Writing

“The vibes are off” is a colloquial expression used to describe a situation where something feels wrong or uncomfortable, even if it cannot be precisely explained. It suggests that the atmosphere or emotional tone of a place, interaction, or event is not as expected or desired. This phrase often implies a sense of unease or discomfort that is sensed intuitively rather than being based on specific, tangible evidence. The term “vibes” refers to a distinctive feeling or quality that can be sensed, often involving shared emotional states or atmospheres.

Gary’s economics explains more of how the public commons perceives the economy vs economists

And it applies to all sorts of scenarios.

The vibes are off. | The Verge

The vibes are off. Some advertisers see Meta pulling back from moderation as a signal they should stop pushing social media outlets to keep hate speech in check, according to The Wall Street Journal. Some have reportedly already stepped back: …the Association of National Advertisers, [which] represents major advertisers such as Procter & Gamble, AT&T and General Motors, quietly ended a brand-safety effort called “Engage Responsibly,” partly to avoid scrutiny or litigation…

And then there’s this.

Maybe when we say the vibes are off, what we really mean is that every person you pass on the street now feels like a glimpse of another dimension behind a glass. — Whizy Kim, The Vibes Are Off: COVID & Losing Shared Reality

Colin and Samir interview Johnny and Izzy Harris about their careers and the creation of their media company, NewPress. (Also, see NewPress network’s other shows like Search Party and Tunnel Vision). The Future of YouTube Explainers Is Here ▶️

Observations

Key Principles for Building a Creative Organization

• Bias towards action - Make decisions quickly, do things fast, and solve problems without overthinking.
• Treat others with kindness and respect, both within and outside the team.
• Templates - Find where structure works and leaves room for creativity.
  • They specifically mentioned templates in the context of creating a reliable system that supports creativity. Templates refer to establishing repeatable formats that streamline the creative process and improve team collaboration.
  • Johnny Harris mentioned that script templates were a very large document with tables, color coding, and other elements that enable a team to work together with communication and structure. Izzy Harris added that these are structures that still allow for creativity. The aim is to systemize repetitive creative tasks without constraining creative output, enabling consistent execution and scalability.
    • In my own way, templates have allowed me to stay focused, also had to grow organically because I need to understand the underlying structure first
• Care more about getting it right than being right. That lends itself to feedback and being open to it.

The odd thing about Voice Notes

• Johnny and Izzy Harris use voice notes as a method of communication to increase efficiency and maintain a personal touch. Johnny uses voice notes, looms, and Marco Polos to communicate with his team, as he can convey what needs to be said in minutes. Izzy noted she is delighted by 6 second voice notes.
• Voice notes are useful for asynchronous communication. Team members do not need to be available at the same time in order to communicate effectively
• Voice notes allow for more detailed explanations and can convey nuance and tone more effectively than text-based communication

NewPress

New Press is envisioned as a new news media entity that will function as an umbrella company overseeing five to eight Creator-led, independent journalism channels.

Here’s a breakdown of what New Press is, what to expect from its offerings, and how it aims to differentiate itself from entities like Vox, according to the sources:

