Ben McCormick

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

We often talk about computer programs purely as collections of “code”.

This is a good summary of the state of AI takes right now I think No one knows anything about AI AI is important.

Something I worry about with generative AI in business and commercial use: almost no one fully reads anything in those environments.

After a frustrating second year of consistent lifting, 2024 brought much better progress, though mostly along some different directions than I’d been focused on the first 2 years.

The first great fact which emerges from our civilization is that today everything has become “means.”

I spent the last 2 months running Dan Jon and Pavel Tsatsouline’s Easy Strength Program.

I ran a mix of 5/3/1 and Easy Strength from January to June and while I continued to work through a shoulder injury in Q1 I did set some new PRs: Squat: 350 -> 375 1RM DL: 400 -> 435 1(and 2)RM Chins: Max of 3 with poor ROM -> 8 clean Shoulder health is s…

Being trusted is a superpower at work and in life.

The intended takeaway from all this is exactly where we started in the introduction: creating quality is context specific.

Over a year old, but new to me – I thought this series of posts was a great roundup of some of the issues that make tech a less happy place to work than in the previous decade: Software and its Discontents

Very helpful writeup on LLMs in production: What We’ve Learned From A Year of Building with LLMs

Reality Has A Surprising Amount Of Detail This is an old piece, but new to me.

2022 was the year I began lifting at home, and it was a year of consistent progress and wins. 2023 was… different.

Last year when I started powerlifting as my main form of exercise I set goals of being able to do 5x325 High bar squat 5x400 Deadlift 5x150 Overhead Press 5x250 Bench Press 10x body weight pull-ups (I’d never been able to do more than 2) BP and Pull-ups a…

Diving back into (Neo)Vim this week for the first time in a few years (have done my core work with VS Code for a while).

Really enjoyed these reflections on LLMs: medium.learningbyshipping.com AI, ChatGPT, and Bing…Oh My

Performance management processes have been different at every company I’ve worked in, ranging from “basically non-existent” at a 15 person startup to “months of work for managers each review period followed by clear expectations that growth feedback will…

“I am human; and nothing human is alien to me” - Terence

Really enjoyed The Narnian by @ayjay — left contemplating what I find delight in

There are 3 primary reasons why one human may be more effective than another in a given work situation.

Basically from a “quality triangle” perspective – execs can control costs or time, but holding the line on a minimum quality bar is essentially a core piece of my job, and nobody wins when you try to promise impossible combinations of scope/quality/dates.

In an ideal world, org leaders define goals and teams figure out what to do.

Reread The Hobbit for the first time in a few years.

The idea that things become hits mostly due to a small number of large audiences rather than point to point viral sharing seems intuitively correct to me: www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/viralit… Or at least the large audiences “seed” the viral behavior