeldman.com/ chriskrychoFor a publishing house brand, rejection over time equals design. It’s as important to our brand as the content we choose to help shape and publish. You can think of rejection as a form of whitespace.]]> jeffery-zeldman publishing design https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:5855ea839b47/ Scalability! But at what COST? 2018-10-06T13:16:58+00:00 http://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/01/15/COST.html chriskrychoLots of people struggle with the complexities of getting big data systems up and running, when they possibly shouldn’t be using the systems in the first place. The data sets above are certainly not small (billions of edges), but still run just fine on a laptop. Much faster than the distributed systems, at least. Here are two helpful guidelines (for largely disjoint populations): 1. If you are going to use a big data system for yourself, see if it is faster than your laptop. 2. If you are going to build a big data system for others, see that it is faster than my laptop. ]]> frank-mcsherry graph-algorithms software-development rust big-data c# parallelism https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:4d943a7e860a/ Antics, drift, and chaos 2018-10-04T03:12:34+00:00 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SM2uXpmyJmA&t=12m51s chriskrycho emergence software-development lorin-hochstein netflix chaos-engineering https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:09cd741afdc0/ It's Hard to Reason About Systems • Hillel Wayne 2018-10-02T02:32:42+00:00 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/reasoning-about-systems/#fnref:bug chriskrychoToo bad everything we like is nonlinear. By having good tests you can move faster. That’s nonlinear. Types support better refactoring tools? Nonlinear. Using Clojure will attract better developers? Nonlinear. Everything’s nonlinear. And, of course, they don’t have to be first-order. Changing the rate of impact on B can change the rate on C. We can also go deeper: Not only can we change the degree of impacts of actions, we can change how much we change the degree of impacts! Hopefully you’re starting to see why we can’t reason our way to answers. Programming isn’t a set of isolated factors you can tackle separately. Everything impacts everything else. We can’t solve a complex system with thinking alone. If you disagree, consider physics: there’s no closed-form solution to the three body problem. Why would a 100-body problem be any different? If software is so complicated, how do we get anything done? Humans are fantastic at rough heuristics. All these complexities soak into our brains and we build an intuition about how it all works. But heuristics are also intensely irrational. That’s not a bad thing! It just means that it depends as much on our experiences, emotions, and muscle memory as it does on our conscious thought. Good for getting stuff done. But the further we get from our narrow experiences, the less useful it becomes. That means it’s pretty bad for finding the objective truth. Just because TDD works for you doesn’t mean it’s the right choice for everyone else. Your intuition about your system may not apply to their system. When we do communicate, we tend to simplify. This is necessary and practical. Second-order impacts tend to be smaller than first-order impacts, third-order smaller still. We can often disregard them as being small enough to be negligable. Adding tests takes up disk space, but you usually don’t care about that. Using up more disk space means pushing to remote takes slightly longer, but you care even less about that. On the other hand, you can’t always write off the second-order impacts: in fact, we often obsess over them.]]> agile-software-development software-development hillel-wayne plt type-theory testing systems-engineering complexity https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:e4f1ac09390f/ Unit Tests Aren't Tests • Hillel Wayne 2018-10-02T02:10:27+00:00 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/unit-tests-are-not-tests/ chriskrychoThe problem is that your program is a collection of interdependent units, and you’re not testing the total program with unit tests. There’s this idea in physics called “emergence”, where simple systems interacting with simple rules give rise to complex systems acting by effectively different rules. For example, atoms are relatively well-understood, self-contained models. Chuck enough of them in a box and suddenly you have the entire field of solid-state physics. Add the assumption that “electrons can’t be inside the protons” and now you have semiconductors. Add a couple more rules and physics throws its hands in the air, says “fuck this”, and fobs it off on the chemists. Code exhibits emergence too. Enough interacting units and your program is vastly more complex than the sum of its parts. Even if each unit is well-behaved and works according to its unit tests, the bulk of the complexity is in their integration. Since you’re interested in the program behaving correctly, not its individual units of code, and since unit tests don’t determine the program is behaving correctly (only the code), they’re not testing the program. Ergo, they’re not tests. They’re development.]]> hillel-wayne unit-tests agile-software-development testing software-development emergence https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:fb240378fb5b/ How is a Class like a Microservice? • Hillel Wayne 2018-10-02T02:01:40+00:00 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/box-diagrams/#fnref:http chriskrychoAnd without that notation, it’s hard to see that one of the major claimed benefits of a microservice architecture, separation of concerns, is us using devops to compensate for a flaw in our programming language. This doesn’t mean that microservices are bad. What it does mean is that we need to be clear of what we want out of microservices. If we want microservices to improve scalability or use multiple languages, then they may be the right choice. But if we want them primarily for the separation of concerns, I think that’s a bad idea. Let’s tie this off with an exercise for the reader. Notation is really powerful. With just three components and a couple rules we were able to see symmetries between classes and services. By defining a specific subset of this abstraction we were able to show why Ruby’s module system encourages coupling. But there are all sorts of ways we can strengthen or weaken the model. Just a few examples: - Arrows have to end at ports. What if we placed restrictions on where they start? - For proper interfaces, arrows can’t cross into a box. What if arrows couldn’t cross out of a box? - Can two boxes intersect? Can a box be inside two different boxes at once? - What if we assigned boxes and ports different “colors” and used that to restrict arrows? - Make some small tweaks to the model. What real-world programming structures does it represent now? What can we learn from it?]]