• Structure and Mission:
  • Creator-Led Channels: New Press will consist of multiple channels, each led by independent creators.
  • Operational Support: While creators will manage their channels creatively, New Press will handle operational and project management aspects. This includes brand deals, agency relations, syndication, publishing, upload timelines, and providing a project management team and thumbnail designers.
  • Shared Resources and Collaboration: Creators will have the opportunity to collaborate, brainstorm, and support each other.
• Offerings to Creators:
  • Financial Security: Creators will receive a salary, benefits, and a share of the channel’s revenue as it grows.
  • Creative Freedom: Creators can focus on content creation without the burden of business operations.
  • Operational Support: New Press provides a full operations team to handle tasks such as project management.
• Content and Accessibility:
  • Accessibility: New Press aims to make videos accessible to a wide audience by using plain language and avoiding jargon.
  • Rigorous Journalism: Content will be deeply researched and fact-checked.
  • Visual Storytelling: Emphasis is placed on visual elements in their videos.
• Differences from Vox:
  • Creator Focus: New Press prioritizes individual creators and their brands over the New Press brand itself.
  • Talent Retention: New Press aims to retain talent by offering fair compensation and creative freedom.
  • Revenue and Creative Separation: New Press intends to keep creative and operational departments separate, preventing revenue pressures from negatively impacting content creation.
  • Maintaining Scrappiness: New Press aims to avoid excessive overhead and bureaucracy.
• Key Principles to Guide New Press:
  • Bias Toward Action: Make decisions quickly and act decisively.
  • Kindness: Treat everyone with kindness and respect.
  • Structure: Balance structure with creative freedom.
  • Focus on Getting it Right: Prioritize accuracy and learning over being right.

I’ve had it. The last time I logged into Instagram, there were a couple of right-wing organizations recommended to me. I don’t care if it’s a glitch, it’s not acceptable. If a CEO tries to be someone you can’t understand or respect, it’s time to leave.

This is my decision to leave Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. It’s been years on these apps, and it’s time for a farewell.

Caveat

I am still on Whatsapp due to communication with some friends who haven’t left that platform yet. I fear Facebook has such a monopoly on there, and I realize such drastic measures are hard to keep when it comes to cutting off ties with everyone.

The final counts are up. We have the following distribution of media for 2024.

Some of my biggest highlights I pointed out in another post.

I’ll leave that here again because it was a really fun list to put down.

• The film that I want to finish: Past Lives (2023)
• The weird film: Poor Things (2023)
• The cringiest TV series: The Curse, Season 1 (2023-2024)
• The book that resonates the most: The Psychology of Money (2020)
• The unexpected book find: Frostbite (2024)
• My RomCom of the year: Upgraded (2024)
• A great TV find: Ramy (Seasons 1 and 2). I still need to watch the 3rd season
• The cry-fest film: Suzume (2022)
• My good 90’s find: Go (1999)
• The most intense non-intense film: Challengers (2024)
• Unexpected horro series: The first four Ring movies from Japan. Absolutely better than the American ones.
• Best horror from this year: The Substance (2024)
• RIP Dame Maggie Smith: Gosford Park (2001)
• Hallmark Movie of the year: Sugarplummed (2024)

I’ll add in there I also enjoyed Quiz Lady on the plane ride home, although that was on January 1st.

I didn’t read enough books this year. They were mainly non-fiction. The highlights were Frostbite and The Golden Thread.

We saw Hamilton this year, our only musical. Totally worth it!

I tried to include video games, although I’m terrible at finishing them. Maybe I should add an “in progress” for some of those because I don’t always finish them.

In terms of TV shows, we’ve enjoyed the new Fallout show. Morgan’s really enjoyed Dune Prophecy. I watched all of the Good Place, which was wonderful, and has a bittersweet ending.

I’ve started a Discord server! This is a place for more group setting conversation. I have found Discord as a much easier way to interact with people, which I wish was more the case of other social media. The real-time nature of old-school IRC mixed with modern features allows us to make fun, creative conversation. Just abide by the code of conduct of being respectful. With anything, moderation is the key.

Enjoy!

The tool should confirm to your workflow, not the otherway around. When you let the tool dictate your workflow, you disrupt your own flow. Tools can teach us about new workflows, but it’s up to our own judgment if that works for or against us.

Tools are not panaceas. They cannot solve all of our problems. The corollary advice about tools is when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

A good tool is one that can do one thing very good. A multi-tool is great if you know it can do each task very well. When it fails at one of those things, you know it’s not a great tool, and you may need to make other tools interoperable with one another. Sometimes, your tools don’t play well. Don’t try to make them interoperable if they have no means to. These tools were never the solution to your problem in the first place.

