Avid learner. Dad. Love tech, space, metacognition, writing, guitars, FPSers. DevOps advocate. Reedie. RT≠+1.
42.8,-70.8 GMT-04
Joined February 2012
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Christopher Little retweeted
年轻人问苏格拉底：为什么那些满嘴仁义道德的人，往往最贪婪？
苏格拉底指着桌上的烤肉反问：如果我想拿走你手里这块肉，最省力的办法是什么？
年轻人脱口而出：拿刀逼我交出来！
苏格拉底摇头：太蠢了，你会拼命反抗，我也会受伤。
年轻人又猜：那拿钱跟我买？
苏格拉底笑了：那我就得付出代价。最聪明的办法，是我先发明一套道德标准，告诉所有人“吃肉是自私下流的，只有把肉让给别人的人，才配得上高尚的灵魂”。
年轻人愣住了。
苏格拉底继续说：等你为了证明自己高尚，乖乖把肉奉上时，我不仅白吃了你的肉，还能站在道德制高点上给你发一张“好人卡”。如果你敢护食，根本不用我动手，周围其他饿着肚子装高尚的人就会先把你撕碎。
所有的道德绑架，底层逻辑只有四个字：免费抢劫。
Christopher Little retweeted
My wife's brother spent six years at a Japanese car plant in Kentucky. He was sent to teach the Americans our way of working.
He came home with a notebook. On the cover, in Japanese: "Things I Learned Instead."
Some pages:
"The first day of deer season, half the line takes vacation. HR plans for it every year. Nobody pretends to be sick. They just say 'deer season.'"
"They name the machines. The welding robot on Line 2 is Darlene. Darlene gets a birthday cake."
"When someone's wife has a baby, the whole line signs a card. The card is bigger than the baby."
"A man with thirty years on the line showed me a better way to do my own job. Then he said, 'Don't tell your boss I told you that, boss.'"
"Every Friday, someone brings doughnuts. Nobody is assigned. Somebody always does."
"They thank the janitor by name. Every day. His name is Curtis."
The last page is from his final day.
In our system, anyone can stop the line, but only for a problem. Stopping it is serious.
"On my last day, the line stopped for one minute. There was no problem. They stopped it to shake my hand."
He says it's the only time in six years he was happy to see the line stop.
Christopher Little retweeted
Have you noticed that Christmas decorations go up before Christmas?
Have you noticed that flu season starts after the vaccines are given out?
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Flu shots are given before flu season on purpose. The CDC advises getting vaccinated in September or October, ideally by the end of October, because it takes about two weeks after vaccination for protective antibodies to develop. cdc.gov/flu/vaccines/v…
Christopher Little retweeted
Have you noticed it gets cold in winter when people start putting warm clothes on?
Have you noticed that flu season starts after the vaccines are given out?
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Flu shots are given before flu season on purpose. The CDC advises getting vaccinated in September or October, ideally by the end of October, because it takes about two weeks after vaccination for protective antibodies to develop. cdc.gov/flu/vaccines/v…
Christopher Little retweeted
Temporarily making my account public so I can post my talk on agentic CI/CD from last month, where I respectfully explain why @Steve_Yegge is wrong (and right!) about the Thunderdome: leaddev.com/culture/the-cont…
Read @Steve_Yegge's post on the Continuous Thunderdome. You should check it out! yegge.ai/essays/the-shape-of…. wrt to "The Metamorphosis of CI/CD" I will humbly (lol) note that in the Continuous Delivery book (2010), we discuss what to do when your tests take too long to run, which is to create a deployment pipeline. Run a fast suite against every commit that takes a few minutes and makes sure things Basically Work. Then run the longer suite continuously against builds that pass the fast suite. Then bisect that when it breaks.
I wil note:
* Mashing things into trunk sure beats feature branches!
* Even if you don't do a deployment pipeline, you can execute at massive scale with the "modern" CI/CD monorepo merge queue approach. Check out the following Google preso from 2023: research.google/pubs/what-br… (and also ch23 of SWE at Google: abseil.io/resources/swe-book…)
* These days, there's no reason not to optimize _everything_ for speed of CI. AI is writing all the code anyway! Why are you using C++, or some other language that is slow AF to build / test? In 2012 Dan Bodart decided the deployment pipeline was a hacky compromise and wrote a post about how he optimized EVERYTHING in his toolchain for CI speed: "Nothing is safe: build tool, compiler, testing library, language, web container, messaging library, persistence layer, architecture, OS, code layout, team and process." dan.bodar.com/2012/02/28/cra…. Again: this was 2012, long before we had AI.