> programming hillel-wayne plt software-development microservices Ruby Java devops https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:32e3f59b1afd/ The Narrow Passage of Gortahig 2018-09-28T02:07:24+00:00 https://dancohen.org/2018/08/26/the-narrow-passage-of-gortahig/ chriskrycho Have they ever thought about, you know, widening the road? Well, it is someone’s house and shed, you’re gently told, a family that’s lived there a long time. Some years ago, the owner evidently offered to let the shed be knocked down to open some more room for the road, but others in west Cork County weren’t passionate about forcing that change. The only group motivated to alter the road were the tour companies that wanted to send large coaches around the Ring of Beara, like they do on the next peninsula over, Kerry. Given the history of the property and the cost of a new road, the majority decided just to let things be. So the narrow passage of Gortahig remains.]]> dan-cohen economics winning-slowly Ireland small-towns https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:c4becb23fbc5/ Why Logical Clocks are Easy 2018-09-26T02:35:45+00:00 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2917756 chriskrychoTracking causality should not be ignored. It is important in the design of many distributed algorithms. And not respecting causality can lead to strange behaviors for users, as reported by multiple authors.1,9 The mechanisms for tracking causality and the rules used in these mechanisms are often seen as complex,6,15 and their presentation is not always intuitive. The most commonly used mechanisms for tracking causality—vector clocks and version vectors—are simply optimized representations of causal histories, which are easy to understand. By building on the notion of causal histories, you can begin to see the logic behind these mechanisms, to identify how they differ, and even consider possible optimizations. When confronted with an unfamiliar causality-tracking mechanism, or when trying to design a new system that requires it, readers should ask two simple questions: (a) Which events need tracking? (b) How does the mechanism translate back to a simple causal history? ]]> causality version-clocks software-development version-vectors logical-clocks acm https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:753f80356e24/ Go: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly 2018-09-23T18:17:48+00:00 https://bluxte.net/musings/2018/04/10/go-good-bad-ugly/#noisy-error-management chriskrychoRust is climbing higher in the stack with great web frameworks and nice ORMs. It also gives you that warm feeling of "if it compiles, errors will come from the logic I wrote, not language quirks I forgot to pay attention to".]]> rust plt software-development programming https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:bc9cde0aa6bf/ Exception Handling Considered Harmful 2018-09-23T18:04:33+00:00 http://www.lighterra.com/papers/exceptionsharmful/ chriskrycho In order to write exception-safe code, at every significant line of code the programmer must take the possibility of an exception and rollback happening into account, to be sure the code cleans up properly and leaves things in a suitable, stable state if an exception occurs – that it doesn't leave a data structure half-modified, or a file or network connection open, for example. That is decidedly non-trivial. It takes a great deal of time and effort, it requires a very high degree of discipline to get right, and it is just far too easy to forget or overlook something – even experts frequently get it wrong.]]> software-development product-types plt exceptions programming https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:3331222b8e23/ My Approach to Getting Dramatically Better as a Programmer – malisper.me 2018-09-19T01:47:25+00:00 http://malisper.me/my-approach-to-getting-dramatically-better-as-a-programmer/ chriskrycho software-development productivity michael-malis https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:b823c54f0e39/ Big companies v. startups 2018-09-19T01:45:12+00:00 http://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/ chriskrychoThe compensation trade-off has changed a lot over time. When Paul Graham was writing in 2004, he used $80k/yr as a reasonable baseline for what “a good hacker” might make. Adjusting for inflation, that's about $100k/yr now. But the total comp for “a good hacker” is $250k+/yr, not even counting perks like free food and having really solid insurance. The trade-off has heavily tilted in favor of large companies. The interesting work trade-off has also changed a lot over time, but the change has been… bimodal. The existence of AWS and Azure means that ideas that would have taken millions of dollars in servers and operational expertise can be done with almost no fixed cost and low marginal costs. The scope of things you can do at an early-stage startup that were previously the domain of well funded companies is large and still growing. But at the same time, if you look at the work Google and MS are publishing at top systems conferences, startups are farther from being able to reproduce the scale-dependent work than ever before (and a lot of the most interesting work doesn't get published). Depending on what sort of work you're interested in, things might look relatively better or relatively worse at big companies.]]> finance career-advice startups dan-luu https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:ab8a7a50bb50/ Response to “The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel” The American Vision 2018-09-19T01:24:13+00:00 https://americanvision.org/16796/response-to-the-statement-on-social-justice-and-the-gospel/ chriskrychoOn the flip side, we today believe and actively live out so much of the “radical” worldview for which the despised opponents of those orthodox men and women stood back then, but which was sneered at as Jacobinism, humanism, depravity, unorthodoxy, heresy, Communism, antichrist, and much more. Yet here we are: we are all abolitionists now. If that is Jacobinism, we are all French Revolutionaries. If race-mixing is Communism, as was openly and widely believed in the 50s and 60s, then we are all Communists now also. If, however, we have seen past all that fearmongering and demagoguery, maybe we should back off a bit this time, too, and make an actual “closer examination.” Maybe we should mark that which is good and important—that which is social about biblical justice and biblical about social justice—and not throw the baby out with the baptismal water. Maybe we need a less ham-fisted, knee-jerk reaction and a more thoughtful one based on God’s law and its outworking of love in the church and society. Maybe, just maybe, the conservative, Bible-believing churches ought to try to lead a social movement on biblical principles, not let the liberals pick up where we fail again, and not circle the wagons again.]]