Polymath Engineer Weekly #41
Are you curious today?
Hello again. Let’s get into it:
Links of the week
▶ AI's Most Insane Week - Things Will Never Be The Same
“There were so many massive announcements in the AI space this week. It was overwhelming and the week moved fast. So I wanted to breakdown everything that happened... And this was just through Thursday!“
Architects, Anti-Patterns, and Organizational Fuckery
“I think that a lot of companies are using some of their best, most brilliant senior engineers as glorified project manager/politicians to paper over a huge amount of organizational dysfunction, while bribing them with money and prestige, and that honestly makes me pretty angry. 😡
But title is not destiny. And if you are feeling mad because none of what I’ve written applies to you, then I’m not writing about you! Live long and prosper. 🖖“
Redefining our microservice development process
“When you’re testing a service you typically don’t care how its dependencies work, you just care that if you pass them a request they give you back an acceptable response. This means we can simplify things massively by faking our dependencies. These fakes don’t change without notice nor do they make their own network calls. Fast and deterministic 🚀“
▶ But what is the Central Limit Theorem?
This is a very cool video. It’s always fascinating to see how 3Blue1Brown creates such beautiful and instructive visuals.
“There are, by my last count, approximately 13 hillion frillion jillion LLM-backed coding assistants out there, as of mid-March. But they are all in a desperate race to the bottom, because they’re all using the exact same raw materials: An LLM, your IDE, your code base, and that pesky little context window.
Nobody can differentiate on the LLM; they’re all about the same. And the IDE and your code base are the same. All they can try to differentiate on is their UI and workflows, which they’re all going to copy off each other. Good for you, bad for them.
The punchline, and it’s honestly one of the hardest things to explain, so I’m going the faith-based route today, is that all the winners in the AI space will have data moats.“
Everything I, an Italian, thought I knew about Italian food is wrong
“Grandi’s speciality is making bold claims about national staples: that most Italians hadn’t heard of pizza until the 1950s, for example, or that carbonara is an American recipe. Many Italian “classics”, from panettone to tiramisu, are relatively recent inventions, he argues. Some of DOI’s claims might be familiar to industry insiders, but most are based on Grandi’s own findings, partly developed from existing academic literature. His skill is in taking academic research and making it digestible.“
Book of the Week
The ADHD Advantage: What You Thought Was a Diagnosis May Be Your Greatest Strength
Do you have any more links our community should read? Feel free to post them on the comments.
Have a nice week. 😉
Have you read last week's post? Check the archive.