There’s a idea by Elle from doing postcards about making a note in her app about these themed ideas that then she puts like different media into to see how they fit well with those and I think that if we make a collection like that that would be perfect
It’s only mid-week, and I’m surprised by the end of the month closing in on us. Two months into 2025, and I feel exhausted. Both physically because of sleep, and mentally as I’ve been behind on my weekly updates.
Record (write or voice memo) all of your questions and observations. When done, ask everything to an expert or top-tier AI. Save the answers to re-read later.
The engineers are mostly young men (I found one woman - Alexandra Beynon). If you’re a woman, you’re the secretary, hiring manager, communications, or other non-technical roles
The terrible berating at the white house is the butt of all jokes.
This has been a catch-up week. We cancelled the dinner with Adriel, which I feel bad about. But in that, it’s been trying to rest up. Morgan and I are more seriously talking about kids, so I need to start my research. The world feels more and more ablaze.
Notes
It’s sad the complete carelessness and wreckage this administration.
Given developments at the Kennedy Center, effective today
I am resigning as artistic advisor to the NSO.
Not for me.
It’s been a wonderful 8 years working with Kennedy Center President Deb Rutter, fellow artistic advisor Renee Fleming, and the entire NSO staff, encouraging thousands of fresh new audiences to appreciate symphonic music. Mostly, and above all, I will miss the musicians of our nation’s symphony orchestra - just the best!
I have this folder in my notes app called “hyperspecific media collections”, where I find a specific mood or topic I love and compile a media collection. They consist of book quotes, song lyrics, paintings, and scenes from movies or television shows. I love the idea that all forms of art and creativity are intricately connected, and seeing these parallels and similarities allows me to truly appreciate art.
It feels like it’s been a long week as Susan asked me to help her with Money, and over the weekend we are having a dinner w/ Adriel. Morgan has been on campus 4 days this week, and it feels like far too much for her.
It’s interesting HuggingFace is using the 671B model to create a distilled model that’s more accessible. I’m curious when I can run one of these small models on my laptop
I’m compiling a list of why AI isn’t replacing the workforce and those other lies. It doesn’t happen as easy as this, and it’s not a 1-to-1 replacement (like the issues that we have without DBAs)
The third week of a presidency hell-bent on ruining our society. I think I’m starting to see the picture now. This week, we took a mid-week break to celebrate Morgan’s birthday. Well worth it, especially to spend an entire day together. The Italian food ruined our stomachs though.
Joel Hooks mentioned Durable Objects as a cloud machine w/ sqlite and a single server session for a single user sounds like a different paradigm. I want to test this out.
This is the vision underlying the technofeudalism thesis, which holds that 21st-century capitalism has been superseded by a new economic system overseen by Big Tech.
Curiosity Snacks - What I call “curiosity snacks” are small, intentional nudges that guide our impulsive curiosity toward learning, creativity, and meaningful discovery rather than mindless scrolling.
The second week into the second trump presidency, and it’s been miserable. There’s endless news on that. At home, we are starting to make sure we are prepared for the worst. The tariffs are around the corner, and there’s not much we can do about it.
Notes
The billionaires are pathetic. So are the men’s rights activists
Default ways, like libraries to use, which version of libraries
E.g. use esm, use typescript, stick to camelcase, use Svelte 5
Screenshots - you can pass along screenshots to help you, whether that’s the app or an image of a PDF, like tables. You can technically add PDFs as well
You can give it links to documentation, but this can be hit or miss
Refactor to separate files rather than refactoring existing files. This might be extremely useful for a large migration.
Good for React components to a different one, then maybe refactor the existing file to relabel as deprecated and use a deprecated flag
Use them to build quick projects. Doesn’t have to be big and fancy. Even a page to help you visualize the new Set rules
Which is great to segway to have them help visualize
Use it to experiment
Use it to branch out (git) and try different animations
Example: Wes created a fire dispatch tool to send out tweets or alerts when there are paramedics around and having it parse out that information to a stream people can easily consume
Midlevel staff are often the first targets of corporate downsizing efforts, but Meta’s plan to replace an entire tier of people with AI is a new wrinkle on an old story.
This is the last week Morgan is around at home before she returns to work. We stayed at home as much as we could as the cold weather makes coat and boots required. We also decided to push back our house warming to the summer when Morgan’s parents can attend.
I was looking through the calendar and contacts, in case I need to create vCards. And on what metadata I should save. Eventually, have LinkedIn scrapper. Maybe have public vs private pages?
Love First is a framework for transforming your reality in a way that benefits all areas of your life, making you feel more connected to your best self, your loved ones, and the world around you.
Some good news for today: There are mall marriages because of the number of same-sex couples who want to be married in Thailand now that it’s legal.
What the author is noting is there are no climate refugees because we are all at some climate risk, which is made worse with climate change. He lived through the 1978 fires where his father would hose down the house in case the nearby fires spread. It’s also an ode to the Palisades. Also, there’s an action plan at the end on how to be more fire resistant.
I read through this and am convinced Matt Mullenweg is on some trip no one else wants to be on. To rip apart the ideals of open source and make things more closed to the community tell me his own ideals have shifted.
I’m curious about this video. Novati no longer works at Meta. He is credited for the most number of commits, which should always be taken with a grain of salt. I’m sure they will talk about develop productivity.
Mostly a return to work this week. We ended the week going to a vinyl night at our local coffeehouse. And doing yard work during the weekend, leading up to the housewarming.
Notes
I’ve discovered a way in Obsidian to make it possible to create these notes much easier using a feature called transclusion. That’s where you can link the contents of one note to another.
I found a redditor who did this for their monthly review reviewing the summaries. I’m hoping this weekly review process helps me out.
Birding! I loved Ed Yong’s XOXO talk that I wanted to read through this article and get started with birding.
Yong talks about how to be a public persona both online and off-line. How do you behave and act around people who are trying to reach out to you? How do you mute them all because it can always feel like a floodgate?
Khan Academy now has a financial literacy course that I want to take!
This comedian reflects on how much focus time is spent on social media work like reels, shorts, and TikTok. That’s a full time job instead of working on the art (comedy in this case)
I took a slow dive into RISC-V, which use an architecture that Framework is spearheading. If true, this could be huge in making modifications in the future where we only need to upgrade a little bit at a time. And can still be performant for a work machine. More to come.
Add this to the Zuckerberg Czar comment, and we’re right on track. I’ve heard it before and I’ll echo it again. Facebook doesn’t care about our privacy or trying to do good. That’s a fact. They are in the profits business.
“How I program with LLMs” - which helps me with understanding how I could be using LLMs as well. Really, there’s three ways this developer does it: autocomplete, search, and chat-driven programming. I already do all of these, and it’s nice to see someone else break them down. Authored by David Crawshaw, co-founder of Tailscale
This is to remain no need features in 2025. I love the attitude. htmx doesn’t work for all use cases, but it sure has made it easier for prototype development
The DJI store has this camera, the Osmo Pocket 3, which focuses on you. Costs around $868, might be good to save up for in the future. Looks really cool
James Altucher writes about writing down 10 ideas a day. I think I used this for Idea Generation in the past. I don’t think generating ideas has been my shortfall. It’s the necessary follow-up required.
