The Expert Beginner

I found out about the Expert Beginner book from Avdi Grimm’s newsletter. It is a small but discomforting book (a series of blog posts turned into a book) that I believe anyone in programming, systems administration or DevOps arena must devote some hours to read. Its basic premise is the following extension of the Dreyfus model:

While the book is a guide on how to spot and avoid Expert Beginners (people who believe they have mastered all there is to master in their field and anything beyond what they already know is useless), it also serves as a guide to spot when you start emitting Expert Beginner signals yourself.

Do yourself a favor and read the book. Especially if you consider yourself a guru, ninja or rockstar of something. It will only cost you two hours.

81-82

Μέχρι σήμερα ο αγαπημένος μου αγώνας μπάσκετ ήταν αυτός. Αυτό άλλαξε και τον αγώνα δεν τον είδα, τον άκουσα στην ΕΡΑ Σπορ.

giannakopoulos_spanoulis — Δεν είναι μόνο το τελευταίο σουτ σημαντικό στον αγώνα. Είναι και σκηνές στην μέση.

Διαρπαγή;

Πολλοί επιθυμούν τη διαρπαγή του θεσμού από τη δημόσια τηλεόραση»

Oh well:

Members of the EBU are radio and television companies, most of which are government-owned public service broadcasters or privately owned stations with public service missions.

Δηλαδή τι; Ποιος ακριβώς άλλος σταθμός στην Ελλάδα είναι (ή μπορεί να γίνει) μέλος της EBU;

Δεν είμαστε όλοι χάνοι.

A very British coup

There had been no tanks on the streets. No one had gone to the firing squad […] It was a very British coup.

I found out about “A Very British Coup” while searching for the origins of House of Cards. A very fascinating novel that deals with the complexities of governance. With a clear depiction of all the forces in power that collide, how and why.

Do you happen to know of a country in the Western World with a leftist government? That dislikes the IMF, the EU and NATO? That seeks funding from alternative sources? Then you should read this book, even though the ending was not of my taste. The novel had to end somehow anyway. Come to think about it, no, I like it how it ends. It reminded me of 1984.

Leading by example #not

Every Saturday morning I have the “privilege” of attending a former Olympic medalist training her team (my kid has nothing to do with her sport, but the noise is loud enough that you do not have the chance of opting out attending her training session too). One would expect her to be an inspiring figure setting the bar of ethos and effort as high as we mere mortals would expect to come with an Olympic medalist.

Instead what we observe is the devastation of young personalities, and definitely a copy of how she was trained, failing to understand that she overcame the verbal abuse, won the medal and possibly it does not have to be this way for her athletes too. And surely it does not have to be this way for the rest of the 100 or so swimmers that train next to her team.

Being a jerk or an asshole does not make you a great leader or coach. It is a pure coincidence that there are assholes that are indeed brilliant leaders.

DevOps in practice

This is a free report that you can download from O’Reilly’s website. It deals with how DevOps was adopted to facilitate Nordstrom and Texas.gov (with a glimpse of how the Texas.gov CISO inserted security provisioning in the development processes).

If you’ve read The Phoenix Project and felt that OK this is nice, but it is also a novel, the Nordstrom story is an indication of how to adapt this outside a novel concept and into the real world. It is worth your time, especially in cases when you need to appeal to real world examples.

The first page of my notebook

About a week ago I started using a new notebook. I had it for quite some time, but did not keep any notes in it. PocketMods keep me happy most of the time, and I just fold the paper, not even print anything special on them.

But when it is a “real” notebook, the first page, the first line to be precise, is always hard. It has to be meaningful and with nice letters. I am not sure why, others are:

So when you see a white person with one of these notebooks, you should always ask them about what sort of projects they are working on their free time. But you should never ask to actually see the notebook lest you ask the question “how are you going to make a novel out of five phone numbers and a grocery list?”

This time the first line reads computational theory of mind.

The next pages were more like the grocery list :) BTW, this page was written with a Moleskine Classic Roller Pen Plus 0.7.

on car ownership

[ mostly preserving a Facebook comment that I made ]

Old pal Themos, retweeted:

RT @SirKneeland: Silicon Valley, last month: “car ownership is dead”
Silicon Valley, now: “I just pre-ordered my new Tesla”

To which I responded:

Car ownership will be like horse ownership: Irrelevant for the most of us. That is the point. Pre-ordering a new Tesla and bragging about it is like bragging about new horse of the “right” ancestry.

But as a general transportation means (as opposed to recreation and vanity) it is going to wear off.

Just like a horse, most of the time a car is idle and when moving it mostly carries its own weightmass.

That does not mean that we’re going to have a population of cars equal to the population of horses bread for racing and games, but more of how we’re going to treat them, especially the ones with decidedly less AI support.

Rock Breaks Scissors: A Practical Guide to Outguessing and Outwitting Almost Everybody

I have to admit, I bought Rock Breaks Scissors: A Practical Guide to Outguessing and Outwitting Almost Everybody because of the title. I was between this and Fortune’s formula. I thought how can one write a book about rock-paper-scissors strategies? Would that include lizard and Spock also?

It turns out there’s only one chapter about the game. The book starts really strong, with Claude Shannon’s outguessing machine and how it worked. It then continues with a bit of Benford’s Law and Nigrini‘s work (and I am both a fan of the Law and of Nigrini’s book). Next is some excursion in Madoff‘s scheme and how it could have been detected had someone paid more attention to the numbers.

Afterwards the book becomes increasingly boring to me as it offers some advise on how to outguess office pools on bets I am not really interested in (like American football, NCAA and picking the Oscar winners). With that comes a so much dumbed down treatise on randomness that is becomes annoying to the point that I sometimes wonder whether Poundstone himself understands it. And all that just to disprove the hot hand feeling that sometimes players feel. Yes, there is no hot hand. No, let them believe it there is. You cannot beat the belief by serving a dumbed down treatise on randomness. You’re making it worse.

Finally, the book finished with some work on the stock market. After several pages with a particular long-term investment example the author finally admits that “nobody invests for 132 years” and then proceeds to offer some advise that fits a lifespan better. Well, I do not like fillers like this when this is supposed to be an advise book.

A US audience might be happier with the book. What is damaging to me though, is that I need to look elsewhere for the history of the Kelly criterion (which is the subject of the other book from the same author that I was thinking about buying).

So now we get spammed via Github :)

So the following popped up in my mailbox:

It is nice and joyful to see your profile on https://github.com and i thought is beautiful to make you a friend,looking for a good friendship, mail me to my box, because i am not often here on xxx@yyy.zzz for more introduction and i will send you my picture.

I guess it was bound to happen. Anywhere you allow messaging to occur, spam will follow. I only wonder why it took so long to happen via a popular service like this.