Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert L. Glass. In essence, this is a book about an industry that refuses to learn. That was true 25 years ago when this book was published, and it's probably twice as true today. (Just think about all the AI adoption metrics being rolled out — back to productivity mistaken for lines of code produced, only more elaborate. And expensive). What I like about this book is that Glass doesn't present anything new. Quite the opposite, actually. Rather, it's about research lessons that we all should know, but tend to forget. Ever had to do an estimate, or plan according to a requirements spec? Or maybe you thought that enough eyeballs make all bugs shallow? Then this book is for you. A great work by a fantastic author.
And it's really about being empirical. So forget all of the things that you learned about past models. Forget everything that you've learned about computer science theory in class. Look at the model, try to do a task, see where it struggles, and then based on that adjust. So it's just like very much become it's not a theoretical science, it's become an empirical science.
I genuinely believe that if you took an open weights model from 2025 and built a pentest harness for it, it could do this kind of sandbox escape and scan/hack in most networks. This is only surprising because you assume OpenAI has sounder sandboxes.
Now the thing is you can of course write examples in your documentation and Rust makes all examples into tests. This means that if you change the underlying code now your test fails. And so this means that you can't even you can't forget to update your examples in your documentation.
as leaders we get so focused on value statement mission statements we forget the mission statement is not the mission. The map is not the territory. Mission is an emergent property of the living superorganism of the thing we're birthing.
Many AI researchers are overly focused on risks from model misalignment, and will be in for a rough surprise when havoc arises from other layers of the stack.
The best book I read last year was Mark Lawrence's The Book That Wouldn't Burn, which much to my surprise did not make a single award list for its publication year of 2023. It was a tour de force of world-building that surprised me multiple times.
This is, bar none, the best sled I have ever used for pushing or pulling. It isn't cheap, but I use it infinitely more than the cheaper sleds I've bought in the past.
I've worked a lot of companies right but I'm wrong all the time and I think consumer behavior can be very fickle and especially when you work at a company you become a power user naturally. So sometimes you you may forget like what the actual user experience is for a brand new user.
So yes, the tools are great. We can use cursor. It helps us. It autocompletes. It writes a bunch of things. But the acceleration of learning I think is another maybe underutilized tool in all of our arsenals
And the German war machine could only win in so-called speed wars, like lightning war. Only if they would do it very fast and surprise, because they were always weaker, basically.
I'm pretty sure people thought Microsoft had an advantage on the internet and Google and um Meta had an advantage on mobile and everyone thought IBM was going to win PCs. Like once IBM made a PC, that was it. It's all over now. And we kind of forget that like there were PCs before and then IBM made one and that kind of became the standard but then IBM lost it.
If you look at the S&P 500 now and you look at the amount of value from companies created in that, one could argue that actually almost all of the exuberance and hype was totally warranted and it in fact did change commerce in fundamental ways.
That might surprise people. The bigger it is, the less noticeable it is that you’ve crossed the event horizon. One way to think about it is curvature is less noticeable the bigger it is.
The relative absence of pre-colonial states meant that the newly independent African states were largely European inventions; modern Kenya, for instance, inherits the boundaries of British East Africa, which was created by pulling together the Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya, Kalenjin, and Kamba ethnic groups.
And so the great mistake of the past years was to forget how fundamental inflation was to the rise of the last political order and to profoundly underestimate how much inflation would change the current political order.
I forget (again!) how I chanced across it, but it fills a very real need for a lot of the students in my inequality class, and I intend to make it recommended/optional reading in the future. (I'll have to see if the library can buy a digital copy.)
is this idea that we form these internal models at particular points of high prediction error or points of, I believe also points of uncertainty, points of surprise or motivationally significant periods. And those points are when it’s maximally optimal to encode an episodic memory.
So part of the reason that we deploy the way we do, we call it iterative deployment, rather than go build in secret until we got all the way to GPT-5, we decided to talk about GPT-1, 2, 3, and 4. And part of the reason there is I think AI and surprise don’t go together. And also the world, people, institutions, whatever you want to call it, need time to adapt and think about these things.
To my surprise, I really enjoyed The Republic. It is both well-written and weird, which puts it above many other famous philosophical books that are too obscure to be easily read.
In fact, I would say it’s more surprising that the matter that we know about is constitutes as big a fraction of the universe as it does. We’re limited, we’re human. The fact that we see 5% of the energy density of the universe, about one sixth of the energy density in matter, that’s remarkable.
It is fair to say that, while economists expected the short end of the yield curve to reflect the higher rates needed to win the fight against inflation, the sharply steeper long end of the yield curve in the last few months has come as a surprise. I shall freely admit that I did not predict it.
Recently though, I went to The Drama Bookshop, which was a delightful surprise. It is the closest I have come to the experience of a Manhattan bookshop as a third place in the kind of Prairie Lights mode.
So, it wouldn’t surprise me any longer if we found life on Mars and it had a genetic code that was not very different to the genetic code that we have here without it just being transferred across, there’s some inevitability about the whole of the beginnings of life, in my view.
So, experts are highly aware of mistakes. But people who are journeymen, many of them stay as journeymen because they they want to move on and forget about their mistakes.
It has displayed a stronger record of reform than any other developing country, as the leadership keeps pulling off politically-difficult tasks: shrinking the state sector, re-orienting the economy towards export-led growth after WTO accession, and so on.
This one might come as a surprise to some, but the reality is that at Fitbit’s more reasonable pricing as of late, the Fitbit Sense is a pretty good option. And it’s a super well-rounded option
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