In case you haven’t heard, we’re in a recession. Actually we’re not, but we’ve spent the last year talking about how we will be, which has the effect of altering behavior as if we were. Even if you’ve come to terms with the fundamental irrationality of the stock market, it’s still difficult to fight the feeling that CEOs are willing this recession into existence to create a justifying narrative for layoffs. Not because they necessarily want to save money, or even redirect the company, but to press reset on what they view as out-of-control compensation packages and worker demands.

Layoff Brain - by Anne Helen Petersen - Culture Study

(via The cloudy layers of modern-day programming | ★❤✰ Vicki Boykis ★❤✰)

I’ve seen a lot of systems where hope was the primary mechanism of data integrity. In systems like this, anything that happens off the golden path creates partial or dirty data. Dealing with this data in the future can become a nightmare. Just remember, your data will likely long outlive your codebase. Spend energy keeping it orderly and clean, it’ll pay off well in the long run.

20 Things I've Learned in my 20 Years as a Software Engineer - Simple Thread

we aren’t particularly good at assessing when evidence is moderately weak or moderately strong. We’re plagued by biases, and when we evaluate the strength of argument, we rely on logically irrelevant context—what we want, what we think of the person making the point, the polish and energy with which they make it, how many other people agree with it—far more than we might think.

How analysis dies - by Benn Stancil - benn.substack

We find ourselves on a treadmill of dependency on a material that is slowly deteriorating from the moment it is first poured. While much of the Global South is embarking on a century of construction, the built environment of the Global North is destined for the monumental challenge of maintenance, demolition and, in the worst-case scenario, ruination.

Concrete’s Carbon Footprint Is Huge. It’s Time To Build Differently

It offers a way to probe text, to play with text, to mold and shape an infinity of prose across a huge variety of domains, including literature and science and shitposting, into structures in which further questions can be asked and, on occasion, answered

ChatGPT Is Dumber Than You Think - The Atlantic

TikTok virality isn’t great for sustained careers, but it does represent a monumental shift in what it means to make audio as an art.

The Unlikely Odds of Making it Big on TikTok

requested by yay-depression

(via When life gives you lemons, write better error messages | by Jenni Nadler | Wix UX)

he AI did not make a use­ful or pleas­ant writing partner. Even a state-of-the-art lan­guage model can­not presently “understand” what a fic­tion writer is trying to accomplish in an evolv­ing draft. That’s not unreasonable; often, the writer doesn’t know exactly what they’re try­ing to accom­plish! Often, they are writ­ing to find out. Will the AI get there, someday? Will I be able to recruit my detec­tive at last? I understand very well the cur­rent pace of improve­ment in this field, and even so … I don’t see it com­ing anytime soon.

Author's note

Consider the inherent nature of groceries: They rot. That is, in fact, sort of their whole thing. That’s one of the primary reasons that hyper-fast delivery of, say, raw chicken thighs or salad greens or a loaf of bread might seem enticing at first glance—you don’t have to guess during your Sunday grocery trip whether you’ll be in the mood for a chicken Caesar salad on Thursday. But the risk of choosing wrong and tossing out food doesn’t entirely disappear. Instead, it’s absorbed by the instagrocer. By encouraging capriciousness, companies such as Gopuff make demand difficult to predict and create a prodigious amount of food waste, which is bad on its own terms and also very bad for a company trying to make money by selling food.

Of Course Instant Groceries Don’t Work - The Atlantic

This world is going to embrace you and love you and support you, is the point. But you have to embrace and love and support yourself first. You’re not doing that right now. It’s time to start.

'How Do I Survive This Ongoing Hell?' - Ask Polly

We feel inadequate because we have some expectation that we be more than this. We feel behind because of some made up expectations of what we should have done already. We feel discouraged because we haven’t met some expectation. We feel overwhelmed because we have an expectation that we should be able to handle all of this easily and at once. We feel frustrated because someone (us, or someone else) has failed to meet an expectation.

The Simplicity of Discipline: Thriving Without the Baggage of Expectations : zen habits