Random find of the day. This Github repo gives us a Blockbuster Video VHS insert template. I made one of The Matrix.

Josh Cunningham wrote a piece called Imagining a Personal Data Pipeline. I started exploring his project, pdpl-cli, which helps you download your personal data and pipe it out to your desired output. I’ve been thinking extensively about this problem for a number of weeks now since I’ve exported my Google Contacts into Obsidian. However, with the lack of database support, I thought about self hosting it. Enter the Personal Data Pipeline.

It’s essentially ETL jobs with integrations to third party services to “recipes” that you can write in yaml and customize to your desired outputs. I think this helps a lot more than determining data schemas for specific third party data integrations and having the raw data in a personal data lake. (Or really maybe a document store).

The idea is to have it local-first and maybe include a sync-thing or cloud syncing as an optional add-on. There’s an emphasis on privacy, although my bigger fear is vendor lock-in. I’ve become so reliant on Google, Apple, and other services that I don’t feel like I own my personal data anymore. Also, as a web developer, the hardest part is grabbing my own data from the sticky hands of these cloud services. Also, this emphasis on files over apps makes a lot more sense to me than the walled garden approach we’ve become accustomed to.

Typst is “a new markup-based typesetting system that is powerful and easy to learn.”

It seems very interesting as an alternative to LaTeX. A lot of emphasis on typesetting. I haven’t gotten the chance to work with LaTeX, so I’d be curious if jumping over that and learning this might be a good alternative. Plus, it has a multiplayer feature built.

Check out their Github, written in Rust.

The post from Latent Space reporting for this quarter’s AI review, The Winds of AI Winter, tries to analyze the macro trends for AI. Long story short: there are high doubts about AI’s current capabilities and its distribution is uneven. “Time to build, or else AI Winter is coming”.

• ChatGPT’s growth has been level (0%) over this past quarter. Related: The Unbundling of ChatGPT (Feb 2024 Recap)
• I forgot that Google is in a downward spiral for “Google AI Overviews being bad, bad, bad, bad (after the Gemini mess)“. I’m really interested in how Google is trying to bounce back. Yesterday at the theaters, they were trying very hard to advertise the new AI features on the latest Pixel.
• A bunch of AI product recalls like Rabbit, Microsoft “Recall”, Figma AI, McDonalds drive-thru AI, Discord cancelling Clyde
• Non-Acquihiring means there isn’t an acquisition to hire the talent from one organization to another, but taking away talent to another company without acquiring the company. Adept lost their co-founders to Amazon. And Inflection Pi to Microsoft
• And of course, over-hyping technology and having high churn, like Harvey in private

The biggest takeaway is big spend and slow return. The the Goldman Sachs report and Sequoia’s report break it down. The one that telle me the most was the distribution of stock returns per phase of AI, where Phase 1 is the chips where Nvidia are doing the best. Phase 2 is the infrastructure running behind it, which is increasing. But Phase 3 and 4, of enabled revenues and productivity are flatlined.

We’re hoping the future will hold better for AI in general, but I’ll leave this quote from Asimov.

The future is here, but it is not evenly distributed.
Isaac Asimov

Simon Willison’s post - Give people something to link to so they can talk about your features and ideas

I evangelize this tool a lot, but OpenAI really aren’t helping me do that. I end up linking people to my code-interpreter tag page because it’s more useful than anything on OpenAI’s own site.

Related to: Learn In Public and Working in Public. It helps with the Open Source community in which you open source your knowledge and let people come and collaborate.

One obvious goal here is SEO: if someone searches for your product feature you want them to land on your own site, not surrender valuable attention to someone else who’s squatting on the search term.

You can drive traffic to this site because people could actually use it. Go back to the tiny web, and not where big corporations ruin the Internet by spamming search engines through SEO.

I personally value the conversation side of it even more. Hyperlinks are the best thing about the web—if I want to talk about something I’d much rather drop in a link to the definitive explanation rather than waste a paragraph (as I did earlier with Code Interpreter) explaining what the thing is for the upmteenth time!

