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markmaglana's comments

markmaglana | 2 years ago | on: Wardley Maps–illustrated through Gerstner

Astute observation!

I’ve had a similar issue with the Business Model Canvas which, while very useful in visualizing a business’ model, leaves me hanging and a bit uncomfortable because, as you said, there are no (or incomplete) hard data to back up its claims.

On the other hand, if we were to consider these tools as just hypotheses makers and validate those hypotheses with the company’s financials (among other things), I think they’d be a very valuable component of a very able business management toolkit.

markmaglana | 2 years ago | on: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”

As a non-native English speaker, the issue that I've had with the dual meaning of "comprise" is that I was first introduced to it via the "is comprised of" usage which resulted in me equating "comprised" with "composed" or "made up" As in: "X is comprised of Y and Z" == "X is composed of Y and Z" == "X is made up of Y and Z"

Some time later, I came across the usage "X comprises Y and Z" and, based on my previous understanding that "comprise" == "compose," I took that to mean "X composes Y and Z" which, in other words, means "Y and Z are made up of X". But really, it means the other way around which is that "X is made up of Y and Z!" Only when I learned about the dual meaning of "comprise" did I correctly understand it to mean the latter.

To this day, I still have to actively juggle this arbitrary "dual-rule" in my head when I come across "comprise."

markmaglana | 3 years ago | on: FDIC Takes over Silicon Valley Bank

I think the additional liability from that event would be much less because it would be computed from the interest payments that the bank eventually owes the depositors.

So given an interest per annum of 1% (for example), a $1m deposit would add $1m liquid, non-earning assets while also adding $1.01m to their liabilities. So, effectively, they’d have $10,000 in unsecured liabilities.

To counter that imbalance (as well as protect the cash from the effects of inflation), they’d have to put some of that cash to work via various investments.

markmaglana | 3 years ago | on: FDIC Takes over Silicon Valley Bank

I wonder if it’s correct to also think about it in this way: idle cash devalues over time. Coupled with interest (no matter how small) that they pay out to their depositors, this exposes banks to future liability. To counter that, they have to give “jobs” to as much of this cash as possible so that they can make those payments while also pocketing a profit for themselves.

markmaglana | 3 years ago | on: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

> Something that is able to simulate having a theory of mind sufficiently well does actually have a theory of mind.

That presupposes that our existing tools for detecting the presence of ToM are 100% accurate. Might it be possible that they are imprecise and it’s only now that their critical flaws have been exposed?

markmaglana | 3 years ago | on: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

At some point, when multiple components (including the LLM) have been connected to form a system that exhibits "knowing" (the way humans do), wouldn't the "intelligence" be distributed across the entire system rather than attributed primarily to the LLM?

In other words, the LLM wouldn't be the equivalent of the human brain. Instead, it would just be equivalent to that part of the human brain that processes language.

markmaglana | 4 years ago | on: When I do TDD and when I don’t

I tend to go by how much anxiety a piece of code might give me once it goes to production. If I expect the level of anxiety to breach a certain threshold (usually when there’s too many logic branching than I can keep in my head), then I write the tests first.

The above assumes though that I’ve done enough previous discovery to have a relatively robust model of the problem domain. If not, I prototype first and during this stage I won’t be using TDD. Prototypes produced are throwaway, of course.

markmaglana | 4 years ago | on: Don't start with microservices – monoliths are your friend

If there’s no organizational barrier (e.g. microservices architecture, separate repos with strict permissions) that will prevent devs from leaking abstractions across technical boundaries, those well-defined modules and interfaces will devolve into a big ball of mud.

I say this with the assumption that the team is large and members regularly come and go.

markmaglana | 4 years ago | on: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

Both sides of the aisle in this debate appear to hold a common assumption that our current method of sharing knowledge (i.e. written and spoken words) are the best methods that we will ever have at our disposal.

However, should a day come when a new method circumvents this very crude way of knowledge transmission, this debate will be significantly changed or even rendered moot.

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