This Is Going To Hurt is, read with a clinical eye, a textbook case study of moral injury and post-traumatic stress in a competent doctor, narrated by the patient himself, with the diagnosis hidden in plain sight.
there's still a lot of startups in this batch that are not shipping fast enough. And so obviously there's variation in shipping speed. It's not just the rate at which you can produce things. You have to think of these ideas first, right?
While Western export bans have severed Russia from much of the auto market, they have not tempered the demand for brand-name SUVs and trucks. That has given rise to a sophisticated network of criminals that steals cars, hides them in shipping containers and sends them to Russia, often by way of the Middle East
and I like the idea that since it was a process it looked kind of active and um and then it could be paired with a document that resembled it so our system was kind of a verb and a noun
buuuut my roadmap is’nt ten times shorter. and I’m definitely not ten times better at deciding what is worth building. teams haven’t started casually shipping a year of product work every month. you can look around and and it’s hard to say what software has gotten meaningfully better in the last year.
there are people who are really big on road maps and there are people who are really big on iteration. I I think the honest answer is you've got to do both. You can't over-index on either.
Superlogical will begin by shipping a terminal multiplexer. I'm pouring my years of experience building a terminal and studying the potential and limitations of other multiplexers into something new, powerful, and, of course, fast.
Do I believe that means anyone should be shipping code to production? That everyone should actually be doing everything? Probably not. But I think that it's good for people to be exploring what's possible.
I get really nervous about having different design languages or different types of user interactions and shipping Frankensteins, basically. So, designers need to then be the people we're hiring again for design systems thinking.
And so it's like I mean getting into Eli Goldrat and the goal is like optimizing for utilization and efficiency of one node in your factory rather than the end to end goal of like how do we ship value and things that people like that are stable and like will last a long time. But that's my idea of token harder
You'll notice what I said was not use loops to ship the features that users want. We use loops to actually improve the codebase quality and we read all the code because we care about how it's architected and we care not just about the system architecture but what I would call the program design
We tried this. We built a lights off software factory in July of 2025 and by November we had shut it down. I think it takes about three to six months of you shipping all the time with nobody reading the code before you realize like, wow, this is getting way worse and it's easier to start over than it is to fix it.
there's a different kind of intuition that you that you develop over years as a software engineer and uh there's many categories of it but the one I'll I'll call attention to that is like a thing that you cannot teach you cannot do you cannot learn in a textbook. The only way to learn it is like I know bad patterns in software because I have debugged them at three in the morning.
You look under the underneath though at the code and it was just a horrible unmaintainable mess. But the fact that people could program the programs that they wanted was a a significant step forward as opposed to I'm going to write a thousandpage requirements document and then wait 8 years and not get what I want which was the alternative that we were offering at the at the time.
If you're going so fast, you're not measuring the impact of the changes that you're making, you don't have time to do that cuz you're just focused on shipping and then things regress and things get worse and we've seen that at Anthropic recently the last like month or maybe more than that where things have regressed.
But in terms of like features, like a website like you can just throw features in there nowadays that nobody really cares about and you can you can do it so quickly. Like a new feature every single day, but do people actually care about that? Is that making it better? It could be making things worse.
and you may now use the actual Inquisition record of you having gone through censorship as the document to prove that you and only you have the right to print the book and therefore you can sue people for plagiarizing it or printing an unauthorized edition. And so, the very first version of copyright is the Inquisition.
there's a difference between belief and hope. Hope is confidence without basis. Hope is just, you know, it's it's a prayer, but it's but it's it's not it's not founded in anything that your your lived experience.
And then for those of you who are skeptical about international organizations, here's one you've never heard of. The International Organization for Standardization then standardized these container sizes to fit one if by truck, two if by railway cars, and thousands if by sea. And this just plummets transport costs.
And if you're doing a 1.0 and the world hasn't seen you, you're not going to get that from consumers, ever. You have to ship it, and you have to build the entire kind of ecosystem so those consumers see it in the fullness so that when they do the evaluation and they spend their own money, then you're getting real feedback.
