Today I LearnedRSS

September 2024

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-autocorrelation/

You must constantly be on guard for sophistry. It's so easy to uncritically accept things that sound completely rational and logical when you already agree with it. Oh how we love viewing novices as incurable dunces. If you think novices over estimate their abilities, you'd be wrong. They just don't know what they don't know. Sure there are lairs out there. Seemingly a lot of them. But when asked to evaluate how skilled someone thinks they are, it's not that novices over estimate and experts under estimate. It's that novices have low precision while experts improve their precision.

This doesn't help explain why there are so many people engaged in bullshitting. Seek truth elsewhere for that one. But hopefully it helps people stop referring to the Dunning-Kruger effect along with many of the other studies being debunked in the replication crisis.

In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (Extended Version)

https://raft.github.io/raft.pdf

It's still extremely hard to get distributed consensus implementations correct, but at least it's much better documented for Raft than Paxos was.

HAMMER2 Design Document

http://bxr.su/DragonFly/sys/vfs/hammer2/DESIGN

I don't use DragonflyBSD, but keeping up to date on the latest developments in modern filesystems is always a joy.

I've never used the patches, but it looks like someone's maintaining an OpenBSD patchset for it. I'm not sure if OpenBSD has interest in mainlining support for it. It's not really built in the spirit of increasing security, so I have doubts. Time will tell.

Lecture Friday: A Systems-Minded Approach to Creating a Music Player Application

Not sure what the future has in store, but I'd really like to do more systems programming. Sadly making money doing this seems particularly difficult in Toronto. On the other hand, there's always building your own business based on Teller's wisdom that, Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.

My career ambitions aside, this is a fantastic talk about building web application SaaS type things like a systems programmer. Namely that fewer dependencies means fewer problems long term.

Generalized Isolation Level Definitions

https://eecs.umich.edu/courses/cse584/static_files/papers/isolation_level.pdf

Why is it almost nobody writing backend software seems to understand isolation levels? I think you should basically be required to present an oral argument about all the levels before being allowed to even connect to the database.

It was funny watching people freak out about the Timeless Timing Attacks which now allows attackers to precisely exploit timing attacks against HTTP2 services. It's only a problem because developers have been blissfully unaware of what Read Committed even means and why shards aren't the secret ingredient in the web scale sauce.

Jepsen 15: What Even Are Transactions?

Not a lecture Friday. Just a praise for the Jepsen testing framework. If you're not familiar and work on a system that isn't just a monolith, you really need to read up on it. Ideally, start using it.

The Subprime AI Crisis

https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/

This bubble's going to be rough. I wonder just how desperate big tech is at this point to pretend growth is infinite.

Crossing The Chasm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm#/media/File:Technology-Adoption-Lifecycle.png

I recently brought up this model in a conversation when I was talking about product adoption and market fit. I think it's a great way to understand how people adopt technology. It's super important to understand that your late market fundamentally thinks differently about your product compared to your early market. The late market wants something different and if you don't understand the right time to pivot, you'll either end up passed by a competitor or alienating your early adopters too early and sink.

Lecture Friday: Capt. Grace Hopper on Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People (Part Two, 1982)

Part 2.