forrestbrazeal

"Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense."

- from the novel Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

I take this quote to mean that most people's idea of "apologetics" (arguing to convince people that the facts of Christianity or some other religion are true) is kind of pointless. You'll never convince someone logically of something that has to be experienced viscerally. LLMs don't help with that at all.

My “weird tech songs” channel is pretty obscure. [0]

[0] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPUSFL3ut4ibHYoBes2tku_XU...

Hi HN,

I've been drawing cartoons about tech-related topics for years, and recently collected them all into one place. [0]

Use the search icon on the homepage to sort by topics, technologies, etc.

All the cartoons you see on the homepage are CC-BY-ND licensed and free to share for occasional non-commercial use.

If you would like to use them in slide presentations, whitepapers, etc (and many people have asked for this over the years), I've created a paid option [1] so you can access full-resolution, royalty-free versions of the comics.

I update with new cartoons every week or so. Happy for any feedback on how to make this site more useful!

[0] https://goodtechthings.com [1] https://www.goodtechthings.com/go-pro/

We shared some details about Gmail's migration to Spanner in this year's developer keynote at Google Cloud Next [0] - to my knowledge, the first time that story has been publicly talked about.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=268jdNwH6AM

Hey Shawn! Always enjoy your writing.

I think you've done well laying out what a lot of people want "AI Engineer" to mean at this moment in time. My concern (coming fresh out of the absolute semantic nightmare that was the "serverless" community) is that the term AI is so hopelessly overloaded, and has been such a moving target over the years, that it's unlikely that a plurality of people will ever share your mental model of what an "AI Engineer" is/ does / knows / is paid.

Personally I've been using Generative Engineering / GenEng [0] to describe the professional practice of building stuff with AI as your pair programmer. I recognize some are pulling away from the term "generative", but to me it feels like a better anchor into the specific flavor of AI we're talking about.

[0] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/t...

The "interesting artistic choice" was to lead people to believe that a song he wrote and recorded himself was generated by a computer.

Yes, many people assumed this. Here's the first example I found (scroll through the thread for many more): https://twitter.com/Russ_Wilcox/status/1647602468623114240 (Note that this guy was smart enough to ask the question - imagine how many people saw "AI-generated song" and just uncritically assumed a computer spat out the whole thing, chatGPT-style)

| the voices afiak are pure AI with the tuning, pitch, etc done in post.

That's what I thought at first too, but the available info suggests that the AI "autotune" was done on a human reference vocal. (cf https://twitter.com/rpnickson/status/1647603043851026433)

I believe a big reason this song blew up on social media was that it was misleadingly hyped as an "AI-generated song". I expect many people thought that AI composed and recorded the (reasonably idiomatic) music and lyrics.

For the record, here's my understanding of how this "AI-generated song" was made:

1. A human wrote the lyrics

2. A human recorded the beat

3. A human recorded themselves rapping

4. An "AI voice filter" made the recorded voice sound like Drake / the Weeknd.

IMO, the real tragedy here is not some threat to Drake (he’ll be fine) but that some dude who wrote an original song had to pretend it was written by AI to get it heard.

My Cloud Resume Challenge project [0] and book [1] uses a set of small, stackable mini-projects to introduce beginners to many of the pragmatic skills used in cloud software engineering.

[0] https://cloudresumechallenge.dev/docs/the-challenge/ [1] https://cloudresumechallenge.dev/book/

I won a Pwnie Award last year (for "Best Song"). I did not accept the award in person, so they mailed it to me because my coworker who accepted it in my place couldn't get it through airport security due to the huge hypodermic needles sticking out of its neck and butt.

It's the most horrifying award I've ever received. I love it. I should probably keep it in a Faraday cage, just to be on the safe side.

A few years ago, at Goodwill, I found a lovely 1930s copy of Eve Curie's biography of her mother Marie Curie. The book had been well-preserved in a homemade mylar jacket. In the flyleaf were two inscriptions: one a woman's name with "Dr", dated in the 1970s; the other dated in the early 2000s with another woman's name, also a doctor. When I flipped through the pages, a "Congrats grad" card fell out. Dr. A was Dr B's mother and had given her this book from her own library upon Dr B's graduation from med school.

I immediately searched "Weltanschauung", and was not disappointed.

A neighbor of mine, a professor at an excellent private college who teaches a stats class where the students are required to do a bit of programming, told me the other day that she's noticed a cycle in her students over the past few years.

15 years ago the students tended to come in knowing more about navigating their computers than she did; now, and especially in the last 4-5 years, she's increasingly having to teach them basic computer literacy in order to get to the learning they're actually supposed to be doing.

This has contributed to my resolve not to let my son have an iPad, but he can have a laptop pretty much when he wants one.

Seems to be AWS-related. Nothing on their status page yet, but people's personal health dashboards are reporting another networking outage

Like with any info product, a lot of the value here comes from what you put into it (the book contains dozens if not hundreds of hours worth of project ideas) - but I'll just add for posterity that part of the value of that sticker price is an included biweekly newsletter that provides inside referrals to hand-curated cloud jobs. We've seen great response to this newsletter so far, including multiple folks getting job offers: https://cloudresumechallenge.dev/newsletter

It's linked in the post! https://dsresume.com

Target audience: anyone looking to build hands-on cloud skills. Most who complete the challenge have between 1-3 years of IT experience of some kind, although there have been quite a few who've tackled the challenge as their very first exposure to tech.

Software engineers without cloud experience are a big part of the audience for the challenge, and seem to be able to complete it in just a few hours in many cases.

For salary comparisons, I would look at SRE roles - these are often a good match for "cloud" engineering titles in terms of scope and salary

Author here. I just updated the post with an additional idea for fixing the free tier, suggested by several readers.

