South Software Content Suggestion #14
What I read and watch this week (Friday, October 25 2024)
We’re back this week with new content to enjoy! Here I review content I consumed in the last week, so you can decide whether to go for it or not.
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Books
Thinking, Fast and Slow
I know, I know. This is the third time I write about this book. But as one of the acclaims goes: buy it fast, read it slow. It’s totally true. It contain so much valuable information about human minds that it requires long time to be consumed and absorbed.
Articles
Asynchronous IO: the next billion-dollar mistake?
On the problems of optimizing what we have instead of imagining different worlds. “More specifically, what if instead of spending 20 years developing various approaches to dealing with asynchronous IO (e.g. async/await), we had instead spent that time making OS threads more efficient, such that one wouldn't need asynchronous IO in the first place?”
Are you writing code because you enjoy it or because it is the only way to achieve what you want?
“The most interesting responses continue to come from people who literally hate writing code. Mostly because I’m surprised they read my stuff at all, to be honest!One of those conversations was with someone who self-identified as “an entrepreneur.” As they describe it, AI let’s them churn out their ideas in large numbers without having to actually write any code. To them, “code is boring,” and the interesting part is what you can do with it.”
Software professionals need to write automatic tests to improve their software reliability. But not all tests are born equal.
“Good code is easy to delete. Tests represent an investment into existing code, and make it costlier to delete (or change). The solution is to write tests for features in such a way that they are independent of the code. I like to use the neural network test for this:”
It turns out I'm still excited about the web
How a non-tech person became an enthusiast of the early web and what “modernity” take out of it.
"It’s so rare these days to find people who want to build that interconnectedness; who see it as a mission and a movement. People in tech talk excitedly about their total Compensation (which has earned its own shorthand acronym, TC), and less so what exciting thing they got to build, and what it allowed people to do. Maybe they’ll give you a line about what they allow for the enterprise or increasing some company’s bottom line, but it’s usually devoid of the humanist idealism that enchanted me about the early web."
Let’s change topic and go into this meta study about human aging. How a researcher found out that an entire field was built on shaky foundations.
“I started getting interested in this topic when I debunked a couple of papers in Nature and Science about extreme ageing in the 2010s. In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly don’t stack up. I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.
The epitome of this is blue zones, which are regions where people supposedly reach age 100 at a remarkable rate. For almost 20 years, they have been marketed to the public. They’re the subject of tons of scientific work, a popular Netflix documentary, tons of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet, and so on.”
Podcasts
A python core developer and long-experience Python developer shares his opinion about the current and future status of the language and of the community.
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