Overvale
Welcome to my website, I hope you enjoy your stay.
Writing
- DARPA, Skunk Works, & Bell Labs: Structured to Innovate
- An attempt to summarize the common ethos and project management approach of The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, and AT&T’s Bell Labs. And to create some basic guidance teams and organizations might adopt to follow in these organizations’ footsteps.
- Systems Engineering at NASA
- This study attempts to summarize how NASA’s System Engineers operate in order to better understand how to manage complex technical projects.
- Systems Engineering for Visual Effects
- This paper describes Systems Engineering, as practiced by NASA, and explores the application of its principles and techniques to the operation of visual effects (VFX) studios. It discusses challenges in VFX projects, like complexity management and technical/artistic integration, and proposes that VFX studios could improve their engineering and operations by adopting the perspective and methods of Systems Engineering.
Notes
- Recommended Books
- Recommended Papers
- Notes on Managing
- Thoughts on Growing a Company
- Black Ivy Style Guide
- My Favorite Free Fonts
- Built-In macOS Window Management Tools
- Worth The Money
- Software I Love
- Harrison Ford Movies
- A Partial List of Movies Released in 2007
- The Revelation of the Complex
- Perfection
- Writing In Plain-Text
Emacs
- Quick Help: Emacs as a Text Productivity Platform
- Confirm Killing Modified Buffers
- Custom Scratch Buffers
- Keymap Prompts
- Mark Line & Marking Transient Command
- Kill Buffer DWIM
- Splitting Windows With the Mouse
- Emacs Keybindings That Won't Get Overridden by Minor Modes
- How Package.el Works with Use Package
- Extending Emacs Bookmarks to Work With EWW
Links
Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life
A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it. A thin desire is one that doesn't. […] the person who spends a year learning calculus becomes someone different, someone who can see patterns in the world that were previously invisible, who has expanded the range of things they're capable of caring about, who has Been Through It. The person who checks their notifications is, afterward, exactly the same person who wanted to check their notifications five minutes ago. […] The business model of most consumer technology is to identify some thick desire, find the part of it that produces a neurological reward, and then deliver that reward without the rest of the package.
The only thing that is doing the thing is doing the thing.
I'm an AI optimist, but when reading about how AI will change everything (it will) I can't help but remember this line from The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence:
The printing press, and each newly-discovered method of communication favoured the intellectual above the physical, civilisation paying the mind always from the body’s funds.
No matter how wonderful our computational advances are we must translate these advances into the physical realm to truly benefit from them. Saying “Cool tech, let me know when it can do my dishes or pick my kid up from school” isn't AI pessimism but the essence of the problem that needs solving. No one needs smarter computers for their own sake, they need better standards of living and new capabilities.
Andrej Karpathy (OpenAI founding member, Tesla veteran, major contributor to today’s AI frameworks) made a really good video going over the practical use of large language models. Dense, clear, highly accessible, but doesn't shy from complexity. Think of it as an excellent two-hour lecture.
We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It is the introduction to a great new series of essays called How the System Works by Charles C. Mann.
The great European cathedrals were built over generations by thousands of people and sustained entire communities. Similarly, the electric grid, the public-water supply, the food-distribution network, and the public-health system took the collective labor of thousands of people over many decades. They are the cathedrals of our secular era. They are high among the great accomplishments of our civilization. But they don’t inspire bestselling novels or blockbuster films. No poets celebrate the sewage treatment plants that prevent them from dying of dysentery. Like almost everyone else, they rarely note the existence of the systems around them, let alone understand how they work.