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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.

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.

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  • 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.

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  • 1 min read

apenwarr

Blog of Avery Pennarun at https://apenwarr.ca/log/

This guy was a L7 at Google. His best is his post on bug triage and system design so far.

I can't quite understand his IPv6 posts yet.

Wish I can get into TailScale (his new company).