Psych-Flavored on Andrew Quinn's TILs

Vibe coding and complementary goods

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Peanut butter and jelly are complementary goods, as are cars and gasoline, newer cars and electricity, electricity and basically everything else.

We don’t normally think of, say, Docker and Kubernetes as complementary goods in software engineering, because you can get both for the low price of free. Or can you? You still have to invest time in learning both, and as the famous saying goes…

Say it takes X hours to learn Docker adequately. If Docker suddenly becomes easier to learn, such that it now takes only X / 2 hours, it’s reasonable to assume Kubernetes will become more popular in tandem, because one of its complements now costs less and is hence supplied in greater quantities anyway. You don’t want a peanut butter only sandwich, do you?

PHP and Web Dev Phobia

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

PHP is, for better and for worse, the Python of web dev in my eyes. It is exceptionally easy to get started, in a way which I think younger developers may not be fully aware of.

So here I’d like to make them aware of it! That’s right, this is a Slowstart for people who have never touched PHP or web dev before.

Start the way we usually do on this blog, with the “tutorial-in-a-box” by installing Vagrant and Virtualbox so you can create a disposable virtual machine with just a few commands.

My pet theory of how great software gets started

Tue, 16 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

(Inspired by yungporko’s Ask HN post, which got me thinking.)

Pretty much every community, dojo, workplace, subculture, scene you can imagine in the modern day had a software sub-scene embedded within it. It can be as small as “that guy who does our Excel”, or as large as the scene itself . This is owing to the fantastic generality of software as a way to make almost anything more efficient, but we won’t go on that tangent now.

Software engineers as mental athletes

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This week I achieved a modest personal dream of mine I’ve had since I was a high schooler: I purchased a proper standing desk, with a low-profile treadmill underneath.

The total cost for a setup here in Finland came out to only about $350, something I can easily afford with a week’s take-home pay. The primary hurdle for me was psychological: How could I justify spending so much money on a more ergonomic setup when I’m not even sure this whole “software engineering” thing will work out for me? Nevermind that I taught myself to program at 14 from a Civ 4 hacking tutorial, nevermind that I’ve been living my life as a budget cyborg for the last 15 years, nevermind that every job I’ve ever had post-college has been at least 60% WFH – how could I be sure this investment in my home office will pay itself back?

Doing is normally distributed, learning is log-normal

Tue, 28 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

There are few things I think about more than the essays on gwern.net, and there are few with as satisfying a theoretical payout to contemplate in my orb as his essay on “leaky pipelines”, aka log-normal distributions.

The skulk: Say you’re working on a Laravel web app. You’re about 90% sure you know how to start the app. You’re 80% sure you know how to handle the infra you’ll need to get it online. And you’re 70% sure you know how to get your first customer. What is your chance of successfully going from zero to first customer? 0.9 * 0.8 * 0.7 = a little over 0.5. That’s … a lot less encouraging than any of the previous numbers, if you buy my multi-step modelling.

Most "life lessons" you hear are about scaling back

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I

Robert Anton Wilson was, is, and always will be a fascinating and hiliarious writer to me. I first read The Illuminatus! Trilogy when I was 13, and while it was coincident with a total and suffocating blackout of meaning, I no longer think reading it actually caused that to happen in any significant sense. Au contraire: Teen me found refuge in his absurdity - it felt bedrock nihilstic, sure, but a far more artfully and deeply buried nihilism than I was able to find elsewhere at the time. (My words, not his. RAW wouldn’t describe himself as anywhere close to a nihilist. I think the glove fits.)