I think the number one success criteria was docker so remember there was mos and msosphere and they had their own runtime corp had come out with nomad and they had their own runtime but the biggest runtime that had already got global consensus was docker
The moment you ship something, you're stuck supporting it forever. And by supporting, it means any future feature you build is going to like interact with it. So you still have to be very conservative with what you put out there. It's hard to undo anything. Just cuz we can ship 10 times more doesn't mean we have 10 times as many good ideas to ship out there.
Summary: Shipping damage. Residue on some of the components. Loud pings and pops from the assembled weight rack. A design that looked great and saved space but was painfully unusable. Restocking fee. Non-refunded shipping fees. Ghosted me about the refund.
But the coding models have gotten good enough that he can pair the kind of the technical knowledge he does have with his really spiky product sense and sense for writing and sense for users.
My opinion is that the least mature area is front end. There have been some attempts to compile Rust to Web Assembly and then run it on the web as a front end as a replacement for TypeScript. But if I was writing a web server, I would totally use Rust for the back end and TypeScript for the front end. I would not really go the web assembly route.
if a revoked user still wants to, say, vandalize a document, they can just backdate their edits, give it an earlier timestamp. So, relying on clocks is absolutely useless here because people can forge the timestamps from those clocks and thereby then potentially undermine the access control mechanism.
Pick your ASIC team where you can say I can bet the farm of I can bet my entire business that you will be here for me every single year. Your cost, your token cost will decrease by an order of magnitude every single year. I can count on it like I can count on the clock.
Um, just shipping out all the engineers and blowing up the fabs means China has a stronger semiconductor supply chain than the rest of the world, right?
And there’s no, like, textbook that exists for game design, at least none that has been introduced to me yet. But I think about, like, elements of fun.
and I think most people experience it as like flat triangles and squares in a biology textbook where it's like you know there's an arrow between like this triangle and this triangle is just like doesn't make any conceptual sense and is like confusing and annoying
So what usually h what often happens is you raise prices and signups don't change. When I say signups, I mean the like signups per month, you know, the rate at sign or signups go up. This happens all the time.
figuring out a document that is actually like sort of all the things that are not platitudes whereas like all the things where someone else like some other company would plausibly take the other side of and but that's but those are the real choices, right? Like if no one would take the other side, it's a platitude.
When AWS ships a service which is half-baked, it diminishes customer trust in AWS as a whole; even if the problems in that service ultimately get corrected (either by fixing them or in some cases by simply getting rid of a service which should never have existed in the first place) the memory of a failed launch will live on in customers' minds for years to come.
This is getting easier in the lastest versions of Fedora and Ubuntu (e.g., Ubuntu 24.04 LTS) which are shipping system libraries with frame pointers by default.
But this is the hard part. When you're when you're doing that market widening, you're not solution deepening. And so your perceived product velocity may decrease. You can avoid some of these things with some smart technology decisions, but mostly you just have to grind through it and it is worth it to get to the other side.
The common archeological wisdom that you’d find out of a textbook is that they just kept pecking away at it with hammer stones and setting them and resetting them until they were perfect, which has to be bullshit, that there is no way that they just were that meticulous. I mean, everybody’s got a hammerstone. I personally think it’s acids.
There is an algorithm called BM25 precisely for this, which is a more sophisticated version of TF-IDF. TF-IDF is term frequency times inverse document frequency, a very old-school information retrieval system that just works actually really well even today. And BM25 is a more sophisticated version of that, that is still beating most embeddings on ranking.
This is Steve Blank's textbook to starting a company. It's the Four Steps to the Epiphany, expanded and much more readable. If you want to deep dive into the Lean methodology, this is the book to read.
If what's holding you back from shipping is, say, getting more customer input, or a brittle release process, or flaky monitoring, or missing tests, then all the bot does is to add noise. It doesn't help you ship.
In terms of iOS apps, I use PDF Expert, which is a great PDF reader and annotator (using Apple Pencil), Notability as a virtual whiteboard (again with Apple Pencil), Google Docs for document editing, Google Calendar, and Gmail.
There are many things to criticize Facebook for; running a product that deployed end-to-end encryption by default for over a billion people is not one of them.
As technologists, we can’t build an access system that only works for people of a certain citizenship, or with a particular morality, or only in the presence of a specified legal document.
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