Swizec

> > put more emphasis on in-person tests and exams. Make it clear that homework assignments are for practice, learning, and feedback. If a person thinks that copy/pasting helps them

> Works for high school, not so much for university degrees. What's crazy is universities have an incentive to flag your work as AI generated as it forces the student to pay more money and is difficult to challenge.

When I started uni (slovenia, 2007) the rules were simple: You are adults. The final exam (written + oral) is 100% of your grade. We don’t have the time or willingness to police what you do. Strongly recommend attending classes and doing homework but whatever it’s your life. If you get high enough scores on the optional midterms, you can skip the written portion of the exam.

It was pretty great. Yes we all tried to cram for exams at the last moment. No it didn’t work very well. Needing 2 or 3 tries to pass was common.

Then later we got the bologna system. Professors stopped bragging about fail rates. Students passing became an actual thing they were evaluated on. Homework became graded, midterms were mandatory and part of your grade, attendance was tracked, etc.

College became like high school. More people passed but I think something was lost about teaching adulthood.

For the record: I didn’t graduate. My freelance business got too busy and I could not keep up with both.

The main thing to understand about the impact of AI tools:

Somehow the more senior you are [in the field of use], the better results you get. You can run faster and get more done! If you're good, you get great results faster. If you're bad, you get bad results faster.

You still gotta understand what you're doing. GeLLMan Amnesia is real.

> If someone meant to engineer a codebase to hide subtle bugs which might be remotely exploitable, leak state, behave unexpectedly at runtime, or all of the above, the code would look like this.

I wonder who could possibly be incentivized to make the cryptography package used by most of the worlds computers and communications networks full of subtly exploitable hard to find bugs. Surely everyone would want such a key piece of technology to be air tight and easy to debug

But also: surely a technology developed in a highly adversarial environment would be easy to maintain and keep understandable. You definitely would have no reason to play whackamole with random stuff as it arises

> So you have to carefully scoop precisely the same way every time to even be close to accurate??

Technically you’re supposed to sift your flour before measuring. This removes clumps and also helps you get consistent packing. I think in ye olden days it also got rid of any leftover wheat husks that made it through.

My point wasn’t that you get the same amount of flour every time. You get the same ratio of ingredients today.

Ime people way overthink home baking. If you’re not trying to make 500 perfectly identical units, you really don’t have to sweat the measurements so much. Make the dough or batter then adjust until it feels right. Having good pictures (or experience) for different stages of a recipe is way more important than detailed measurements.

> The US seems to run on volume, rather than weight.

Baking is based on proportions. As long as you use the same measuring tool, the details don’t matter.

2 cups of flour works regardless of the size of your cup

> at 15 engineers, it is very doable for a single person to keep track of everyone's work and ensure alignment.

All my past experience disagrees. Sure you have 15 engineers, but you're supporting a business of 150 people. This is a pretty common ratio.

The noise gets very loud at that scale and it becomes almost impossible for self-managed engineers to make forward progress. At the very least you need super clearly defined ownership boundaries. That means business process and workstream ownership, not code ownership.

I installed oh-my-zsh back in early college some 15 years ago, before zsh was even the default on macs, and it is so good I’ve never felt compelled to experiment or try any other shells terminals or configs. It’s the first thing I install on every new computer.

> For me, the writing speed has never been the issue. The issue has been my thinking speed. I do not see how an AI coding assistant helps me think better

Similar to moving from individual work to coordinating a large codebase: coding agents, human or otherwise, let you think at a higher abstraction level and tackle larger problems by taking care of the small details.

> without other the states not being in on it

California represents 12% of USA population, 14% of US GDP. Effectively that means CA can throw its weight around and companies are forced to at least pretend to comply. Whether they actually comply depends on enforcement.

Now if Delaware were to adopt such a law for every company “headquartered” there …

> So by the time "active" cooking is taking place, it's a pretty chill affair

Nice! As my mom used to say: A good cook leaves the kitchen cleaner than they found it.

I do a mix of mise-en-place and frantic chopping in between things. Depends on what I'm making and how the different activities gantt chart together.

Here’s how you optimize the time it takes for things to boil:

You spend that time prepping ingredients, cooking another dish, or cleaning the kitchen. In cooking there’s no such thing as waiting.

The time it takes for water to boil is your time to prep all the ingredients or clean the kitchen. In cooking there is no waiting.

Blind optimism is silly. But time and again we’ve shown that tit-for-tat is the best strategy in repeated games.

Start optimistic. Stop if it doesn’t work. In the long-term you don’t need to win every iteration, just enough for a positive expected value. And make sure you don’t get wiped out in any single iteration.

The weeks are short but the decades are long and the industry is smaller than you’d think :)

> > but optimists win. > Win.. what?

Depends what you want to win?

You won’t have happy kids and a good family life, if you don’t think it’s possible. Same as you won’t make a cool open-source library, if you aren’t optimistic (or naive) enough to go work on that.

And if you keep saying everything is impossible a huge drag extremely worthless and why even bother trying, you won’t get the fun projects at work.

> I've tried the ultra-cynical view at workplaces, and would have had better results with some "idealism", which he rightly notes in his form is just a more effectively action atop a base of clear-eyed cynicism.

Cynics feel smart but optimists win.

You have to be at least a little optimistic, sometimes even naive, to achieve unlikely outcomes. Otherwise you’ll never put in enough oomph to get lucky.

