The zone has indeed always been flooded, especially since its a title that collides with “integration architect” and other similar titles whose jobs are completely different. That being said, it’s a title I’ve held before, and I really enjoyed the work I got to do. My perspective will be a little skewed here because I specifically do security architecture work, which is mostly consulting-style “hey come look at this design we made is it bad?” rather than developing systems from scratch, but here’s my take:

Architecture is mostly about systems thinking-- you’re not as responsible for whether each individual feature, service, component etc is implemented exactly to spec or perfectly correctly, but you are responsible for understanding how they’ll fit together, what parts are dangerous and DO need extra attention, and catching features/design elements early on that need to be cut because they’re impossible or create tons of unneeded tech debt. Speaking of tech debt, making the call about where its okay to have a component be awful and hacky, versus where v1 absolutely still needs to be bulletproof probably falls into the purvey of architecture work too. You’re also probably the person who will end up creating the system diagrams and at least the skeleton of the internal docs for your system, because you’re responsible for making sure people who interact with it understand its limitations as well.

I think the reason so much of the advice on this sort of work is bad or nonexistent is that when you try to boil the above down to a set of concrete practices or checklists, they get utterly massive, because so much of the work (in my experience) is knowing what NOT to focus on, where you can get away with really general abstractions, etc, while still being technically capable enough to dive into the parts that really do deserve the attention.

In addition to the nice markers and whiteboard, I’d plug getting comfortable with some sort of diagramming software, if you aren’t already. There’s tons of options, they’re all pretty much Fine IMO.

For reading, I’d suggest at least checking out the first few chapters of Engineering A Safer World , as it definitely had a big influence on how I practice architecture.

Guess I’ll be expensing a nice set of rainbow whiteboard markers for my personal use, and making it up as I go along.

Congratulations, you figured it out! Read Clean Architecture and then ignore the parts you don’t like and you’ll make it

Ugh OK I have to vent:

I’m getting pushed into more of a design role because oops my company accidentally fired or drove away all of a team of a dozen people except for me after forgetting for a few years that the code I work on is actually mission critical.

I do my best at designing stuff and delegating the implementation to my coworkers. It’s not one of my strengths but there’s enough technical debt from when I was solo-maintaining everything for a few years that I know what needs improving and how to improve it.

But none of my coworkers are domain experts, they haven’t been given enough free time for me to train them into domain experts, there’s only one of me, and the higher ups are continuously surprised that stuff is going so slow. It’s frustrating for everyone involved.

I actually wouldn’t mind architecture or design work in better circumstances since I love to chat with people; but it feels like my employer has put me in an impossible position. At the moment I’m just trying to hang in there for some health insurance reasons; but in a few years I plan to leave for greener pastures where I can go a day without hearing the word “agentic”.

The satan thing makes a certain kind of sense. Probably catering to a bunch of different flavours of repressed: grindr republicans, covenant eyes users, speaking-in-tongues enthusiasts, etc.

Also appearing is friend of the pod and OpenAI board member Larry Summers!

The emails have Summers reporting to Epstein about his attempts to date a Harvard economics student & to hit on her during a seminar she was giving.

https://bsky.app/profile/econmarshall.bsky.social/post/3m5p6dgmagb2a

To quote myself: Larry Summers was one of the few people I’ve ever met where a casual conversation made me want to take a shower immediately afterward. I crashed a Harvard social event when a friend was an undergrad there and I was a student at MIT, in order to get the free food, and he was there to do glad-handing in his role as university president. I had a sharp discomfort response at the lizard-brain level — a deep part of me going on the alert, signaling “this man is not to be trusted” in the way one might sense that there is rotten meat nearby.

I still say that the term “scientific racism” gives these fuckos too much credit. I’ve been saying “numberwang racism” instead.

I always thought he had some weird pro trumpy (“anti woke”) takes. Colour me shocked.

Now a full post

LMAOU congrats David.

@BioMan @self

Gerard and Torres what now?

tangent: I’ve seen people using this Bubblegum Slop (BS for short) in their social media stories. My guess is that fb/insta has started suggesting you use their slop instead of using music licensed from spotify, or something.

Uzumaki intensifies

Rationalism described as a cult incubator

I see my idea is spreading. (I doubt im the only one who came up with that, but I have mentioned it a few times, it fits if you know about the silicon valley tech incubator management ideas).

I think I’ve heard Rationalism described as a cult incubator

Aside from the fact that rationalism is a cult in and of itself, this is true, no matter how you slice it. You can mean it with absolute glowing praise or total shade and either way it’s still true. Adhering to rationalist principles is pretty much reprogramming yourself to be susceptible to the subset of cults already associated with Rationalism.

Previously, on Awful, I wrote up what I understand to be their core belief structure. It’s too bad that we’re not calling them the Cyclone Emoji cult.

