Amjad Masad

Developing that skill is really hard. It isn't the methodology. It's that you need the pervasive paranoiac scientific desire to poke holes in the idea. And that's very hard for most people. Carmack applies evidence to develop his posteriors very well. i.e. when evidence comes along for an idea you have, most people will say to themselves "Even though that's true it's not enough" or "but that doesn't disprove it". In fact, I'd hypothesize (with poor evidence) that people who do not alter their posteriors when presented with evidence cannot do this at all. And that's very common - because lots of evidence won't disprove anything, it'll only make it less likely. If you never alter your posteriors you will dismiss it. I know I sometimes fall in love with an idea and this happens. By the way, here's a quick read of the idea if you can't read the video: https://amasad.me/carmack

>As much as people talk about "callback hell," it's never clear to me what problems they actually think they're having. It seems that as often as not, it's just a visceral dislike of indentation. It's surprisingly hard to articulate the problems. It's one of those things that you can experience but hard to explain. I tried to explain it[1] by going through the example of implement a vending machine[2] in various concurrency patterns in JS. Starting with callbacks and ending with async/await. I still don't think I did a great job. [1] http://amasad.me/2015/10/31/javascript-async-functions-for-easier-conc… [2]: The vending machine example is inspired Tony Hoare's examples in the CSP book http://lass.cs.umass.edu/~shenoy/courses/summer04/readings/Hoare.pdf

Oh, internet drama. I love internet drama! So I looked it up as I never heard this story before. https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/ Looks like this CEO isn't of good character after all. He looks almost like a jerk when looking at the end of the story. Even in his last email he tried to get his (obviously wrong) point. He never apologized for the things that mattered most, only tried to extinguish the social media fire all in all. Also he doesn't look very smart, imho: https://amasad.me/meta Big LOL here! The abstract things are the simplest, yeah! That's why progress in something like math or theoretical physics is made by the dumbest people, in contrast to something like sociology where you need genius level of intelligence to come up with some new ideas. Sure, sure. But that's of course not everything this dude got completely backwards. Would explain why replit is the most useless of all the online IDEs: It has no direction, no true value proposition. It's not a good cloud coding environment. It never was a good code snippet playground (actually one of the worsts). Now they even require accounts, so the quick code snippet aspect is also gone. Also they badly positioned in the education space… Of course I wish them luck! But I guess they have no chance against something like Gitpod, Github, or OpenShift codespaces, which are light-years ahead. OK, maybe the exit-strategy is "just" to be visible enough that at some point they get bought by one of the…

Eddie Zaneski is an awesome and friendly guy! Here's another awesome article on it: http://amasad.me/2015/10/31/javascript-async-functions-for-easier-conc…

A friend had sent this link. It dawned on me later, there is an interesting intersection between that article and this one about the Product Engineer: http://amasad.me/2016/01/03/overcoming-intuition-in-programming/

> That post feels like it approaches "conspiracy theory" levels of leaps While I don't agree that there is conspiracy going on, Replit's co-founder, amasad's post on entrepreneurship from 2016 kind of explains why his tweets outlining his outlook for the future of his company may come off as that: I view entrepreneurship as means of reconciling the infinite and finite. You venture into your imagination, gather knowledge, and dream about a better world. But you have to bring some of that back to earth. You take a step -- no matter how small -- towards your imagined world in the real world. This is not a one time thing, it's a recursive process. If your imagined possibilities became real then that's your new "finite". The process restarts and that's how we make progress. ... I see this as the perfect framework for the work we do in technology. There is always a tension between what is and what could be. There are people and organizations who are stuck in the status quo (the finite). On the other hand, there are folks who are stuck in the what could be without any actionability (the infinite). Taking a step into the infinite could be hard, but the hardest thing of all is bringing something back to the finite. The real art is coming up with the smallest possible task that can be done here and now. https://amasad.me/kierkegaard