Craft By Zen by Jeremy Wong

• The Fairytale Narrative: Structured strategic planning
• Henry Kissinger, Who Shaped U.S. Cold War History, Dies at 100 - The New York Times
• The AI Founder Taking Credit For Stable Diffusion’s Success Has A History Of Exaggeration
  • If you want to read the article, take it to 12ft.io
• 44 memorable Charlie Munger quotes about life and markets
• Writing Documentation for Your House
• How I Use ChatGPT (As a Reasonable Person)
• A Tech Conference Listed Fake Speakers for Years: I Accidentally Noticed - The Pragmatic Engineer
• 23andMe hack now estimated to affect over half of customers
• Introduction to the Hare programming language
• BFI Sight and Sound 50 best films of 2023
• CSS Wrapped 2023

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.

Here are some links that resonated with me.

• Mystery respiratory illness in dogs
• The Roots of Today’s Modern Backend Engineering Practices - The Pragmatic Engineer
• An Extremely Detailed Map of New York City Neighborhoods - The New York Times
• Charles Munger dies at 99
• The Q* hypothesis: Tree-of-thoughts reasoning, process reward models, and supercharging synthetic data
• The Failed Commodification Of Technical Work — Ludicity
• The Rust I Wanted Had No Future - By the original author of Rust
• Reading List from Nice White Parents podcast

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.

• Effective Altruism vs. Effective Accelerationism, a Redditor explains
• 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
  • ELI5: What is 4D chess?: explainlikeimfive
• Navigating around in your shell
• Of all of the OpenAI drama posts there are (and there were too many), the only one I really cared to read was The End of OpenAI Hegemony - by swyx - Latent Space
• Reduce the noise, make space for progress - by Fran Soto
• File in Data Viz: GitHub - cxli233/FriendsDontLetFriends: Friends don’t let friends make certain types of data visualization - What are they and why are they bad.
• Films to watch: American Symphony (Trailer below)
  • 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
• Mysterious Respiratory Illness Affects Dogs in Multiple States - The New York Times - We keep an eyebrow raise for every cough our dog makes
• Writing as an engineer
  • As someone who writes a lot more documentation than I used to, I agree with the time assessment
• Engineering strategy notes. | Irrational Exuberance
• Software you are thankful for | Lobsters
• Electric Composter - Lomi

This is a personal list of links for Black Friday deals, 2023. As I find more, I’ll continue adding to this list.

I won’t be shopping in-person that day. Mostly, I’ll be finding any deals for anything that helps my wedding.

• The Verge’s guide to Black Friday 2023
• Black Friday 2023: The 75+ Best Early Black Friday Deals Available Now
• The Field Guide Black Friday Sale
  • Code: TURKEY1983
• Reddit: Dreamlight Valley - $42
• Black Friday Deals on PS5 Slim, Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch OLED, AirPods, and Gaming TVs
• Build your bundle: get up to 60% off Pip Decks
• Tailwind UI and Refactoring UI Get over 30% off when buying both products together
• The Pragmatic Bookshelf - 40% Off

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
• A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox
• A Guide to the James Webb Telescope’s View of the Universe - The New York Times
  • - An image of the Orion Nebula and the discovery of a new molecule in our galaxy not seen on planet Earth
• React Server Components, without a framework?
• Oh my poor business logic | Redowan’s Reflections
• The New CSS Math: rem() and mod()
• Seeing like a Bank
  • I’m always curious about seeing the world in different perspectives
• 67 Weird Debugging Tricks Your Browser Doesn’t Want You to Know | Alan Norbauer
• Can’t Think, Can’t Remember: More Americans Say They’re in a Cognitive Fog - Uh oh. When you think of the needle moving a percentage point on your demographic, that doesn’t appear good.
• Continuing the OpenAI leadership news, Sam and Greg accepted offers to join Microsoft. He will head a new AI research unit within Microsoft
  • The OpenAI board elected Emmett Shear to be the new interim CEO
    • Emmett is opening an investigation on what was the lead up to the board’s decision
  • Over 500 employees protested, asking to reinstate Sam and Greg. One of the signatories included Ilya Sutskever who was on the board.
    • He includes regrets about the board’s decision

