March madness

15 March 2025    

Putting time to reflect on the learnings of others makes little sense at the start, but that micro exposure compounds and you find yourself in a different state of awareness of your market, state of technology and a broaden worldview.


General


Books has the potential to enlighten or destroy us


Wheel reinventer


Sometimes you learn by reinveting the wheel efficiently. You know how it ends but you don’t know how to get from the problem to the solution.


The process of discovery could serve valuable learning points for you in your situation.


Just a row in an excel


Work as hard as you might, what is not seen are not at the top of mind. And decisions are made with whatever’s at the top of mind.


Quiet quitting


40mins NYC subway journey
how far are you able to go on the NYC subway


The tech industry is a burnout machine


Inside the product manager’s head
A bunch of stakeholder’s voices - and often times in conflict with one another.


MacAir review


Its just as good as a computer can get. The quality and capability for merely a mac air is just beyond imagination.


Tired of Software engineering


Entrepreneurship, management and carpentry.


Emotionally Intelligent People Use 3 Brilliant Phrases to Stop Negative Thinking, Stop Overexplaining, and Learn From Every Moment


Back to reality
Appreciation + no + well wishes
Once in a life time


Framework to understand worldviews


What if there is a framework to make sense of the vast competing worldviews out there?


Finding the fundamental axis to compare is the first step


However, the idea that there’s a core, fundamental axis suggests a specific model of how worldviews are formed and organized. One which resembles a decision tree, where your position on the fundamental axis constrains your range of possible beliefs, values, and views on a whole host of seemingly unrelated issues2.


sales without calls


They don’t know what you are offering


They don’t know how to use it
If your product is not self serving, and if your onboarding sucks.


Do you have public documentation with sufficient data to scope out a POC or integration?


They don’t know your pricing


They don’t trust you. Trust is a function of time. The longer you exists, they more probably they will think you will continue to exists.


Security could be a concern, so having clearly written certifications helps with your assurance and sales process asynchronously.


freelance mentoring


Interesting setup with an FAQ on how to get started and how will the process run.


Stories of NYC subway


Don’t use consine similiarity


Why cloudflare is so generous


1 out of 5 jobs posting are either fake or never filled


The real number of jobs are about 60% of the total jobs out there.


Tesla’s market position VS BYD and others


The need to get into india to reduce its cost


By comparison, Tesla products look rather staid and stale to Chinese and Asian consumers, who have a penchant for new things.


Telsa only selling 4,121 cars in Thailand for the whole of 2024 sounds quite disastrous for shareholders.


Nobody cares


There are many setups and projects that have been executed meaninglessly. Typically, these projects are not


Reading cursive is a national problem


Can you read cursive?


BYD with their own cargo ship for their supply chain


The rule of four
Groups of people in deep conversations are seldom larger than 4. Why?
Some perceive it might be the mental limitations - it is not easy to hold the inner state of people in the conversation beyond 3 (the other 3 people in the conversation other than yourself).


The mental model of reciprocity
By observation, you often get what you give. If you are kind to an individual, you will more likely get kindness in return


They receive a benefit from the world proportional to what they put out there… Reciprocity based on self-interest is still reciprocity. Engaging in positive behavior to then be a receiver of positive behavior is about the long game.


Technology


[Good vs bad refactoring] (https://www.builder.io/blog/good-vs-bad-refactoring)


AI is making tech debt more expensive


Unnecessary index is bad for your mongodb


[the hidden costs of building own RAG](Dear IT Departments, Please Stop Trying To Build Your Own RAG | by Alden Do Rosario | Nov, 2024 | Towards AI)


The maintenance cost will kill you.
The chase of new issues on scale, hallucinations and security will be a nightmare.


focus on the business problems, noone cares if you built or buy, they care if their problems are solved.


How do you scale websockets


First we need to understand how websockets work


  1. Establish connection (Handshake)
    Client sends a HTTP request to the server with a header (Connection: Upgrade); this will request to switch protocol to WebSocket.

If the server supports WebSockets, it responses with an HTTP status code 101 Switching Protocols, confirming the upgrade.


Once this handshake is completed, the client and server can now start exchanging WebSocket data.


  1. Persistent Communication
    After the handshake, the connection remains open, allowing both the client and server to send messages at any time without the need to re-establish a connection for each message.

Messages are transmitted in small unit called ‘frames’ that contains either text or binary data.


  1. Real-time Data exchange
    WebSocket allows low-latency communication, making them ideal for applications.

Chatapps, online gaming, live dashboards, stock trading platforms


  1. Closing Connection
    Either client or server can close the connection explicitly

Tech management


investment into tooling


Stability of internal tools for developer experience.


Needs ongoing maintenance


The use of a dev cloud environment for engineers to manage their work off their computer and remotely. Edit your code locally on your computer and allow it to run on your devbox remotely in the cloud.


Microservice may not be the only logical way of scaling:


We did continually invest in tools and patterns for modularity and abstraction within the monorepo, but the confidence in the overall “stickiness” of the structure of the Ruby monorepo also justified our large investments in specialized tooling


Product


The Problem Platform


Ollama tools calling


Tool calling is now of the norm, agentic workflow is the new norm. There will come a day that no-code AI workflow managements will take over. Look out for tools such as n8n or orchestrator to facilitate these.


Srcbook


Potentially improve the company’s experience


Vue balloon


Improve UX


Typing animation


Slideshow on web


AI


Gradient Descent
Gradient descent is the preferred way to optimise neural network - finding the local minimum errors. This is an attempt to showcase how does that error minimisation process work.


how inherent bias can shape AI


Workflows and Agents


Chatbot Arena


What the history of Math can tell tot about the future of AI


foundations of LLMs

  • the concept of pre training, generative models, prompting techniques, and alignment methods



TLDR


Not much updates apart from the strong emphasis to commit to reading and writing. This self-investment benefits no-one more than yourself. And noone will fight for you more than yourself. You owe it to your future self to commit to your own development so you are ready for the change/breakthrough you have been praying for.