i am trying to build a jigsaw puzzle which has no lid and is missing half of the pieces. i am unable to show you what it will be, but i can show you some of the pieces and why they matter to me. if you are building a different puzzle, it is possible that these pieces won't mean much to you, maybe they won't fit or they won't fit yet. then again, these might just be the pieces you're looking for. this is summing up, please find previous editions here.

• our comrade the electron, if you look at the history of the kgb or stasi, they consumed enormous resources just maintaining and cross-referencing their mountains of paperwork. imagine what stalin could have done with a decent mysql server. we haven't seen yet what a truly bad government is capable of doing with modern information technology. what the good ones get up to is terrifying enough. highly recommended
• no one knows what the f*** they're doing or the 3 types of knowledge, the real reason you feel like a fraud is because you have been successful in taking a lot of information out of the "shit you don't know you don't know" category and put it into the "shit you know you don't know" category; you know of a lot of stuff you don't know. the good news is that this makes you very not dangerous. the bad news is that it also makes you feel dumb and helpless a lot of the time. recommended
• programming as theory building, it is concluded that the proper, primary aim of programming is, not to produce programs, but to have the programmers build theories of the manner in which the problems at hand are solved by program execution
• toward a better programming, if you look at much of the advances that have made it to the mainstream over the past 50 years, it turns out they largely increased our efficiency without really changing the act of programming
• regulation ratchets, in any area where we let humans do things, every once in a while there will be a big screwup; that is the sort of creatures humans are. and if you won't decrease regulation without a screwup but will increase it with a screwup, then you have a regulation ratchet: it only moves one way. so if you don't think a long period without a big disaster calls for weaker regulations, but you do think a particular big disaster calls for stronger regulation, well then you might as well just strengthen regulations lots more right now, even without a disaster. because that is where your regulation ratchet is heading
• the eight-hour burn, we treat scarce resources as being more valuable, and we make more efficient use of them. when you have too much time to work, your work time reduces significantly in perceived value
• the expert, short film by lauris beinerts