It’s been almost two years since my last update here. A lot has happened. I hope you all are continuing to weather the ongoing multiple global pandemics and other anthropogenic crises.
Apologies that this is so long; I didn’t have time to make it shorter.
Obviously blogs do not come with a service level agreement, but some explanation is in order for the long gap. It’s pretty simple.
- Facebook actively discourages people to blog about their work.
- Working from home during the covid pandemic was enervating.
- After thinking about programming languages for many hours a week for over 25 years, I simply didn’t have the energy and enthusiasm to write much on the subject.
Blogging was an easy thing to drop in favor of pursuits that got me away from sitting in front of a screen in my home office. I’ve been spending my leisure time in the last couple years working on improving my nature photography skills and learning to scuba dive. Turns out you cannot catch covid when below 15 metres of seawater. And there are weird slugs in the Puget Sound!
Photos of the author and a golden dirona nudibranch by Amber, who convinced me to take up diving.
Today is the tenth anniversary of moving my blog to ericlippert.com on my last day at Microsoft, the fiftieth anniversary of my birth, and my last day at Facebook-now-Meta.
My team — Probabilistic Programming Languages — and indeed entire “Probability” division were laid off a couple weeks ago; the last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned.
The mission of the Probability division was to create small teams that applied the latest academic research to real-world at-scale problems, in order to improve other groups’ decision-making and lower their costs. New sub-teams were constantly formed; if they didn’t show results quickly then they were failed-fast; if they did show results then they were reorganized into whatever division they could most effectively lower costs.
We were very successful at this. The PPL team in particular was at the point where we were regularly putting models into production that on net reduced costs by millions of dollars a year over the cost of the work. We were almost ready to be spun off.
We foolishly thought that w
