2024 Week 36 - Weekly Notes

In my last newsletter, I talked about seasonal playlists playlist. Pair that with the Commonplace Book Club from the Noted Substack and you get this habit of collecting tiny details. I’ve kept a continuous journal habit for over a decade and love to collect quotes, song lists, moments, stickers, and so much more.

See Also:

• How to Keep a Journal
• Commonplace Books Are Like a Diary Without the Risk of Annoying Yourself
• Keep Track of the Tiny Details
• The Ultimate Summer Playlist
• A Playlist to Remember

“Don’t take it personally when someone turns you down. Assume they are like you: busy, occupied, distracted. Try again later.”
— Kevin Kelly

• Margin and buffer
  • Margin, ownership, and boundaries
  • Buffer is making sure there is overflow. It’s like redundancy, although it doesn’t have to be necessarily overflow.
  • Margin is more about the bandwidth. You give yourself enough to recover from. Buffer is for stock. Margin is the space you make mentally, although the definition is typically around the edge of a boundary.
• I added webmentions following this: Adding Webmentions to a static Astro site

Around the Technosphere

• Latticework: Unifying annotation and freeform text editing for augmented sensemaking

  Latticework is a system that unifies annotation and freeform text editing for augmented sensemaking. It allows users to fluidly move between “foraging” through source documents and “sensemaking” in a working document, with interchangeable highlights, copied snippets, marginalia, and textual elaborations. Latticework uses a pane-based layout with bidirectional navigation and previews to help combat disorientation, and provides collapsible snippet links to manage working memory overload.

• The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite – The Scholar’s Stage
  • I love “canons” or other pieces of work that give a more cohesive picture. This might be a website worth creating
• Moriz Buesing - Greppability is an underrated code metric
• 2024.08.01 - Olympic Trans Scandal - Destiny’s Notebook - Obsidian Publish - What could notes look like? Destiny (Popular Streamer) shows how his sources look, which looks very similar to Wikipedia
• Jeff Hodges - Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods – Something Similar
• 1X Technologies | Safe, Intelligent Humanoids - Do I feel safe?
• Jim Nielsen - Sanding UI
• Jordan Cutler and Steve Huynh - My Tech Promotion Algorithm
• Forest Friends Zine
  • A digital guide for AI Engineers building the wild world of LLM system evals
• GitHub - anthropics/anthropic-quickstarts: A collection of projects designed to help developers quickly get started with building deployable applications using the Anthropic API
• Kenneth Friedman - The 2034 Website
  • What does long-term storage look like? Especially in the next 10, 20, 50, and 100 years? Can websites last that long?
• Jaana Dogan - Things I Wished More Developers Knew About Databases
• Gianluca Segato - The dawn of a new startup era
• How AI Disrupts Tech Investing - by Tomas Pueyo
• Ars Technica - Internet Archive’s e-book lending is not fair use, appeals court rules
• Ashwin Mathews - Hacking sales as an introvert
• Ted Chiang - Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art | The New Yorker
• Paul Graham - Founder Mode

Culture around the world

• How to say hello. Say hello, change your life. | by James Buckhouse | Medium
  1. Adjust your voice: Take a deep breath or two to drop your voice down from the squeak of social anxiety to its normal, wonderful, natural register. Your voice doesn’t start in your head, as we might imagine, it starts down between your gut and your heart with the pull of your diaphragm.
  2. Adjust your body language: Roll your shoulders back to pull your frame upwards and raise your gaze. This will shift your posture from the shape of a question mark to an upside-down exclamation point. You want to your spine look like (¡) not (?).
  3. Relax your face: Relax your face. You don’t have to smile if your mood doesn’t match it—a fake smile erodes trust—instead, just relax away your leftover facial tensions so you don’t accidentally send an expression of hate or worry or disdain to a person you haven’t yet met.
  4. Start adjusting before you speak: “Hello” happens long before you speak. We can tell from across the room when a salutation might soon occur. Start your hello adjustments (mind, body, voice, attention) sooner than later. A challenge: can you walk into the room already adjusted?
  5. Speak with curiosity: You can uncover something interesting about nearly anyone if you converse with curiosity instead of apathy, greed, mistrust, or resignation.
  6. Respond with an “I believe” statement: If someone asks you “what do you do?” resist the temptation to respond with your job title. Instead, respond with an “I believe” statement. Example:
  • “So, Jim, What do you do?”
  • ” I believe story, art, and design can bend the arc of humanity’s progress, and I try to bring that into everything I do: from movies to startups to paintings to books and to ballets.”
  7. Make eye contact: When you greet someone, look at the other person’s eyes. Do not look at their feet or your feet or the ceiling or the person behind them or your phone or your watch or your elbow or anywhere else. Eyes to Eyes.
  8. Ask questions and listen: After you introduce yourself, ask a question. Listen to their response carefully and ask a question that allows them to develop their idea further. You already know your own ideas, so why not focus on theirs? The conversation will be more fun if you uncover interesting ideas hidden behind the foreheads of others.
  9. Remember details for next time: Once someone does tell you something, store it away in your mind for the next time you meet. When you see that person again… a day, a week, a year from now… bring it up—so how was that trip to Spain? I remember it sounded wonderful… And weren’t you about to do something interesting at your Tunnel Drilling Startup?
• How Costco Hacked the American Shopping Psyche - The New York Times
  • Costco has hacked the psyche of the American consumer, appealing to both the responsible-shopping superego (“Twelve cans of tuna for $18!”) and the buy-it-now id (“I deserve that 98-inch flat screen”).
  • Ostensibly, Costco is a discount store, a place to save money and stretch your grocery dollar, but it is also an aspirational shopping experience, feeding that most American of appetites: conspicuous consumption.
  • Costco is revered for its high wages, attentive customer service and “deep commitment to integrity,” said Jeremy Smith, the president of Launchpad, an Oregon-based food brand incubator that specializes in placing products at Costco.
• How Navy chiefs conspired to get themselves illegal warship Wi-Fi
  • StarLink not to the rescue?
• MSN - The Friendship Paradox
• Logan Ury - Want to Improve Your Relationship? Start Paying More Attention to Bids
  • Bids matter. Bids are the “fundamental unit of emotional communication”, according to Gottman
  • a bid is an attempt by a person to connect with their partner, through verbal or nonverbal means.
  • Paying attention to your partner’s bids for connection is crucial for building a healthy, successful relationship
• Neal presents Printing Money
• Reuters - Fed might deliver upsized rate cut as US job growth cools
  • Sep 18th is the big date
• The Onion - ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happen
  • And A Brief History of Mass Shootings - By Maria Esther Hammack
• AlphaProteo generates novel proteins for biology and health research - Google DeepMind
• Highlight on songwriter Amy Allen - Sabrina Carpenter and Pop’s Next Gen Have a Secret Weapon: Amy Allen - The New York Times

Recommendations

• The New York Times - How Laurie Anderson Conjured Amelia Earhart’s Final Flight
  • I spent the morning learning about Amelia Earhart’s pacific trip. It is fascinating how much news still comes out today about her trip.