what i'm reading: July 19

Over the past few days I’ve been seeing trickles of experiments with GPT-3, the new machine-learning text-generation algorithm from the team that published GPT-2, but I haven’t found a good article about it yet. Based on the excerpts, I am starting to suspect everything I see on the internet of being generated by AI.

This link post was written by a human, I swear.

Books

• Finished Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter by Charlton D. McIlwain (audiobook). A mix of oral history from a handful of Black early-adopters and a fairly compelling case for how lack of diversity in early computing hubs like MIT and IBM had a strong influence on racial injustice being built into the earliest computerized systems for criminal justice. Data has never been impartial. Would have liked to hear more voices of Black women though.

Articles

Technology choices

• Came across Nelson Elhage’s fun work toward an Ultimate Tic Tac Toe solver in Rust while looking for best practices on representing game boards as I wrote my own toy tic-tac-toe implementation—unfortunately I didn’t notice the sub-page on efficient board representation until after coding my own inelegant version!

• Ben Cane’s well designed presentation on structuring Go packages offers some useful best practices for someone like me who’s still trying to figure out idiomatic Go.

• Iain Bean makes a good case for why your static-site-generated blog doesn’t need a javascript framework. Goes a little into the weeds of the specific frameworks he tried, but covers the pros and cons and some solutions pretty well.

• Corey Quinn outlines a few under-acknowledged sources of vendor lock-in that you have to think about before going “multi-cloud”.

• I don’t often keep track of the many, many short articles, documentation, and Stack Overflow questions I reference when trying to write code, but I’m having trouble internalising Rust data types so I especially appreciate in-depth guidance like Josh McGuigan’s exploration of different ways to initialize arrays in Rust.

Security and privacy

• Emily Stark shares some stats to disprove the trope that users will always blindly click past security warnings. The truth is careful design can encourage the desired behaviour.

• Lea Kissner has an excellent post on IAPP about the complexities of data retention in a distributed system, and now I want to read the rest of the series.

Leadership

• Phil Bennett has a pretty fun process for building your own personal manifesto, which thankfully is self-aware about the silliness of it.

• Dave Winsborough has specific guidance on how to avoid micromanaging a project, always good advice to keep in mind if you have a lot of expertise but are not the person doing the work.

• Solid tips for being a leader who creates stability instead of chaos that is honestly mostly excellent advice for how to run meetings.

Being a human in tech

• An interview with Victoria Tran about designing better communities online.

• I admit to liking these funny ads from Apple, and how the new one captures a lot of true-to-life working-from-home experiences.

• A new study concludes that whiteboard interviews test for stress responses, not coding ability. I’m intrigued by the comparison to the Trier Social Stress Test and may go read the source study later.

• Phil Giese gets into helpful specifics about how to write tests that are easy to debug later

• I saw some tweets about supporting coworkers by complimenting them to their manager and was delighted to find that Julia Evans wrote a whole blog post of the collected advice. (Including to ask permission of your coworker first!)