Entry 170. Seven years complete. The streak’s uptime survives its 170th consecutive fortnight, and this entry closes the senior era’s fourth year with news held since Thanksgiving: the platform team launches January 6th, and the org has attached a title to its lead. STAFF ENGINEER. Me. The packet (this blog, jokes removed, again — #074’s trick still undefeated) cleared committee last week. More from the far side.
2019’s THESIS: THE REPRICING. The public market repriced the cheap-money decade’s mythology (Uber #155, WeWork #162-164 — from $47B to founder-defenestration in six weeks). The 737 MAX repriced certification-by-inheritance in the dearest currency there is (#151; the fleet remains grounded, the reports still landing). China repriced the cost of global platform values (#165). Quantum repriced “impossible” with an asterisk and a rebuttal (#166). Even endings got repriced (#156 — ask HBO what a rushed one costs). The decade closes with every kind of confidence — financial, institutional, computational — marked to market.
The quiet item, per tradition (#121’s Transformer, #146’s BERT — the thread the future will grade this archive by): OpenAI spent 2019 releasing GPT-2 in STAGES, initially declaring the full model too risky to ship, then walking it out quarter by quarter as the sky declined to fall. The capability curve (write-a-paragraph → write-a-page, coherently, from a prompt) is compounding on schedule; the release-strategy debate (staged rollouts… for LANGUAGE MODELS — #159’s Cloudflare lesson arriving in AI form pre-emptively) is the part I suspect matters most. The 2010s’ quiet thread ends the decade neither quiet nor loud: humming. Extrapolation remains an exercise for future entries, who I trust are living in it.
MY decade, since the format demands it: 2013’s terrified junior (git reflog, #001) closes 2019 as a staff engineer with a Proverbs file at 201 entries, two Fantasy PL titles (Null Pointer Exception dynasty status: disputed, banner count: legally binding), one marriage of sport and craft so complete the group chats merged (#080), and 170 fortnights of evidence that the compound interest of small consistent things (#100) is the only get-rich scheme that works. NEXT SPRINT (the 2020s): lead the platform team like it’s a product. Write more, delete more. Watch the humming thread. The graphs are flat, the on-call is quiet, and the twenties are going to be BORING and NORMAL, I can feel it. See you on the other side of the decade.