What I'm Reading: February

Tech

• Cultural and architectural insight's into Meta's hyperscale infrastructure

• Making a calculator app is actually hard

• A developer's LLM workflow

• A software maintainer's perspective

• What makes a good software engineer?

  • Writing good code, adjusting behaviors to account for future values and costs,

    informed decision-making, avoiding making others’ jobs harder, and learning continuously

• A cool visual of Markov chains

Career

• On being able to flex your management style, from hands-on to hands-off, to the needs of your reports

• On thinking of "A Players" situationally, using the Chicago Bulls as an example

• Anthropic's take on AI's impact on the labor market

  • AI mainly used in software development and technical writing

  • 36% of jobs use AI for some tasks; only 4% rely on it heavily

  • AI collaborates with humans (57%) more than it directly performs tasks (43%)

  • Adoption highest in mid-to-high wage roles like programming but lower in the lowest- and highest-paid jobs due to AI's limits & challenges

• Software engineering job listings down 3.5x from peak in 2022

• On making someone say 'no' rather than asking for a 'yes'

  • The difference between "Am I good to do X?" and "I'm going to do X if I don't hear back by end of day"

• AI reasoning models have made intelligence cheaper - and we've only begun to figure out how to use them

Etc

• AI company Anthropic asks applicants not to use AI to write their applications

• How to avoid "outrage fatigue" - consume less media and talk to people in the real world

• The full story of the FAA's hiring scandal

• 819 million hours collectively spent on CAPTCHAs - they're more about tracking and advertising than security

• Honda makes spicy capsaicin tape to keep rodents from chewing wires - someone decided to taste it

  • It turned out fine, but still a fun read

• New York's coolest, and most ubiquitous font: Gorton

• Finding focus and flow in work

• 50 years of travel tips

• On getting rid of the penny

  • The pros and cons of the penny

• People are buying fewer black plastic cooking utensils, more wood and steel, on fears of chemicals leaching into food

• The man who spent 42 years lounging at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool

  • Attn: C

Kip Moore's new record: Solitary Tracks

Tools I want to try: Replit, AI agents, and reasoning AI models