Bookmarks tagged with #essay.
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Taste Is All That's Left | Blog
On what is left to do once the machine can make anything, and why taste is the last craft worth keeping.
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on: 2026-08-07
The Cost of Safetyism
What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard.
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on: 2026-05-26
Drunk Post: Things I’ve Learned as a Senior Engineer
Everything your mentor wants to say but HR won't let them
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on: 2026-04-22
The AI Vampire
This was an unusually hard post to write, because it flies in the face of everything else going on.
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on: 2026-02-11
Why talking to LLMs has improved my thinking – Vallified
I’ve been surprised by one aspect of using large language models more than any other. They often put into words things I have long understood, but could not write down clearly. When that happens, it feels less like learning something new and more like recognition. A kind of “yes, that’s it” moment. I have not…
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on: 2026-01-23
You misunderstand what it means to be poor
The more I speak about being poor, the more I realize how fundamentally other folks misunderstand what it means to be poor versus being broke.
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on: 2025-11-14
Becoming the person who does the thing | @fredrivett
Bad news: your internal identity dictates everything you do. Good news: you can change it
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on: 2025-09-12
Infinite Pixels
In which I push browser engines to their finite limits using infinite values.
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on: 2025-08-07
Software Development at 800 Words Per Minute | Dickson Tan's blog
How I develop software at 800 words per minute with a screen reader
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on: 2025-07-28
you are in a box
your data is trapped inside the box that is your program. you can only see what the program author exposes.
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on: 2025-07-14
Getting Over Not Being A Good Enough Programmer
Here’s the truth about feeling like you’re not a good enough programmer…
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on: 2024-11-26
IMG_0416
Between 2009 and 2012, Apple iPhones and iPod Touches included a feature called “Send to YouTube” that allowed users to upload videos directly to YouTube from the Photos app.
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on: 2024-11-11
What's Functional Programming All About?
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on: 2024-09-04
You Are NOT Dumb, You Just Lack the Prerequisites
I always thought I was too dumb to understand math. During my school years, it was evident to me that for some kids math was easy, and for others like myself: painfully difficult.
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on: 2024-08-25
Code as Art - Andrew Watson
Computer programming as an art form in and of itself
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on: 2024-08-22
I don't write code the way I used to - stitcher.io
A blog about modern PHP, the web, and programming in general. Follow my newsletter and YouTube channel as well.
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on: 2024-08-08
How I Use "AI"
I don't think that AI models (by which I mean: large language models) are over-hyped. In this post I will list 50 ways I've used them.
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on: 2024-08-08
Essays on programming I think about a lot | benkuhn.net
Computers can be understood • Choose Boring Technology • The Wrong Abstraction • Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names • The Hiring Post • The Product-Minded Engineer • Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend • The Law of Leaky Abstractions • Reflections on software performance • Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods • End-to-End Arguments in System Design • Inventing on Principle
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on: 2024-05-27
The curious case of the missing period
When Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is not simple
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on: 2024-05-22
Use Your Potions and Scrolls
I find that when I play RPG games, I often hoard single-use items like potions and scrolls, saving them for some future critical moment. I finish games like Skyrim with a backpack full of unspent resources, reserved for a crisis that never actually arrives. What’s the point, then, of all these items?
Just like I save items in games, in real life I too am reluctant to ask for favors or promote my own projects. (Sometimes I even save all my favourite treats and I never eat the last one). I treated these social and professional resources as if they were single-use “magical items”, not to be wasted but reserved for some important-yet-undefined future magnum opus event.
Recently I played Baldur’s Gate 3 and I decided to try something new: I would actually gasp use my items as needed, as they were intended, without undue reservation. Not only was it actually fun to use my fireball scrolls and blow stuff up, but I also discovered new layers and hidden quests. For instance, using a ‘Speak with the Dead’ scroll on a certain suspicious corpse unveiled a questline I would have otherwise missed.
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on: 2024-04-17
https://blog.ayjay.org/the-real-value-of-a-catholic-modernity/
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on: 2024-02-28
An app can be a home-cooked meal
I made a messaging app for my family and my family only.
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on: 2024-01-05
Form and Matter: Hylomorphism
This essay provides an overview of the main claims and basic motivations for hylomorphism, the view that all material objects consist of both matter and form.
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on: 2023-12-17
Remembering things that haven't happened yet
How will I know what I need to hear in a future I can't anticipate? Who will I be, and what will she want?
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on: 2023-12-14
Christmas on the Moon
Baby, it's cold outside! Especially when you spend the holidays in a tent full of explosives.
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on: 2023-12-09
Staring at a Wall: Embracing Deliberate Boredom
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on: 2023-10-28
Career Advice
To my great surprise, young people now somewhat frequently contact me in order to solicit career advice.They are usually in college or highschool, and want to know what the best next steps are for a career in security or software development.This is, honestly, a really complicated question, mostl...
