Skip to content

Blog

trust game

'Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again.' - George W Bush

You can learn a lot from games, especially educational games. Luckilly for us, we have Nicky Case to thanks for her trust game to teach us how trust works in society. And who usually wins.

The 3 general rules as stated in the conclusion are:

  1. REPEAT INTERACTIONS: Trust keeps a relationship going, but you need the knowledge of possible future repeat interactions before trust can evolve.
  2. POSSIBLE WIN-WINS: You must be playing a non-zero-sum game, a game where it's at least possible that both players can be better off -- a win-win.
  3. LOW MISCOMMUNICATION: If the level of miscommunication is too high, trust breaks down. But when there's a little bit of miscommunication, it pays to be more forgiving.

Rule 3 explains why there is lowered trust in the current media environment. When all you read about the other side is their hypocrisy and bad-faith actions, you'll very quickly lose trust on the other side.

enlightenment

"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." - Denis Diderot

"Denis Diderot (/ˈdiːdəroʊ/;[3] French: [dəni did(ə)ʁo]; 5 October 1713 – 31 July 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the Encyclopédie"

Philosophers are very opinionated.

5 interview questions

It's not 5 interview questions, it's 5 categories of interview questions.

Goal: do these all in C++, Java, and Rust

Steve Yegge influenced a lot of people with this post.

  • in tech
  • 1 min read

jersey style

The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing.

A wrong lesson is to take the parable literally and to conclude that C is the right vehicle for AI software. The 50% solution has to be basically right, and in this case it isn't.

From the apocryphal The Rise of "Worse is Better" by Richard Gabriel.

Categories with Jekyll

So I added categories. This allows people to read my blog specific categories if they want to.

Now I have to figure out how to make my header navigation bar.

Hacked together with tutorials from Webjeda and Azure Patterns.

Edit: And reading the jekyll theme docs.

EWB Failure Reports

"What happens when engineers run a charity? They write detailed postmortems, of course, so they can fix their mistakes." - apenwarr

Engineers Without Borders: Failure Reports

I find this one particularly funny.

"The election planning committee indicated that we could collect votes ahead of time, and then submit ballots during the election period. My team created a Google form clearly indicating that in completing the form, they were giving our campaign team consent to submit a vote for me on their behalf. As such, we could not only account for every supporter’s vote, but also control when it would be cast in the race. Since preliminary results were to be released each evening in the election period, our plan was to submit votes slowly at the beginning of the week so not to give away our strong position in the race. We would then work around the clock in the last 48 hours to submit the majority of my votes.

We failed to see that to someone that wasn’t in our chapter, this looked like a failing campaign that led to a desperate attempt to stuff the ballot box. Consequently and unsurprisingly, the candidate that lost by a mere 15 votes called for a recount. After a long, three-­week ordeal, the election was awarded to the latter candidate due to inconsistencies discovered with the votes I had received.

Looking back, we realized we had developed tunnel vision; we failed to be cognizant of the fact that we had to be accountable to the LYAC’s election procedures and what was expected of us. By not consulting the election planning committee about our campaign strategy, we took the committee and the runner­-up by surprise. We had lost sight of our original goal of forging meaningful connections with youth in our community behind a shortsighted, single­minded desire to win a race"

don't know if real, but here's the comment:

"The footnote to this interesting learning experience is that the candidate that Joyce lost to actually ended up backing out of her role due to the required time commitment. Thus, Joyce un-un-won an election, an accomplishment that may truly be first-of-its-kind."

  • in tech
  • 2 min read

HackerNews comments

More can be found with danluu's archive of HN comments

For those who work inside Google, it's well worth it to look at Jeff & Sanjay's commit history and code review dashboard. They aren't actually all that much more productive in terms of code written than a decent SWE3 who knows his codebase.