*Engines That Move Markets: Technology Investing from Railroads to the Internet and Beyond* by Alasdair G. M. Nairn
I’ve had a few aha moments while reading this book. Although it's primarily written from an investor's perspective, it does contain a fair share of insight about creation and commercialisation of technology, the mechanics of monopolies, government involvement, foreign affairs, etc.
I was at Etsy after Dan left, and I think it scaled pretty well from the few hundred engineers when I joined to closer to 1000 when I left. Etsy's engineering culture had a lot of problems, but they weren't caused by empowering people. If anything, being encouraged to work cross-functionally built a lot of empathy and understanding for different roles and hats in the org, and made a lot of engineers a lot more effective.
There were some annoying parts of the ultra-permissive culture. Sometimes you'd need to literally beg people to stop YOLO-committing code into your UI component because they're not checking how it looks with your flag enabled and they're breaking your A/B test over and over and you just lost a week because you need to restart it. But we gained more than we ever lost.
While I was writing a tool for myself to summarise daily the top N posts from HN, Google Trends, and RSS feed subscriptions I had the same problem.
The quick solution was to use beautiful soup and readability-lxml to try and get the main article contents and then send it to an LLM.
The results are ok when the markup is semantic. Often it is not. Then you have tables, images, weirdly positioned footnotes, etc.
I believe the best way to extract information the way it was intended to be presented is to screenshot the page and send it to a multimodal LLM for “interpretation”. Anyone experimented with that approach?
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The aspiration goal for the tool is to be the Presidential Daily Brief but for everyone.
Naming is hard. AthenaDB was the initial name of the MVP, I just never came up with a better one. Guess I'll have to do that now that I know AWS has another DB adjacent product with that name.
> it takes 2 RTTs to complete a consensus request from the view of a client. One RTT takes place between the client and the leader server, and the leader server takes another RTT to broadcast the message to the follower servers
Adam d'Angelo[1] who is on the board is also the founder of a commercial AI startup called Poe which lots of people are claiming is a conflict of interest given openAI are moving into a space that seems adjacent/overlapping. Sam Altman said Adam is one of openAI's biggest customers and its helpful to have the customer perspective on the board.
dlemire, you note that the read ”overflows”. Why can’t you copy just `len` bytes? Does it slow too much because of the branch/more load/store operations?
I’ve had a few aha moments while reading this book. Although it's primarily written from an investor's perspective, it does contain a fair share of insight about creation and commercialisation of technology, the mechanics of monopolies, government involvement, foreign affairs, etc.