Flexoki is this color palette generator of sorts that fits with the Tailwind scheme of 50 step increments. The output is specific to prose and code, so the colors are simply put for those aspects.
Human, Being is all about exploring and celebrating what it means to be human. I (hi 🙋🏻♀️, I’m Erin) share musings and reflections, grounded by over a decade in the health and wellness space and guided by my insatiable curiosity about the human experience, on how we might be able to make the most out of our time here on Earth.
Movie: Flow (2024) - no dialogue animation that follows a cat that has to survive a flood. Along the way, the cat meets some other unexpected animals to face the flood. Warning: some sadness with animals (mostly no deaths, if you are worried about cats or dogs dying)
I’m documenting my quest to start a tiny bookshop on a cobblestone street in a quaint hill-town in Umbria. Narni is a place of long, light-filled days, birds crying overhead, cats napping on warm stone. It’s a magical city where dreams feel like they might just come true.
Its the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025! I’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 to—you guessed it—kindness and generosity.
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.
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. I’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 can’t do, read, consume everything
Sometimes the boring stack is better. Rogério talks about different project make-ups and how it’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 isn’t going to necessarily replace in you
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, there’s “doing Elon’s bidding” 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 isn’t supposed to be relatable. But their public persona is what really bothered me.
Last week note of the year. Which I’m making public on the last day of the year.
Writing takes a lot of work. Building up the notes are also a lot of work. I’ve been expanding my usage on how to create better notes that can help with the overall writing time.
Thanks for the AI
Turing Post might be one of those AI websites to follow
In the book on how to read a book (Mortimer and Alder), here’s some strategies they employ:
Underlining - For me, it’s highlighting the lines that resonate with me
Vertical lines at the margin - Honestly, this isn’t something I run into for underlining a multi-line passage because highlighting using a digital book is a lot easier
Star, asterisk, or other doodad at the margin - This is the step after highlighting to determine which pieces of highlights continue to resonate after the first insight.
Numbers in the margin - Originally to indicate the sequence in which an argument is developed, might be a good notation for anything subsequent enforcing an argument.
Numbers of other pages in the margin - This is making reference to another highlight. Some people use Cf to be a “compare from”. It’s a reference mark.
Circling of key words or phrases - This serves much the same function as underlining.
Writing in the margin, or at the top or bottom of the page - the words or notes around the books. This could be questions and answers (like Oxford notes), the major points, reflections, related to other pieces of writing.
I finally bought Anki, and looking at different ways to make the flashcards better. I’m at the rote memorization phase of learning Mandarin, so I’ve been figuring out what content to put on there, especially to help with grammar, word position, and vocabulary. I’m starting to graduate from words to coming up with my own sentences.
I’ve read a good chunk of Cal Newport’s books over the years. He breaks down his own interests in The Tao of Cal
Make Care Packages
I love the idea of creating care packages for friends and family. Christmas shouldn’t be the only time you create gifts for people, so maybe call them care packages instead.
And on that note, I love themed gifts. Here’s the one my wife and I use
Something she needs
Something she wants
Something to wear
Something to read
Show me your home library
I came across a video breaking down the largest home library. I wasn’t aware of the Loeb Classical Library, or other collections of the sort. The hoarding mind of mine would love to have a complete set. But who am I kidding. It’s enough I have a good set of Criterion Collection films.
Speaking of books, I have been recommended Nick Milo’s “How to work a book”. Here’s a short write-up of what to expect from the one hour course. Books are for thinking, not reading
I really love the depth Simon Willison goes into details like this where I’ve heard the debate from different angles and how he’s able to consolidate them. Storing times for human events
TimeMap.org - World History Atlas - This has been an interest of mine to control the timeline and understand a map better. Or any other incident. Scrubbing, as they say.
This is really interesting, creating an adventure game given the text of the book the author wrote about the fingerprinting system used in crimes back in the 1910s. I would love to simulate some other scenarios from history. Apparently, the author has done the same thing for the cuban missile crisis.
Costco says bye bye to books
To be clear, they are going to still have books during the holiday season. From what I can tell, the previous buyer for Costco retired, and this might be one of those consequences.
The world is more dangerous than we know it. Thank you, crypto bros
Where’s Your Ed At?
Ed Zitron’s newsletter, “Where’s Your Ed At?” is absolutely worth the read. His latest newsletter, Lost In The Future, has an insightful reflection on the Trump win, and the sentiments we all feel.
When a clown enters a palace, the clown doesn’t become a king, the palace becomes a circus.
— Turkish proverb modified by Elizabeth Bangs
I love collecting quotes. The first one came from another newsletter that I needed to read the original poem. The second is a reflection of the current state of things.
When you need to brighten up your day
Thank you Elmo for going on Chicken Shop Date (even if he eats veggie nuggets)
Doctors vs. AI
Okay, the title is clickbait-y. What we’ve noticed is if you put your symptoms with an LLM, there’s a likelihood it could get your illness diagnosed, but of course, don’t actually call it a diagnosis.
There’s been a bunch of back and forth with shuttling our things out of our old apartment. As such, I have not been taking as many week notes for this week.
PSA
The Atlantic - Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula - I mean, I definitely grew up with them and used them throughout college until moving over to silicon ones. When one melted, I “noped” out of it.
Where is the balance between how much we capture and how much that we capture is useful?
Some notes are returned to on a recurring basis, like cooking thanksgiving meals
For all things digital, the heuristic is to store it in archive, as loss aversion leads to regrets if the file is lost forever. Examples: lost photos, notes, etc.
Newsletter - Depths of Repair - Untangling the barriers that make finding genuine connection and growth so difficult. Strategies and tools presented through raw personal stories of failure, resilience, and unearthing our best selves.
This was election week. And frankly, one that was a hard pill to swallow. There are a range of responses, but I’m going to keep my head down as we move into our new place.
Practice = Purpose + Frictionless Systems + Consistency
— Source Unknown
Last week felt weird. Like a strange Halloween that was misplaced. I was heavily distracted by election news this week and have been putting off the previous week’s notes.
I’m continuing the week notes format like I did last week with topic-based notes. It seems to be helping me get acclimated to stop organizing everything.
Expect more election news next week as I get caught up.
We address four major areas of cultured meat research and development: establishing cell lines, cell culture media design, microscopy and image analysis, and bioprocessing and food processing optimization.
Progress is good, but progress slowed around 1970. Nobody knows why, but theories include shifting social attitudes, over-regulation, or exhausting the potential in a few big inventions like electricity and mass production. This slowing was a great historical tragedy.
I changed up the format last week. In a way, it’s a little more freeing because I don’t have to group everything with like things, necessarily. Plus, it gives me a chance to play around with looser organization.
With everything we have to move, most of my time and efforts at home at spent on that and not on the blog. Which makes sense - life sometimes has other priorities.