It turns out there is a non-widely-known program called AWS Educate Starter Accounts [0], which give no-credit-card access to a limited but useful subset of AWS services. The problem is that you can only get access to these accounts through student affiliation with a participating educational institution like a high school or university.

It might be more feasible to expand this program, say to any applicant who demonstrates some reasonable threshold of non-bot-ness, than to re-engineer the normal free tier.

To any AWS people reading this: I believe this could be a useful step toward solving the free tier problem, and would be happy to be a sounding board.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/education/awseducate/aws-educate-faqs...

For a fascinating and impeccably researched deep dive into this and many other questions of Genesis interpretation, see John Walton’s “The Lost World of Genesis One.” https://www.amazon.com/Lost-World-Genesis-One-Cosmology/dp/0...

I don't know you, but I love that you commented on this because your history and perspective is a perfect example of the phenomenon I'm talking about.

TO your question, I don't claim to have all the answers (let alone all the "Answers in Genesis") but I've come to understand there's a lot more nuance to a "literal" understanding of the Bible than Ken Ham may have led you to believe.

A couple of resources I've found helpful when navigating the intersection of historic Christianity and modern science are biologist Joel Duff [0] and physicist Aron Wall [1]. (Fun side note on the latter: he's the son of Perl creator Larry Wall.)

[0] https://thenaturalhistorian.com/ [1] http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog/

There are certainly other factors at play in the decline of mainline Protestant churches. I'm not sure that evangelicalism's problems (subject of my comment) imply anything about whether they should be shrinking faster or slower than other types of churches.

My personal observation (having left a fundamentalist background, though still identifying as Christian) is that hardcore young-earth creationism of the Ken Ham variety has driven a ton of deconversion in my generation.

Ken Ham & his ilk have been teaching for decades, explicitly and repeatedly, that if you do not buy into their specific 6-day literal interpretation of Genesis, then you might as well be an atheist. [0] This line works great to rile up the faithful, but...

Fast-forward to today, and you have an entire generation of young adults who can no longer square YEC with reality, going: "Huh, I guess I'm an atheist then?"

Ham-flavored fundamentalism rules huge swaths of orthodox Christian tradition out of bounds, and it's been devastating for the future of the American church.

[0] https://www.au.org/blogs/wall-of-separation/a-flood-of-nonse...

Found through this interesting video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=OT3VNn5VFCM

Favorite nugget: who knew that the King James Version contains dozens of uses of the word "suburb"?

A fairly unique and interesting feature of LinkedIn that I've noticed: posts seem to have a much longer tail than, say, Twitter or Facebook. If I share a text-based post with useful info, it's often still getting engagement 15 or even 30 days later.

And because the median quality of LinkedIn posts is so bad, good, non self-aggrandizing posts really stand out. The algorithm is GREAT at elevating them.

I guess what I'm saying is, posting on LinkedIn in good faith is the new attention economy market inefficiency.

Like many kids, I learned about Krakatoa from William Pene du Bois' 1948 Newbery Award-winning YA novel "The Twenty-One Balloons" [0]. The story is about a fantastical steampunk civilization hidden on Krakatoa, which (spoiler) is eventually destroyed in the eruption. The book is an absolute trip , figuratively and literally - recommended for all ages!

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Twenty-One-Balloons-Puffin-Modern-Cla...

Here are a few of my learnings:

- Expect nothing from the publisher in terms of marketing support. In fact, a good nonfiction book proposal is going to spend most of its length explaining to the publisher how you will sell the book for them through your connections and credibility - not the other way around. It's all on you.

- Don't do it for the money. You're going to make 10-15% of a pretty small pie. If you want to write info products as a moneymaking side gig and you have any following at all, self publish!

So why go with a traditional publisher? Here was my reasoning:

- The publisher probably will get your book in the hands of a larger absolute number of people, so if you care about maximizing readership and you don't have a stupid-large online following, their network effects through bookstores, library sales, etc will help you sell more copies than you could on your own (though again, you'll see very little of the money!)

- There's still some social proof involved with traditional publishing, and it's a nice thing to do once - just so you know in the back of your head that you "can"

- In my case, I was producing a highly graphic book that really doesn't work except in print and in full color, and I needed the resources of a traditional publishing house to make it not look terrible.

The Wiley experience was overall positive for me and I don't regret it, but if I ever produce a text-based info product in future it's hard to look away from the ROI advantages of self-publishing.

Hi HN,

I wrote "The Read Aloud Cloud" [1], 160+ pages of cartoon-filled cloud computing explainers, so my non-technical friends and family would finally understand what I do for a living.

Just for HN, I've uploaded a sneak peek of Chapter 2: "Evolution of the Cloud (A Prehistory)" [2]

Happy to answer questions about:

- How to write a nonfiction book proposal that sells

- The traditional publishing process (and why I went that route instead of self-pub)

- Cloud or tech careers in general

- Cartooning

- Whatever else!

[1] https://www.bookdepository.com/The-Read-Aloud-Cloud/97811196...

[2] https://www.dropbox.com/s/izyele6p60dfb68/Ch2.pdf?dl=0

ACG employee here so grain of salt, etc - but I paid for an ACG subscription long before I worked there.

My favorite piece of ACG actually isn't even the courses, but "Cloud Playground", which came over in the recent Linux Academy acquisition. [0] One-click AWS, Azure, or GCP sandbox environments. They're live for 4 hours on ACG's credit card and people sometimes assume they're just for doing course labs, but, like, you can use them for whatever. It's an end run around sandbox account procurement in a business context, or a safeguard against leaving an expensive resource running for personal experimentation.

[0] https://help.acloud.guru/hc/en-us/articles/360001477955-Clou...

Thanks for this feedback - will share with the ACG design team.