2024 Week 29 - Weekly Notes

I’m leaving the politics short this week. It’s been a ride for the past 2 to 3 weeks of non-stop politics news that I’d rather turn down the dial for. It’s still there, creaking eerily as it demands its own attention to be gobbled by the monster it has become.

There’s too much disdain for my tastes about which candidate is better, which one got shot, which one tries to show up for unity and instead tears down the other side like they are vicious animals. And the local news isn’t all that much better, with news of affairs.

Instead, I went on a walk today to clear my head. This weekly notes of digesting whatever happened this week has helped me put a macro-lens around this. Even though the chaos of the moment-by-moment playback by social media might take up our eyeballs, I think it’s the moments we step away from the screen and think about where we are help us form better opinions.

Around the technosphere

I’m lumping back together all of the technie, AI, and tools for thought links. It’s been too much to create all of these categories, and frankly, when I go back, I can easily search them using my website.

And speaking of website, I’ve reconfigured my main page so the tagline and some other things will be on the sidebar and the main content is front and center. I’ve lumped together the books, streams, writing, projects, and other curations in this manner.

• City Walks Live - Fun livestreams and long videos of people walking around streets around the world

• Henrik Karlsson - How to think in writing

• Currently reading: A System for Writing by Bob Doto

  • It’s making me reflect on my own note-taking and note-making processes and how to capture and refine the things that I read with my own thoughts. I think if I re-read Sönke Ahrens’s book, How to Take Smart Notes, I would also get some new ideas too.
  • I’m pretty good at the capture part, given how long my weekly notes are. What I struggle with are the ideas presented in the sources that I’m reading. One thing I desperately need to do is to process these and put them in their own source note correctly. Readwise did the syncing part where I take notes on the piece of media. The next part is the harder lift.

• Dan McKinley - Choose Boring Technology

  • And the slides for it spawned this website - Choose Boring Technology

• Charles Féval - Use A Work Journal To Recover Focus Faster And Clarify Your Thoughts

• Marcus Ranum’s post from 2005 resurfaced about The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security. It’s still a great read today

• Github: Claude Engineer - is an interactive command-line interface (CLI) that leverages the power of Anthropic’s Claude-3.5-Sonnet model to assist with software development tasks. This tool combines the capabilities of a large language model with practical file system operations and web search functionality.

  • Also, - Claude Dev - goes beyond simple code completion by reading & writing files, creating projects, and executing terminal commands with your permission.

• Brightball - Story Points are Pointless, Measure Queues. I’m slowly trying to ween my company to Kanban

• Sebastian Bensusan - We need visual programming. No, not like that.

• ArXiv Paper - SpreadsheetLLM: Encoding Spreadsheets for Large Language Models

• Jim Gray - Lessons learned in 35 years of making software

• Swyx on Decentralizing DevRel - DX @ HuggingFace: Scaling open source ML community 200% a year with No OKRs & No Meetings

• Robin Rendle - Stop calling yourself an IC

• The end the week, the Crowdstrike SNAFU - Microsoft Outage: What Caused the IT Meltdown

Around the World and back

• The New York Times releases their 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
  • Response from Austin Kleon - 21st century books with pictures
• Tiago Forte - Rewriting My Financial Story: How I Healed My Relationship with Money
• Michal Pándy - WTF happened to blogs
• The MAGA Plan to End Free Weather Reports - Just why?!
• LessWrong - Poker is a bad game for teaching epistemics. Figgie is a better one.
• The New York Times - An Algorithm Told Police She Was Safe. Then Her Husband Killed Her. - This is about the system in Spain the police use called “VioGén”. When it gets domestic abuse wrong, it’s fatal.
• Justin Skycak - The Greatest Educational Life Hack: Learning Math Ahead of Time - I’m definitely one of those kids who wanted to learn more math than what was presented in class. It got too boring too quickly when the material presented wasn’t challenging enough
• Anshu Sharma, CEO of Skyflow, presents How to Start a Company
• The Perplexity Team’s article on Mongolia’s Viral Olympics 2024 Uniforms
• Food and Wine - All the Cookbooks on Carmy’s Bookshelves in ‘The Bear’
• Brian Potter - What Would It Take to Recreate Bell Labs?
• Every - How to Use ChatGPT for Psychological Growth

Obits

• Thomas Hoepker, Who Captured an Indelible 9/11 Image, Dies at 88
• Ruth Westheimer, the Sex Therapist Known as Dr. Ruth, Dies at 96
  • The New York Times - The Irony of Dr. Ruth
• Shannen Doherty, ‘Beverly Hills, 90210’ Star, Dies at 53
• Herbert Hoelter, Prison Consultant to the Rich and Infamous, Dies at 73 - This is a profession that almost baffles me, but also makes sense
• Shelley Duvall, Star of ‘The Shining’ and ‘Nashville,’ Dies at 75 - I don’t know how I missed this one from last week’s week notes
• Cheng Pei Pei, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Actor, Dies - Come Drink With Me is still on my to watch list. I’ll put the blu-ray in soon.
• Bob Newhart, 94, Dies; Soft-Spoken Everyman Became a Comedy Star

Recommended to me

• Video Game: Papers, Please
• Newsletter - Ethan Mollick’s One Useful Thing
• Web Game - Say What You See — Google Arts & Culture
• Preorder Book - Sahil Bloom - The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life
• Book - The Golden Thread by Kassia St. Clair - I read her other book on the secret lives of color

Viral enough for me