My general rule is to go to one in-person conference a year, if possible. I’ve certainly met my quota this year with !!Con. There are some I think I want to go to next year if possible, but of course, travel is a lot of work too.
This came up because there’s this YouTube channel I started exploring about going to speed running every BART station stop. The current time to beat is 5 hrs 10 mins. I created my own wiki page to see how crazy this is and where people have attempted these riding challenges. Turns out, there are so many. Also, this book is a reminder in creating challenges for ourselves.
Time tends to move both fast and slow as you are purchasing a home. This is our first home, and I can tell it’s been a whirlwind of emotions all around. When there’s a serious need to provide documentation, we have been on top of things. When it’s on the other end, waiting for the loan officer or underwriters, it feels like a snail crawl. That said, yesterday, we closed on our home. We got the keys handed over to us. It’s an exciting landmark moment. And I wasn’t expecting to be this tired. But here we are, and life’s moments got in the way of releasing any week notes.
With that reflection, it may be time to pair this down quite a bit. I loved the past year of sharing an incredible amount of links, reflecting on the week, giving my daily notes to breathe back into me. Too often, we are tirelessly scrolling through an endless feed of passive, yet wanton, feed that fuels the monkey brain. It’s as if we can’t turn off the addiction to our devices and has an incredible pull for us. We can’t go to the restroom without our devices. We can’t sleep without them. The always-on nature of it makes it incredibly hard to listen to our natural circadian rhythms.
I’m not saying let’s return back. I’m not sure we can. We let the genie out of the bottle, and I don’t think there’s going back. But what does forward look like? I’d like to craft a space where forward are the things that matter the most. With that, here are hand-picked items that I’ve run across this past week, and are worthy of putting in the “read later” category, and stick to it that later means concentrated, but still passive, consumption.
They are in research phase. To Be Born in a Bag. It’s crazy stories like this that make me wonder how did we get here and when will it be available. And also, the biomedical side of my brain runs through all the risks and challenges you must pass through.
Home Buying Process
Mortgages have been on the mind. And Freddie Mae has caught me up in mortgage rate trends over the past few decades.
Also, we learned the Underwriting process is essentially to QA everything. Check out the leins on a home and rectify them.
Hurricane Milton
The unbelievable nature of disasters strike close to home again where my in-laws live. The New York Times reporting Fears of Hurricane Milton Drive Millions From Their Homes in Florida. It did make landfall and did cause havoc. Thankfully, my in-laws are okay, and the state had to reel from two major hurricanes in the span of two. That’s unbelievable.
It’s made me think back to the article earlier this year about loneliness and the amount of work it takes to keep up friendships in the US. The lack of third places and the way we treat community feels more of a reciprocal give and take.
This was the second week of 100 days of note-taking, and it’s been taking time to loosen up my writing. I’ve been mulling over personal problems to global ones. Otherwise, I wrote a newsletter, which has more personal updates.
Last week, I deployed a website called Make 50 Things. I’m proud of taking the first step, but there’s so much more to do on this website, including adding webmentions, adding my own 50 projects, making it open for others to add their own 50 things, and to make a linkroll of all of the 50 projects other people have created.
I took the HTML 2024 survey and learned a bunch of things, like the File System Access API and forms within dialogs
I finally setup Hyperkey. I didn’t realize they had a setting called “quick tap” option that re-maps it to escape. Finally can open up opportunities in keyboard shortcuts!
It sounds like I should use AI with my obsidian vault. Or the very least with a notion so that I can find things that I couldn’t find years ago. Samantha search versus AI search seems to be the differentiator.
the new model could work its way to a correct (and well-written) solution if provided a lot of hints and prodding, but did not generate the key conceptual ideas on its own, and did make some non-trivial mistakes.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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 (?).
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.
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?
Speak with curiosity: You can uncover something interesting about nearly anyone if you converse with curiosity instead of apathy, greed, mistrust, or resignation.
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.”
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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?
Last week, I finished Burn Book, which I ahem burned through. I found myself wanting to read faster when I borrow the book from the library. Shout out to Libby! The book introduced me to a play from Spalding Gray called “Interviewing the Audience” that I would love to watch a recording of, if they exist.
Ultimately, we want to maximize quality time spent reading long-form documents, not substitute for it.
Daniel Doyon, Readwise July 2024 Updates
Do The Hard Work That’s Required - AI is not a shortcut. Do the reading. Do the things required. Don’t think that AI will just make something great.
AI tools should help you do the hard work that’s required to make something great; AI tools should not replace the hard work that’s required to make something great.
Harvesting problems have straightforward solutions and no shortcuts: You just get a big basket and pick every damn strawberry in the field. You solve these problems with pure perseverance, slogging away for weeks, months, or years until they are done.
Some problems are like fishing. You know that there are fish out there in the ocean, but you don’t know exactly where. If a great fisherman knows where the hungriest fish are and how to set their lines just right, they might catch everything that they need in a few hours. Fishing problems can sometimes be solved shockingly fast by motivated teams with a bit of luck.
Some problems are like panning for gold - going out to a river or stream where there might be gold, getting your pan out, and seeing if you can find traces of the shiny stuff in the sediment. If you find gold, you can become generationally successful - think of the massive moats created by Google Search or the AirBnB network.
Select | Dasel - CLI tool for selecting and updating JSON, CSV, and other one file data files
I feel like creating a page that collects these book collections.
Around the World
Collab Fund - Fill The Bathtub - With all of the BS we are fed today, we want to get the facts and for politicians to tell it straight. Hence the term, “Fill the Bathtub”.
I was listening to the Good Food podcast, and I am frankly appalled there’s a scalping market for restaurants. But of course, it’s not a black and white issue. But still, this shouldn’t be the case.
If you haven’t heard, Mike Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain died within. a week of each other after both being acquitted from fraud charges. The coincidence is telling but also tragic.
Each entry on this list of common misconceptions is worded as a correction; the misconceptions themselves are implied rather than stated. These entries are concise summaries; the main subject articles can be consulted for more detail.
Meredith Arthur in Beautiful Voyager presents a three part series on “The Ultimate Stress Relief Cheat Sheet”
This week marked a transition with my PKM where I made huge updates to my vault thanks to the Ideaverse v1.5 migration.
I’m slowly migrating away from the PARA flow, although it will be a long time until resources and archive are going to be migrated
A huge lift is thanks to some script automation that Claude has been helping with. Many scripts are going to be saved and added to my magic sand repo.
Currently Reading: Burn Book, by Kara Swisher. If you live in Silicon Valley and have wanted to know inside baseball with the elite who are in the area or are influencing the area, this is the book to read.
The UK sent out a decree in the 1850s that stated protein is the only nutrition that matters affected the landscape of what Britain’s ate. The slaughter of animals meant that there was a huge push to try to transport livestock to the cities transitioning to dead stock, this is had a crazy amount of effect. No one anticipated these early globalization efforts.
Nate Irwin’s team made the first digital National Park Service maps. We sat down to understand how they transformed the visitor experience one map at a time.
