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.
Yesterday was my 34th birthday. It was a wildly unexpected year, full of twists and turns that I could not have seen coming.
How did the annual theme go?
The thought process behind my annual theme, the Year of Intention, was to make time more intentional. In Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman writes about the finite time we have. To balance out my active vs. passive time, in which you need both, I want to guard what little precious time I have. In a way, this is a scarcity mindset and one which I should remind myself of often.
Intentionality is planned focus. Meaning I focused my attention on specific areas of my life. After planning, there’s a phase of reflection, like reviewing the initial plan and how it went, doing goal setting and planning, and reviewing my energy management. In the past, I would like entropy to set in and stop planning altogether, drop my long-term goals, and let the energy demons enter. Demons may include procrastination, burnout, and being overwhelmed.
At the beginning of the year, I put a few things in motion.
Daily Reviews
Weekly Reviews
Monthly Reviews
Quarterly Goals
I thought having a lot of reviews would help me with goal setting, reviewing those goals, and avoiding crashing and burning.
So, the big question is, how did it go?
The short answer is not well. The longer answer is it went partially well. Daily reviews have been great. Weekly and monthly reviews crashed and burned. I did half of my quarterly goals. Let me dive deeper through a short detour on what happened this year.
Family Emergencies
This year will go down as one of the worst years when it comes to family. While I can’t go into too much detail in this area, I can tell you it was a terrible time for my parents. My aunt passed away last January and my father had a terrible accident. Both incidents left us in the hospital far longer than we ever expected.
Needless to say, both incidents left me extremely frazzled. As part of my theme, I wanted to leave my “Hyperactive Hive Mind”, but after half a year, I had it worse than ever. After being at the hospital for a full day, I would come home and crash by being on my phone. Quite the opposite of turning off for the day. And to put matters worse, I almost drove my partner insane by barely making enough time for our big move.
The Rest of the Year
While the family emergencies occupied my mind for a good portion of the year, many other things happened. Here’s a shortlist.
My work went through two reductions in forces (round of lay-offs). Luckily I was not impacted
We moved to San Jose
We checked out our first antiquarian fair
I got to catch up with old friends who I haven’t talked to in years
We checked out the Dandelion Chocolate Factory tour
We got to go to 2 musicals and an opera (see more in my logs)
Visited Christmas in the park for the tree lighting ceremony
Closing Thoughts
While 2023 will go down as a year to remember, I am hopeful for 2024. I’m going to get married! Also, I’ve taken a lot of lessons learned from a more intentional life and will be taking those with me in the next year. As I make those changes, I’ll reflect and write about them in the future.
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’ve talked extensively about my dad’s health issues
at length, so I thought it might be worth talking about other things that
I’ve been currently doing. It’s a new year, and I’m prepping more writing for
2024, including a first entry elaborating my yearly theme, the “Year of Renewal”.
I’m getting married this May! Most of my time is spent planning until then.
Otherwise, I’m chugging away working at Clear Labs, taking care of little Yuzu,
and finding any free time to have dates with my fiancée.
Little tired Yuzu sleeping on pillow
Reading
I’m currently reading “How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World”
by Deb Chachra. I absolutely loved her newsletter.
On that note, the next book after I finish that book is “Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles”
by Jay Owens.
Website updates
At some point, I plan on making a “curation” section, that will supercede my
“Lindy Library” and maybe collapse my books and films section. Undecided how it
will look. I absolutely love going to the library or bookstore and seeing blurbs
of small reviews, and I thought it would be lovely to show collections of found
items the same way.
Also, you may see more tiny projects on the website, much like my JSON editor of
last year. I’m loving Make Real, so I might use that
as a good prototyping tool.
Watching
I’ve gotten some kudos from multiple people about my media logs. I’m
continuing to log my media for 2024, hopefully more comprehensive than last year.
There are still some movies I’ve watched that I have to parse from my fiancée’s
watch history.
I’ve been playing with the Anbernic RG35XX Plus, and I absolutely love it.
