Various new written things:
- Smolderingly fast b-trees
- Serious fun
- What is the point of an online conference?
- It's ok to be afraid
HYTRADBOI progress
The speaker list for HYTRADBOI is more or less complete. I don't want to announce any names until I actually have the recordings in hand, but I'm excited.
I would still like to add talks about the jsc/spidermonkey/v8 backends, if anyone wants to volunteer.
The technical work is largely done too. Video streaming, transcripts, chat etc are all figured out. All the remaining work has to wait until after I have a finalized program.
No other progress
While I've been working on HYTRADBOI I haven't been coding at all, which feels weird. It's been 46 days without a commit.
It's not that HYTRADBOI is actually taking up all my time, but it is taking up most of my mind. Plus I had to unblock various social media to contact potential speakers and do some early marketing, and having those unblocked is really bad for my ability to hold a serious train of thought.
I don't really have any HYTRADBOI work left to do until end of january, but I'll be away for most of december so I'm having a hard time getting rolling on anything in this few week gap.
By the time I get home it'll be something like 90 days without coding, and then I'll again only have a few weeks before jumping back into HYTRADBOI work. I'm not sure I like that.
vancouver.systems
Vancouver (BC) now has a systems meetup. I couldn't make the inaugural meeting, but they filled the space so it seems like there was some pent-up demand.
It's not the incentives
A random bystander who happened to eavesdrop on a conversation between a group of scientists kvetching about The Incentives could be forgiven for thinking that maybe, just maybe, a bunch of very industrious people who generally pride themselves on their creativity, persistence, and intelligence could find some way to work around, or through, the problem. And I think they would be right. The fact that we collectively don't see it as a colossal moral failing that we haven't figured out a way to get our work done without having to routinely cut corners in the rush for fame and fortune is deeply troubling.
...you're a scientist, and trying to get closer to the truth, and not just to tenure, is in your fucking job description. Taxpayers don't fund you because they care about your career; they fund you to learn shit, cure shit, and build shit. If you can't do your job without having to regularly excuse sloppiness on the grounds that you have no incentive to be less sloppy, at least have the decency not to say that out loud in a crowded room or Twitter feed full of people who indirectly pay your salary. Complaining that you would surely do the right thing if only these terrible Incentives didn't exist doesn't make you the noble martyr you think it does; to almost anybody outside your field who has a modicum of integrity, it just makes you sound like you're looking for an easy out. It's not sophisticated or worldly or politically astute, it's just dishonest and lazy. If you find yourself unable to do your job without regularly engaging in practices that clearly devalue the very science you claim to care about, and this doesn't bother you deeply, then maybe the problem is not actually The Incentives - or at least, not The Incentives alone. Maybe the problem is You.
For-profit academic publishers love llm garbage
I'm not sure about the economic analysis, but this part struck me:
The tighter the labor market and the more artificial the metrics we use to evaluate each other (the farther from actually reading the work and subjectively evaluating its quality), the more power these institutions have.
Much of the dysfunction in academia seems to be fueled by our unwillingness to admit that quality cannot be objectively assessed, and that the success and careers of academics are determined by the subjective assessment of a small number of reviewers. That subjectivity is uncomfortable, so we flee to arbitrary p-value cutoffs, impact scores, an obsession with quantitative over qualitative methods etc.
books
Mettle. A barely edited collection of blog posts. Often self-contradictory. Not recommended.
Time surfing. Somewhat interesting. I may reread it next year when I'm more focused again.