Do Quests, Not Goals - We should pursue “quests” rather than “goals”. Quests are personal adventures that change us, while goals are just practical attempts to change our circumstances. Quests involve overcoming internal obstacles (“dragons”) and lead to personal growth and life-expanding rewards.
Intel’s financial results were very poor, with declining revenue, margins, and earnings.
Intel is planning significant job cuts to reduce costs.
Intel’s turnaround plans are still in the early stages and have not yet shown significant results.
Intel’s failure to diversify beyond its core x86 processor business is seen as the root cause of its decline.
My Failed Personal Site Redesign - Jim Nielsen’s Blog - Jim Nielsen describes his failed attempt at redesigning his personal website. He was inspired by the comic-book style of Anh’s website and the large “DAVE” hero text on Dave’s homepage. He went through several iterations of the redesign, experimenting with hand-drawn comic strips and different layout approaches. However, he never got the design to a point where he was fully satisfied, especially on mobile.
Ultimately, he decided not to ship the new design and instead kept his existing website. But he archived the work he did as a blog post for posterity.
The first Fitbit was designed for women, with a clip-on form factor that could be worn discreetly on a bra. The founders faced challenges in developing the step-counting algorithms and manufacturing the device, but the first Fitbit shipped in 2009.
Locality of Behaviour is the principle that the behaviour of a unit of code should be as obvious as possible by looking only at that unit of code.
— Carson Gross on talking about htmx
A new version of Ideaverse Pro came out and I spent the weekend configuring it. It’s up now, and I’m getting used to having my setup change. While there’s the obvious changes, like the new theme, there’s more subtle changes, as treating some maps as collections.
SQLite actually has a CSV mode, and in-memory mode. And then it also will take queries directly from the the command line, so you don’t have to go into like little SQLite UI, and do things from there.
React Conf 2024 made me realize that the Apple Event Summary Slides are called “Bento Slides”. I updated the note to reflect that.
This week has been quieter than other weeks. I’ve been doing less reading, fewer news articles, and honing in on more deep reading. I’m still enjoying Baldur’s Gate 3 with my wife. We have not been tuned in to House of the Dragon’s latest season. And somehow I have not been sucked into the spoiler zone either.
Knowledge Management is usually a core component of organizational learning.
Knowledge Management at Goddard is About People
Knowledge Management is “better application of collective knowledge to the individual problem. So we need to develop some systems and do a little more work to share collective knowledge and make us smarter.”
Social Media Can Enhance Learning (but relationships matter) > Learning in Public is Hard, but Worth It. If you share what you know and what you don’t know in the middle of a project, you give people an opportunity to share specific knowledge that can help you in the moment. If it works, this can help save time and money.
I’ve certainly been in this trap before. I still think about what I want to build vs. trying to sell that idea first
The only way to get a true signal in these conversations is to sell. By asking for money you shift from the niceties of a social conversation to an economic conversation, which activates a part of the brain in buyers that you care about: whether or not they will part ways with their money to use your product.
There are three types of closure that are key to understanding emergent phenomena in complex systems
Informational closure: The lower-level details do not provide any additional information for predicting the behavior at the macro level.
Causal closure: The macro level is self-contained in terms of causation - the lower-level details do not provide any additional control over the future behavior at the macro scale.
Computational closure: The different levels of the system are hierarchically organized, with each level being a coarse-grained representation of the level below it. This nested structure allows the macro-level behavior to be predicted using only information at that level.
New research suggests the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 virus behind an ongoing bird flu outbreak has the unprecedented ability for efficient and sustained mammal-to-mammal transmission.
The implications for this is huge! Potential mutations arise out of that could result in adaptation to mammals, spillover into humans, and potential efficient transmission in humans in the future!
David Perell interviews Harry Dry about copywriting. Harry’s website Marketing Examples is a trove of interesting copywriting to entice your customers.
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
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.
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.
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
Sometimes, I feel like the news is ramping up the demise meter by forcing down our media consumption one terrible news cycle after another. What started with an deluge of pieces to replacePresident Biden from the race and ending with an assassinationattempt of FormerPresident Trump. In the chaotic nature of news makes me feel nervous, like there is no stability in our world. Entropy wins, and we can’t expect more than chaos. But there’s optimism inside of me, knowing there is a better future, which we have to make changes in the present for them to be realized. Dare I say, manifest.
That said, maybe it’s the heat that’s getting to us. - Death Valley reached 129 Degrees. This heat dome was enough for me to stay inside or to go to the pool. Stay cool out there!
Technological change often happens gradually, then suddenly as key thresholds are crossed.
AI models are rapidly improving and crossing key capability thresholds, making them more useful tools.
Tracking AI’s evolving capabilities through an “impossibility list” can help understand its rapid progress.
Also, if you haven’t used Claude’s artifacts, it’s helped me quite a bit with generating diagrams (mostly in mermaid since it’s compatible with Obsidian’s markdown flavor)
A great write-up about Enhancing The New York Times Web Performance with React 18 by Ilya Gurevich from the New York Times about using the new APIs from React 18 and how that migration went. As I’ve worked in this before, it was interesting how existing interactive elements had to be re-worked with a different script. It’s fascinating what the Times does to keep up to date with these frameworks.
When I talked to the Cooking team about how they keep recipes, it’s apparent to me how much Engineering effort they take to make sure it’s all running smoothly.
Changelog take: He goes on to back this conclusion up with five bullet points and a list of devtools that are succeeding with no/minimal DevRel staff. In conclusion, DevRel is not dead, but ZIRP DevRel is. Folks need to adjust accordingly.
With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody. Hyrum’s Law
Mr. Inhofe opposed abortion, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, health care legislation and campaign-finance reforms while supporting the death penalty, gun rights, counterterrorism powers, offshore oil drilling and constitutional amendments to require balanced budgets and ban flag desecration
My own interests this time around is to write a story I know a ton about - film history and preservation.
To add to my watchlist is “The Beast”. I love the Sci-Fi concept of living past lives, and this sounds right up my alley. I think I really want to write a Sci-Fi thriller that goes through past lives. I know there have been similar veins in “Everything, Everywhere All At Once” and Matt Haig’s “The Midnight Library”. If you love these kinds of movies and books about alternate realities, let me know. This may be the premise of another short story I would love to write.
Around the blog
I’ve made some updates this week in terms of content and quality of life. This includes all curation posts in one page. Adding the full timestamp on the bottom. Adding the author to all blog posts. And fixed some cover images on some book posts.
I read somewhere comparing AI to the Internet boom from the 90’s. Except there’s a major difference: Cost. To train AI models and the cost to compute takes a lot of GPUs, of which it’s hard to innovate. These consulting firms feel like they are selling slightly better workflows but certainly not 10x the output.
Newsletter - Tim Leffel’s Nomadico - covering tips for working beyond the office, and living in motion. It’s his coverage of digital nomads, remote work, travel hacking, van life, FIRE, learning journeys and more.
Robin Berjon writes The Public Interest Internet. I’m preparing a post talking about the Internet’s last mile problem, and a lot of that has to do with the infrastructure behind it.
