adriau

Obliterate toil: automate it.

Automate ruthlessly. This is where I have seen the most surprising pushback. We’re programmers. Automating processes is what we do! People will flinch about this, afraid of time spent automating things that won’t pay off. Yes, we’ve all been there. So don’t do that. Don’t automate things that are really one-offs. If there’s any chance you have to do the same thing more than five times, automate it. If it’s complex and difficult for a human to do, automate it. If the blast radius of the explosion caused by a human doing it wrong is large, automate it. If the end results need to be the same every time, automate it.

Infrastructure should be automated as far as you can push it.

The upside of automation is that the software that does the work for you can be instrumented.

Please remember to use your regional currency when interpolating strings.

const const name = "world"!
print("Hello ${name}!")!
print("Hello £{name}!")!
print("Hello ¥{name}!")!

And make sure to follow your local typographical norms.

print("Hello {name}€!")!

Similarly….. DreamBerd also features AI, which stands for Automatic-Insertion. If you forget to finish your code, DreamBerd will auto-complete the whole thing!

print( // This is probably fine

Please note: AI does not use AI. Instead, any incomplete code will be auto-emailed to Lu Wilson, who will get back to you with a completed line as soon as possible.

Now recruiting: The backlog of unfinished programs has now grown unsustainably long. If you would like to volunteer to help with AI, please write an incomplete DreamBerd program, and leave your contact details somewhere in the source code.

The discovery raises intriguing new questions about the role wildfires may play in spurring the growth of microscopic marine algae known as phytoplankton, which absorb large quantities of climate-warming carbon dioxide from Earth’s atmosphere through photosynthesis and are the foundation of the oceanic food web.

“Our results provide strong evidence that pyrogenic iron from wildfires can fertilize the oceans, potentially leading to a significant increase in carbon uptake by phytoplankton,” said Nicolas Cassar, professor of biogeochemistry at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.

The algal blooms triggered by the Australian wildfires were so intense and extensive that the subsequent increase in photosynthesis may have temporarily offset a substantial fraction of the fires’ CO2 emissions, he said. But it’s still unclear how much of the carbon absorbed by that event, or by algal blooms triggered by other wildfires, remains safely stored away in the ocean and how much is released back into the atmosphere. Determining that is the next challenge, Cassar said.

Reddit not learning the lessons of Twitter.

It’s been over a decade since we’ve heard from the elusive White Stripes drummer. Could renewed attention over a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nomination coax her back into the spotlight?