Previously we took a look at what a UA
is, the degree of trust, and the power imbalance. If you didn’t get
a chance to read up on it, now is the time. I’ll wait!
arrow_forward The increasingly inaccurately named
User-Agent
This post expands the concept a little bit.
User-Age...
In the wee hours preceding dawn of the 29th of June, 3123 BCE, a
Sumerian astronomer looked up at the night sky and recorded the
trajectory of a large object. The object is believed to have been over a
kilometer in diameter (about 11 football fields). Its impact is known as
...
It occurs to me how much of human communication is
disambiguation.
We have short lives and shorter attention spans. So we have to be
tactful about fitting in just enough detail into the brief blips of
attention that we are afforded. We wouldn’t enjoy listening to
protracted ...
The title is a reference to the five-volume Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams. The fourth and fifth
volumes in the series list themselves as being part of the
increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker’s Trilogy.
The User-Agent, a technical name for...
As far as product development is concerned, the only thing that
matters is the change we make in the user experience. We want our users
to be happier because our product exists or, at the very least, less
sad.
So when we build things we expect that our work will result in a
...
Fonts should be pretty, and text layout should be easy to read as
possible. When publishing on paper, publishers can control the physical
format for the presentation. We can assume, for the most part, how
someone might hold and read a book or a newspaper. Based on that we ca...
This post skips over an in-depth explanation of Shannon
entropy and only addresses the intuition surrounding it and how it
can be misleading. Googling for “information theory” should come up with
plenty of options for a more thorough treatment of information
theory.
In inf...
Teams can fail in many ways1. But when they succeed,
the most critical roles are those that form the communication structures
within and across teams. Forming these structures require teammates to
have some level of autonomy. In turn this requires a team stucture that
allows...
The concept of glue work isn’t new. Team building, mentoring, running
meetings, and many other mundane tasks fall under this category of often
uncompensated work. How glue work establishes unofficial communication
structures within and across teams is, however, discussed le...
Beyond the obvious team scoped function of soft roles, they also
perform important functions at the organizational level. Of these two
common types are:
Glue-people who are necessary to tie teams
together, build cohesion, connect the dots between silos that are not
effecti...
Google’s early success is partly attributed to the use of commodity
hardware that were expected to break occasionally. Rather than demanding
perfection from complex systems it is far more effective to expect and
design around imperfections1.
By
Erik
Pitti from San Diego, C...
It is July 4, 2025, and many major universities (Alan Blinder,
n.d.) in the US are struggling to deal with threats and
funding cuts from the Trump administration.
A major impact of funding cuts is the loss of enrollments of
promising students due to fewer programs. Internati...
We are prone to anthropomorphizing anything that looks or acts
vaguely lifelike. All the way back in the 1960s, when people were
confronted with a rudimentary chatbot, they were convinced that it
embodied empathy and understanding (ELIZA effect)1.
Roll forward to the 2020’s ...
This is a meaning.
It doesn’t look like much because I haven’t told you what it is yet.
That’s going to come in the following paragraphs. All I’ve done is toss
an abstract concept up in the air. It seems pointless, but it gives us a
canvas to paint with meaning later.
For...
It’s been a while since I’ve published anything here. This is partly
because every time I try to write there is something much more important
and terrible happenning in the world that I’m not qualified to write
about. Everything else including whatever it was that I was tryi...
Large language models’ ability to mimic human language and show signs
of intelligence is quite strange yet makes sense at the same time. This
series is a very gentle introduction to how they almost capture
human experience through language and how language is perhaps the
weirdest invention of all.
It’s going to be a bit of a long ride. Perhaps by the time you read
it I haven’t quite finished the whole series. So you’ll see what looks
like an abrupt ending or missing episodes. They are coming. Just
slowly.
Intrinsic vs. extrinsic
A long long time ago in a totally hypothetical company that still
exists but only in name, there was a little bit of discontent1. You see, one of the core values of
the company was its commitment to diversity and inclusion. Rather than
lowerin...
From Here To There On The
Internet
This article is an attempt to explain the concept of buffer bloat to
someone not super familiar with networking. Why would someone not super
familiar with networking need to know about buffer bloat? It was
supposed to point out the effects...
It’s been fourteen years since I joined Google. Much has happened
since then, and people think the old Google is dead. This is somewhat
correct.
One way to understand what is happening is to compare and contrast
the Google of yore and the present (as of late 2024) Google.
Fr...
Astute observers of this blog may have noticed that the blog looks
suspiciously different lately. That’s because I changed the static site
generator I was using.
Previously the static site
generator I used was Hugo. This
arrangement worked for a while but it had some shortco...
