Weekly Readings 2022-08

Rebeca Sarai · February 20, 2022

Inspired by What I Read This Week: 2021-30

  • Heuristics That Almost Always Work
    • Shared this extensively with my team. Relying on dogmas and rules is dangerous when your work depends on judgment calls tailored to situations. Always considering highly untypical situations as impossible is not smart, is turning yourself into a rock.

      She debunks everything. Telepathy? She has a debunking for it. Bigfoot? A debunking. Anti-vaxxers? Five debunkings, plus an extra, just for you. When she started out, she researched each phenomenon carefully, found it smoke and mirrors, and then viciously insulted the rubes who believed it and the con men who spread it. After doing this a hundred times, she skipped steps one and two. Now her algorithm is “if anyone says something that sounds weird, or that contradicts popular wisdom, insult them viciously.” Fast, fun to read, and a 99.9% success rate. Pretty good, especially compared to everyone who “does their own research” and sometimes gets it wrong. Still, she takes up lots of oxygen and water and food. You know what doesn’t need oxygen or water or food? A rock with the phrase “YOUR RIDICULOUS-SOUNDING CONTRARIAN IDEA IS WRONG” written on it.

  • Four stages of competence
    1. Unconscious incompetence
    2. Conscious incompetence 3.Conscious competence
    3. Unconscious competence
  • An ad plugin was stealing 30% of the revenue for a year and I didn’t even notice
    • A tale about being curious and finding a problem.
  • I’m harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from your site. Here’s how.
    • A hypothetical (or not) explanation on how to steal users’ information on the modern web.
  • How To Stay Curious as a Coder
    • I’m thinking a lot about software development and curiosity, as I see it, one can not excel in a software engineering job without being fostering curiosity.

      Consume content the same way a lion consumes prey. Spend most of your time passively observing the stream of information before you. When hunger strikes, ferociously stalk your curiosity.


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