More links are better. I think Willison’s blog is an excellent example of adding curation with links, but let the links stand up for themselves. Also, see Waxy.org - Andy Baio lives here.

Give people something to link to!

A curiosity sparked because my co-worker pointed out the Spring Framework is currently owned by Broadcom. That’s because VMware is now part of Broadcom, and Spring Framework was part of VMWare prior. I had an inkling there was a scandal Broadcom had awhile ago. Low and behold: SEC Charges Four Current and Former Broadcom Officers for Backdating Options (Press Release No. 2008-87, May 14, 2008). In 2010, the charges were dropped - Chipmaker Broadcom stock options backdating case ends. That’s not all though. Their first CEO, Henry Nicholas had criminal charges. The SEC dropped those charges in 2010, but that was enough to disgrace the people involved. Their former SEO left Broadcom before the SEC investigation back in 2003 to “work on his marriage”. He was sleeping with prostitutes.

Read: Henry T. Nicholas III: A human tragedy. And the follow-up a decade later with Orange County tech billionaire Henry T. Nicholas III charged with drug trafficking following Las Vegas arrest.

The court filings in the past case painted Nicholas as a ruthless entrepreneur who slipped drugs to competitors without their knowledge, who threatened the lives of employees he believed had turned against him, who had the means and motive to flee beyond the reach of justice in his private jet.

His start was in researching ICs, and later that’s what Broadcom sold. He was given awards for his research. He’s like a walking contradiction, trying to save his name with his philanthropy while making wildly bad decisions. File under downfalls.

It’s always fun when the MDN documentation doesn’t tell us what the options are within the methods page, I you have to dig deeper into the constructor. The TypeScript bindings don’t always make sense.

MDN - toLocaleString

Anyways, I needed a datetime string with the date, time in hours and minutes, and the timezone. I’ve made the timezone explicit and came up with this snippet.

date.toLocaleString("en-us", {
  year: "numeric",
  month: "short",
  day: "numeric",
  hour: "numeric",
  minute: "numeric",
  timeZone: "America/Los_Angeles",
  timeZoneName: "short",
});

This would return something like “2024-07-03, 12:00 PM, PDT”.

The shorthand option is must be used in object destructuring to remove redundant prop: value to be prop.

What I wanted was this shorthand:

const { asFragment } = render(container);

But what codemod generated was the following:

const { asFragment: asFragment } = render(container);

While both are true, I would rather have the shorthand, as that’s what we have strictly for eslint rules. This Github Issue helped describe the solution on how to implement in your transform file.

const code = j.objectProperty(j.identifier("h"), j.identifier("h"));
code.shorthand = true;

j.variableDeclaration("const", [
  j.variableDeclarator(
    j.objectPattern([code]),
    j.callExpression(j.identifier("require"), [j.identifier('"packagename"')])
  ),
]);

How to embed TikTok videos in Obsidian’s editing/live preview and reading mode.

<iframe
  src="https://www.tiktok.com/player/v1/7382225350710824222?autoplay=0"
  allow="fullscreen"
  style="width:100%;height:50vh;"
/>

where 7382225350710824222 is the video id you get from TikTok from this example link: https://www.tiktok.com/@_jen_hamilton_/video/7382225350710824222.

The TikTok v1 player has a bunch of controls that you can use to modify from this documentation.

There’s still some wonky height issues, and I suspect this is the default height Obsidian has on the container around the editor. I gave it a good enough viewable height of 50vh, which should be enough.

Example Video

Reference links

• How do I embed TikTok Videos? - Help - Obsidian Forum
• Emedding TikTok Videos - Help - Obsidian Forum
• html - How to stop auto play in an embedded video? - Stack Overflow
• TikTok for Developers

d3 v7 is packaged as ESM only. That made it difficult to use in the Node.js REPL. From this StackOverflow thread, I found a solution.

let d3;
import("d3").then((module) => {
  d3 = module;
});
// Then you can use d3 anywhere once the promise is resolved.