> racism doug-wilson social-justice liberalism john-macarthur joel-mcdurmon https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:c74ca7c70831/ Zuckerberg’s Blindness and Ours —L.M. Sacasas 2018-09-17T02:30:57+00:00 https://thefrailestthing.com/2018/09/16/zuckerbergs-blindness-and-ours/ chriskrycho Reducing knowledge to know-how and doing away with thought leaves us trapped by an impulse to see the world merely as a field of problems to be solved by the application of the proper tool or technique, and this impulse is also compulsive because it cannot abide inaction. We can call this an ideology or we can simply call it a frame of mind, but either way it seems that this is closer to the truth about the mindset of Silicon Valley. It is not a matter of stupidity or education, formally understood, or any kind of personal turpitude. Indeed, by most accounts, Zuckerberg is both earnest and, in his own way, thoughtful. Rather it is the case that one’s intelligence and one’s education, even if it were deeply humanistic, and one’s moral outlook, otherwise exemplary and decent, are framed by something more fundamental: a distinctive way of perceiving the world. This way of seeing the world, including the human being, as a field of problems to be solved by the application of tools and techniques, bends all of our faculties to its own ends. The solution is the truth, the solution is the good, the solution the beautiful. Nothing that is given is valued. The trouble with this way of seeing the world is that it cannot quite imagine the possibility that some problems are not susceptible to merely technical solutions or, much less, that some problems are best abided. It is also plagued by hubris—often of the worst sort, the hubris of the powerful and well-intentioned—and, consequently, it is incapable of perceiving its own limits. As in the Greek tragedies, hubris generates blindness, a blindness born precisely out of one’s distinctive way of seeing. And that’s not the worst of it. That worst of it is that we are all, to some degree, now tempted and prone to see the world in just this way too. ]]> knowledge l-m-sacasas hannah-arendt mark-zuckerberg social-media facebook technique technology wisdom https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:cc3c32a89bab/ Data on discrimination 2018-09-13T04:06:16+00:00 https://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/ chriskrycho Differential treatment of women and minorities isn't limited to hiring and blogging. I've lost track of the number of times a woman has offhandedly mentioned to me that some guy assumed she was a recruiter, a front-end dev, a wife, a girlfriend, or a UX consultant. It happens everywhere. At conferences. At parties full of devs. At work. Everywhere. Not only has that never happened to me, the opposite regularly happens to me -- if I'm hanging out with physics or math grad students, people assume I'm a fellow grad student. When people bring up the market in discussions like these, they make it sound like it's a force of nature. It's not. It's just a word that describes the collective actions of people under some circumstances. Mary's situation didn't automatically get fixed because it's a free market. Mary's rejection by the recruiter got undone when I complained to my engineering director, who put me in touch with an HR director who patiently listened to the story and overturned the decision4. The market is just humans. It's humans all the way down. We can fix this, if we stop assuming the market will fix it for us, and fix things ourselves. ]]> software-development racism sexism discrimination computer-science dan-luu https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:2aeffcdafbed/ Audience Overload 2018-09-11T03:13:08+00:00 https://thefrailestthing.com/2018/09/09/the-deforming-power-of-an-ever-present-audience/ chriskrycho while it is impossible to fine-tune that audience in the same way we might work to fine-tune our information flows, we nonetheless can customize it a significant degree and, more importantly, we have some ideal image of that audience in our mind. It is that image of the audience we desire, the audience we want to please, the audience from whom we seek a reaction to satisfy our emotional cravings—cravings already manipulated by the structure of the platforms that connect us with our audience—it is the image of that audience and the influence it exerts over us that has disordered our public discourse. ]]> michael-sacasas performativity information-overload l-m-sacasas social-media https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:7b03e94f506f/ The American Scholar: The Privilege Predicament 2018-08-19T03:18:10+00:00 https://theamericanscholar.org/the-privilege-predicament/#%23A+few+years+ago,+I+found+myself+embroiled+in+an+argument+at+a+symposium,+where+one+speaker+had+referred+to+%E2%80%9Cwhite+privilege%E2%80%9D+as+a+self-evident+phenomenon.+Was+it+really+necessary,+I+asked,+to+point+out+that+there+is+privilege+and+privilege,+whiteness+and+whiteness?+If+my+white+colleague+felt+that+she+had+a+great+deal+to+apologize+for,+and+thought+a+public+symposium+a+suitable+occasion+for+a+display+of+soul+searching,+that+was+well+and+good,+so+long+as+she+did+not+also+suggest+that+we+must+all+follow+her+lead+and+all+feel+about+our+own+so-called+privilege+exactly+what+she+felt.+Was+it+reasonable+to+suppose+that+whiteness+confers,+on+everyone+who+claims+it,+comparable+experiences+and+privileges?+Was+my+own+background+as+a+working-class+Jewish+boy,+growing+up+in+a+predominantly+black+community,+remotely+similar+to+the+background+or+disposition+of+a+white+colleague+who+had+never+known+privation,+or+had+no+contact+at+all+with+black+children?+Did+it+matter,+thinking+of+ourselves+simply+as+possessors+of+white+privilege,+that+one+of+us+had+written+extensively+on+race+while+the+other+had+devoted+herself+to+scholarly+research+on+metaphysical+poetry?+Was+it+not+the+case,+I+asked,+that+what+Claudia+Rankine+and+Beth+Loffreda+call+in+The+Racial+Imaginary+%E2%80%9Cthe+boundaries%E2%80%9D+of+our+%E2%80%9Cimaginative+sympathy%E2%80%9D+had+been+drawn+in+drastically+different+ways?+How+could+whiteness,+or+blackness,+signify+to+us+the+same+things? chriskrychoThe absurdity inherent in all of this should not obscure the damage it has wrought: damage in sowing confusion even about the obvious—about the difference between what is important and less important, between doing what is injurious and being deficient in doing what is positively good, between sponsoring injustice and simply living more or less modestly in an imperfect world. To be unable to make these kinds of elementary distinctions is to be radically impaired, and there seems to me no question that the tendency to invoke privilege has exacerbated that impairment. There was, at the heart of the privilege turn, an aspiration to enlightenment. But the partisans committed to promoting the privilege critique are mainly interested in drawing hard lines separating the guilty from the saved, the serenely oblivious from the righteous, fiercely aggrieved, and censorious.]]