2026-01-17

Einstein on being a loner

“I am a typical loner in my daily life... my awareness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has prevented me from feelings of isolation.” — Albert Einstein

This totally made my day. I am very much a loner, but in talking with many folks I have realised that I have very rarely been miserable about it. On the contrary I would say I am pretty happy loner.

Cracked Engineers

Forget Vibe Coders: ‘Cracked Engineers’ Are All the Rage in Tech — The Information

Not exactly the kind of article

In November, a young robotics startup called Gradient began interviewing applicants for an engineering internship at the Palo Alto, Calif.–based company. But after talking to a half-dozen of them, the startup decided to ditch its plan to add interns.

Why exactly? “Not worth our time,” said J.X. Mo, 23, Gradient’s co-founder. While some of the applicants had seemed promising, “none of them would be cracked enough for us to hire them,” he said.

These days, plenty of people within tech are after the same thing Mo is: a “cracked engineer,” a buzzphrase that describes an idealized version of a software engineer capable of thriving in the AI era through scrappiness, workaholism and technical savvy.

I figure I would put myself more in the category of a 5X engineer with the "willingness to use AI tools" and "capable of thriving in the AI era through scrappiness, workaholism and technical savvy", EXCEPT I am not exactly a workaholic 🙃. Does that make me "semi-cracked" then!?

Before it became a banner for a certain kind of programmer, the term “cracked” originated from videogames, as slang describing an especially adept gamer. Someone with a series of gnarly kills in Call of Duty? They’re totally cracked—that kind of thing.

Within tech, the people most eager to hire a cracked engineer are often startup founders at early-stage companies that haven’t yet accumulated significant venture capital. With limited funds, they need engineers who can operate as the company’s only coder—or perhaps one of a handful at most. And while some engineers specialize in writing code for machine learning or cloud infrastructure, cracked engineers are versatile enough to do it all.

Furthermore, these founders often view cracked engineers as more likely to be undiscovered savants who aren’t after cushy positions at big tech companies, rather than programming veterans. They are typically in their 20s, but they may have accumulated a decade of work experience by the time they reach their mid-20s, startup founders say. Most have little interest in managing other people.

Flat White Under Attack

Is There Really Such A Thing As A Large Flat White? | Sprudge Coffee

My vote is No.

The flat white is under attack. Or at least according to one Guardian contributor. The aggressor? Milk. More milk. Flat whites apparently now come, confusingly to some, in two sizes—small and large—which some see as a grave offense to the hallowed Antipodean espresso drink.

Except there is one tiny little difference between the flat white and the other drinks listed. What makes the flat white different is that there is no agreed upon definition of the flat white. Even among Australians, who spread it around the world, and New Zealanders, who in actually invented it. We know because we asked thousands and thousands of them all about over a decade ago, when arguing about flat whites still seemed novel. The closest thing to agreement we could find in our survey was that the flatty was “small-ish”. Think of it like a small latte. Further confounding things was the lack of consensus on whether a flit whoite had a double shot of espresso or a single. Ratios here are just as important, if not more, than total drink size, so that’s not ideal.