I’ve been able to play games I haven’t gotten the chance to, including “A Link to the Past”,
“Final Fantasy II”, and many others. The emulation and controls are absolutely
everything I wanted, and more.
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 was listening to the latest Latent Space podcast with Steve Ruiz of tldraw. (You can watch the full video below).
What I was taken back by is the “Make Real” demo that included different approaches to using GPT4-Vision.
Of course, my first instinct was to play test it and see what I could make and where the limitations are.
As a part-time designer, I was curious to see a working demo of a wireframe I had in mind.
Demo
“Make Real” outputs in HTML, CSS, and JS (with tailwind), and I was able to cobble together this little demo of telling you the timezones based off of the selected input.
One thing to note is the component below is actually a Svelte component, which I created using ChatGPT to convert the HTML to Svelte.
And of course, I’ve made slight modifications so there are more timezones than the ones given to me.
System Timezone:
Selected Timezone:
Design aesthetic aside, this is a fully functional prototype that I could reuse and prettify.
With a little bit of coding knowledge, I can be off racing towards putting this in a production-ready app.
Of course, the way to make these modifications are easier if you have some implementation knowledge of what you’re doing.
Thoughts on Make Real
It’s not an career killer for front-end engineers. We are far from that.
Instead, these should be seen as tools to augment our work and allow us to spend more energy playing over mulling over small implementation details that might get changed later.
With each iteration, I was able to get “Make Real” to output different variations of the same idea, to really see what the realm of possibilities are.
There’s a balance though of giving annotations and adding or subtracting more to the drawings.
For example, when I asked it to give me 50 timezone selections from the most populated areas on the earth, it only gave me 10 items.
And even then, ChatGPT came up with TZs not in use.
In a different iteration, I wanted an explorable map.
When I asked it to give me a map of where this selected timezone was, it gave me a placeholder. Not so helpful.
The following is the video with Steve Ruiz, and I highly recommend watching it to see more.
Where do I think we can go from here
I haven’t tried state machine drawings yet, and I think that can help extend what we can do with drawings.
I also would love to explore what other people have done as helpful aids for the drawings to get GPT4-Vision to come up with something better.
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.
Season’s greetings! And for those who follow the Christmas tradition, a happy, Merry Christmas!
I hope you are all spending time with your loved ones, or thinking about them dearly. It’s the end of my very long and tumultuous year.
In my tough times, I wish I could see everyone again in some capacity. Life changes, our circumstances change, and friendships grow and drift apart. The paradox is that we are hyperconnected and missing out on each other in person. A train ride from San Jose to San Francisco is approximately 65 minutes. And yet it is hard for any of us over 30 to make a spontaneous plan to travel. And when distances span across states or countries, we find ourselves in a long text chain in one of seven apps on our phone.
In my current state of self-reflection and the beginnings of my annual review tradition, the word that has stuck with me this year has been “calm.” When things feel like they are at their worst, my borrowed mantra has been to “share your calm.”
Over the summer, one of the worst things happened. I got a call I feared: my dad was rushed to the emergency room. He fell from the roof while climbing down a ladder, leaving him with a bad concussion that led to a brain bleed. After surgery, being in the ICU, then hospital, then rehab hospital, then assisted living, he’s finally home after a long 4 months. For this period, I’ve taken a part-time caretaking role, and have spent more hours with him than any other time in the last decade. It’s been grueling watching him wax and wane on his road to recovery. Some days would be fantastic, while others felt like major setbacks.
One time when I was shuttling him, he mentioned he only wanted to remember the good memories, and none of the sad ones. It was like reliving the lowest moments of his life, like when his mom and brother died. I cried a little, and I’ve never heard my dad be so vulnerable before his accident.
As my caretaking responsibilities wind down, how do I redistribute that energy? I’m also asking myself, what do I have to accept? And what can I leave behind?
My dad’s injury reminds me our time and attention are precious, and we shouldn’t take those for granted. Recovery isn’t an end condition, but an endless journey. Have grace and patience.
If something I wrote resonated with you, or you just want to say hi, please reply. I miss you all, and I wish you a wonderful 2024. May our paths cross again soon.
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
