Icelander. Eudaimonist. Individualist. Cofounder, @unisonweb. Author of Functional Programming in Scala.
Dec 3, 2022 • 9 tweets • 5 min read
Many people have showcased OpenAI's new AI assistant in amusing ways, or denigrate it as merely a "chatbot". Granted, it cannot browse the internet or perform any kind of automation. But you can use it to do useful intellectual work, today. Here are a few ways you can use it:
1. Meal planning.
Aug 18, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Thinking a bit about decision fatigue. It's the idea that making a lot of decisions in a short time degrades the quality of your decisions.
A solid strategy for dealing with this is putting in place habits and policies that eliminate most low-value decisions.
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For example, engineer your wardrobe so that you never have to decide what to wear.
Develop a preference regarding things you don't actually care about. E.g. always get paper bags. Always buy the store brand. Always get the organic apples.
Aug 4, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The truly precious resource is not your time, but attention. Spending attention wisely improves the quality of your time. Conversely, time is worthless when you attention is scattered.
How do you mine this resource? By careful curation of the things you let into your life, your space, and your mind at any given time. Curation is a skill. It requires time and effort, but the return on investment is attention and focus.
Jul 1, 2020 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
One of the most basic tradeoffs in life is the one between spending resources to obtain knowledge, and exploiting that knowledge to obtain resources. This is commonly known as the exploration/exploitation tradeoff. Less known is that this is an adjunction.
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We have two categories. One is a category of models. These form a partial order by how well they represent the world. From zero knowledge (where any action is as good as any other as far as we know), to full knowledge (the system is fully explored).
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Mar 16, 2020 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
In Iceland, @decodegenetics is testing for COVID-19 anyone who wants to be tested. They can test 1000 people a day, so in a month they'll have tested 10% of the country's population. They have some interesting findings:
(thread)
They found that 1% of those tested had the virus. Around 40% of positives had no symptoms, and the rest had "an ordinary cold".
They're sequencing the virus from every single positive, tracking how the virus spreads and mutates.
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Feb 25, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Here's a crazy idea for technical interviews. Instead of whiteboard coding, 45-minute algorithms challenges, and brain-teasers, ask the candidate to bring some code they wrote. It can be anything. The interview is then just a code review.
If they don't have something to show, offer a small project they can work on before the interview. Or if they prefer, spend the interview day working on something with them.
Aug 16, 2019 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Software development estimation is a crucial activity because people need to make plans, and a low-resolution plan is better than none at all.
But too often, estimation is seen as:
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1. A negotiation.
"How long will it take?" - "2 weeks." - "That's too long, how about 1 week?"
This is not a cooperative atmosphere, but a battle of wills. This behaviour pushes people to underestimate.