> privilege rhetoric identity-politics identity modernity robert-boyers https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:8ecf7e6d2823/ Context Switching 2018-08-18T16:35:03+00:00 http://artsy.github.io/blog/2018/08/10/On-Context-Switching/ chriskrychocli apps productivity tools programming https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:1980b623fd31/ Pure UI Control 2018-08-04T21:50:29+00:00 https://medium.com/@asolove/pure-ui-control-ac8d1be97a8d chriskrycho…the idea we’re missing is an application’s control states. Previously we enumerated all of an interface’s display states as all the meaningfully different ways it should display. A control state is all the possible states of the interface that have different sets of allowed interactions. Sometimes the two layers of states align, as in a loading state that displays a spinner and ignores all user input. In other cases, an interface’s display state can remain the same even while it’s control state changes.]]> pure-ui software-development design state adam-solove ui control-flow https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:c489cf53c1f3/ Augmenting Agile with Formal Methods 2018-07-30T13:13:20+00:00 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/augmenting-agile/ chriskrycho I’m not suggesting formal methods replaces heavy refactoring, pairing, testing, etc, but that it augments it. Specifications give us a means of thinking quickly and deeply about complex systems and finding flaws in our designs. It helps us build higher-quality systems faster and cheaper. If that isn’t Agile I don’t know what is.]]> formal-methods agile-software-development hillel-wayne verification testing software-development tla+ https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:fcb3e2f3c83f/ A Single Prioritized List (a Story) – Hacker Noon 2018-07-30T02:03:08+00:00 https://hackernoon.com/a-single-prioritized-list-a-story-a3e6590c52bc chriskrychoBy far the hardest part is the transparency. Perhaps in the past this was just “known” — the less important effort was called equally important, but it wasn’t, or the CEOs pet project was called “strategic” to get it rushed through. But it wasn’t explicit. For that, you need psychological safety and trust.
You are going to hit blockers, and you’ll have a choice…either hide them away, or not. Finally, people see through “fake” autonomy. They sense when the system is highly constrained. So if you want to get to the point where teams can really own their own value streams and be truly independent, you can put that out there as an aspirational goal and keep working towards it.
A single prioritized list of business outcomes/missions, and limit work in progress.
]]> product-management management leadership software-development john-cutler https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:432f3f57974e/ Start With Naive Pragmatism 2018-07-30T01:55:17+00:00 https://medium.com/@johnpcutler/start-with-naive-pragmatism-b152f2b772dd chriskrychoMost folks are more “here and now”, and that heuristic has worked decently well throughout history.
For systems thinkers this can be very challenging. We want to to address the root dynamic. We want something that will “stick” and will be self-sustaining. We may want to engage diverse perspectives to further explore the problem.
But you have to keep your eye on the prize.
Example… say I want to address the problem of unplanned work sapping throughput from my team. I can talk about it on a high level, or I can dig into the last 7 days and look at the specific issues that cropped up. Then I’ll explore the expected issues in the next week, and together with my team try to solve today’s problem (not the broader systems problem).
…
This isn’t to say that you should abandon lasting solutions. Don’t abandon your “start with the Why” instinct. Keep that, but narrow it down to “why right now”. Most people will respond to local experiments that work. They’ll be initially unreceptive to the bigger discussion — those are scary, and unpredictable, and vague. But with some momentum that can change.
]]> product-management john-cutler management software-development leadership https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:45a5a6525afa/ PMs: Share Outcomes With Your Team – Hacker Noon 2018-07-30T01:50:15+00:00 https://hackernoon.com/pms-share-outcomes-with-your-team-dcb687766b23 chriskrychoProduct managers tend to focus so myopically on what is “on deck” and in progress, that they fail to close the loop on prior work. The second something is shipped — with fanfair and some success theater — the focus shifts to the next thing.… Return to the same dashboards whenever possible to minimize ramp-up and repeat questions. Don’t be afraid to share qualitative data too — real customer/user stories can be incredibly impactful. Invite a customer if you can. Challenge yourself to really own presenting this stuff with confidence, and engaging the team. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, do not be afraid to share negative or disconfirming information…you’ll get far more respect that way vs. being a “know it all PM!”… No magic tool will replace this kind of open and reflective communication. How you spend your time as a team is a good reflection of what you care about.]]> product-management engineering john-cutler software-development management https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:8f16326e8260/ Ripple Effects, No, and Chips On Shoulders… 2018-07-29T22:26:08+00:00 https://medium.com/@johnpcutler/ripple-effects-no-and-chips-on-shoulders-a4037b683f81 chriskrychoBacking up I’m hearing a couple things. I’m hearing that you should probably say No, but that saying No doesn’t feel like an option. You’ve dropped hints, and they aren’t biting. Leadership has some cause to ask questions, but they’re also somewhat complicit in the problem. You’re eager to please and don’t want to be pegged as obstructionist. It sounds like a wicked loop of sorts. Who will break the cycle? Someone should break the cycle, right? As long as this persists, things will just get worse and trust and confidence will degrade further.]]> john-cutler software-development culture engineering https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:b29e2f0c466c/ Is Agile the Enemy (of Good Design)? 2018-07-29T22:05:57+00:00 https://hackernoon.com/is-agile-the-enemy-of-good-design-14a35806cde7 chriskrychoThe stuff you’re talking about rarely happens. It is all about “ship, ship, ship”. We don’t pivot. We don’t refine. The product owner just wants to mark it done in Jira. The MVPs are an excuse to get crappy stuff out the door. I guarantee that if I am methodical with my prototype testing, I can come up with something better because I will expose it to users. Not AS great as doing it the perfect Agile way, but better than nothing. I mean I struggle even to do usability testing. So you know…yes in theory all that is good, but it doesn’t happen.
