Morfternight #39: Procrastination is not Laziness
We talk about Internet (de)centralization, the surface of the Sun, and machine-generated code.
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👋 Good Morfternight, Friend!
It suddenly hit me this morning…
I called this newsletter “Morfternight” and added the tagline “The Newsletter that bridges time zones” because “Good Morfternight” is a greeting I started using years ago while leading for the first time a team spread from UTC-8 to UTC+9
But no one knows that.
A few of you Morfternighters know, but probably not the majority. And that’s when the solution became apparent: this newsletter should be called “Good Morfternight!”
✅ Done
🌍 Internet is way too centralized
All the conversations about web3 and the need for a decentralized web remain pretty abstract, and today most services built on blockchains are still very much centralized.
Every once in a while, AWS or, like yesterday, Cloudflare, break and bring down half of the web with them. Those are the moments when we realize this whole thing we rely on almost entirely is way too centralized.
Is it fixable?
I don’t know, but we are certainly not moving in the right direction, considering initiatives like GitHub Copilot. An AI-based suggestion tool to help developers write code faster.
Let’s leave aside the debate about how GitHub takes code written by all developers using the platform (the AI model is trained using open source code available on GitHub) and reselling it to the same developers.
My primary concern is that it will make code much more similar across products and applications. When the code breaks or introduces vulnerabilities, they will be widely distributed across unrelated products.
A bit like navigation systems sending all cars through the same itinerary to avoid a traffic jam, thus creating another one.
🪩 Sun is Lava
An incredible image of the Sun’s surface. You can read all the details in this article: NSF’s Newest Solar Telescope Produces First Images.
Each of the “bubbles” visible in the image is about the size of France, according to Eric Lagadec, a french Astrophysicist worth following on Twitter.
🫧 Procrastination is not laziness
It’s again past 3 am as I finish writing this, and I swear I had the time to finish much earlier. On the bright side, after finishing my 30-day drawing challenge, I have kept the pace, so today, I can offer you a visualization of the problem.
Procrastination is not laziness. It’s not about not doing anything; it’s about doing all the things but the ones we are supposed to do. If you want to understand better, I recommend this classic from 2013: Why Procrastinators Procrastinate and its sequel, How to Beat Procrastination.