NPR - Caesar salad turns 100: It was born July 4, 1924 in Tijuana. Although the birthdate is quite contentious as the creator might have been traveling around this time. It didn’t debut officially in the restaurant’s menu until 1926. The location where it was originally served claims to serve the recipe, although modified to include anchovies. Certainly I’ll travel to Tijuana and try it out.
Educational
Chris Woodford’s Explain that Stuff which covers 400 articles about how things work. Especially good for Home Schooling those STEM topics.
Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos are back with a short film called The Second. From the duo who made the YouTube series, “Every Frame a Painting” and a segment of VOIR. Also, they made some excellent segments on FilmStruck (RIP) and some extras on The Criterion Collection.
Movie poster for The Second
Currently Logging
Continuing “Dave the Diver”
Continue campaigning with my wife “Baldur’s Gate 3”
I’ve changed the process in how I write these by placing all of the day’s note into this note and curating out the pieces that are clear they won’t make it to these weekly notes. It’s due to the random things we look up on a day-to-day basis that don’t matter on the weekly cadence. And it goes to show how much we leave out once we are done with our curation.
Personal Learning
I’ve been trying to understand jscodeshift as React 19 is around the corner. With the help of Claude (and a little of ChatGPT, although their model was a lot worse) to explain how to crawl the AST. I wrote a stream about the trouble I went through
Recommendation comes from Sophie Fuji, who wrote “The book recounts how tourism took off in England. It concludes with the evolution of tourism from travel ‘regulating imagination with reality’ to ‘regulating reality with artifice’”.
Be a cycle maker, not a cycle breaker
— Jatee Kearsley, owner of Je T’aime Patisserie Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Video
This idea of forgoing cycle breaking to making new cycles, like being the first grad to your family, or running your own business. Jatee talks about being the first business owner in her family, and I loved her enthusiasm and spirit.
Reflection - I’m using these weekly notes to remind myself what I’ve been reading and consuming over the past week and reminding myself why these things are important to me. I’ve felt myself being pulled in too many directions, and the heading in this note help me understand what overall topics are interesting me as of late. Hopefully I want to string these together into more cohesive themes that I can thread from week to week.
Because of [Google Maps] global scale, even a small shift in maps routing from a seemingly-innocuous (and frankly very useful!) feature could create a reinforcing feedback loop with spatial inequality. Inadvertently diverting foot traffic from low-income streets to high-income streets takes revenue and potentially tax dollars from already struggling communities and funnels it instead to richer communities.
Thread by @kaseyklimes
A long piece I found worth reading as a DevBootcamp grad. Ben breaks down the issues with ISAs and the background with BPPE, as well as management at Lambda School / Bloom Institute of Technology and their untrustworthy CEO.
Jenny Nicholson - The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hote
Someone mentioned in the comments how much research she’s done in this experience and how that service has already flopped. The amount of research into this topic is nuts.
I use my Obsidian Daily Notes. Each of those daily notes are reviewed on a weekly basis (hello Weekly Notes) and may be added to its own Obsidian note. Sometimes they get added as Streams.
Book: Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. By Nicola Twilly. Amazon
An engaging and far-reaching exploration of refrigeration, tracing its evolution from scientific mystery to globe-spanning infrastructure, and an essential investigation into how it has remade our entire relationship with food—for better and for worse
Book: Simple Marketing For Smart People: The One Question You Need to Win Customers without Gimmicks, Hype, or Hard Selling. By Billy Broas and Tiago Forte. Amazon
I started this book this week
Book: How to Baby: A No-Advice-Given Guide to Motherhood. By Liana Finck. Amazon
That’s more than just parroting back what you’ve already seen. I think that these models don’t just parrot back what they’ve seen. I think that they’re able to extrapolate beyond what we’ve shown them, to recognize patterns in the data and apply those patterns to new inputs that they’ve never seen before. Definitively, at this stage, we can say we’re past the stochastic parrot hypothesis.
Stochastic Parrots hypothesis
The claim of that paper is that these [models] are just repeating words back at us, and there isn’t some deeper intelligence. And actually, by repeating things back to us, they will express the bias that the things are trained on.
what does stochastic mean in AI?
In AI and machine learning, “stochastic” refers to a variable process where the outcome involves some randomness and has some uncertainty. It is a mathematical term closely related to “randomness” and “probabilistic” and can be contrasted to the idea of “deterministic.” Stochastic processes and algorithms make use of randomness during optimization and learning, which allows them to avoid getting stuck and achieve results that deterministic algorithms cannot.
Brightwave shared some tips on leveraging LLMs as Judges:
Human vs LLM reviews: while they work with human annotators to create high quality datasets, that data isn’t just used to fine tune models but also as a reference basis for future LLM reviews. Having a set of trusted data to use as calibration helps you trust the LLM judgement even more.
Ensemble consistency checking: rather than using an LLM as judge for one output, you use different LLMs to generate a result for the same task, and then use another LLM to highlight where those generations differ. Do the two outputs differ meaningfully? Do they have different beliefs about the implications of something? If there are a lot of discrepancies between generations coming from different models, you then do additional passes to try and resolve them.
Entailment verification: for each unique insight that they generate, they take the output and separately ask LLMs to verify factuality of information based on the original sources. In the actual product, user can then highlight any piece of text and ask it to 1) “Tell Me More” 2) “Show Sources”. Since there’s no way to guarantee factuality of 100% of outputs, and humans have good intuition for things that look out of the ordinary, giving the user access to the review tool helps them build trust in it.
It’s been clear in the last year that the half-life of a model is much shorter than the half-life of a dataset
Coming out of vacation is hard to transition back into the normal routine gears. As such, it’s the end of the week and I haven’t reviewed my notes from the previous week.
I lost my sense of smell, known as parosmia?, and it completely threw me off guard. And by losing your sense, you notice the hidden ways you use your nose. Like detecting smoke, cooking, and tasting food. Or the smell of the outdoors like petrichor after it rains.
I’m trying something new with this week’s format. It took far longer to create, so I think I might scale it back next week. Let me know if you like this better.
For those who are curious, my system is Inbox Ten. That means I aim to end every day with fewer than ten emails in my inbox. I also have fewer than ten open chat threads across all interfaces. I’ve also read all relevant notifications in internal tools, read all relevant posts in internal groups I care about, and started rough drafts of any relevant proactive communications I intend to produce.
— Boz
Amateurs, in contrast, are not certified as knowing. They may or may not know, and their “knowledge” may or may not be trustworthy, but they are always seeking. They are striving to know, in their own ways of knowing, ways that are meaningful to them but may or may not be meaningful to others. Amateurs are always learning, never at a steady state of knowing.
— Peter Gray on his newsletter, Play Makes Us Human, writing “In Praise of Amateurism”
After a month long break, we’re back! The reason for my absence is I got married! 💒
At the altar
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
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
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.
With the protests happening on US university and college campuses, I want to give some time and pause to reflect on what’s going on nationwide. There’s a lot of political discourse and turmoil over the past month, and I might mix some politics with the next few weekly notes.
Note: this week and next week my notes might be late due to some last minute wedding planning.