The enemy of both actual agilistas and the UX/design community in 2018 is, as John points out, short-term, output-centric thinking driven by a focus on short-term financial results, and all the cultural ramifications of this mindset.
And this is some hot fire here:
So where does this leave us? Designers have a right to be concerned. At least with waterfall no one prematurely yells “ship it” in the middle of the project. Designers have time to work instead of trying to jump on and off the sprint conveyor belt. And because the “thing” is built in a big batch, they have time to tackle the design problem holistically right from the beginning. “Good” waterfall beats abused Agile any day.
]]> john-cutler agile design ux startups culture https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:5ce39dfba6a3/ Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet | News | The Guardian 2018-07-29T18:21:10+00:00 https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jul/27/english-language-global-dominance#%23The+gravitational+pull+that+English+now+exerts+on+other+languages+can+also+be+seen+in+the+world+of+fiction.+The+writer+and+translator+Tim+Parks+has+argued+that+European+novels+are+increasingly+being+written+in+a+kind+of+denatured,+international+vernacular,+shorn+of+country-specific+references+and+difficult-to-translate+wordplay+or+grammar.+Novels+in+this+mode+%E2%80%93+whether+written+in+Dutch,+Italian+or+Swiss+German+%E2%80%93+have+not+only+assimilated+the+style+of+English,+but+perhaps+more+insidiously+limit+themselves+to+describing+subjects+in+a+way+that+would+be+easily+digestible+in+an+anglophone+context.+Yet+the+influence+of+English+now+goes+beyond+simple+lexical+borrowing+or+literary+influence.+Researchers+at+the+IULM+University+in+Milan+have+noticed+that,+in+the+past+50+years,+Italian+syntax+has+shifted+towards+patterns+that+mimic+English+models,+for+instance+in+the+use+of+possessives+instead+of+reflexives+to+indicate+body+parts+and+the+frequency+with+which+adjectives+are+placed+before+nouns.+German+is+also+increasingly+adopting+English+grammatical+forms,+while+in+Swedish+its+influence+has+been+changing+the+rules+governing+word+formation+and+phonology. chriskrychoCurrent educational discourse is full of talk about the need to bolster children’s cognition. In the culture at large, experts have been trumpeting the cognitive benefits of everything from online brain games to magic mushrooms. Why not try Hopi instead? The point of this education wouldn’t necessarily be to acquire fluency in an extinct or smaller language – it would be to open a door.]]> English linguistics globalization jacob-mikanowski https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:72b42f829a45/ The Ignoble Lie by Patrick J. Deneen | Articles | First Things 2018-07-21T04:55:10+00:00 https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/04/the-ignoble-lie#%23One+might+have+thought+that+students+at+such+a+school+would+be+keenly+interested+in+hearing+a+lecture+by+someone+who+would+discuss+the+evidence,+basis,+and+implications+of+economic+and+class+divergences+in+America+today.+Indeed,+one+might+suspect+that+if+the+students+were+upset+about+inequality,+they+would+have+been+inspired+by+Murray+to+direct+the+onus+of+their+discontent+against+Middlebury+College+itself+as+a+perpetrator+of+class+division+or+even+against+themselves+as+willing+participants+in+that+perpetuation.+At+the+very+least,+one+might+have+thought+that+they+would+be+interested+in+listening+to+an+analysis+of+the+role+educational+institutions+play+in+creating+and+maintaining+inequality.+Instead,+they+shouted+down+the+man+who+was+going+to+speak+with+them+about+the+role+they+play+in+perpetuating+inequality%E2%80%94in+the+name+of+equality+itself.+Of+course,+it+wasn%E2%80%99t+the+subject+of+Murray%E2%80%99s+lecture+that+was+being+protested,+but+the+fact+that+he+had+discussed+statistical+differences+in+IQ+among+different+races+in+his+1994+book,+The+Bell+Curve.+The+main+point+of+that+book,+however,+was+concern+that+social+sorting+would+exacerbate+class+differentiation+in+America%E2%80%94just+the+kind+of+sorting+that+elite+schools+like+Middlebury+help+to+advance.+The+violent+protests+against+Murray+had+the+convenient+effect+of+preventing+any+exploration+of+the+pervasive+class+divide+in+America+today,+and+leaving+the+elite+students+and+%C2%ADfaculty+of+Middlebury+self-satisfied+in+their+demonstrative+support+for+equality. chriskrycho So long as liberalism was not fully itself—so long as liberalism was corrected and even governed by Christianity—a working social contract was possible. For Christianity, difference is ordered toward unity. For liberalism, unity is valued insofar as it promotes difference. The American experiment blended and confused these two understandings, but just enough to make it a going concern. The balance was always imperfect, leaving out too many, always ­unstably oscillating between quasi-theological evocation of unity and deracinated individualism. But it seemed viable for nearly 250 years. The recent steep decline of religious faith and Christian moral norms is regarded by many as marking the triumph of liberalism, and so, in a sense, it is. Today our unity is understood almost entirely in the light of our differences. We come together—to celebrate diversity. And today, the celebration of diversity ends up serving as a mask for power and inequality.]]> Christianity America unity pluralism patrick-deneen divercity Christendom liberalism post-liberalism https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:bc8b76f664ed/ The Barbell Method of Reading 2018-07-17T01:18:42+00:00 https://zettelkasten.de/posts/barbell-method-reading/ chriskrycho Read the book. Read swiftly but don’t skip any parts unless they make you vomit or put you to sleep. Mark all the passages that stand out and contain useful, interesting or inspiring information. Read the book a second time. But now you read the marked parts only. This time you make notes, connect them to past notes (Zettelkasten Method!) and think about what you’ve read. Make mindmaps, drawings, bullet points – everything that helps you to think more clearly.]]