2021-10-01 Nerd Roundup

I thought I was all on my own! Great to see Jon dropping by about halfway through. Also ... free candy!*

Jon and I have been dancing around the intricacies of DDD for some time now. I think he's more of a MDA guy (not sure) and I am way out in left field. We really need to dive down on all of this.

links
STORY	BUT WHY?
Why We Killed Our End-to-End Test Suite - Building Nubank When you're building a large system, what you're really building is a high-speed testing and logging system, not the actual architecture itself. Sure wish more people knew this instead of continuing to do it ass-backwards. There's a zillion kinds of testing, but testing is how the org learns, and a fast learning loop has to come ahead of any other consideration (although that loop first exists at the business layer) Here's a random blog essay	Testing architectures are hard. Let's go shopping! Testing architecture issues are a leading indicator of many, many other kinds of architecture issues.
Comments on designing low upkeep software Obligatory: my Good Enough Programming essay	The comments from atual nerds in the field are more interesting than the essay itself
Category Theory Illustrated Logic Related: the Category Theory YT series which I found enjoyable (if a bit fluffy)	Yay! Another explainer/keeper for a tech topic
Death is a way to lose at chess 18 Weird chess rules everyone forgets	I need to re-do my chess page to handle PGN notation, dang it. This looks like a great resource page. It was a great weekend article. From HN, "Does this imply killing the opponent is a viable strategy in chess?"
Havannah Syndrome Attacks Widen The Morgellon's Panic. "...Most materials collected from participants' skin were composed of cellulose, likely of cotton origin..."	Another Morgellon's? Or something real? If real, what the heck?
A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas Related: also happening with the story of the original Native Americans	We're watching history slowly change, from I-think-I-know-that to maybe-this-other-thing-is-true then this-is-always-true then back to the start. Also the "viking map" has recently been show to be a forgery
Place, Personhood, and the Hippocampus: The Fascinating Science of Magnetism, Autonoeic Consciousness, and What Makes Us Who We Are Wikipedia for Autonoetic Consciousness	My new buzz term for the week, "Autonoeic Consciousness", which is the brain's ability to time travel and theorize about how other brains, and itself, might act based on future events or past counterfactuals
Why Science Can't Settle Political Disputes Taylorism, and its many failures in both political life and industry) is probably the best example of how a physics-based scientific mentality about managing things in the real world seems obvious but is deeply flawed. It's not that it's always wrong. It's that it is intuitively obvious and works until it catastropically fails. It's important to know why	For any sort of technical/nerdish discussion, the most important thing to do is set up boundaries or guardrails before you wander all over the place. People forget the diamtetric opposite nature of science and politics, and it's hurting both fields
Response to 'Call for Review: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0' (w3.org) This, alongside web3, could be a game-changer. We'll see. Here are the goals from the W3C	Interesting. The future?
Democracy and Entrepreneurship The Tocqueville Problem is a real, clear, and present danger to western democracies. We ignore it at our peril	From my linkedin feed, an interesting study from a year ago. Lotsa political theory mixed with startup stuff and stats nerds can measure. Is this simply restating the obvious? Is that necessary in this subject area now?
Unbreakable glass inspired by seashells Related: an update on "transparent aluminium". 30km high structures! Wowser! Scotty was right!	The kind of tech news likely to slip under the radar of most tech people
How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum Dear Scrum Butt-heads, you can't be dogmatically non-dogmatic. Learn more why and less how, then some of this will make a lot more sense. During the online discussion, there was a great reference to the McNamarra Fallacy	Much of interest here. I esp like him bringing up WhatsAp. A good architecture can lead to a small, nimble team that delivers, and vice-versa. Architecture is the only way you can aggressively limit the number of people involved, and that's a requirement for running fast
Offline First HN Discussion on Offline First. Some readers complain they still haven't found the holy architecture for offline first, which to them means replicating the entire backend on the client. No doubt. Lotsa hidden assumptions in the way hackers talk about this. I love the SQLite/S3/Lambda comment by smackeyacky	I've been a huge fan of this since around the time of LocalStorage. I have no idea why this isn't the default paradigm.
These toons do not exist	Total AI cartoon dramas custom made are not that far off
Code Smell: Primitive Obsession	BONUS: Greg Young and I did a vid on the code smell Primitive Obsession that got a little traction on HN. Sounds like a cologne for nerds

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