Daily Reads:
Speaking to a colleague today, & they rattled off a bunch of words they heard an executive say in a meeting. I said "Buzzword Bingo" and startled them. Coincidentally, I’d read this article last night, talking about what buzzwords in job descriptions really mean.
I learnt that kayfabe is a real word in the professional wrestling word that describes the altered reality of layered falsehoods in which nothing can be assumed to be as it appears. The human mind can suspend reality for fantasy. The application: When joining a new team, it’s worth understanding if the situation we find ourselves is a kayfabe – a situation where the players are all deliberately coordinating to remove unpredictable upheavals that imperil the participants, while the audience continues to believe that what they’re observing is reality!
Tim Urban’s 2015 post "The Tail End" is worth reading at least once every year for a reminder that viewing life as units of time, we are better served (and our focus sharpened) if we measure it in activities or events. For example, he points out that by the time we’re in college, we’re statistically likely to have spent 93% of the in-person time we will spend with our parents in our lifetime.
I watched and shared Simon Willison’s talk at WordCamp 2023. He offers some concrete examples of how to think about, and work with, LLM’s, and some caveats on the problems that can arise.
QOTD:
In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul. – Mary Renault, novelist
Music:
I’ve begun learning Django Reinhardt’s Montagne Sainte Genevieve from this. I’m making slow but steady progress.