> barbell-method note-taking learning zettelkasten reading memory https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:95d626449f19/ The Other Whisper Network 2018-07-08T18:19:36+00:00 https://harpers.org/archive/2018/03/the-other-whisper-network-2/ chriskrycho I can see how the drama of this moment is enticing. It offers a grandeur, a sweeping purity to our possibly flawed and fumbling and ambivalent selves. It justifies all our failings and setbacks and mediocrities; it wasn’t us, it was men, or the patriarchy, holding us back, objectifying us. It is easier to think, for instance, that we were discriminated against than that our story wasn’t good enough or original enough to be published in The Paris Review, or even that it did not meet the editor’s highly idiosyncratic yet widely revered tastes. Or that a man said something awful and sexual to us while we were working on a television show, and we got depressed and could never again achieve what we might have. And yet do we really in our hearts believe that is the whole story? Is this a complete and satisfying explanation? There is, of course, sexism, which looms and shadows us in all kinds of complicated and unmappable ways, but is it the totalizing force, the central organizing narrative, of our lives? This is where the movement veers from important and exhilarating correction into implausibility and rationalization. (One of the deeply anonymous says, “This seems like such a boring way to look at your life.”)]]> feminism katie-roiphe sexuality sexism sexual-politics #metoo https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:c5ecf3bd8d9d/ the Aspen Tech Solutionism Festival —Snakes and Ladders “I have long loved the Atlantic and am proud of my association with it, but every time the Aspen Ideas Festival rolls around my inner Unabomber emerges and wants to burn the entire endeavor to th 2018-06-26T12:16:04+00:00 https://blog.ayjay.org/the-aspen-tech-solutionism-festival/ chriskrycho Maybe Code for America is reconsidering some of its priorities but it’s still Code for America and its “solutions” inevitably involve deepening people’s dependence on Big Tech. (“We can give you a texting tool that allows you to text with people and it’s been shown to decrease the rates of failure to appear.”)]]> politics silicon-valley technology alan-jacobs google aspen-ideas-festival https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:f5c397e94bdf/ Civic Tech in a Time of Technopessimism 2018-06-26T12:14:39+00:00 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/civic-tech-in-a-time-of-technopessimism/563696/ chriskrycho Her point was: It’s not the technology that’s significant—a texting tool is not a complex technical artifact—but the tool can change the way the system works. Here in 2018, it’s possible that you’ve noticed that tech did not save government. But some parents who have been accused of crimes in Tulsa, Oklahoma are now spending the night at home with their kids instead of in jail. Or to take another major Code for America initiative, a bunch of California counties have now made it easier to apply for food stamps. Neither of these efforts is likely to be hailed as “technology saving government,” but maybe those big abstractions were part of the problem.]]> criminal-justice alexis-madrigal government ethics code-for-america recidivism technology silicon-valley politics probation alexis-c-madrigal localism https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:a18cf385457a/ UTC is Enough for Everyone, Right? 2018-06-26T02:14:27+00:00 https://zachholman.com/talk/utc-is-enough-for-everyone-right chriskrychoBuilding a calendar sucks. Like there’s really cool shit you can do, since every calendar out there today is basically straight outta 2005, but at the end of the day you’re stuck dealing with all of the edge cases that all your dork friends have warned you about since the dawn of time. (Like literally, the dawn of time is a separate edge case you have to account for as well.) So there’s been a lot of heinous stuff we’ve had to work with. This is a truly amazing compendium of weird time bugs.]]> time zach-holman iso8601 programming https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:dc0308f9c018/ The Great Theorem Prover Showdown —Hillel Wayne “Functional programming and immutability are hot right now. On one hand, this is pretty great as there’s lots of nice things about functional programming.” 2018-06-26T01:30:23+00:00 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/theorem-prover-showdown/ chriskrycho Functional programming and immutability are hot right now. On one hand, this is pretty great as there’s lots of nice things about functional programming. On the other hand, people get a little overzealous and start claiming that imperative code is unnatural or that purity is always preferable to mutation. I think that the appropriate paradigm is heavily dependent on context, but a lot of people speak in universals. I keep hearing that it’s easier to analyze pure functional code than mutable imperative code. But nobody gives rigorous arguments for this and nobody provides concrete examples. Nobody actually digs into why assignments and transitions are so much harder to reason about than pure functions and IO monads. We’re just supposed to accept it as an axiom. I don’t like accepting things as axioms. If we make a claim, we better damn well put it to the test.]]> hillel-wayne dafny fp type-theory programming haskell idris agda ip computer-science fstar theorem-proving https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:7776c84ff97c/ We Are What We Build, by Eric Meyer · The Manual 2018-06-23T15:59:08+00:00 https://themanual.org/read/issues/5/eric-meyer/article chriskrychoKathy Sierra, who has been targeted for harassment more than once, relates in her book Badass that the horse trainer’s mantra is: “Make the right thing easy and the wrong thing difficult.”8 Now consider the converse: what is easy comes to be accepted as the right thing, and what is difficult comes to be regarded as the wrong thing. That’s why I say what we do now isn’t neutral. Everything we do, from what we share to how we interact with our networks to how those networks are structured, is influencing the near future of our societies. Not just the hyper-digital developed world’s societies, but all societies everywhere, because what happens online will shape what happens offline. And speaking of concepts that may make no sense in a couple of decades, consider the idea that there’s a distinction between online and offline. We often try to demarcate them, talking about the virtual and real worlds as if the internet is a different planet that we sometimes visit and then return home. That’s never been true, but the mobile revolution has made the fiction obvious. The internet is no more a separate, “virtual” world than are books or songs. We talk to each other directly, and share ourselves, whatever the medium. We wouldn’t say that by making a phone call we enter a different world; when we go online, we aren’t going away either. Wherever we go, we take ourselves with us, and seek to be heard. All of this is right, but the first bit is more right. That there is no true divider between our online and offline selves is not the same thing as there being no important differences between interacting digitally and acting in person – just as communicating only via letter is different in important ways from interacting in person, and indeed is also not neutral!]]