I’ve been reading a lot about fascism lately, some of the notable titles I recommend:

• Anne Applebaum Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy, Inc
• Ruth Ben-Ghiat Strongmen
• Heather Cox-Richardson How the South Won the Civil War
• Cass R. Sunstein and Kaleo Griffith Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America
• Sinclair Lewis It Can’t Happen Here
• Richard J. Evans The Coming of the Third Reich
• David W. Blight Frederick Douglass
• Barbara F. Walters How Civil Wars Start
• Sebastian Haffner Defying Hitler
• Tim Alberta The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory
• Jeff Sharlet The Undertow
• Katherine Stewart The Power Worshippers
• Sergie Guriev & Daniel Treisman Spin Dictators
• Jonah Goldberg Suicide of the West

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Asking for help is unavoidable as a software engineer. It is easy to become completely stuck, especially when you are working on a new piece of software or with new tools. Much of your professional growth will entail gaining the knowledge required to answer questions posed to you by developers with less experience, and those skills are difficult to acquire without having first asked many questions yourself. That being said, there are good and bad ways to ask for help.

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The apparent leap in the capabilities of large language models has been made possible because venture capitalists have been persuaded, by earnest but misguided entrepreneurs like Sam Altman, that given enough resources such models would eventually be developed into generalized artificial intelligence. In other words, with enough money, OpenAI will build you a machine that is capable of doing the same cognitive tasks as your human employees but doesn’t need a 401k or health care and will work a 168 hour week without complaint without a paycheck.

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I was chatting with Dan Lorenc from Chainguard (who I adore as a company) on Twitter about the trevails of patching open source software last week, and immediately thought of many stories-from-the-trenches I’ve accumulated during the past 25 years or so of working at Akamai Technologies of Cambridge, MA.

We are heavy users of open source software and in many situations will use our own builds of stuff rather than distro packages. While this obviously creates some extra overhead, it means that we have a lot of in-house expertise in building and releasing third-party libraries that are critical to us if the need arises.

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Now that I work remotely full time a large part of my day is spent, like most remote workers, in video calls. For a number of reasons, I prefer using a headset rather than a mic and speakers. For an even longer list of reasons, I prefer using an analog broadcast-style headset. I’ve had several of these but splurged last year on a Sennheiser HME 27, which is an isolating headset with a boom mounted condenser mic. This is overkill for video conferencing, but I often use the headset for studio projects as well and the extra sensitivity of the condenser mic is handy.

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Some time back in the ‘80s, I decided I needed a new fishing reel. I spent a couple days of summer vacation fishing with my older cousin, and he’d introduced me to his Shimano Bantam bait-casting reel. It was shiny and black, with small silkscreened text identifying the various capabilities of the machine; claims regarding the number of ball bearings it contained and which parts were graphite or aluminum. It was mounted to a fancy graphite rod with a sophisticated looking rubber grip. It had guides made by Fuji, and this was reportedly a big deal.

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Policy for Language Evaluation and Selection

In 2014, two languages qualify as industry standard Systems Programming Languages, C/C++ and Java. I define Systems Programming languages as the category of languages that have applicability outside web development or desktop applications development. C# and Objective C are a little unclear, but because they tend to be closely associated with a specific platform, and because of their connection to the C/C++ family of languages, I will lump them into one category.

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I originally posted this article 01/15/2011 at my old blog, but owing to Matt Asay’s post I am compelled to post it again here

Linux taking over “the desktop”

In the past 10 years I must have seen a hundred articles titled along the lines of “Will/Has/Could/Can Linux take over the desktop?”. This evening I saw another one somewhere, and it occurred to me what a weird question it is, because as far as I can tell, Linux had utterly demolished everything else in its segment at least 8 or 9 years ago.

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I recently took a position at a new company. This was a big deal for me since I’d only changed jobs a couple of times before. A good chunk of the last job was spent amassing institutional knowledge and (I hoped) maturing as a programmer. I was always dubious on the latter. The new job was exciting because I knew I’d be working in a new language, and there was a good chance it’d be Erlang.

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I hadn’t seen this post before, but it sums up my own feelings on a subject so well that I feel relieved knowing somebody has already done a better job of writing it than I could have done, and I don’t have to do anything.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/01/the-magpie-developer.html

This reference is also superb:

http://quoderat.megginson.com/2006/03/06/programming-languages-of-distinction/

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