Giorgio Sironi @giorgiosironi@qoto.org
Tech Lead Manager at @eLife/@ScietyHQ, helping scientists accelerate discovery. Fighting simplism since 1988.
Joined Oct 2022
Giorgio Sironi
boosted
Great visual showing why even getting 90% of the implementation budget might simultaneously sound like a lot and lead to unusable results...
Mozilla's Pocket and its stock Kobo app are fitting well my use case of "read this web page later on". Heck, it even goes beyond some paywalls and provides reasonable recommendations.
Giorgio Sironi
boosted
“Tell me about the Great Migration, grandfather.”
“Aye, we knew it was time when the Mad King Elon took the throne and the trolls had free rein across the kingdom,” he answered, the crackling fire reflected in his eyes. “The Migration was hazardous — we lost many a good account along the way,” he said softly, looking into the distance. “But we are settled here now, and this was all so long ago. Why I myself arrived in October of the year 2022 — it’s been a full quarter-journey around the sun.”
The Museum of Italian Emigration in Genoa (MEI) has a nice hanging contraption of passports. So much we associated with a standardized object - the whole issue of citizenship; and rights to reside, move, and work. Better than the floppy disk icon!
A city with a complex road network, and not falling in an American or British tech bubble: Genoa, Italy. A good test for how much we believe large scale Internet services (Google Maps) to tell the truth, which for me resulted in:
- locations of bus stops costantly off
- transit information like a metro being shown as running (it was suspended for expansion works)
- a museum being shown as closed (while it had extended hours due to summer time)
- walking from a stop to an airport on roads without sidewalks and crossing into direct traffic (they always had a problem with walking directions)
Soon to be brought to you by an AI made to be convincing, regardless of whether it can tell you the truth.
I remember the days of manual failover of MySQL from a primary to a secondary, and the fear and terror that ensued. Facebook putting a consensus algorithm on it sounds incredibly hacky and complicated but also solving problems at a scale difficult to imagine https://engineering.fb.com/2023/05/16/data-infrastructure/mysql-raft-meta/?utm_source=pocket_reader
On the UK housing crisis, I am having a great (sobering) time reading All The Houses I've Ever Lived In https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62711393-all-the-houses-i-ve-ever-lived-in an intersection of what it means to make a place home, and what it means to people to have to move continuously
A good framing on the way out of lack of housing being... building houses (it is complicated, but inescapable) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/12/home-ownership-house-building-property-prices?utm_source=pocket_reader
You'll have a big edge in, say, producing marketing content using generative AI (all else being equal). Except "All else is not equal. Everyone else is going to be using these things too"; as such, expect an arms race with spam filters trying to stop all this generated content from stealing your attention, and to lose productivity as well wading through the noise
A bit long-winded but this is proper journalism about the AI hype "ChatGPT is not human, it has no critical faculty, and certainly no commitment to the truth" https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/22/can-we-still-handle-the-truth-journalism-alternative-facts-and-the-rise-of-ai?utm_source=pocket_reader
It has to be said this is complete bullshit from the BBC "AI can interpret data impartially" https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230515-workplace-ai-how-artificial-intelligence-will-transform-the-workday?xtor=ES-213-[BBC%20Features%20Newsletter]-2023May26-[BBC_Features_StartUsingAI_Worklife]
Giorgio Sironi
boosted
Twitter is falling apart everyday in front of our very eyes and it’s actually hilarious.
Giorgio Sironi
boosted
My favorite part of Altman's Senate testimony: "we noticed ChatGPT spits out falsehoods, propaganda, hate speech, and bomb-making instructions, so we edited the training data to remove erotica."
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23814360-openai-written-testimony-051623
Giorgio Sironi
boosted
Giorgio Sironi
boosted
In the first 4 hours of any software project, we could, indeed, characterize what we do as "writing code". But that's the morning of the first day. After that, all we ever do with code on that project is change it.
Professional software developers *change* code.
"Develop" is a synonym for "change".
To learn how be a professional software developer, focus your learning around the topic of *changing* code.
Very interesting idea yesterday by @kevinrutherford to use Eventstorming in the process notation to explore a team's own work rather than a business domain. Helped me a lot in coming up with a consistent language, and seeing hotspot areas; a compiler for practices. As always, I run out of space!
Indeed frontend is terribly complex and hard to learn nowadays https://christianheilmann.com/2023/05/09/the-ongoing-defence-of-frontend-as-a-full-time-job/ the key I guess is placing specialist into a balanced team where the product is not entirely driven by anyone's specialty
Giorgio Sironi
boosted
Please ChatGPT write me a post with a fake graph and making no argument on why something should continue to improve, yet believing it will https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/bet-on-growth
Tech Lead Manager at @eLife/@ScietyHQ, helping scientists accelerate discovery. Fighting simplism since 1988.
Joined Oct 2022