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on: 2023-10-04
Absurd Success
So… I’ve had the most unreal week of coding. Zero exaggeration, I’ve halved the RAM requirements of the search engine, removed the need to take the system offline during an upgrade, removed hard limits on how many documents can be indexed, and quadrupled soft limits on how many keywords can be in the corpus.
It’s been a long term goal to keep it possible to run and operate the system on low-powered hardware, and so far improvements have been made, to the point where my 32 Gb RAM developer machine feels spacey rather than cramped, but this set of changes takes it several notches further.
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on: 2023-08-31
Emotions: A Code Book
What I write about my own personal journey is intended as just that—my personal journey.
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on: 2023-07-26
What we talk about when we talk about System Design
Early in my research career, I had a chance to work with some of the best system researchers1 in the world on a number of really interesting system designs. One of the enjoyable aspects of research was the particular process used by researchers (particularly in the SOSP/OSDI community) to come up with novel yet practical designs. This design process can be characterized as “fighting complexity with abstraction”: in any complex environment, how do you corral that complexity into cleanly defined boxes (or more technically, abstractions) and then divide functionality across these boxes? This sounds like hyperbole, but I’ve been quite lucky when it comes to mentors; put together, my advisors at Cornell and colleagues at the now-defunct MSR Silicon Valley lab were responsible for inventing much of modern distributed computing over a span of five decades, but that’s a topic for another post. ↩
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on: 2023-07-22
How to Do the Thing You've Been Avoiding
What if there's no good reason to avoid it?
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on: 2023-06-22
Finish your projects
Starting a project can be full of excitement, hope, and blissful productivity. Finishing that last ten percent, however, can feel like too much. Here’s how to get past that and actually finish.
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on: 2023-06-14
How to Stare at Your Phone Without Losing Your Soul | Sim O.N.E. (Observati
Why tracking screen time doesn't matter and improving the relationship with your phone requires conscious decisions.
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on: 2023-05-30
Troy Hunt: Divorce
I wish I'd read this blog post years ago.
I don't have any expertise whatsoever to be guiding others through this process so please don't look at this as a "how to". But what I do have is an audience, and I've found that each time I've opened up about the more personal aspects of my life and where I've struggled (such as my post a few years ago on dealing with stress), I've had a huge amount of feedback from people that have been helped by it.
Just read this. Hugely helpful to me going through
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on: 2023-05-03
The key to becoming extraordinary
As I watched him on stage, I thought about what made him extraordinary. It’s not his voice. He readily admits that his voice isn’t amazing.
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on: 2023-05-02
50 Ideas That Changed My Life - David Perell
David shares 50 ideas that changed his life. Read here.
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on: 2023-04-11
I’ve been employed in tech for years, but I’ve almost never worked – Emmanu
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on: 2023-03-17
The 10 Best and Worst Decisions I’ve Ever Made
Today’s post is a little more personal than professional (in fact, this started off as a post for my personal blog), but there’s still plenty of overlap into entrepreneurship and crowdf…
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on: 2023-01-28
8 Hard Truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job
I got laid off from a software engineering job in April of 2020.
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on: 2022-12-29
Twenty Questions
Let’s play a game. I’m thinking of a number from 1 to 100. You guess, and I tell you whether my number is higher or lower.
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on: 2022-11-15
DALL·E 2 and The Origin of Vibe Shifts - Divinations - Every
By Means of Natural Selection
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on: 2022-04-23
What is Money, Anyway? - Lyn Alden
Editor’s Note: This topic is now comprehensively covered in my book, Broken Money. Money is a surprisingly complex subject. People spend their lives seeking money, and in some ways it seems so straightforward, and yet what humanity has defined as money has changed significantly over the centuries. How could something so simple and so universal, […]
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on: 2022-03-28
The End of the Beginning
The beginning of technology was about the shift from batched computing in one place to continuous computing everywhere. That era of paradigm changes may be over, which means the real changes are on…
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on: 2020-01-08
Learning Machine Learning: A beginner's journey
I have been learning about machine learning and deep learning (ML/DL) for the last year. I think ML/DL is here to stay. I don't think th...
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on: 2016-12-26
Andrew W.K. on Life's Ups and Downs | VICE | United States
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on: 2016-12-15
On Getting Old(er) in Tech
After years of scoffing at talk of prejudice in the information technology field -- as a white male with good hair --, I'm starting to call prejudice against my being old(er). It’s true: age discrimination is a real thing.
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on: 2016-12-09
ribbonfarm – experiments in refactored perception
constructions in magical thinking
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on: 2016-10-25
The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men's Lives is a Killer -
Mark Greene explores how in American culture, men avoid all contact rather than risk even the hint of causing unwanted sexual touch.