Extremely esoteric bug. I’ve had an open issue for the past three months related to this other issue. I couldn’t figure out why npm’s registry would pull an older version of d3-scale-chromatic when I upgraded the @observable/plot library. As a future note for myself, if I run into this issue again, I’ll have to go into the package-lock.json file and update d3-scale-chromatic to v3.1.0.

From this ACM paper, On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots, the hypothesis is maybe these LLMs are parroting back what we already know and aren’t learning. We can probably, maybe, safely say that is no longer the case.

From The Progressive: Students Have the Right to Protest Apartheid. My lovely fiancé wrote a piece about the student protests for Palestine.

While the Republican-led Congress has used its power to condemn any protests on behalf of Palestinians, where was the same outrage and zealousness when white nationalists came to college campuses?

I forked a small demo from Wes Bos and ran in on my own sandbox. It seems much cleaner than using a script tag per each dependency, and works on all major browsers.

In my little demo app, I placed the importmap in the head of the document. I’m using react as well as my own utils file to test out the functionality.

<script type="importmap">
  {
    "imports": {
      "react-dom": "https://esm.sh/react-dom",
      "react": "https://esm.sh/react",
      "utils": "./utils.js"
    }
  }
</script>

Read more about importmap on MDN

From there, I imported these libraries in a script module.

<body>
  <div id="app"></div>
  <script type="module">
    /* eslint-disable */
    import { useState } from "react";
    import { createRoot } from "react-dom";
    import { formatMoney } from "utils";
    createRoot(document.querySelector(`#app`)).render(formatMoney(100.2365));
  </script>
</body>

I had a hiccup with [plugin:vite

Luxon datetime library defaults startOf and endOf methods to UTC. But this isn’t great for end users who don’t live in UTC / GMT. To offset this, we need to grab the time zone offset from the user’s system.

const systemTimeZoneOffsetInMinutes = new Date().getTimezoneOffset();  
const systemTimeZoneOffsetInHours = systemTimeZoneOffset / 60;

Then we can add the offset to the Luxon datetime object.

const now = DateTime.now();
const startOfLocalDay = now.startOf('day').plus({ hours: systemTimeZoneOffsetInHours });
const endOfLocalDay = now.endOf('day').plus({ hours: systemTimeZoneOffsetInHours });

I was listening to this podcast: The boring JavaScript stack featuring Kelvin Omereshone (K.O.O) (JS Party #319). My takeaway is I should be using a boring stack to build my business ideas. Leave the shiny new toys for tinkering and use something stable.

While Kelvin talks about the benefits of using Sails, I was thinking about the other “boring” things that constitute a boring stack. It goes beyond tecnologies, like how to run a business, how to organize your team, and how to market the product. And when those things are boring, they are unsexy and oftentimes neglected.

Related: Kelsey Hightower’s nocode

The best way to write secure and reliable applications. Write nothing; deploy nowhere.

I wrote a script that updates my daily notes to add properties. Since I’ve been using Obsidian for awhile, properties was introduced much later. I’ll walk through my code.

// Get the current file title, which is in a common date format: YYYY-MM-DD
const currentFileTitle = tp.file.title;

// Set folder you want to get latest file for here
const folder = "Calendar/Personal Reviews/journal and daily review/2022";

// Get all files in that folder, including nested folders
const filesInFolder = app.vault.getMarkdownFiles().filter(file => {
    return file.path.startsWith(folder);
});

// Sort files by file name
filesInFolder.sort((a, b) => a.basename < b.basename ? 1 : -1);

// Get the index of the current file
const currentIndex = filesInFolder.findIndex(file => file.basename === currentFileTitle);

// Get basename of previous and next TFiles to be used in link
let previousEntry = '';
let nextEntry = '';

// Wrap it around a try catch block in case there's something wrong with getting these basenames
try {
    previousEntry = `[[${filesInFolder[currentIndex + 1].basename}]]`
} catch (err) {
    console.error(err);
}
try {
    nextEntry = `[[${filesInFolder[currentIndex - 1].basename}]]`
} catch (err) {
    console.error(err);
}

Here’s my template that the templater plugin uses in markdown.

