2024-05-31

• I’m reading Brendan Gregg’s Systems Performance book. Goes into very significant depth about operating systems and how applications interface with the OS. It’s interesting that by default this is almost totally absent as a concern for me as an application developer. Stuff like “on Linux, pass O_ASYNC flag to open(2) to create a file descriptor in an async fashion”. Thankfully, I do still remember doing this kind of programming in school and whatnot. Otherwise, this would all be quite challenging/go completely over my head. But it’s definitely an interesting reminder about how much of the programming stack is abstracted away at any given level. It feels like studying performance as a topic is a good one for pushing into a lot more layers of the stack. Every part of the stack matters from stuff like padding data structures to be word-aligned, to setting I/O sizes at the OS level, to controlling network protocols, to compiler flags, to application data structures/algorithm design. Fun stuff 😀. It also reminded me of one of the big takeaways from reading that Google File System paper. So much of the software design ended up being downstream of the hardware capabilities (e.g. the system is built around streaming large blobs of data from disk, which capitalizes on the high throughput of sequential disk reads after seek vs a system that might try to provide lots of small random reads and hits slow seek times over and over). Kind of similar to how much of the processing code that gets written is downstream of the way the data is structured.
  
• Saw a good thread on the pros/cons of homeschooling from a prominent Twitter person who was homeschooled for most of their childhood. A good reminder that while “education” is rightly considered a “universal good,” any specific system of “education” will involve real tradeoffs and for different people, the right tradeoff for them could easily be different from others. As an example, when I talk with friends about the prospect of homeschooling some future children, there’s an almost universal concern that homeschooled children will be “undersocialized,” that they’ll be “weirdos,” etc. What this perspective seems to miss is any notion of tradeoffs. It seems to get right the idea that homeschooled kids will likely be pretty culturally different from their public/private schooled peers. And it gets right that there will be numerically more kids in the public/private school category. But what it gets wrong is the notion that the public/private schooled peers are “correctly” socialized. Or, more accurately, it assumes a cultural dominance between homeschool culture and public/private school culture when it’s likely closer to merely a case of cultural differences. For example, the tweet thread noted that one of the most disturbing “socialization” outcomes of public school kids (whom the tweet author met during a 3 month stint in public high school) was that the many of the public school girls were incredibly insecure about their body image compared with homeschool girls. I hadn’t personally thought about that stuff, but also, yeah it makes sense! High school is rough for so many people! So that seemed like an insightful point about the pros/cons of socialization in public/private school. Helpful to have that outsider perspective. Another one that comes to mind is the tweet author noted that public/private school kids have relationships extremely segregated by age (often the vast majority of socializing happens with kids almost exactly your own age), whereas homeschooled kids had deeper/more meaningful relationships with people in an age-agnostic way in their community. This one is imo less bad than the body insecurity stuff, but it’s still obviously a tradeoff. I came away from the thread with a much stronger impression that the homeschool vs public/private school socialization question is one of tradeoffs vs one strictly dominating the other. Of course, public/private school kids have advantages in socialization, too. I think it’s fair to say they are better prepared to play certain types of social games going forward in life. And if that’s important to you or you want your kids to be good at those games, by all means, optimize for that! Hopefully in that assessment, there’s also some element of asking whether you could build an alternative system outside the public school system that accomplishes the same goals better, but that’s a lot to ask of an average person. At a minimum though, hopefully we can retire the meme of “homeschooled kids are going to turn out as social weirdos.” (Now, I will note at the end here, that one unfortunate part of this story is that the tweet author is pretty widely considered to be an extreme weirdo, but oh well.)

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