I finished Chris Voss’s book “Never Split the Difference” where he shares his experience and techniques as an FBI hostage negotiator. It surprised me because I thought it would be much more “hardcore” but it’s actually about well-known communication concepts applied to conflict situations with a lot of common sense.
It’s the kind of book with ideas that seem simple and obvious but are hard to put into practice. The foundation of everything is: people want to feel understood and in control.Read more...
Graceful termination of pods in Kubernetes is essential to prevent data loss, minimize interruptions, and ensure services are stopped in a controlled manner. This process occurs when Kubernetes deletes a pod, whether due to a Deployment update, scaling, eviction for lack of resources, or when the user manually deletes the pod. Understanding how graceful termination works helps you design more robust applications.
When Kubernetes wants to terminate a pod, it gives it the opportunity to shut down gracefully.Read more...
David Whyte —marine biologist, poet, and philosopher (boom!)— has written about a concept that caught my attention: the conversational nature of reality. The idea is surprisingly intuitive: reality isn’t a solid block you push against in a single direction. It’s a series of exchanges in which you give and receive, and each interaction reshapes the world. Reality isn’t a problem waiting for a final solution, but a conversation that gradually reveals itself.Read more...
I wanted to stop showing in the frontpage of this blog powered by (Hugo) the posts tagged as “TIL” or “IWL”.
My theme template is
{{ $blogPages := where .Site.RegularPages.ByDate.Reverse ".Type" "in" .Site.Params.mainSections }} I tried with “intersect” and “where” but it did not work, not sure if it is because my Hugo version is old but, anyway, I was too lazy to upgrade Hugo (and adapt all templates, breaking changes, etc) so this simple code made my day:Read more...
Warning: This review contains spoilers
This book is special because it contrasts Zen teachings with 1950s consumer America.
We meet Franny Glass, a young woman who belongs to a family of gifted intellectuals. She feels overwhelmed by life’s superficiality and seeks answers in spirituality. The story is divided into two parts showing important moments in the lives of Franny and her brother Zooey.
A note about the author: Salinger was transformed by his experience in World War II, where he participated in D-Day and witnessed the horrors of concentration camps.Read more...
Fooled by randomness These are my notes for the book “Fooled by Randomness” by Nassim Taleb.
The thesis of the book is that when we look at the past we find things that are not there, the past is much more random than our vision. This is called the Hindsight bias. So we have to be aware that when people relate the past usually they tend to create post-hoc rationalizations and retrofitted explanations.Read more...
In her book “Randomness,” Deborah Bennett presents an example that illustrates how bad we are at calculating probabilities, even highly trained professionals. A group of doctors received this question:
The test of a disease has a 5% false positive rate. The disease affects 1 in 1000 people in the population. People are tested randomly, whether they are suspected to be sick or not. A particular patient’s test is positive. What is the probability that this patient actually has the disease?Read more...
Seeing the evolution of StackOverflow, which seems to be declining due to the rise of ChatGPT and similar tools, I wonder about the long-term viability of projects like this.
On the other hand, where will AIs get their information if these projects disappear? Their answers could degrade significantly without such resources.
Could we be stuck in a cycle where AI destroys these collaborative platforms, worsens after losing them, then these platforms revive because this is information that is needed (and now is missing), only to decline again as AI uses their information to present it in a more convenient way?Read more...
In Bash, when we run the command type type type type, we observe a peculiar behavior: it executes three times instead of once or four times. This phenomenon is fascinating and is due to how Bash processes arguments and how the type command specifically works.
The behavior of type The type command is a Bash builtin used to determine how Bash would interpret a command name. When we execute:
type type type type We get an output similar to this:Read more...
These are my reading notes for the book “Ética para ingenieros” by Galo Bilbao Alberdi, Francisco Javier Fuertes Pérez and José Mª Guibert Ucín.
The Engineering Profession Different sociological perspectives explore the meaning of professions, from traditional occupations like doctors or lawyers to modern professions requiring university education. The fundamental aspect of a profession is its unique service to society, a vocation that has intensified with modernity through “professionalization.”
There are notable concerns about the excesses of this process, such as the obsession with titles rather than service to society, distinguishing between “bad professionalism” and “good professionalism” oriented toward the community.Read more...