A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering (Matthew Green) - A quick post on Chen’s algorithm. A primer on Chen’s algorithm for quantum cryptography, although as of this writing, a bug has been discovered within it.
A checklist to setup for larger projects by Alex Kladov - Basic Things
Nadia Asparouhova writing in Asterisk - Manufacturing Bliss. I read her book, Working in Public. This seems to be a wildly different article about jhanas meditation and some Bay Area practitioners. Interesting read.
I’ve become a lot more cognizant of how those first six words might be the only thing that show up in the notification panel on their phone, so I need to make sure that those words are a succinct and accurate overview in their own right.
This past week, I’ve been busy at work finishing up loose ends for the next major project. At home, we’re three weeks left until my wedding. We’ve got all major purchases out of the way for the event, as well as booking tickets to Maui for our honeymoon. 💒
The golden visa program brought Spain billions of euros in investments. But property prices paid by rich foreigners are well beyond the earning power of locals.
Today, I have my caps lock key remapped to escape. Hyperkey is an interesting proposition to have the cmd + option + control + shift key down at the same time to unlock more shortcut keys. I’m tempted.
This goes beyond site incident reports. I used to do this for testing as a quick way to determine if we had any weird testing debug outputs. But of course, Sentry bugs should fall under this too. We need to write this in.
No Mercy / No Malice - Prof K on Ketamine Therapy and Ketamine Seizures
I’ve been enjoying micro-blogging a lot more than I anticipated. It lowers the barrier for writing a quick post and sharing it. An essay is something that is a much heavier lift, and goes through many edits before I publish.
I didn’t realize where we were with AI-generated music.
Besides the Fuzzy Search, VSCode also now has locked scrolling when you have two windows side by side
I’ve been listening to the podcast, Shit You Don’t Learn in School. There are a lot of gems, especially around finding business ideas. I might take the patent one at some point
Also, if anyone would like to collaborate with me for a potential business idea brainstorm, let me know
There’s a waitlist for Ali Abdaal’s Productivity Lab. I’m debating it
Last week, I launched the Stream which I’m proud of. I finally have a short space to write things down quickly and post to the website, rather than the longer posts for my essays. It all blurs together as I work on different output types. At some point, I want a more robust content funnel for writing. Or somewhere I can see the progress of different writing pieces visible on one dashboard.
Honestly, I didn’t know there was a community called Web of Weeknotes that posts on Medium and gets picked up by this filter. Right on. I stopped posting on Medium after everything got locked up in paywalls. I don’t feel right having to make people pay for a platform they don’t own. I thought freely writing on a platform means you should be able to share it with anyone. But then again, this isn’t Blogger or LiveJournal of yesteryear.
What’s interesting is when they mentioned the two party system in the early 1900s was not all that much different.
Progressivism wasn’t a thing yet, or was still its own party
Presidents were giving people jobs. The merit system wasn’t a thing yet either. Robert Moses wanted to enact a point-based system (much like how we use algorithms today)
Open-source intelligence (OSINT) is intelligence collected from publicly available sources. In the intelligence community (IC), the term “open” refers to overt, publicly available sources (as opposed to covert or clandestine sources)
By 2013, Netflix had begun entering into a series of “Facebook Extended API” agreements, including a so-called “Inbox API” agreement that allowed Netflix programmatic access to Facebook’s users’ private message inboxes, in exchange for which Netflix would “provide to FB a written report every two weeks that shows daily counts of recommendation sends and recipient clicks by interface, initiation surface, and/or implementation variant (e.g., Facebook vs. non-Facebook recommendation recipients). … In August 2013, Facebook provided Netflix with access to its so-called “Titan API,” a private API that allowed a whitelisted partner to access, among other things, Facebook users’ “messaging app and non-app friends.”
Honestly, I’m not depressed. I remember Austen Kleon’s book inspired me to read more obituaries. There’s some notable people (and throw in an aspect of design) that have passed away this past week.
The 2 pillars of strong relationships: High expectations and high support.
…
High expectations are the belief that the other person is capable of excellence, that their potential is only limited by their own views. High support is the ability and willingness to provide the love, support, and engagement to help the person meet those high expectations. Both are necessary to achieve a strong relationship.
— Sahil Bloom
Notable Videos
I didn’t realize how relatively new this all was with our switch to Natural Gas. And how much we’re shipping. This “bridge” seems quite permanent to me.
Instead of vertical format, which classes might tend to be presented with, you rewrite your concepts and smaller shots, especially when there’s a lot of information filled out to you lecture. This might be really good for understanding how to better study, especially when you go back to memorizing things for an exam and you Have to get better at the studying part of studying prepare for an exam
I did a really big re-write of my contacts in my personal rolodex, which I covered as part of a blog post I wrote recently. I was thinking about dissecting this further and exploring what next avenues to do with that. I was super curious what other people had to say about this topic, but it led to further discussion about how it relates to sales and marketing for their business. Or focuses on a specialized tool, like Monica. I have a few notes about this that I could also share as well.
In other news, my sleep has been destroyed again by springing forward for Day Light Savings, and I can’t seem to get to bed at a consistent hour. And I’m out of shape, as proven by running and biking again. Going full speed after stopping for a long interval was not a great idea.
Notable of the week
Gleam - Gleam is a friendly language for building type-safe systems that scale!
Running on the battle-tested Erlang virtual machine that powers planet-scale systems such as WhatsApp and Ericsson, Gleam is ready for workloads of any size.
I went through the language tour, and for the most part, it was straight forward. I learned about tail calls as recursion is used for looping.
Results are another thing I can’t really grapple with yet. As well as the left-handed arrow syntax for use, but I’m sure if I work with some Erlang, it will make more sense.
My mind has been wandering into thinking about how to stop the short-term, quick release, distraction hobbies. It’s a hard addiction to break. Very likely this will be a longer journey than a month of my “year of renewal”.
We rush because we’re late. We also rush because we want to move quickly away from discomfort. We rush to come up with solutions to problems that would benefit from more sustained consideration. We rush into obligations or decisions or relationships because we want things settled.
I’ve caught myself in a rush of “what is next” rather than ask myself “where am I at”. It’s this pull of not wanting to know how bad things are. Like what’s the status of my health? What’s the status of my relationships? My family? My obligations? Instead, I find myself numbing out, distracting away from the real problems. Of course, it’s not a rock bottom. It’s a functional state of just bearable enough to see where I’m at, then go back into my doomscrolling activities. It’s not healthy.
To counter this, I’m placing some mindful practices. Sprinkle them where I can. I started a new note called my North Stars, or guiding principles. They help me with heuristics in choosing one things over another. Like producing over consuming. Engagement over distraction. Little mantras that can help me escape the distraction loop.
Through Sunday, the life-threatening storm dumped over 7 feet of snow at Donner Peak, an 8,000-foot summit in the Sierra Nevada mountain range, the weather service said.
USA Today
1-bit Large Language Models (LLMs) focuses on the innovative approach of quantizing model parameters to ternary values to achieve efficient performance comparable to traditional 32-bit models.
