Pinboard is Eleven. “Much of the core code on the site dated back to 2009-2010 and was written by Past Me, a vindictive, inscrutable nemesis who devoted his life to sabotaging Present Me. Doing this on a live system is like performing kidney transplants on a playing mariachi band. The best case is that no one notices a change in the music; you chloroform the players one at a time and try to keep a steady hand while the band plays on. The worst case scenario is that the music stops and there is no way to unfix what you broke, just an angry mob. It is very scary.”
How to Write Technical Posts (so people will read them). “Here’s the biggest thing to keep in mind: your reader doesn’t really care what you have to say.”
Recognizing vs Generating. “Here, as in many other Recognizing vs Generating dichotomies, it can be easy to trick ourselves into thinking we’re putting in more effort than we really are. “After all,” the tempting thought goes, “both reading the textbook and writing proofs feel like they fit the definition ‘studying’, so why can’t the easier one work?”
Narrative Collapse. “In other words, when you read a narrative, for example, you are encountering the product of a series of choices that have already been made for you by the author out of a myriad of possibilities… The countless other choices that were possible are present only to the imagination. You see the words the author chose, not the ones she could’ve chosen. You see the path marked out for you as a reader, not the multiple paths that were rejected.”