• In other news, Cruise CEO resigns
• What the OpenAI fallout means for the rest of us? [[Shawn Swyx Wang]] has predictions
  • 
  • It’s also a reminder companies who have built their tech stack on top of OpenAI have it rough having the rug pulled from under them

Daylight savings is a pain. It’s 4

• Digital Nomads - Official Andalusia tourism website
• Mint is shutting down, and it’s pushing users toward Credit Karma - The Verge
  • I still get alerts from Mint, so this appears to be a task to add for future budgeting
• LA Times: Matthew Perry, ‘Friends’ star, dead at 54 | CNN
• Whole Earth Index
• Good conversations have lots of doorknobs
• Attenuating Innovation (AI) – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
• Episodic Future Thinking (EFT) - EFT is defined as “the capacity to imagine or simulate events that might occur in one’s personal future”.
• Drugmakers Are Set to Pay 23andMe Millions to Access Consumer DNA: Health
  • As one of those suckers who did one of these tests, welp
• Tyson Recalling Dinosaur Chicken Nuggets After Complaints of Metal Pieces - The New York Times
  • For one of the best selling products out there for Tyson, this one sounds like it hurts
• How AI fake nudes ruin teenagers’ lives - The Washington Post
• How Discord Can Serve Millions of Users From a Single Server
• Introducing GPTs
• 90-year-old Regal UA Berkeley theater to close after bankruptcy filing
  • 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.
• Laufey x Norah Jones + Christmas

Personal Notes

• 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
• 20 Years of SRE lessons from Google
• The Climate Denier’s Playbook - Podcast from Climate Town

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.
• This new genome map tries to capture all human genetic variation

It’s called a pangenome, and it could explain the DNA that makes each of us unique.

I’m super curious about the intersection of science and data visualization, so this might be something of a research area in my near term.

• I’m super curious when it comes to wedding tea ceremonies, as my wedding is coming up next year. I’ll probably be going to SF Chinatown, after looking at Photos: Inside a traditional dress shop in S.F. Chinatown.
• 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)
  • The top 7 software engineering workflow tips I wish I knew earlier 🧰
• An oldie, but goodie given I was doing a bit of research on what if I won that recent $1.76 Billion lottery
  • Congratulations! You just won millions of dollars in the lottery! That’s great. Now You’re F**ked - r/AskReddit
• As someone who lived in a house that had many elements of Disney themes, this article delights me in how Disney fans make Disney-inspired home decor feel like magic
• In lieu of the point above about systems, a tangent is the idea of mental models. Here are 10 mental models that make the modern world
• Netflix DVD is now over. However, I still love my physical media, even with storage constraints. Changelog recently did an episode on physical media and lamenting the golden age of films
• ‘Love Locks’ Left at Grand Canyon Draws Ire of Park Service
• I’ll log this in what “I didn’t know I needed to know”
  • How to Load a Dishwasher - Consumer Reports

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.

Sparked Interests

• The Stubborn Myth of “Learning Styles”
  • 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.
• Cloud Costs Every Programmer Should Know
• Desalination system could produce freshwater that is cheaper than tap water
• Work from Sardinia (Ollolai) - the €1 program. Anyone else interested?
• Talon is an accessibility tool for editing text using speech
  • And an extending library, Cursorless

• Making GPT-4 see: GPT-4V(ision)
  • This is known as multi-modal (additional modalities in which can act as input)
  • This is explored further by Chip Huyen in Multimodality and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs)
• Two UC Berkeley professors have clashed on Israel-Palestine. War led them to a joint message

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 would love to train an AI to teach dying languages. It was inspiring to see OpenAI use GPT-4 to help the Government of Iceland with this problem.
• Watched Martin Kleppmann’s talk from Strangeloop: “New algorithms for collaborative text editing”
  • Absolutely fascinating how he breaks down the algorithms in Automerge.
  • I had no idea Martin (et al) came up with the idea of local-first
  • For those who don’t know, Martin wrote Designing Data-Intensive Applications , which is like the bible for distributed computing.

