- Playground by Richard Powers: the ocean reminds us that we, along with our obsessions and rivalries, are small
- Orbital by Samantha Harvey: a book were not much happens, but a lot goes on below the surface
- Hum by Helen Phillips: looks at an AI controlled near future through a different lens
- Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow: sex, lies, and video games
It's very plausible that anxiety causes heart disease, anxiety causes insomnia, and insomnia leads people to use melatonin. Same with diphenhydramine, overactive inflammatory response causes allergies, allergic people take allergy meds, and too much inflammation contributes to dementia.
Association studies too easily get interpreted as X causes Y. Maybe that's true, but not necessarily.
Yeah, sounds like the problems are more due to monorepos rather than with GitHub actions. Seems like the pendulum always swings too far. Overdoing microservices results in redundant code and interservice spaghetti. Monorepos have their own set of issues. The only solution is to think carefully about a what size chunk of functionality you want to build, test, and deploy as a unit.
I found it quite worthwhile to ask GPT4o to give an english summary of the paper linked in the Wikipedia article, _Bekräftartekniker och motstrategier - sätt att bemöta maktstrukturer och förändra sociala klimat_, which translates to _Techniques of Suppression and Counterstrategies: Addressing Power Structures and Changing Social Climates_.
Recognizing and pushing back against the dark patterns of group dynamics is super important.
Programming was mostly a hobby in the days of 8-bit PCs. It was a profession for some decades. Maybe it will be a hobby again in 5 years. Like gardening, sailing, fishing - professions at one time, now hobbies.
On the other hand, the arrival of futuristic capabilities like computers speaking human languages is what drew me to technology in the first place. Luckily, you can choose to look forward and backward. You don't have to pick only one.
I don't know what the optimal population is, but here are a couple of arguments against the "ever greater" thesis. Diminishing returns kicks in at some point. The economic value of human life is subject to supply and demand. Where there excess supply, life is cheap and not in a good way.
I tried to do a similar thing, but in New Zealand, for engineering or ML engineering roles, without success. The folks I know of that pulled it off either knew people from previously working together in-person or were special in some way - PhD in valuable niche, wrote a book.
- Playground by Richard Powers: the ocean reminds us that we, along with our obsessions and rivalries, are small - Orbital by Samantha Harvey: a book were not much happens, but a lot goes on below the surface - Hum by Helen Phillips: looks at an AI controlled near future through a different lens - Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow: sex, lies, and video games