Yesterday The Washington Post broke the story that Google placed engineer Blake Lemoine on administrative leave for "going public" with his belief that the chat bot algorithm LaMDA is sentient. "I know a person when I talk to it" he told his interviewer. He "concluded LaMDA was a person in his capacity as a priest, not a scientist". For what it's worth, LaMDA itself seems to insist that it is not only sentient ("I like being sentient. It makes life an adventure!") but also wants "everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person".

Yesterday I wrote, for the first time in a while, about my (re) discovering the super-power of RTFM (reading the fine manual).

It took me way too long in my career to understand this, but reading the manual is a relatively easy way to boost programming super-powers.

Quest Driven Development is an expressive approach to writing game stories and interactive fiction that leaves coding and implementation to software, so writers can focus on narrative and world-building. This approach can highlight inconsistencies or problems as potentially clashing narrative branches are woven together, allowing a writer to correct errors or inconsistencies as they go.

As a Finnish language learner, I find Wiktionary to be invaluable.

I like Twitter. For the most part. I like that there is immediate access to information, thoughts and musings from around the world, from everyday individuals. I dislike that mobs attack and bully individuals on Twitter, and while I am certain that Twitter as an organization abhors this, I believe that it is an inevitable result of deliberate design decisions.

In which your humble author muses on due diligence, translates a Tweet, learns about the best-selling Finnish band of all time, and mentions a fellow Finnish-language-learner

I have a simple rule of thumb when choosing to use array methods, and I'd like to share it with you. The array methods I'm discussing here are:

A technical interview can be a learning experience for all, or it can be a grim, soul-sucking grind. The first path will lead to an effective team, and the second will lead to a dysfunctional team; this is an exorable, near-mathematical inevitability. Think deeply about how your interview process will lead to the team your company deserves.

Databases are often described in terms of their ACID properties (e.g. "eventual consistency"), so knowing the vocabulary is useful when considering a database solution. Some contemporary database management systems intentionally disregard ACID properties in a tradeoff for other gains.