So I think the Thunderdome is a bit lazy, although as I say, still better than feature branches :D
Christopher Little retweeted
I watched a river for an hour and understood that it's never the same water yet always the same river, and then I understood I am exactly that. Every cell, every belief, every mood has been replaced since childhood, and still something continuous calls itself me. I am not a thing. I am a pattern that water passes through. That dissolved my fear of change entirely, because change was never the threat to my identity. Change is the only thing my identity has ever been made of. I am the shape, not the water.
Christopher Little retweeted
Once upon a time there was an engineer who observed an SQL delete statement on a field called blah = x. That query was doing a full table scan and unnecessarily locks many rows in the execution path causing contention and sometimes deadlocks, mainly because blah didn’t have an index.
The engineer added an index and that made the query much faster.
Another engineer discovered that there was a bug in the code and that query shouldn’t have been executed to begin with. They removed the code that executed the delete and replaced with simpler delete on a more selective id field which was the primary clustered index on that table.
The index on blah remained on the table for decades, no one remembers why its there or questions it anymore.
The index lived happily ever after on that table, bloating storage, amplifying writes and WAL and slowing inserts.
The end.
Christopher Little retweeted
"If the Executive can discount votes and threaten an ongoing election due to unproven allegations, then our democracy is in danger."
— Judge David O. Carter, the first federal judge to observe that Trump likely committed crimes in his assault on the 2020 election. buff.ly/hSDF7SA
Christopher Little retweeted
Judge Carter’s order blocking DOJ ends with an ominous warning: “Eroded trust in our democracy is irreparable…If the Executive can discount votes and threaten an ongoing election due to unproven allegations, then our democracy is in danger. This court declines to be a party to such process.”
Christopher Little retweeted
This was an article in the New York Times two years ago.
He’s done all of it.
Christopher Little retweeted
Michael Pollan reveals how the introduction of caffeine completely changed human history and consciousness.
"Before caffeine, it was a very different world and a very different consciousness. People were drunk a lot of the time, buzzed almost all of the time because it was safer than water"
"Water was really how you got diseases. If you fermented things, even low alcohol, it killed a lot of the microbes. So people, even kids, drank hard cider for breakfast"
"Tea, chocolate, and coffee all arrive in the same decade in England, and things start to change... no one ate or drank boiling water or hot beverages before"
"Boiling it made it much safer. This gave this incredible public health boost to these places, and then you have the drug that fosters a kind of more linear, rational, focused way of thinking"
"People in the 1600s started writing about it saying, 'Wow, we have this new civil and sober drink that we can use.' And that, I think, makes possible things like the Industrial Revolution"
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The clip repeats the myth that pre-caffeine people were mostly drunk because water was unsafe. Historians and medieval sources show water was commonly drunk from wells/springs while weak ale provided nutrition/calories, not a substitute for bad water.
leslefts.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-gr…
slate.com/human-interest…
fakehistoryhunter.net/2026/02/02/dri…
Christopher Little retweeted
Besides being nakedly racist and bigoted, this is just hilariously wrong on all levels.
I mean, Omar Yaghi won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year, and he won the Wolf Prize in 2018. And that's just one example.
He also said Arabs don't produce any literature. Last year's winner of the National Book Award was Lebanese writer and painter Rabih Alameddine. The winner in non-fiction? Egyptian-American journalist Omar El Akkad.
Christopher Little retweeted
Among my many questions after seeing the amazing You Can See Everything: Why did Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans bring their documentary idea to A24? (Not Netflix or HBO or someplace else)
Turns out A24 has a long relationship with co-director (and friend of Nathan Fielder) Lance Oppenheim. Years earlier, Oppenheim made a New York Times doc about how documentaries can be used to get judges to go easier on criminal defendants by humanizing them.
Coincidence? Or careful research and planning by Holmes?
Christopher Little retweeted
It’s kinda crazy to me that we melt sand down, clean it to 99.99999% purity, literal wizards have to draw it slowly into an ingot, we cut it, inscribe a hundred billion little on/off switches on it, and when you run electric current through it you can do basic arithmetic, which when you do enough of it can do any math on the planet, and which describes reality well enough that we can teach it the ontological meaning of words and their distance from each other on a high-dimensional space, and if you ask, it can tell you what word comes next and that apparently is powerful enough that if you do it a hundred billion times it’s the smartest thing to ever exist
oh yeah and we use this primarily for email