Pao Ramen
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On preventing mistakes
The culture of postmortems makes us overreact on not repeating mistakes. But perhaps, we should be more categorical about preventing new ones. I often think that a better rule of thumb to postmortems could be: If it’s the first time a mistake happens, acknowledge it and move on. If it’s the second time, then ensure that it does not happen again. This would save organizations from a lot of useless…
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The only AI for me are the mad ones... Awww!
A take on how docile and boring AI gets as an intellectual companion. The article reviews several episodes of people getting mad⎯including Gandalf, and how genuine those interactions feel instead of AI’s servant-style. This reminds me of Jack Kerouac’s most famous quote from “On the road”. What will it take to have an AI to behave like Neal Cassady*? …the only people for me are the mad ones, the o…
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On fixing things
Seneca pointed out that people tend to be reflexively stingy with their money, but almost comically wasteful with their time. There are at least two ways to take this. One is that Seneca thought he used his time better than you and I do, and maybe he did. Another interpretation is that everyday life, for most people, is an untapped gold mine. Things break all the time, and we get used to it. We a…
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DBs vs sheets
Yet another exploration of bridging the mother of all software (excel) with databases. I'm curious to see the UX, since there are definitely challenges to trying to square the circle. It is true that Postgres, with RLS, can get closer to an excel experience, since authorization is one of the biggest gaps to overcome.
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Ockham's razor is losing it's edge
Very interesting study that explore what we've been preaching for a long time: nature is complex, and so ought to be the models that explain it. Medieval friar William of Ockham posited a famous idea: always pick the simplest explanation. Often referred to as the parsimony principle, “Ockham’s razor” has shaped scientific decisions for centuries. Humans are obsessed with simplicity. After all, t…
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RSS Search
Very interesting feed aggregator. You can search any term and it returns results from all the feeds they have indexed. The searches themselves are also RSS feeds, so you can subscribe to “topics”. Perhaps I should integrate this to fika to help people discover new feeds? Once I do tag and topic extraction, we could automate this to add a bit of entropy and kickstart the recommendation flywheel.
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Coding without planning
Another example of plan to start vs plan to finish. Like writing, or playing music, there are different characteristics to a planned strategy to an improvised one. As one gets more experienced, intuition based approaches tens to have better outcomes than rational ones.
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Deepseek and the Jevons Paradox
Nvidia is down 17%. Deepseek has released their latest R1 model which they claimed to be trained very cheaply. Half the internet is calling it a bubble burst, the other half are rushing to buy the dip. Who is correct? Well, that's not so easy. What would Charlie do? At this point, it's not about the fundamentals anymore. It's just to speculate about AI and the role of Nvidia. One thing is clear, …
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IP query
Interesting service to query anything about a given IP. I’ve had to implement this at every single company, mostly for marketing reasons. This service seems to be free, so it’s a good bookmark to have around.
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Building on top of ATProto
An exploration about building a side-project app on top of ATProto. I’m saving this since at some point, I want to integrate fika with Bluesky. I enjoy a lot the “captain-log” kind of articles. It’s always interesting to see how people build and learn. As usual, it’s also comforting to see people sharing the same struggles: As always, the hardest part of this project, as with any project, was und…
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Like Scratch, but textual!
Very interesting project to teach programming to kids. The main difference with Scratch is that Hedy uses Python (yuck!) on a textual environment. To be able to reach kids around the world, they’ve open sourced a python-like language that is multi-lingual. There is of course the eternal debate to whether kids should learn to program or not, exacerbated by the advances in generative AI. But I still…
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Platform teams: the eternal debate
As a CTO, one of the unsolved challenges is whether to have a platform team or not. This article explores the downside of building platform teams. I think the article is a little bit biased and presents only one way of implementing platform teams. I still believe that platform teams are a net-positive, but only when they use golden paths to achieve their goals.
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Web Monetization
A web3 way of accepting payments on the internet. Looks pretty cool, and could be a good way to counter the SaaS models of medium and substack. As usual, though, the challenge would be for adoption to go mainstream.
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Doc Publication
There is a revival of publications. Individuals join and curate and write content. And you, instead of letting an algorithm determine what you read, subscribe to those publications. In this case, the people of UX collective decide to own their own publication and monetize it with Web Monetization, a web3 way to accept micropayments. I hope fika allows people to create such beautiful publications.
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A list of long-form articles worth reading
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a writer. This was fueled by an intense reading habit: I would spend hours on the library looking for more Roal Dahl books, and later on, Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin. Nowadays I don't read as many books, and mostly non-fiction. I guess I’m more time deprived, and have a more utilitarian habit. Long form articles strike the right balance for me. They are longer an…
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The source of truth shouldn't be figma, but the code
Nth attempt to solve the designer/developer problem. An open source tool for designers to work with react components. Figma has been trying to convince designers that they are the source of truth, therefore, a handover process is required. And it's the developer job to translate designs into code. But the reality is that developers are convinced of the opposite. Figma is the just theory, but truth…
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C02 consumption from your daily tech usage
I love this kind of sites. It’s the deepest article I’ve seen on the topic of CO₂ emissions in tech, with interactive bits, graphs and calculators. It starts with this shocking calculation. A seemingly normal tech consumption is actually pretty costly in terms of CO₂ emissions. Last week, I streamed 20 hours of videos on Netflix, YouTube, and Canvas. I asked 50 questions to ChatGPT and made 532 Go…
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Clickless search and the internet of machines
Interesting read about the repercussions of a “clickless search” world. We no longer use search engines to navigate through the web, but to get answers immediately. The author content ponders: The interesting question isn’t how to optimize for AI agents, but what kinds of human experiences are worth preserving in a world where machines do most of the talking.