> gamergate eric-meyer technology ethics norms twitter internet social-media https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:b46d7a00e7b2/ The New Web Typography › Robin Rendle 2018-06-23T15:38:24+00:00 https://www.robinrendle.com/essays/new-web-typography/#fnref:7 chriskrycho I think we need to at least acknowledge that typography, reading and design in general is far more complicated than we’d like to admit. And where we stand on this spectrum is predominately what shapes those experiences more than anything else. We have to acknowledge the subtlety of this continuum in our work, even if we prefer the comforts of one specific point. And this:
The text above is predictable since it will be rendered in every browser. The font, however, is fragile in comparison. It’s a critical point of failure for typographers to grapple with, and ultimately we must accept that preparing our typographic interfaces with failure in mind is better than the alternative.
]]> robin-rendle design progressive-enhancement typography https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:16c5502f7074/ The React is “just” JavaScript Myth - daverupert.com 2018-06-05T12:43:06+00:00 https://daverupert.com/2018/06/the-react-is-just-javascript-myth/ chriskrychojQuery was just JavaScript too (no VBScript whatsoever). I jest, but I think React and jQuery share a lot about what makes a successful project: an intuitive syntactic sugar API and a bubbling ecosystem of plugins and extensions that solve common developer problems. Other largely-adopted technologies like WordPress, Rails, heck even Linux, possess those same characteristics. This is exactly right. React itself is “just JS” (though… so is every other framework?) but it’s the ecosystem that makes it viable and that’s a lot more than just your bog-standard vanilla JS.]]> jquery react dave-rupert javascript https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:b314ea89b7f3/ Reading Jonathan Edwards (Nathan Finn) 2018-05-19T18:47:00+00:00 http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2018/05/19/reading-jonathan-edwards-nathan-finn/ chriskrychoMost Colonial Puritans believed that God prepared the elect for regeneration through their participation in various means of grace such as public worship, prayer, and fasting. They believed that the normal course of one’s spiritual life was to be raised in a Christian family, participate in these means of grace, and at some point to come into awareness of their regeneration, which would result in “owning the covenant” (professing Christ publicly) for themselves. They also believed it was presumptuous to express assurance of one’s salvation. Edwards pushed back on this formula. Far more than his Puritan predecessors, he emphasized the experience of conversion, which was evidence of one’s regeneration and, consequently, one’s election. He thought it was normal to have a basic assurance of one’s salvation, even while admitting that God alone knows the heart of each individual. He was never a radical who believed that a conversion experience of some sort automatically meant someone was an authentic Christian, but he did believe that a lack of emphasis on personal conversion contributed to nominal faith. I believe his critically positive approach to conversion, which avoided both the “conversionism” of the radicals and “gradualism” of the preparationists, remains helpful. Conversionism too often leads to false professions, while gradualism too often leads to a sentimental or superficial identification with the faith. This is interesting, and it's a place where I differ from Edwards and Finn (though I'd differ a bit with the Puritans as well). The emphasis on an experience of conversion seems to underplay how for many people the "preparation" approach does accurately reflect their own experience of the faith. Certainly it's a fair picture of mine! You can push back against the lack of assurance without pushing back on the rest—and you should, as the Reformers did: "Look to your baptism!"]]> nathan-finn jonathan-edwards conversion puritans regeneration https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:ef038d64f9d7/ Lessons From Isaac Asimov's Multivac 2018-05-15T01:55:49+00:00 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/05/lessons-from-the-multivac/523773/ chriskrychoTechnology’s threat to democracy is not, at its root, that of poorly designed systems (though certainly design improvements can be made). The real threat is when technical progress is relied upon as a substitute for moral progress in cultivating the civic virtues, norms, and values that sustain functional democracies.]]> shannon-vallor ethics technology google democracy politics isaac-asimov https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:8bae6ec9a9e1/ Team reviews – Marc Hedlund – Medium 2018-05-12T00:42:16+00:00 https://medium.com/@marcprecipice/team-reviews-4b395bee61c9 chriskrychoTeam reviews are quick and easy to do, and every time I’ve done one, the manager and I wind up talking about important topics, pushing ourselves to promote and reward people who deserve it, and taking action where needed. It also helps me know our whole team better, and get clear signals from managers that make interactions with each person more meaningful. I highly recommend the practice.]]