I skipped last week’s update to spend some extra time with my family - my son had an extra day off on his break and last week was going to mark the final week of my recharge break after leaving Ohai.
It was the final week because today was my first day at Penn Entertainment where I’ll be leading mobile engineering for theScore and ESPN Bet and the rest of Penn’s digital portfolio. This is a special group of people with a strong engineering culture. I’m also rejoining a few former colleagues from my ESPN & Disney days. We did some special things over a decade plus working together, so I am looking forward with excitement and with high expectations on what we can achieve at Penn.
LA Fires #
I have family that was affected by the fires (thankfully just evacuations - the houses are still there). Numerous friends and former colleagues are also in the area. It’s been stressful for us worrying about them from afar, so I cannot imagine what it must be like for everyone affected by the fires. Thank you to all of the first responders working so hard to protect everyone.
We have a standing monthly donation to the American Red Cross because, honestly, natural disasters strike more often than we like to think about. Groups like the American Red Cross provide critical on-the-ground resources in the aftermath of these disasters, across the country. Please consider donating whatever you can.
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Wildfire Donations: Your Generosity is Inspiring: The LAFD has some notes and links on other ways you can donate supplies or money.
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A thread on incarcerated firefighters: I didn’t know much about this program, so this was a fascinating thread on how these programs work. I’m grateful that these folks are out there supporting the full-time firefighters, and I hope they all find the program as fullfilling as this former inmate.
Reads #
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Things we learned about LLMs in 2024: I somehow missed this in my end-of-year roundup, which is inexcusable. It’s a great summary of everything that happened in LLMs last year. Some of it echoes my summary, but it goes into great detail in some specific areas, worth a read if you’re working on anything remotely around LLMs and AI. This is now the second year Willison has done this roundup.
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How I program with LLMs: A good writeup from a very experienced developer on how they use LLMs to accelerate their work while making sure it’s accurate and up to their experienced, high standards. A few small tips, with a key insight that generic tools may not have the kind of efficient workflow versus tools built around a specific language. That’s why they’re building sketch.dev, “an LLM-enhanced Go playground” aimed at, you guessed it, Go developers.
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Bits, Features, and Truth: In my career, I’ve appreciated working with strongly opinionated, direct program managers. Some of my biggest, most successful projects have had excellent program managers who were the keepers of the truth, and who had the skills to speak that truth no matter what. This piece is one of the best explanations of the function they provide that I’ve read in a while:
Yeah, I know you start-up folk believe you’re doing just great without a semblance of program or process management. You believe that these types of folks are going to slow you down with their agendas and to-do lists. Here’s the deal: just because no one has the title in your garage doesn’t mean the role doesn’t exist. In any group larger than one, someone has taken the role of keeper of the truth and their key skill is information wrangler. They constantly gather the information from the group, synthesize it, translate it, and, sometimes forcibly, present this information to the folks who are busily lying to themselves.
Absolute truth.
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On Meta’s content moderation changes: I wrote this piece after Meta announced their content moderation changes. It’s over on the personal blog because it, I think by necessity, has an explicitly political angle and I would like to keep this space free of politics. If you’re ok with that, though, I summarized my thoughts and rounded up a number of reactions around the web that, quite frankly, are better than anything I could write.
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Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia: Wikipedia is an important way for folks to learn and make serendipitous connections that spur curiosity and invention. Molly White corrects some of the misinformation from the latest bugaboo for some folks like Elon Musk. Wikipedia is a treasure, flaws and all.