While not exactly a blog, I've collected ~16 years of [startup] engineering lessons into a book and I think it came out fantastic. People are saying super nice things.

https://scalingfastbook.com

> Hamming was also writing from a highly privileged position.

Hamming had a lot of career capital. He was the only person in the world with his track record. If you needed his kind of research/output/teaching/etc, he was the person you needed.

Cal Newport talks a lot about this. Great books.

Have something [unique/valuable] to offer and you'll be surprised how many doors it opens. Yes it takes time to stairstep your way there. A fresh grad has less career capital than a seasoned engineer with a track record of building billion dollar companies.

My favorite lens on this comes from Hamming:

> It is well known the drunken sailor whos taggers to the left or right n independent random steps will, on the average, end up about sqrt(n) steps from the origin. But if there is a pretty girl in one direction, then his steps will tend to go in that direction and he will go a distance proportional to n. In a lifetime of many, many independent choices, small and large, a career with a vision will get you a distance proportional to n, while no vision will get you only the distance sqrt(n). In a sense, the main difference between those who go far and those who do not is some people have a vision and others do not and therefore can only react to the current events as they happen.

Just a tiny bit of bias towards a direction will get you very far very fast.

I once modeled+visualised this with a bit of javascript[1] and it's quite surprising to see the huge difference from even a tiny multiplication factor on each random/probabilistic decision.

[1] https://swizec.com/blog/your-career-needs-a-vision/

Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

> If your grading is based mostly on correctly reproducing facts and applying algorithms you memorized then that’s the outcome your education system optimizes for

My favorite college class was compilers.

The whole semester you worked on a compiler for a simplified Pascal. Each homework added a feature.

The final exam was 4 hours. Open textbook, open internet. No chat with classmates. You got a description of 3 features to add to your compiler. Grade is number of tests passed.

Fantastic way to teach understanding.

Yes most people would fight back against foreign occupation

Ruth is a historian who hosted a bunch of BBC documentaries about regular day to day life a few decades ago. They’re great, strong recommend. I assume BBC generally does strong fact checking for things like that. The episode was about how exercise became a thing that people do.

However, I could be misremembering so I went digging. The internet suggests weight lifting was strongly discouraged for women. Here’s a pubmed paper:

> Medical experts of that era believed that intense exercise and competition could cause women to become masculine, threaten their ability to bear children, and create other reproductive health complications. Consequently, sport for women was reserved for upper-class women until the mid-twentieth century.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28886817/

Having grown up less-well-to-do and post-communist/socialist, my favorite thing to remind people is that working class women always worked. The idealized past of stay-at-home moms never happened for a large majority of families.

Sure sure my great grandma was “stay-at-home”. That meant feeding an army of ~8 kids and any additional farm workers every day for 60+ years. She wasn’t stay at home, she ran a cantine. And worked the farm during peak harvest season.

I’ll never forget a quote from a BBC documentary (Ruth Goodman I think): ”While victorian science cautioned that weight lifting is bad for women, the women working their kitchens tossed around 100lb pots every day”

> you are well within the top decile of income for the US

Yes and still can’t [responsibly] afford to buy in my locale :)

The situation is truly fucked and it’s about time Americans admit that housing cannot be both an expectation and an investment. Either everyone gets to own a house or it can be an investment. You can’t have both.

IMO housing is a consumption expense but people hate it when I bring that up at dinner.

Good question. We make tech money and rent a 3bed. No more rent control than SF defaults, we’ve only been here 2 years.

The shocking part is that we pay 5k in rent, but mortgage on the same place would be closer to 9k. Plus the commitment part (annual lease vs 30 year debt)

Very important to do your own math on these things and not just follow common wisdom.

> there is a chance you’re spending more than 1/3 of your income on housing. People with higher rates and people who are renting, spend a lot more than 1/3 of their income on housing.

We live in San Francisco and pay rent at about 15% of combined gross income. I think people really underestimate the value of renting.

I’ve seen Picallilli’s stuff around and it looks extremely solid. But you can’t beat the market. You either have what they want to buy, or you don’t.

> Landing projects for Set Studio has been extremely difficult, especially as we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have been for exactly that

The market is speaking. Long-term you’ll find out who’s wrong, but the market can usually stay irrational for much longer than you can stay in business.

I think everyone in the programming education business is feeling the struggle right now. In my opinion this business died 2 years ago – https://swizec.com/blog/the-programming-tutorial-seo-industr...

There are glaciers as far south as Slovenia. Spitting distance to the mediterranean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skuta_Glacier

Granted it’s not a very big glacier, but it’s there :D

> When you're an employee, you can hide behind process and blame the market.

You can still blame the market. A good market makes everything easier, a bad market makes everything harder.

But here’s the catch: You choose the market.

To share an example: When I started my react teaching side business in 2015 it was so easy. Growing 2x year over year, I thought I was some kind of business genius. Then one day it stopped. React became old, no longer the exciting new thing, the market consolidated into 2 or 3 big players with The Default resources and my stuff wasn’t one of them. I totally missed the land grab aspect of the early market phase and didn’t go hard enough on pure growth. Not a business genius after all.

> I hated it, /../ I mainly kept it, because I couldn't trust anyone else to do the job correctly.

I think the best managers are people who will even do management if that's what it takes.