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on: 2016-09-12
Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful — Medium
2019 UPDATE: Since this post came out, I co-authored a book about it called Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models. Around 2003 I came across Charlie Munger’s 1995 speech, The Psychology of…
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on: 2016-07-06
La poesia "Se" di Kipling è l'eredità che tutti i figli dovrebbero ricevere
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on: 2016-06-21
The Money Letter That Every Parent Should Write
A good, soulful letter can become a family keepsake and should include a list of crucial habits and the tangible things that have helped the family.
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on: 2016-06-19
On the Wildness of Children — Carol Black
The Revolution Will Not Take Place in a Classroom
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on: 2016-05-30
How I’ve Avoided Burnout During More Than 3 Decades As A Programmer
After reading a couple of posts about programmer burnout today I started to think about how I’ve kept interested even after working in such a long career (since 1981). Why do I still care to write code?
Of course I covered some of this in my popular post Yes I Still Want To Be Doing This at 56 almost three years ago. But that was regarding the programming side of being a programmer, this is about about how I can still stand to work as a programmer, which isn't just about writing code. What is i
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on: 2016-04-10
The rectangle behind you — The rectangle behind you — Medium
I give talks. I usually enjoy giving talks. Sometimes, I get paid to give talks, which I guess makes me a professional… …although I still rarely feel like one. I speak too fast, I make shitty eye…
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on: 2016-03-31
The New Web Typography › Robin Rendle
How should we go about making typographic laws, rules and guidelines for the web?
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on: 2016-02-23
Letter to My Younger Self by Pete Sampras
You’re about to go pro, and you’re pretty excited. Deep in your heart you know you’re eventually going to succeed.
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on: 2015-12-05
Teams: building, managing, leading, performing
Years ago, after finishing my bachelor in computer science, while doing my specialization studies in teaching and, later on, while doing my masters in leadership and management, I had several subje…
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on: 2015-11-03
How I Became an Artist — Medium
I am extraordinarily blessed to do what I love for a living. Somehow in the last decade I’ve turned a hobby into a profession and then into a lifestyle. While I don’t claim any profound wisdom nor…
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on: 2015-07-07
Fixing Italy, a little bit at a time | The Real Italy
Italy has so many wonderful, beautiful amazing places and things, and all if it in an area about the size of California. And yet, it’s got a lot of problems too. What drives me crazy in pa…
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on: 2015-04-17
Cari studenti, sono un’insegnante e vi chiedo scusa
La settimana prossima comincerà un nuovo semestre e mi sento costretta a chiedervi scusa. Nonostante tutti i nostri sforzi, noi insegnanti non siamo riusciti a persuadere quelli che hanno il potere politico a cambiare il nostro sistema educativo. A quanto sembra, non siamo capaci di convincere il nostro premier che investire sulla vostra istruzione andrebbe a vantaggio di tutti noi e non inquinerebbe né l’acqua né l’aria. Leggi
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on: 2015-03-11
Screw motivation, what you need is discipline.
If you want to get anything done, there are two basic ways to get yourself to do it. The first, more popular and devastatingly wrong option is to try to motivate yourself. The second, somewhat unpo…
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on: 2015-01-31
Google Search Will Be Your Next Brain - Backchannel - Medium
Hinton, a sinewy, dry-witted Englishman by way of Canada, is standing at a white board in Mountain View, California, on the campus of Google, the company he joined in 2013 as a Distinguished…
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on: 2015-01-17
An example of preparatory refactoring
A simple example of how it can be easier to make a change by first refactoring the code to make the change easy.
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on: 2015-01-05
How to learn efficiently – Daniel Lemire's blog
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on: 2014-12-30
Parents With Computers — Medium
My dad’s got a new computer. It’s not exactly new — he bought it a few months ago, but hasn’t used it since because it runs Windows 8. My dad hates Windows 8, or rather: my dad hates having to deal…
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on: 2014-12-28
Cancer Doctor Peter Bach on Losing His Wife to Cancer -- New York Magazine - Nymag
The streetlights in Buenos Aires are considerably dimmer than they are in New York, one of the many things I learned during my family’s six-month stay in Argentina. The front windshield of the rental car, aged and covered in the city’s grime, f [...]
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on: 2014-05-07
Game Over – Ultimo Uomo
Questo weekend la Juventus ha vinto lo scudetto, il Milan ha vinto il derby, è quasi finito il campionato. Dopo i fatti di Roma, alcuni vorrebbero che finisse per sempre.
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on: 2014-05-05
What Killed My Sister? - The American Scholar
The answer—schizophrenia—only leads to more perplexing questions
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on: 2014-04-29