Will Wilson  

@WAWilsonIV

Math, religion, and distributed databases. Twitter is for meeting cool strangers. Working on something new. Previous hits include: Google, Apple, FoundationDB.

Mountain View, CA
Joined December 2009

Tweets

You blocked @WAWilsonIV

Are you sure you want to view these Tweets? Viewing Tweets won't unblock @WAWilsonIV

  1. 17 hours ago

    Fact: The Last Men in “Also Sprach Zarathustra” complain of indigestion. Surface reading: this shows their pettiness. Esoteric reading: this shows Nietzsche’s appreciation for deep Indo-Aryan wisdom concerning the mind-stomach connection, as transmitted by the Pythagoreans.

    Undo
  2. Jan 30

    I guess the one nice thing about employer provision of health insurance was that once the situation got bad enough, somebody like Amazon was bound to take matters into their own hands.

    Undo
  3. Jan 28

    Went back to our old church in DC, and one of its new buildings contains a gigantic handpainted icon of our youngest kid’s (fairly obscure) patron saint. So rad!

    Undo
  4. Jan 26

    “I think this optimization reduces our cycle time enough to be a productivity win, assuming it doesn’t take all day.” *spends all day grappling with subtle bugs caused by optimization*

    Undo
  5. Jan 26

    Yeah, when I hear “21st century superpower” I definitely think “place that everybody is desperately trying to get their money and their person out of.”

    Show this thread
    Undo
  6. Jan 26

    Both also involve learning the interaction dynamics of complex systems using a combination of induction, deduction, and experimentation which I find mildly addicting.

    Show this thread
    Undo
  7. Jan 26

    There’s a rough isomorphism between system performance optimization and debugging your weightlifting form that I find compelling. In both cases as you progressively increase load, smaller and smaller problems need to be resolved in order to continue.

    Show this thread
    Undo
  8. Jan 25

    China is such a strong country and a future economic power that people are giving their credit cards to criminal gangs so they can get their money out faster:

    Show this thread
    Undo
  9. Jan 25

    Building production systems is fun, but man I’d forgotten what a blast pure research can be under the right circumstances.

    Undo
  10. Jan 25

    This result (via ) that Buddhist monks fear death more than laypeople does not surprise me at all: The causation simply runs the other way than the authors are expecting: fear of death -> thinking deeply about ultimate matters.

    Undo
  11. Jan 24

    Probably the least malicious possibility is that some line manager is trying to pull a Volkswagen. From there the options get worse...

    Show this thread
    Undo
  12. Jan 24

    Linus has never been a diplomat, but yeah Intel’s behavior throughout this saga has been deeply disturbing: Makes me wonder if maybe they care about neither real-world performance NOR security.

    Show this thread
    Undo
  13. Jan 24

    My WMATA experience has me idly deliberating between buying a second car and hiring a ruthless band of mercenaries to take over the system and run it properly. I feel like a real Washingtonian again.

    Undo
  14. Jan 23

    Text editors and bubble gum ain’t gonna cut it for much longer...

    Show this thread
    Undo
  15. Jan 23

    Getting there will take tools and techniques as yet uninvented. There are already many camps trying to reinvent the field with program synthesis, automated verification, and tons more. I don’t know which will win. I do know programming in ten years will look nothing like today.

    Show this thread
    Undo
  16. Jan 23

    Thinking about the subtlety and operating reliability of a piece of equipment like LIGO is a good reminder of how immature software is. Most of the interesting stuff hasn’t been written yet, and even less of the stuff that will last.

    Show this thread
    Undo
  17. Jan 23

    Reading about the atrociously fine tolerances and degree of acoustic isolation these devices would need gave me the heebie-jeebies. And yet somehow, people did it!

    Show this thread
    Undo
  18. Jan 23

    Then I remember reading about the early planning for LIGO and LISA (RIP) as a pre-teen and teenager. They seemed impossibly far away.

    Show this thread
    Undo
  19. Jan 23

    Maybe it’s a timing thing. When I was a kid they were the kind of thing that was on the last page of my science books with headings like: “FAR-FUTURE POSSIBILITIES.”

    Show this thread
    Undo
  20. Jan 23

    Occasionally I’m reminded of the fact that gravitational wave observatories actually work, and am bowled over all over again.

    Show this thread
    Undo

Loading seems to be taking a while.

Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.

    You may also like

    ·