Share this posttl;dr in tech by Joe Karlsson - Issue #57joekarlsson.substack.comCopy linkFacebookEmailNoteOthertl;dr in tech by Joe Karlsson - Issue #57Joe KarlssonNov 29, 2022Share this posttl;dr in tech by Joe Karlsson - Issue #57joekarlsson.substack.comCopy linkFacebookEmailNoteOtherSharePhoto by Alex Knight on Unsplashtl;dr: "A new wave of robots is arriving—and, in a world short of workers, business leaders are more eager to welcome them than ever... This new generation of robots have mobility and vision, and are capable of flexibility in their behavior that simply hasn’t been possible with the kinds of industrial robots that have been in use in manufacturing since the 1960s."tl;dr: "For the past two years, I’ve been building and breaking recommender systems at Wordpress and Tumblr. I’m starting a new adventure soon, but this scope of work has been the most meaningful and fun of my career so far, and I wanted to reflect on a few things I’m taking away." Vicki discusses her takeaways about ML, people, culture, communication, and the joys of engineering.While the statistical underpinnings of A/B testing are a century old, building a correct and reliable A/B testing platform and culture at a large scale is still a massive challenge. Mirroring Fisher’s observation above, carefully constructing the building blocks of an A/B platform and ensuring the data collected is correct is critical to guaranteeing correctness of experiment results, but it’s easy to get wrong. Uber went through a similar journey and this blog post describes why and how we rebuilt the A/B testing platform we had at Uber.tl;dr: "The practice of breaking up a large change into smaller, individually reviewable PRs which can depend on each other, forming a DAG." Ben discusses advantages, including that stacked PRs are easier & quicker to review, since there are fewer changes to sign-off on, and easier to rollback if they cause breakage.tl;dr: "The time estimate went from a bit over an hour, to multiple hours, to over a day, to almost a week. After giving it some time, and after failing to find anything helpful through Google, I decided that learning the tar file format and making my own tar extractor would probably be faster than waiting for tar. And I was right; before the day was over, I had a working tar extractor, and I had successfully extracted my 1.1TiB tarball."tl;dr:1) Get a standing desk.2) Get a good keyboard.3) Setup shortcuts or learn Vim the author shows us his AutoHotkey setting.4) Ergonomic chairs don't really work.5) Big monitor and big text. And more.tl;dr: Simulating shitty network connections so you can build better systems.tl;dr: 3 steps:1) State what happened. The most important step is initiating the conversation. It's common to downplay bad news or share the bare minimum.2) Provide an explanation for the cause. This may be embarrassing, particularly if your action or inaction was a contributing factor but trying to avoid acknowledging your embarrassment often makes it worse.3) Here's what you're planning to do: this gives the other parties the benefit of your thinking while signaling your openness to theirs.