> via:jeremywsherman management leadership https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:b5731c8ca5ee/ Love, Again 2018-05-11T03:58:35+00:00 https://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/love-again/ chriskrycho I spent my childhood and adolescence fixated on the kind of family I was certain was the only sort worth having: I wanted to be a husband and a father, one whose very identity was defined by permanent relationality. (You can’t stop being a father, and you shouldn’t, according to Jesus, stop being a husband once you’ve promised to be one.) Instead I’ve been given a different sort of family, one marked by promises of a sometimes-overlooked kind. When the married couple with whom I currently share a house and I sat down recently to be interviewed about our unusual living arrangement, we surprised even ourselves, I think, as we talked about how much the practice of godparenthood had reshaped our understanding of what family is. Before they had children of their own, my housemates, Aidan and Melanie, had become godparents to another couple’s son, with whom they had shared a home previously. They stood at the font as their friends’ baby was sprinkled with water and marked as Christ’s own forever, and they promised to help raise him in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. And soon thereafter, that baby’s parents would stand next to me at the font as Aidan and Melanie’s daughter was baptized, and we together—weaving an even thicker skein of commitment—made the same promises in relation to her. Biological and marital kinship, it turned out, had become the site around which a deeper, sacramental kinship would flourish, tying us all to one another not only by the well-known forms of conjugal and parental love but also by the sometimes less-celebrated form of voluntary devotion. We were, we felt, proving Jesus’s words true: “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children.” ]]> homosexuality sexuality celibacy love wesley-hill hospitality family https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:d784a9537398/ The Dead End of the Left? | Commonweal Magazine 2018-05-10T19:09:13+00:00 https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/dead-end-left#%23Molnar+put+it+quite+bluntly:+the+left+is+doomed+to+oscillate+between+utopian+anarchism+and+extreme+political+realism+because+of+a+philosophical+mistake.+He+quoted+Jacques+Maritain+in+The+Peasant+of+the+Garonne:+%E2%80%9CThe+pure+man+of+the+left+detests+being,+always+preferring,+in+principle,+in+the+words+of+Rousseau,+what+is+not+to+what+is.%E2%80%9D+But+while+Maritain+viewed+this+as+a+mere+temperamental+inclination,+Molnar+believed+that+in+the+modern+age+%E2%80%9Contological+restlessness%E2%80%9D+had+evolved+into+a+systematic+and+militant+attitude,+a+habit+of+denying+reality+and+%E2%80%9Cchasing+the+imaginary.%E2%80%9D+Molnar+probably+had+in+mind+the+counter-culture+of+the+late+%E2%80%9960s,+such+as+radical+pacifism,+absolute+sexual+freedom,+the+hippie+movement,+etc.+However,+he+also+cites+some+famous+French+left-wing+intellectuals+of+his+time,+whose+work+is+still+very+influential+in+American+academia:+L%C3%A9vi-Strauss,+Lacan,+Althusser,+Foucault.+The+latter,+in+particular,+theorized chriskrychoDel Noce also reflected deeply on the political repercussions of the advent of such “post-Marxist bourgeois society.” He believed that, ironically, the enduring influence of Marxist ideas would leave the left ill-equipped to correct the excesses of capitalism. If values like justice and human dignity do not have an objective reality rooted in a metaphysical order knowable by reason, then social criticism becomes purely negative. It can unmask the hypocrisy and contradictions of ideals like religion, family, and country, but there is no conceptual ground for new ideals. Secondly, Del Noce thought that the left itself was doomed to become “bourgeoisified,” by losing its ties to the working classes and becoming focused on causes broadly linked with sexuality. By doing so it would end up embracing an essentially individualistic and secular idea of happiness, which French sociologist Jacques Ellul had called the bourgeois trait par excellence. Conversely, politics would no longer be the expression of a fabric of social life organized around families, churches, ethnic neighborhoods, trade unions, etc., because all of them were being undermined by the individualism of the new culture.]]> identity-politics liberalism post-liberalism Christianity Marxism neoliberalism roman-catholic sexual-politics politics socialism carlo-lancellotti https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:13acf8bc8357/ Entity-Component-System architecture for UI in Rust 2018-05-09T22:57:47+00:00 https://raphlinus.github.io/personal/2018/05/08/ecs-ui.html chriskrycho The overuse of RefCell is a sign of unidiomatic Rust code. With the right architecture, it can be avoided entirely. The general techniques apply in many cases where there is dynamic interaction between multiple stateful components. These techniques are: use integers as references to nodes within a graph, split state into mutable and immutable parts when diving in, and explicitly export “continuation” state when too deeply borrowed, rather than transferring control flow directly. ]]> ECS raph-levien gui immediate-mode-gui rust https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:094026fef531/ Security Trade-Offs in the New EU Privacy Law 2018-05-09T19:31:07+00:00 https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/04/security-trade-offs-in-the-new-eu-privacy-law/ chriskrycho I can say without hesitation that an overwhelming percentage of that research has been possible thanks to data included in public WHOIS registration records. Is the current WHOIS system outdated, antiquated and in need of an update? Perhaps. But scrapping the current system without establishing anything in between while laboring under the largely untested belief that in doing so we will achieve some kind of privacy utopia seems myopic. If opponents of the current WHOIS system are being intellectually honest, they will make the following argument and stick to it: By restricting access to information currently available in the WHOIS system, whatever losses or negative consequences on security we may suffer as a result will be worth the cost in terms of added privacy. That’s an argument I can respect, if not agree with. ]]> security krebs internet secondary-effects GDPR https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/b:cd85389d445d/