What I read this week - 2024.09.14

A few articles I enjoyed reading this week.

This week's best article is an opinion piece discussing a recent interview with Mark Zuckerberg. It explores how Zuck has turned to a new strategy when dealing with criticism and feedback. Meta has always been a company that ships quickly and looks for signals in the noise to determine what to do next. This ultimately leads to frequent criticism, but it's a core reason why they are a juggernaut.

Mark Zuckerberg’s 20-year mistake

Meta’s CEO says he’s done apologizing. Should we worry?

PlatformerCasey Newton

Side note: If you are not listening to the Acquired podcast - you should be.

Initial studies measuring the enhanced productivity of engineers using AI (such as Github Copilot) are starting to come out, and the results are fascinating. This study explores the effectiveness of Gen AI on software development at Microsoft, Accenture, and an anonymous Fortune 100 company.

The Effects of Generative AI on High Skilled Work: Evidence from Three Field Experiments with Software Developers

This study evaluates the impact of generative AI on software developer productivity by analyzing data from three randomized controlled trials conducted at Micro

See all articles by Zheyuan (Kevin) Cui

Cloudflare routes a massive amount of content for the entire internet. Small wins really add up. In this case, the company's core proxy service was using 480 CPU cores to clean internal headers before forwarding traffic to its final destination. Cloudflare optimized this function by a little over 1% and freed up more CPU cores than most companies have provisioned to run their entire operations.

A good day to trie-hard: saving compute 1% at a time

Pingora handles 35M+ requests per second, so saving a few microseconds per request can translate to thousands of dollars saved on computing costs. In this post, we share how we freed up over 500 CPU cores by optimizing one function and announce trie-hard, the open source crate that we created to do it.

The Cloudflare BlogKevin Guthrie

A summary of a podcast episode discussing why exercise is the single most potent weapon we have to improve our health. My favorite excerpt from the piece is the following.

Imagine we’re making an advertisement for a new pill that’s being marketed during Sunday football games, and that pill is called exercise. And at the end of the advertisement, there’s a fair balance disclaimer: Exercise may cause injury and shortness of breath. If you’re sedentary, please talk to your doctor before using exercise, etc

“Exercise May Be the Single Most Potent Medical Intervention Ever Known”

Euan Ashley joins Derek to discuss the benefits of exercise and our current scientific understanding of why it helps

The RingerDerek Thompson

The original IndieHacker/Digital Nomad Pieter Levels joined Lex Friedman in a recent podcast episode. Pieter is an army of one who has built some incredible internet businesses using what many would consider “basic” or out-of-date tools—HTML, PHP, and jQuery. His shit-posting on X (formerly Twitter) is pretty entertaining as well.