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Earlier this month, I used Claude to port (parts of) an Emacs package into Rust, shrinking the execution time by a factor of 1000 or more (in one concrete case: from 90s to about 15ms). This is a variety of yak-shave that I do somewhat routinely, both professionally and in service of my personal computing environment. However, this time, Claude was able to execute substantially the entire project under my supervision without me writing almost-any lines of code, speeding up the project substantially compared to doing it by hand.
I worked at Stripe for about seven years, from 2012 to 2019. Over that time, I used and contributed to many generations of Stripe’s developer environment – the tools that engineers used daily to write and test code. I think Stripe did a pretty good job designing and building that developer experience, and since leaving, I’ve found myself repeatedly describing features of that environment to friends and colleagues. This post is an attempt to record the salient features of that environment as I remember it.
I was recently introduced to the paper “Seeing the Invisible: Perceptual-Cognitive Aspects of Expertise” by Gary Klein and Robert Hoffman. It’s excellent and I recommend you read it when you have a chance. Klein and Hoffman discuss the ability of experts to “see what is not there”: in addition to observing data and cues that are present in the environment, experts perceive implications of these cues, such as the absence of expected or “typical” information, the typicality or atypicality of observed data, and likely/possible past and future time trajectories of a system based on a point-in-time snapshot or limited duration of observation.
This December, the imp of the perverse struck me, and I decided to see how many days of Advent of Code I could do purely in compile-time C++ metaprogramming. As of this writing, I’ve done two days, and I’m not sure I’ll make it any further. However, that’s one more day than I planned to do as of yesterday, which is in turn further than I thought I’d make it after my first attempt.
More in technology
Waymo’s factory, a map of US land values, ships in the Arctic Circle, battery industry trends, and more.
Today, Alec Watson posted a video titled “Algorithms are breaking how we think” on his YouTube channel, Technology Connections. The whole thing is excellent and very well argued. The main thrust is: people seem increasingly less mindful about the stuff they engage with. Watson argues that this is bad, and I agree. A little while ago I watched a video by Hank Green called “$4.5M to Spray Alcoholic Rats with Bobcat Urine”. Green has been banging this drum for a while. He hits some of the same notes as Watson, but from a different angle. This last month has been a lot, and I’ve withdrawn from news and social media quite a bit because of it. Part of this is because I’ve been very busy with work, but it’s also because I’ve felt overwhelmed. There are now a lot of bad-faith actors in positions of power. Part of their game plan is to spray a mass of obviously false, intellectually shallow, enraging nonsense into the world as quickly as possible. At a certain point the bullshit seeps in if you’re soaking in it. The ability to control over what you see next is powerful. I think it would be great if more people started being a bit more choosy about who they give that control to.
A quick look at the physics of conductors, insulators, and electric charges.
What `git config` settings should be defaults by now? Here are some settings that even the core developers change.
Plus the government did the stupid thing after all.
