Following the great advice I just read on https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/ (thanks Hacker News for the pointer), I'll try to start posting TILs
Note: there's no hidden knowledge contained in this post, it's just a reflection on how reading someone's reaction to an analogous situation changed my outlook Like everyone who works in an information job, I have been worried these last few months about how AI would impact my place in the labor force in the coming decade. Even though I didn't get to the depressed extremes we've been seeing on the Internet, I could not shake off the feeling that what I could offer to a company - no, to the whole economy, which just means "other people" - would get a lot less valuable. Come mid January, I wast taking a week off and had taken to read a few books since I read so little non-technical content on a day to day basis. One of these books was "Founders at work" by author and YC co-founder Jessica Livingston. The book is a series of interviews conducted by Jessica with the founders of some of the most important tech companies - sometimes specific products -...
Fun story: I came to Python through data analysis - so I wasn't a "python/programming expert" - and for an unreasonably long time used exclusively csv, parquet (thanks to pandas) and later JSON to persist data from my projects (local projects, of course. Mongo, RDS and Athena were always there). At work this was 100% enough (mostly parquet), but it always felt a little clunky to use JSON for a quick cache, especially when said cache grew larger for longer running processes or longer projects. Opening, parsing then serializing back again becomes slow surprisingly fast. Then after a few years I decided to start using SQLite. I knew it existed, but always felt like it was a bit of a hassle to define a schema and "get" and "set" functions in all projects just to have a basic persistent k-v functionality. It was OK and had the extra benefit of allowing me to safely check this cache on a different jupyter notebook process when running longer proce...
One of the books on my reading list is Bryant and O'Hallaron's Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective . As the name implies, it teaches you how computers work. The book uses C since it's a low-level language that "exposes" the machine and it appeals to me because I've been eager to learn both systems-level programming and computer hardware, and this book addresses both areas using C. Now, the reader might not be aware, but there's currently a low-level language holy war between Rust and C going on (well, more like a two-front war with Rust tackling C and C++ at the same time). Which is fine and all - I've got no dog in this fight - but it got me thinking: Is there some book or piece of content that can teach me the same breadth of hardware knowledge based on Rust? Even though learning is fun, I'd rather learn a language at the same time I learn about hardware. I don't expect to become a systems programmer any time soon, ...
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