Hi, and thank you for subscribing! If you find the Paperless blog content interesting you’ll probably like this.

I’ll be sending one of these every week or so, linking to interesting articles since the last newsletter.

To kick things off, here are some things I read this week:

• Style/taste:
  • Thom Holwerda's EasyEffects should be part of every Linux distribution and desktop environment to massively improve laptop speaker sound quality helped me bring my laptop speakers from awful to usable. Thanks for the tip!
  • Matthew Martin discusses how non-descriptive names make a system even harder to understand in Your Cool Internal System Names Suck. This spawned a bit of a discussion around some of the finer points, like what if you don't yet have a strong feel for what the system will do?
  • Yakir Havin writes about how copying someone else's style is probably not doing you any favours in Do Things Your Own Way.
  • Nat Bennett goes through some of what might be the secret sauce for a superb working environment in What was special about Pivotal? This reminds me of a UK startup where I used to work; pairing every day for four years made it my biggest learning experience ever, by a long shot.
  • Jim Nielsen's Can We Stop With the Uptime Percentages? suggests instead writing uptime as a human-readable sentence. We should probably explore this further, and I wonder whether using odds like “1 in 35 chances” could work.
  • Sharon Rosner explains how a custom, light-weight, custom SQL API can be more flexible and pretty simple in Beyond ORMs .
  • Christine Lemmer-Webber points out that using an LLM means you circumvent the hard-but-necessary work of developing taste in But where does taste come from?
  • Jordan Andersen AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too
• Nix-related:
  • Farid Zakaria's How to piss off your Nix friends has some mildly spicy takes.
  • Farid Zakaria also came out with Any Nix package, live in your browser, which blows my mind!
  • Shahar Or's Nix Freaks 46 is my first podcast appearance 🫣.
• Research:
  • Data Colada uncovers more research data tampering in Artificial Deadlines - Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination.
  • On the other hand, Scott Alexander points out that Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine.
  • Ken Pang, Anja Ravine, Kellan Baker, and Will Conabere uses twin studies to destroy some prejudices in Critics claim trans people 'defy biology.' New research suggests otherwise.
• Misc:
  • Brad Feld's The Real Luxuries In Life lays down the most important things to strive for.

🖖

Victor