Joy & Curiosity #14

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

This week I deleted all social media apps off my phone. They’ll be back — I’m no saint — but after letting loose on Wednesday, snorting up everything on every feed in every spare minute, I woke up hung-over on Thursday, disgusted with myself. And disgusted with myself I, of course, scrolled some more, then slapped myself in the face and deleted the feeds.

Thursday evening I then spent reading books and long-form — like the person who wakes up with a New Year’s resolution to loose weight and immediately does 20 push-ups in their bedroom that won’t do anything weight-wise — trying to zoom out, trying to step back away from the chatter. That resolve has also snuck into this list this time.

Also: I’ll be at the RustLab conference in Florence on Sunday and Monday — if you’re there, feel free to say hi!

• Short & sweet: why software only moves forward. ”Ok so the database can't be rolled back. Data lives forever.”

• Time for me to finally recommend Patrick Radden Keefe’s books to you. In September I read three of them: Say Nothing (fantastic!), Empire of Pain (fantastic!), and Rogues (so good!). In October I read his first one, The Snakehead, which I didn’t enjoy that much — made me think that at that point he hadn’t figured out the recipe that made the other three so good, which are really good and you should read them. (Also: I learned that Dua Lipa runs a bookclub and had Keefe on.)

• Listened to two episodes of the Dwarkesh Patel podcast. This one with Daniel Yergin cured my social-media hangover (now I want to read The Prize) and the one with Sarah C. M. Paine I’m still going through and enjoying every minute of.

• Andreas made me laugh out loud by saying we “might as well use claytablets.”

• This week I also signed-up to Readwise.io again and it resurfaced the following quote from Clayton M. Christensen’s How Will You Measure Your Life?: “Given that 93 percent of companies that ended up being successful had to change their initial strategy, any capital that demands that the early company become very big, very fast, will almost always drive the business off a cliff instead.” I’ve been thinking of this quote for three days now. I mean, it sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But then you think about it and compare it to what you see and realize that, no, wait, what an insight.

• This New Yorker piece from 2015 (!) asks: Can Reading Make You Happier? “The insights themselves are still nebulous, as learning gained through reading fiction often is—but therein lies its power. In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks.” Read it on Thursday evening and it made me feel better.

• Another book, another reading recommendation: David Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man. It’s about working, being creative, running a business — and it’s endlessly quotable, so I’m having a hard time to pick the right one here. Let me go with this one, which applies to programmers to: “Once upon a time I was riding on the top of a Fifth Avenue bus, when I heard a mythical housewife say to another, ‘Molly, my dear, I would have bought that new brand of toilet soap if only they hadn’t set the body copy in ten point Garamond.’ Don’t you believe it.”

• Max Siedentopf’s Passport Photos made me smile. First on my phone, while looking at the photos, then on my computer too, when seeing the mouse cursor he has on that site.

• At work I was writing about branchless programming and tried to find something I can link readers to, something that explains what branchless programming is, or why branches can be a problem. Found these two Daniel Lemire blog posts on the topic that are excellent: Mispredicted branches can multiply your running times and Benchmarking is hard: processors learn to predict branches.

• Speaking of performance: this podcast episode with Martin Thompson on Mechanical Sympathy is something I often think of.

• Just like this Scott Myers talk.

• Or this one: The Future of Fast Code — Giving Hardware What It Wants.