We explored the rationale behind moving towards smaller, more efficient LLMs, driven by environmental, economic, and deployment considerations, and the potential for these models to operate on consumer hardware.
Through analogies, we illuminated how quantization and stochastic quantization work to maintain model performance despite reduced precision, akin to summarizing a vast collection of books into single sentences that capture their essence. These discussions underscore the balance between efficiency and performance in the evolution of LLMs.
Yuzu - Switch emulator (and hot on a lawsuit w/ Nintendo, although. the case could be weak because you have to bring your own encryption key)
Summary: The podcast transcript explores the concept of intentionality in depth, as discussed between the host and their guest, Serena Collier. Intentionality is presented as living life with purpose, direction, and a conscious choice to pursue what one truly desires. It involves having taste, standards, and a vision for what one wants their life to be, alongside the determination to achieve it despite potential setbacks or failures. Practicing intentionality means creating a personal set of standards and desires, and actively making choices that align with those standards and desires to shape one’s life according to one’s personal vision. It’s about making deliberate decisions rather than going through life passively, and it requires resilience, tenacity, and a willingness to confront challenges and discomfort for the sake of personal growth and fulfillment.
There isn’t much to update. This has been a slower week for me.
I’m thinking more about making small spaces online, and I’m thinking more
holistically about what that philosophy means to me. As well as gathering examples.
If you run a small website, reach out to me about how you’re treating your small
communities and how others can benefit.
I’ve been pretty active with the website updates. I thought it might do me a little good to start adding a short changelog to the website. This sounds like it will be different than my now page.
Around the Website
Re-arranged the tags so it is better formatted in-line with the published date
I’m also coming up with more ideas of what to do next. I’m thinking about doing a microblog inspired by Linus’ stream. I’m getting inspired from “From Jason” Where Have All the Websites Gone and how he thinks we should trade in our linktree links with things that we like on the Internet. Hell, if I think about my own patterns, they used to be on curated link aggregators.
Episode #171 of Have You Heard podcast: The Damage Done - There’s a large discussion happening about public education right now, and teaching to the Common Core. It’s not pretty, and makes me think hard about sending my kids to public schools
I tried talking to ChatGPT today and using voice as an input. While learning Mandarin might not be there yet (the AI voice doesn’t recognize tonal languages as well), I can see it being good for my Spanish.
Solidifying my Weekly Review Template has been extremely useful. It reminds me what’s important and what’s not, and putting the reasoning as to why I put a task on my weekly review.
I found a YouTube short about this woman who lost her job, and her reaction was to be happy. Like of course it’s going to garner views, and she even admits it’s not the normal reaction people have to being fired.
I’ve become a huge fan of Jillian Hess’ newsletter, Noted. She distills what she’s learned by reading some of history’s favorite note-takers (and contemporary)
For all of these little hacks, I place them in a separate note with the title of the device. Our Crosley record player stopped spinning, and all I had to do was move the needle to the right
A rabbit hole I fell into was the history of the Fillmore in San Francisco, and the legacy of Bill Graham
One thing I was browsing through were the old concert posters for Fillmore West. The psychedelic poster art from Wes Wilson are just phenomenal, especially if you grew up listening to Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, and The Grateful Dead.
Custom GPTs could be to build a technology tree visually connected to an infinite canvas app (parked idea)
“Rencontrer” is a meeting with the new. Remembrance is the comfort of recognition.
— Esther Perel
Last week, I learned there are three curiosity attractors. Curiosity Attractors are the recurring fascinations that you can’t shake, whether active or latent.
Epistemic curiosity refers to your desire to learn about the world and resolve gaps in your understanding
Empathic curiosity relates to your interest in connecting with others, understanding their perspectives and experiences
Diversive curiosity is that fleeting urge you sometimes feel to explore something new just for the sake of novelty, with no clear goal in mind
Curiosity attractors also often intersect with parts of your identity. We go back to questions that fit with our personal values and worldviews
— Anne-Laure Le Cunuff
I learned from Scott H Young that from these three models of learning, the model that appears to be best fit is based off differing prior knowledge. Even for a beginner, they do learn a lot, even if it’s still not as much as someone who came in with a lot of prior knowledge (and they get benefit too)
I’m planning on making a short post updating what my weekly reviews are looking like, updated for 2024.
Every year or so, I’ll review my existing template and see what should be modified. It takes me a few times to get used to the format, many more months of thinking about what’s working and what’s not, and making slow incremental improvements. Look out for that soon.
Also, as mentioned last week, I spent some time updating my newsletter service. I migrated from TinyLetter to Buttondown, which you can read here.
It touts itself as a Search engine alternative w/ AI
Initial Impression: It’s got promise, but isn’t very fast.
After a week: I don’t think it replaces Google. It’s great as an alternative. Some things I’d rather still Google, and I’ll probably write-up something about it
A group of Israeli scientists wants to send a giant sail into space to block a portion of solar radiation. The shade in this artist’s rendering is enhanced to illustrate the concept.
The YouTube algorithm said, it’s time to get into Chess, so that’s what I dived into this week. I was introduced to Anna Cramling, whose YouTube videos were really interesting to think about the moves as they were happening real-time.
I remember one of times I visited New York and seeing the Chess Hustlers in action. There’s something fascinating about trash talking while playing a game of chess, like in many other games like Poker or Hockey. There’s also this intellectual pursuit of watching openings, mid-game, and end-game material that’s just a wealth of knowledge, vs. studying tactics, which as a teenager appealed to me.
Anyway, I want to start playing again. What’s your favorite way to play chess, online or offline?
Over the weekend, 23andMe sent out a notice of data breach
Based on our investigation, we believe a threat actor orchestrated a credential stuffing attack during the period from May 2023 through September 2023 to gain access to one or more 23andMe accounts that are connected to you through our optional DNA Relatives feature.
Containers didn’t just lower the cost of shipping—they all but eliminated it. Transportation costs became negligible, no longer a barrier to worldwide distribution.
— Deb Chachra, How Infrastructure Works, Chapter 3: Living in Networks
I’ve been taking a slow burn reading Deb Chachra’s new book, “How Infrastructure Works”. It’s the book I wanted The 99% Invisible City to be. It’s a nice compliment to it, and dives deeper into the idea of how networks dominate our everyday lives in a (sometimes) hidden way.
At some point, expect this book to be in my book list.
Also, a quick update about the website. My library will be changing. I’m working on a “Curations” page that will replace it, as I want to extend it to be a gallery of found things. It’s like all of those tiny European museums that have trinkets and things, but in a more digital, meaningful way. And if you have no idea what those are, maybe I’ll write about it in the near future.
I’m absolutely smitten with the idea of escalating streaks. It’s something I’m keeping a note of for my “Year of Renewal”
I don’t know what my obsession is with micro-niche articles like THE CHAIRS OF DOCTOR WHO (1963 – 89). My ex-roommate did her final paper on the history of chairs, and it’s one of those hidden household features. Even more fascinating is what people in the past thought chairs in the future might look
Every time someone brings up the argument “X” job will be displaced by AI, I think about how AI has to be maintained. This article is a good place to start. It’s Humans All the Way Down - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
I’m calling my 2024 the “Year of Renewal”. I’m going to write up a blog post about this soon, as well as monthly challenges along this theme. At least, that’s the resolution.