<%*This is where the JS code above is inserted-%>
---
tags: 
    - logs/daily 
created: <% currentFileTitle %>
previousEntry: 
    - "<% previousEntry %>"
nextEntry:
    - "<% nextEntry %>"
---

I’ve had to modify this depending if the file already has properties or not.

I got a chance to play around with Elicit and was reading through Adam Wiggin’s Tweet. I think I might make a quick web app trying multi-column queries about a particular topic and allow more of a computational style of conversational chat.

I was getting some errors in my unit test output because I converted my SVGs to React components using SVGR. As such, I needed to re-configure Jest accordingly.

1. Create the mock file

export default "svgr-div"; // This is the kebab case that jest is looking for
export const ReactComponent = "div";

// @see https://react-svgr.com/docs/jest/ for setup

2. Configure jest in package.json

{
  "jest": {
    "moduleNameMapper": {
      "\\.svg": "<rootDir>/PATH_TO_FOLDER/svg.js"
    }
  }
}

In practice, you try to eliminate task barriers that require back and forth communication by setting dedicated block of time to meet. An office hour, reminiscent of your professor’s office hours, means you broadcast to your working network you are available in this block of time to chat about open loops.

The problem this solves is eliminating the number of unknowns in your work, whether that be client feedback, questions about a design contract, or ambiguous bug tickets. These tasks become open loops are require external help in order to uncover what tasks you have to do next. It also lowers the communication gap with your work network or team and bridge that gap of understanding. The end goal is it helps with end output and/or goals.

Championed by Cal Newport and highlighted in his book, Slow Productivity.

In VSCode, open your palette, and type %, you get a fuzzy search across your files. And you can use navigational keybindings like cmd+up or cmd+down .

I periodically try to dump all of my mental contexts into my notes. I noticed this comes in a few different flavors.

• Safari Tabs on my iPhone and iPad: Goes into daily notes
• Random thoughts - go into drafts and get processed daily
• Shopping - including groceries, bills, and things I would like but not need. Those all go into a task manager
• Dangling tasks - gets reviewed in the task manager inbox weekly
• Personal thoughts - journaling every two weeks, although I want to do this more often
• Events I have not logged - go into my calendar.
• Downloads folder - weekly processed into other folders.
  • Long-term storage in Dropbox and backup drive.
  • Short-term in Inbox folder
• Photos - place special ones in folders. Select shots in favorites.

I am trying to think of other things that I purge. I used to write in a notepad and write on the page of everything I was thinking about. I used to write about people I have not spoken to in a long time that I should reach out to, mantras I came up with, or completely random thoughts.

Tiago Forte recommends putting all unused files into an Archive folder. This This activity helps remove our digital file mess and stops us from immediately organizing everything.

Stands for Observe-Orient-Decide-Act (“OODA”) Loop. It’s an iteration because it feeds back into itself. Initially applied for military use, but has since been used for business decision-making and personal development.

• Observe the situation and mentally note any key data points.
• Orient by placing data in the context of existing knowledge and mental maps to create a picture of the current situation.
• Make a decision on how to act in light of that situation.
• Act and assess for any necessary adjustments.

Source: Sahil Bloom - The Curiosity Chronicle

I’m finally cleaning up my RSS feeds because it’s too untenable. In my Readwise Reader, my inflow is far greater with things I know I won’t read over things that I know I’ll read later. Hence trapping me in a cycle of scrolling over reading. I’m going to unsubscribe from a bunch of things.