Doolta

…and How AI Made Him a Mason

My psychological profile is INTJ¹, also known as the Architect, and I spent a good part of my life proving that this label fit… in the worst possible way.

Years of having a multitude of ideas

• on analysis systems (Blockchain, Productivity)
• on personal development methods (Memory, Discipline, Learning)
• on algorithms (routing, metacompression, encryption)
• on tools (format conversion, project management, system administration)

Years of producing hundreds of ideas in a row, for nothing, or worse, only to see some of them realized by others years later.

Introduction

In computing, the aphorism “Less is More” comes up often. With Jujutsu (jj), it takes a very concrete form: a simpler mental model can reduce the daily friction of version control.

In this article¹, I will not try to “prove” that jj is superior to git. I will show, on a concrete case, why some common operations: interrupting work in progress, reorganizing changes, fixing a non-atomic commit or resolving a conflict, become more natural with jj.

Sometimes an investigation tells a different story than the one you expected.

That’s what happened to me recently while investigating why a pod was ending up OOMKilled two to three times a day.

A quick look at the memory of the incriminated pod doesn’t show the typical rising curve of a memory leak. I’m missing data just before the OOM (because it’s always when your metrics system is migrating that this kind of incident happens), but with the day’s data, the cause seems to lie elsewhere.

Faced with an AI capable of compiling our intentions into working programs, I ask myself: does our craft reduce to assembling syntax, or does it hide a dimension that is by nature beyond computation?

I was 17 when I finally got my hands on “The Art of Computer Programming” by Donald Knuth. At the time, in 1989, reference books on programming were rare and the 4 volumes of TAOCP had the status of a “bible”; it remains for me a reference work that every computer scientist should read.