Full Time, On discovery and consumption, When We Lose Autonomy—Whose Life Are You Living?, Modern software quality, or why I think using language models for programming is a bad idea.
I started this work just to see how far I could take it. Building an Internet search engine was such a ridiculous thing to attempt, it was such an obvious truth that it couldn’t be done…
Plus belle découverte de la semaine.
Je n'arrive plus à trouver ce que je veux par Google. C'est bêtement devenu une méta-marketplace. Depuis le début de cette Newsletter et avant ça pour ma veille personnelle, je passe par d'autres moyens pour explorer des sujets activement, sans attendre que ça tombe dans ma boite (même si je n'exclue pas ce que je peux y trouver d'intéressant), en sautant de sites en sites. Mais lorsqu'il s'agit d'explorer un sujet précis, je me retrouve vite contraint par mes sources. J'en suis venu a monter un moteur de recherche maison qui fonctionne à peu près, mais qui m'a tout de même permis de découvrir par hasard plus de contenus intéressants qu'à travers les moteurs classiques.
Et voici que je tombe sur Marginalia search. Le mode recherche ressemble beaucoup à la façon dont j'utilisais Google vers 2007 : une suite de mots clés que je voudrais voir ressortir dans une page (et il donne même la position dans la page !). Et ça fonctionne au top ! Une autre fonction que je trouve géniale, c'est que le moteur permet de ne filtrer que les résultats provenant de blogs et sites personnels, ce qui permet de trouver largement moins de contenus commerciaux, beaucoup plus de retours d'expérience et de points de vue d'experts.
Dans cet article, l'auteur explique qu'il passe à plein temps sur le développement de ce moteur.
I was reading this article earlier today and it got me thinking about something that I have never considered before. One major change the web has experienced was the consolidation of discovery and consumption. Digg was—and still is—a place to discover new content but the consumption of that content takes place away outside of Digg.
And the same was true for discussions around the content. Those used to happen in comment sections spread across the internet. But now, places like Twitter or Instagram are acting as places for both the discovery and the consumption of new content.
Un article très court, vous venez d'en lire la première moitié, et qui donne une perspective sur l'évolution des plateformes de contenu. Reddit est cité en exemple de ce qui ressortirait du lot, mais comme on le verra dans la newsletter de la semaine prochaine, les choses ont changé.
"Your heart sees the important things in life, but your eyes don't see them."
The message is a fantastic reminder of how adults tend to bind themselves with a narrow view of the world.
Optimizing a function against an observable objective is easy. Just take a global average, and follow what the greatest majority agrees. On the other hand, no one, except yourself, can define a metric that measures your happiness. In fact, it is easier to make ourselves "busy," avoid a conversation with oneself, and list many reasons not to act, because everyone does so. This is when humans lost their autonomy. But busy for what? We already have (and can do) more than we think, and the key may have been right in front of us since a long time ago.
Speaking of adult life, understanding the nature of aging might help us to be autonomous agents. In From Strength to Strength, social scientist Arthur C. Brooks highlighted that our intellectual performance peaks out much earlier than we think, and life transitions to its second phase as early as in our 30s. In the later phase, people need to cultivate spiritual life and deep relationship with surrounding people, and the effectiveness is proven by social scientific studies7. Otherwise, we end up with workaholics and success addicts as many "successful" but unsatisfied people are. Be careful: our eyes don't see the most important things in life regardless of how hard we work.
Sur la boulimie de l'information normée et son influence sur nos vies.
We are a mismanaged industry that habitually fails to deliver usable software that actually solves the problems it’s supposed to. Thus, Weinberg’s Law:
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
It’s into this environment that “AI” software development tools appear.
The punditry presented it as a revolutionary improvement in how we make software. It’s supposed to fix everything. —This time the silver bullet will work!
[…]
If you were ever wondering if we, as an industry, were capable of coming up with a systemic issue to rival the Y2K bug in scale and stupidity? Well, here you go.
You can start using a language model, get the stock market bump, present the short term increase in volume as productivity, and be long gone before anybody connects the dots between language model use and the jump in defects.
Even if you purposefully tried to come up with a technology that played directly into and magnified the software industry’s dysfunctions you wouldn’t be able to come up with anything as perfectly imperfect as these language models.
It’s nonsense without consequence.
Sur l'utilisation de l'IA pour l'assistance au développement. Même si cet aspect de vous intéresse pas, je vous conseille vivement de lire le premier cinquième de l’article (jusqu’à la section sur le management donc).