I hope you all have a wonderful 2024! Thanks so much for reading my “Craft By Zen” blog, to be 10 years strong in this coming year. I’ve saved a few things to read this winter break. Here’s some good reads.
Also, my fiancée’s article got published! Go check it out!
I’ve taken holiday with my fianceé’s family house in Florida.
We’ve had a wonderful Christmas week, and taking this time to rest after a very active year.
I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season and a new year.
Post-Thanksgiving week was “short” in the sense that I was getting back into the swing of things. It’s that holiday slump period where you don’t care for more to happen. For me, the period marks a sense of reflection. Time to go outside in the cold and take a hard look at what this year has been like.
Thanksgiving holiday was this past week. I’m thankful for making through this hectic year, for friends and family going through the best and the worst, and for a loving partner. We’re taking this time of year to relax and take it easy.
Scott Adams (Cartoonist who produces Dilbert) write in his blog about how persuasive he sees Donald Trump. I can’t find the exact post, but he mentions how Trump is playing 4D chess against all of his opponents who don’t know his next moves. Trump supporters use this to boost their candidate. Source
At some point, I want to do a short review of “Between Two Kingdoms”, which chronicles Suleika’s journey in healing from her Luekemia, and the parallels I had with my father’s ongoing recovery
2FA Directory - I didn’t know there was a directory for 2FA / MFA. I’m certainly going to review this
I use a version of a resonance calendar, but it’s more like what sparks. I put it in my notes, wait a day, and see if I’m still interested. Time is usually my best filter.
The idea of a Resonance Calendar seems to have come from the community surrounding the notetaking app Notion, but awhile back I adapted it for my own uses and I’ve found it really useful as a casual periodic practice. The idea is to keep track of and reflect on the various things that you read, watch and listen to. I used to go back over what I read and review the summaries I wrote about why I bothered, but I fell out of the habit as my pregnancy progressed.
Eleanor Konik
Still Tasty - a website to find out what’s spoiled and what’s still good in your fridge
The announcement came earlier this year. As someone who loved going to these three theaters, UA, Shattack Cinema, and California Cinema, in Berkeley throughout the ’90s and ’00s, this was heartbreaking.
I remember seeing Lord of the Rings: The Twin Towers at the UA after school, and it was magical. Something about not having these theaters for the next generation breaks my heart
I also distinctly going to see Spirited Away at Shattack Cinema, and remembering how Miyazaki movies instill magic into them.
I’ve put my dad’s 30 day notice for senior living in today. He’s ready to go home around Thanksgiving time. He’s ready to go him.
My dad’s health is generally okay. He’s having some skin problems at the moment from not putting on enough lotion. His hygiene is terrible, and we are wondering if he needs to shower every day. He also is not shaving. We had dim sum yesterday, and are ready for other caretakers to help take care of him.
His recovery is stagnant. We want him to interact with more of the people. I’m starting to create a recovery team for him so he has support
Back to your regular notes
I’m looking into a way to embed songs to Obsidian so I can link a song. I might use a YouTube embed in the meantime.
Here’s a note I wrote about my LYT showcase.
I recognize perfection is the enemy of good. And the way I’ve wanted to present my work is hardly how it looks when I’m in the middle of the idea. In my writing, first drafts hardly resemble the published draft. And even the published draft may be upcycled to other ideas. I’m very happy to see many other students embrace the mess
We are back in our regular rotation. LYT Workshop 12 wrapped last week, as I mentioned in the previous week, so expect this to be more regular.
I’m finally getting back to doing a quarterly review, a month later than I would’ve hoped.
NaNoWriMo is starting this Wednesday, and I’m planning to participate. I put my Project Page up for everyone to see.
At work, we’ve been chugging along working on next product requirements that’s hush hush here
As some people are aware with my father, we’ve followed up with PT this past week where he can start walking supervised without his cane, which is a win all around.
I’ve been returning to this idea about systems, and when I encounter new ones (tagged: experimental), I try to incorporate them in my own workflows and see if they mesh. Most do (I’m looking at you, GTD)
Missed last two weeks, as I’m going through the LYT workshop. I decided to cease publishing anything until I complete it.
Now that it’s the last week, I’m turning my attention back from my PKM to this website again. My goal is to publish once a week. 🤞🏼
Therapy Remark
Share Your Calm
This really resonated with me when talking with my therapist. In times of others’ stress, it’s easy to get caught up in the moment and take that on yourself. Instead, take a moment and show your calmness, rather than echoing the stress.
Freewriting sessions
When I kept up my journaling experiences for a decade, some days, I’d let it all out on paper. Take my thoughts and feelings and let them bleed on paper. Sometimes I’d come up with barely anything. Other times, I’d pour my heart on the page.
I’m going to return to this practice because it’s a form of practicing my calm (tying the previous point back in). I’ll take a short amount of time, 3 minutes to be exact, and do the work in my journal.
Filed under “Challenge what you believe”, this was kind of an eye opener. Sometimes, I want to say I’ve read the evidence and find it very compelling. But I didn’t. I was in a staff development meeting when I was teaching at a Prep school, and we had to work in groups telling each other what learning styles we were.
I’m back from the very last Strangeloop and from visiting my cousin for her baby shower in Las Vegas. I forgot how it feels to do non-stop traveling back-to-back. Reminds me of the time I traveled across the US, then hopped on a plane to South Korea.
I took this idea of “Weekly Notes” from Jamie Tanna who I met at Strangeloop, and I thought this would be a wonderful recurring segment for the blog. Even if I have low readership, this is a nice capsule to look at for my monthly, quarterly, and annual reviews. 😁
Derek Sivers updated his post on Tech Independence, where it’s a single command now
DALL·E 3 - [[OpenAI]] updated DALLE where prompt engineering is needed much less. Positioning is a lot better, with context
There’s a new map style on OpenStreetMap.org! The Tracestrack Topo map from @tracestrack.
I’ve decided to share things that I’ve found throughout the week, curating for you. You will find things that have caught my attention, notes that I think are worth exploring, and thoughts that have been perculating.
Now the list is there for us to add to, revise, and to refer to! He feels more supported and capable in being supportive and actually helping and I feel more supported and, less depressed!
@sharon.a.life
Now the list is there for us to add to, revise, and to refer to! He feels more supported and capable in being supportive and actually helping and I feel more supported and, less depressed!
♬ original sound - Sharon.a.life
Get used to the bear behind you.
— Werner Herzog’s 24th and final maxim
I heard this quote on a podcast in respect to creating. While there are things you can’t control, it’s your attitude to it that matters the most.
Also, Justin Welsh has written enough where his “new” content is really an update to his old content. Hence, having a 730-day content library. I would love to aspire on my ideas like this, and refine, refine, refine.
- An image of the Orion Nebula and the discovery of a new molecule in our galaxy not seen on planet Earth
