Craft By Zen

Unsplash image from Jazmin Quaynor showing a weekly calendar
Unsplash image from Jazmin Quaynor showing a weekly calendar

šŸ“– 9 min read

šŸ”– weeknote   AI   relationships   news

2025 Week 01 - Weekly Notes

Its the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025! Iā€™ve changed up how I do daily notes, and in part this will change my weekly notes format. The unstructured version of daily notes means I should make it easier on myself to publish this.

Science says lasting relationships come down toā€”you guessed itā€”kindness and generosity.

News

Some random news stories this week

Notes from the week

A night dinner of pastas. It would be great to run this.

Latent Space talked about paper club during NeurIPS. This conference is for PhDs to talk about their research, especially in the ML and AI space.

This post is rehashing an earlier one about learning AI. Itā€™s updating with what to learn now with the past 6 months of AI updates.

I read a bunch of items from Derek Sivers again. Mainly because I re-read Directives and wandered around recent writing. This was one and there was another contemplating end of life matters.

Iā€™m not sure why I was thinking of Strong Towns again. I certainly want to write down the main thesis. Also recap the book

A redditor made a few Obsidian Themes. It looks pretty good on MacOS.

Iā€™m working on using Anki, and this came up while I was figuring out how to craft flashcards.

Ashley Stimpsonā€™s ā€œAwestruck,ā€ featured inĀ Johns Hopkins Magazine,

As 2025 starts, there are many listicles that start appearing. Hereā€™s one that seems quite interesting for [[CSS]]

I used Fish years ago. Interesting it is now 4.0

There are some old homes in the UK for a small price but look spectacular.

In electromagnetic signals from our brain, the rate of input might be slow, but thereā€™s also a benefit.

Thereā€™s a mental model or principle lying somewhere inside of this. We need to check.

Good to keep up with trends and predictions. Although, we know predictions arenā€™t always right. Understand the basic assumptions

I think it would be great to create a default app list, not the ones you want it to be.

Worth re-looking at unemployment trends as I may need to look for another job in 2 years.

The people list of some importance. Worth checking through, although it would be great to see profiles of each person

I love this as sometimes itā€™s not the big things we find joy in, but the little joys like re-learning Python. This is worth looking at.

I think it might be worth subscribing to Bluesky or Mastodon and trying out some of these blogging events, take ā€œBlogventā€ as an example

Spotifyā€™s plot against musicians

David Brooks writes about what the religious experience looks like.

Criterion Collection has a wonderful collection in their publication, ā€œCurrentā€, from this past year

Using a Raspberry Pi 5 to showcase a mini-computer build called Pilet

David Cain experimented with the year of depth back in 2017. I want to read more about how this affected him. Iā€™m going through one of these types of years to really slow down and understand things deeper, not as much as I can. I suffer too much of that and the [[2025 Year of Capacity]] is acknowledging I canā€™t do, read, consume everything

Celine Nguyen wrote about calendars and this specific design was interesting. It made me think about that full calendar and how to really visualize it

Simon Willison summarized his year with LLMs and is kinda a great voice in consolidating and synthesizing what it might mean

There are home hackers that are creating their own magic mirror. This would be an amazing side project.

Hereā€™s an AI article that I didnā€™t read.

Tim Urbanā€™s idea of a controlled dopamine hit makes a lot of sense to me. Maybe this is how we slow down.

Rounded up resources regarding Ollama

Sometimes the boring stack is better. RogĆ©rio talks about different project make-ups and how itā€™s difficult to find the right balance while the product makes money.

A software developer is more than their code ability. Addy Osmani talks about the other type of skills that AI isnā€™t going to necessarily replace in you

Switching from casual to real usage, I want to understand actual workflows. Authored by Fernando Borretti.

I read this blog post, and it irked me. I dug a little deeper, and making bold statements without understanding the repercussions make me resent I was reading this at all. Sure, thereā€™s ā€œdoing Elonā€™s biddingā€ with the new DOGE, but it goes way deeper than that. The need to continue hustling (i.e. hustle mode) vs. taming the ego really showed here. This person was putting out their thoughts, so I understand this isnā€™t supposed to be relatable. But their public persona is what really bothered me.

This is specific to analytics on AWS pages. We should see what they are

I probably should look at this soon and try it out. Not a someday build, but in the learning category. [[Someday Topics]] may need a different note

Something to look at for longer term prospects for work

Simon Willison goes through why itā€™s probably not companies rushing to turn on your video or microphone

Data Visualization awards. I forgot about this, and maybe I should collect them in my vault?

Where in the world to go to. Not as comprehensive as the 1000 places to see before you die, but yet a good thing to review.

I think if I did my 100 days of note-taking Iā€™d feel better instead of skipping out once we had house stuff to deal with

The new 2025 list has been released

Recommendations

Obits

Former President Jimmy Carter dies today

By suicide. Really sad. Way too young.

Written by Jeremy Wong and published on .