Fix0red

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_unsolved_problems_in_computer_science&diff=next&oldid=1320261740

None of those are well defined “problems”. An entire applied research field is not a “problem” akin to other items on this list lik P vs NP.

Gentoo is firmly against AI contributions as well. NetBSD calls AI code “tainted”, while FreeBSD hasn’t been as direct yet but isn’t accepting anything major.

QEMU, while not an OS, has rejected AI slop too. Curl also famously is against AI gen. So we have some hope in the systems world with these few major pieces of software.

Linus: All those years of screaming at developers for subpar code quality and yet doesn’t use that energy for literal slop

What if we turned a markov chain containing two decades of internet fan fiction into an oracle. Just spitballing here…

further things: one, that’s the first website I’ve made where I wasn’t just plugging into a template, and I’m a little proud of it even though it’s almost nothing. I would appreciate feedback and suggestions

two, a future episode idea I have is to examine what I’m thinking of as “the trustless society.” it’s about the replacing of social relations with legal or financial intermediaries. Those of you who are long time buttcoiners will be familiar with this process. if any of you have specific readings to recommend I would love to hear it. I’ll probably mostly focus on balaji but anyone or anything will help

well, I can’t counter it because I don’t think they do know how it works. the theory is shallow yet the outputs of, say, an LLM are of remarkably high quality in an area (language) that is impossibly baroque. the lack of theory and fundamental understanding presents a huge problem for them because it means “improvements” can only come about by throwing money and conventional engineering at their systems. this is what I’ve heard from people in the field for at least ten years.

to me that also means it isn’t something that needs to be countered. it’s something the context of which needs to be explained. it’s bad for the ai industry that they don’t know what they’re doing

EDIT: also, when i say the outputs are of high quality, what i mean is that they produce coherent and correct prose. im not suggesting anything about the utility of the outputs

I mean if you ever toyed around with neural networks or similar ML models you know it’s basically impossible to divine what the hell is going on inside by just looking at the weights, even if you try to plot them or visualise in other ways.

There’s a whole branch of ML about explainable or white-box models because it turns out you need to put extra care and design the system around being explainable in the first place to be able to reason about its internals. There’s no evidence OpenAI put any effort towards this, instead focusing on cool-looking outputs they can shove into a presser.

In other words, “engineers don’t know how it works” can have two meanings - that they’re hitting computers with wrenches hoping for the best with no rhyme or reason; or that they don’t have a good model of what makes the chatbot produce certain outputs, i.e. just by looking at the output it’s not really possible to figure out what specific training data it comes from or how to stop it from producing that output on a fundamental level. The former is demonstrably false and almost a strawman, I don’t know who believes that, a lot of people that work on OpenAI are misguided but otherwise incredibly clever programmers and ML researchers, the sheer fact that this thing hasn’t collapsed under its own weight is a great engineering feat even if externalities it produces are horrifying. The latter is, as far as I’m aware, largely true, or at least I haven’t seen any hints that would falsify that. If OpenAI satisfyingly solved the explainability problem it’d be a major achievement everyone would be talking about.

Another ironic point… Lesswronger’s actually do care about ML interpretability (to the extent they care about real ML at all; and as a solution to making their God AI serve their whims not for anything practical). A lack of interpretability is a major problem (like irl problem, not just scifi skynet problem) in ML, you can models with racism or other bias buried in them and not be able to tell except by manually experimenting with your model with data from outside the training set. But Sam Altman has turned it from a problem into a humble brag intended to imply their LLM is so powerful and mysterious and bordering on AGI.

Not gonna lie, I didn’t entirely get it either until someone pointed me at a relevant xkcd that I had missed.

Also I was somewhat disappointed in the QAA team’s credulity towards the AI hype, but their latest episode was an interview with the writer of that “AGI as conspiracy theory” piece from last(?) week and seemed much more grounded.

Ah, the site requires me to agree to “Data processing by advertising providers including personalised advertising with profilingConsent” and that this is “required for free use”. A blatant GDPR violation, love-lyy!

3D-knitted, or “knitted” for short.

It’s like a thong for your iPhone

@o7___o7

Apple is Touching Cloth.

More evidence for my conspiracy theory that all companies have switched their PR strategies to full-time ragebaiting. wake up sheeple

Oh joy, I can perform a threat display by twirling it around my head like a bolo. I think I will get the pink or bright yellow one

In the last couple of years I have noticed that people have been using single purpose phone holders/straps (as opposed to a multipurpose thing holder like a handbag etc.), so I understand this as apple coming in a little late trying to cash in on a trend. That being said: Apple don’t try to make their soft material products to last, so I expect this to be hot garbage.

I think they need to hire an English teacher for their marketing department.

Introducing iPhone Pocket: a beautiful way to wear and carry ____ iPhone

Please complete the sentence, a smartphone isn’t a person.