recursion

In The Middle Kingdoms Martyn Rady writes about the development of state capacity in Central Europe in the nineteenth century. In France, Britain, and the United States the presumption of the law favored the citizen: what is not forbidden is allowed. In Central Europe, it was the opposite. Governments and bureaucracies could govern by decree where the law was silent through “administrative discretion” (freie Verwaltung). This created a very powerful administrative state.

In the twentieth century that administrative state was used for mass murder. Rady writes about one of the most messed up things I’ve ever read about the Holocaust:

The administration of the railways is illustrative of the bureaucratic ethos that made murder possible. Some two thousand trains belonging to German Reich Railways (Deutsche Reichsbahn) conveyed about three million Jews to their deaths. Each train had to be separately commissioned and paid for by Himmler’s staff according to passenger numbers. The rate was based on second-class fares (even though the passengers were crammed into wagons) and worked out according to kilometre distance. The railway administration charged Himmler’s office half fare for children under ten, and those under four went for free. Trains with more than four hundred people qualified as holiday excursions and were eligible for further reductions. Only the guards were counted as return fares.

Did you know fonts can include arbitrary code to shape text? I didn’t.

In particular, this “arbitrary” code could in principle be an entire LLM inference engine with trained parameters bundled inside, relying on treating text containing magic symbols for fake “ligatures” to initialize the LLM and use it to generate text.

Hats off for an amazing hack.

We have two drivers, one car, and zero parking spaces. That means hunting for street parking in our assigned residential parking zone. This can be difficult, because state law prevents charging based on demand and there’s no limit on the number of permits issued. At $16 per month for 200 square feet, this is the cheapest rent in San Francisco.

Since it can be hard to find parking and there are two of us putting the car wherever we can find a spot, sometimes one person will park the car and the other person won’t know where it is when they need to use it. I realized we could use a shared AirTag to solve the problem. Here’s what it looks like:

It works pretty well. The only problem I’ve found is that when we’re lucky enough to park in front of our apartment, Find My thinks the item is with you. But given that I can see the car in that case, it’s not a big downside.

Will Larson shares some sobering career advice for 2025. This is mostly aimed at engineering leaders, but the general feeling of this being a time of great change and uncertainty seems accurate for tech careers in general. Navigating the transition from ZIRP to AI is going to be challenging for a lot of companies.

It’s said that the golden age of science fiction is thirteen. It was certainly true for me. I spent a lot of time pouring over my high school library’s copy of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (second edition) edited by Peter Nicholls and John Clute. I learned a lot about the genre and the works of my favorite authors.

I got a blast of nostalgia from stumbling on a search result to the online version. All the entries from the printed edition are there and it’s still being updated weekly. The site also has an active Bluesky account posting new entries, memorials, and anniversaries daily.

Patrick Dubroy:

Early in my career, I was convinced there was “good code” and “bad code”. That you could look at something and — without knowing anything about the context — pass judgement on it.

These days, my views are much more nuanced. I try to adapt my style to the situation. The code I write, and the process I use, depends a lot more on what the goals are. Am I trying to bang together a quick prototype to learn something? Or am I fixing a bug that might affect hundreds of thousands of users? My approach would be completely different in those two scenarios.

Years ago, I read Edward De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, which describes a framework for problem solving and creative thinking. The idea is that you can “put on a hat” to deliberately adopt a specific mode of thinking. It’s a bit corny but (imo) there’s a useful idea there.

Maybe this applies to different styles of programming, too? What “coding hats” do I use?

Dubroy suggests five “programming hats”: Captain (by the book code for mission critical systems), Scrappy (minimalist style for MVPs), MacGyver (figuring out if something is even possible), Chef (beautiful code), and Teacher (emphasizing communication and demonstration).

I like this concept. It reminds me of the idea of register in language. In many languages, speakers adapt their language to the situation and who they are speaking with. With code, it’s the same. The type of code I write for a production service, a one-off script, and a personal project is different and this “hat” concept is a useful one to categorize them. A mismatch between hats seems like a common interview failure mode to me. For example, you wrote in Captain’s mode because you wanted to show off how careful you can be, but the interviewer wanted the Scrappy mode because they wanted to see how you could react to changes.

I’ve been listening to Kevin Stroud’s History of English podcast so I got a huge kick out of finding this cover of Running Up That Hill in early Middle English. It was created by YouTuber the_miracle_aligner who creates bardcore covers in old languages.