2024 Week 22 - Weekly Notes

After a month long break, we’re back! The reason for my absence is I got married! 💒

It’s been one crazy month. Everything leading up to the wedding was a whirlwind. Everything after the wedding has been nice and calm. We spent our honeymoon in Maui, then all of last week after our return, we spent on the couch sick with COVID-19.

This week, we’re back. I’m coming back at you all with some links that I found for the entire month. After this update, I’m going to overhaul a few things about the weekly notes.

Link Roll

The goal of a book isn’t to get to the last page, it’s to expand your thinking.
— Dave Rupert

Everyone is waiting for that one post, that one video, that one podcast from someone that explains things is just such a way they can understand.
— Jim Nielsen

• People to follow:
  • Ashley Janssen | Productivity Consultant, Writer, Speaker
  • Simeon Griggs | Thoughts on Internet
• Helpful Tailwind color index: Overview of Tailwind CSS Colors
  • Also: Tailwind Tints: Tailwind CSS 11-color Palette Generator and API
• To make a test website? Eleventy is a simpler static site generator
  • Also, I want to use a project with Fly.io - Deploy app servers close to your users · Fly
• Jon Christensen writing on Every - The Death of Code as Craft
  • I’m pretty mad about this article. What I’m taking away from it is the low level details don’t matter for human comprehension. That’s really not true. Many times, assumptions are made early on that take a codebase one way, then later on, the requirements change and logic needs to be adjusted.
  • I’m not sure this person has spent enough time with LLMs on how messy the code they write is. Like it’s fairly unoptimized and feels extremely hacky. Yes, the code will be better in the future, but today’s LLMs don’t have this yet. And to expect a CEO to determine how this code is run is terrible because the nuances of what needs to be comprehended is not there.
  • Instead, the work of an engineer isn’t to read prompting with the LLMs output is but to decide if the code is maintainable. The idea of configuration over convention increases cognitive exercise, not decreases it. The article assumes the LLM output can read and write through the code and the engineer is lazy and doesn’t want to read through technical details. The best engineers are the ones who read through those technical details and understands those nuances.
  • I agree though in that businesses don’t care about code craft. They have other priorities - and it boils down to being able to make money (in a for-profit anyway).
• Wood chips or the material cut from a book can be used as bonus material
• I just realized TikTok and short form video appeal is when you’re reading articles and books on behalf of an audience. Like duh. People don’t read and it’s easier than reading
• Serious Eats - Oklahoma-Style Onion Burgers Recipe
• X Thread - Nick Gray on going to Japan with a blind date
• Delia Cai presents Hate Read
  • An absolutely hateful series of newsletters that’s actually a great read and showcases the real oddities of the Internet
• Mainstream Publications
  • CNBC - AI engineers face burnout in ‘rat race’ to stay competitive hits tech 👀
  • Notable NYT Articles
    • A Peek Inside the Brains of ‘Super-Agers’
    • Tensions Rise in Silicon Valley Over Sales of Start-Up Stocks
    • Where 3 Dead Tourists Were Found Fast, Thousands Remain Missing
  • BBC - North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs
    • St. Mary’s Walk ➡️ St Marys Walk
  • The Guardian - Man linked to viral dress pleads guilty to endangering wife’s life
• Josh Watzman on Cord - Exploring LLM Weirdness: How We Built It & What I Learned
• The Hybrid Hacker’s Nicola Ballotta - Practical Learning Strategies for Engineers
• Nabeel S. Qureshi - How To Understand Things
• Conor Barnes - 100 Tips For A Better Life
• William Brown - Passkeys: A Shattered Dream
• Dylan Huang on Konfig - I Reviewed 1,000s of Opinions on HTMX
• Tim Spann on Cloudera - Small Language Models (SML) for the Win
• Doug Turnbull - Dont have F-You money? Build an F-You Network.
• Tim Fisken - Avoiding the soft delete anti-pattern
• Deb Liu - Make the First 90 Days Count
• Hollywood Reporter - Kino Lorber New Streaming Service
• Flood Map: Elevation Map, Sea Level Rise Map
• Indian Paintbrush founder Steven Rales buys Criterion, Janus Films

Obits

• Bernard Hill, Actor in ‘Titanic’ and ‘Lord of the Rings,’ Dies at 79
• Roger Corman, Producer of Low-Budget Horror Films, Dies at 98
• Morgan Spurlock Dead: ‘Super Size Me’ Director Was 53

Highlighted Videos

One creator I didn’t know I was missing from my life was Van Neistat. His philosophy about the spirited man really speaks to me in a way I wish I found earlier. One of his videos surfaced about screws. It’s not a comprehensive look at them more than a practical one. I spent a lot of time with my dad at Home Depot, and screws have always fascinated me on our 3-hour long trips there.

Also from Colin and Samir interviewing Van. On why digital tools don’t translate for him. His brain is wired different.