2024 Week 35 - Weekly Notes

Over the past weekend, I went to !!Con 2024 in UC Santa Cruz. I always feel each talk, while 10 minutes, has. a lot to digest. I decided to pick back up my pen and paper journal, the Lecturrum 1910 and Uniball pen. The end of these niche conferences signals a sadness inside, and I hope to fill that void with something else beautiful. Also noted, this was the same week XOXO held its last conference.

I’m fairly late this week when it comes to going through the notes from the previous week. Labor day came and went, and I wanted to focus on other things beyond the computer work.

Around the technosphere

• DIY Methods 2024 - A Mostly Screen-Free, Zine-Full, Remote-Participation Conference on Experimental Methods for Research and Research Exchange
• Molly White - Blockchain-based systems are not what they say they are
  • I journeyed with Molly’s writing and talks down the Web3 rabbit hole. It goes deep into the web of lies and deception
  • Follow the Crypto
• Simon Willison - Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data
  • Imagining a personal data pipeline | Hacker News
• I read through Hypermedia Systems in two sittings, and found the approach of htmx to be an interesting update to the earlier web days. While it doesn’t lean fully into Jeremy Keith’s idea of progressive enhancement, it lends itself towards that goal.
• Conference - B-Sides Las Vegas
  • I think this is the one I was recommended during !!Con. As well as talking to Gabriela at Strangeloop last year
• Mike Diamond - Hacking together a dirt-cheap LoRa device.
• What Is AI Going To Do To Art? The History Of Photography Offers Clues.
• Graphic Design Criticism as a Spectator Sport - DesignObserver
• Create Calendar Entries with Anthropic Claude 3.5
• How we built Townie – an app that generates fullstack apps
  • Fantastic write-up using Valtown APIs. I’m wondering how I can convert this back over to projects that I can host?
• Ethan McCue - Just use Postgres
• Kevin Cox - CORS is Stupid
• Ars Technica - New AI model can hallucinate a game of 1993’s Doom in real time
• arXiv PDF - SWE-Bench: Can language models resolve real-world Github issues?
• ListenBrainz
  • I started using this service as a back-up for my last.fm
• Caleb Porzio - I just crossed $1 million on GitHub Sponsors. 💰🎉
• Ars Technica - California legislature passes controversial “kill switch” AI safety bill

Around the world

• David Bordwell on the Two-Shot: Where did the two-shot go? Here.
• Mark Manson - The Most Important Question of Your Life
• The New Yorker - Why You Can’t Get a Restaurant Reservation
  • A fascinating look at how the restaurant industry is taking on reservation system poachers
• Ugh of the week - TechCrunch: Andreessen Horowitz co-founders explain why they’re supporting Trump
• From the Weekly Show with Jon Stewart, they had on Jill Lapore who is a historian and professor at Harvard. She mentioned how political conventions in the 19th and early 20th century looked a lot different. They would pick candidates by rallying others to vote on their candidate of choice. And the chosen candidate didn’t make appearances. It wasn’t until FDR that changed
  • Political Conventions: At This - The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart - Apple Podcasts
• ProPublica - the state of mental health: Why I Left the Network
• RFK Jr. Was My Drug Dealer - The Atlantic
  • This was in the 70s, and also this to a Trump campaigner now that RFK jr has officially endorsed him

    The candidate you’re campaigning for, in whose administration you apparently intend to serve, wants our laws rewritten so that drug dealers, particularly those who sell narcotics, face capital punishment. Given that you sold cocaine in your youth, how do you feel about his advocacy of a regime that might have resulted in your own execution at age 19?

• The New York Times - 2 Men Charged With Damaging Ancient Rock Formation at Lake Mead
  • Why do people insist on doing stupid things, especially with their daughter watching
• Book - The Tread of my Soul: Coming of Age on the Pacific Crest Trail by Chad Couch
  • It’s also on his blog for free. I’m loving it so far.
• The New York Times - Boar’s Head Plant Tied to 9 Listeria Deaths Had Mold, Leaky Pipes and Flies - Listeria outbreaks be damned

Recommendations

• Book: Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire
• Software: Flexibits | Cardhop | The contacts app you’ll actually want to use.
  • I use Fantatical, which I believe is also from Flexbits. I’m curious about the offering
• Book (Pre-order): Tom Scott, David Bodycombe: Lateral: Wonderful Answers to Weird Questions
• Daily Quote Puzzle - Gisnep

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