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.

• Popular nasal decongestant doesn’t actually relieve congestion, FDA advisers say
  • This includes anything with phenylephrine in it, including Sudafed
• A Portrait of Tenochtitlan • 3D reconstruction of the capital of the Aztec empire.
  • It’s a really cool 3D reconstruction of what might have been the civilization at the time
• EWG’s 2023 Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce
• TikTok - Depression Support List
  • 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

• 3 Habits of Emotionally Strong Couples
  1. Assertive Requests
  2. Firm Boundaries
  3. Intentional Vulnerability

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.
• I’ve had Psyllium Husk on my counter for months, and I had no idea it’s attracted the Ozempic crowd. Priya Krishna write about A Centuries-Old Fiber Supplement Entices the Ozempic Generation. Maybe it’s time I open up my packets.
• I learned about the Merlin Bird ID app for bird calls

My dad fell from the roof. It was 10pm, Friday night, July 7th, 2023. It’s the call you never want to receive. I was getting ready for the dog’s last walk, and then go to bed. Instead, I rushed over to Highland Hospital in Oakland.

Initially, it all seemed the head injury he sustained was minor. He had a concussion and some bruising, which did not appear to be a big deal. Matters got out of hand on the second day when the nurse treated the family as if he knew better than the doctors. The nurse forced my dad a standing position, even as he complained of naseua and dizziness. There was a lot of confusion, and the nurse thought he knew better than to ask the doctor if my dad needed another CT scan ordered.

The next day, I got a call from the night nurse that the staff rushed my dad into the operating room. A surgeon performed a craniotomy on my dad. Within 24 hours, they stabilized his intercranial pressure and removed excess blood that pushed his brain to one side. It was a life or death situation, and we were all praying for the best outcome. He was intubated post-operation until the next day. Mentally, he appeared barely existing for the next few days. After being in the ICU that week, he was moved to a step-down unit, a section of the hospital that is less intense than the ICU, where he was under routine supervision for the next week.

Reflecting on the situation, I took a few things away that many care-givers should know.

Don’t take the nurse’s or doctor’s word. If someone you love is in critical care, you are the first observer, especially if you are there 24/7. Having family members help in shifts are really important, as you can cover as much time as possible.

Seek out the patient advocate. If things are not going well, like the nurse has become combative, every hospital has a patient advocate. It may take time to dig up their information, but having someone who truly cares for patient safety can be the difference between life and death.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Although I might be an outlier in the amount of medical knowledge I have, I still ask questions, even qualifying ones. It’s important to know which medications are administered and why. It’s important to know when the nurse shift change is. It’s important to know when your loved one will be discharged. Much of what I’ve learned in the last month has helped me navigate what shouldn’t be such a complex healthcare system.

When writing this, I assume the following.

1. The critical care facility is in the U.S. (California)
2. Your loved one is in a life or death situation
3. You have others helping you (makes it a lot easier)

I hope I’ll never have to come back to this note, but in the worst case scenario, I would have loved to read this advice.

📍 Location: Hayward, CA

Every weekend, I’ve been slowly moving to San Jose, so I haven’t been able to spend enough time with my hobbies and side projects. This website has seen a down tick in content, and I’m looking forward to writing more in the near future. Certainly post-move.

To spend the in-between time not thinking about code, I’ve been playing Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. We recently finished Cult of the Lamb, and it felt pretty special.

I went to the Figma conference last week at San Francisco Moscone Center, and it was a packed event. I’m excited to dive deep into more UX work.

In the late 2000s, Google Reader was my jam. The feeds were just beginning to populate, and I remember enjoying my social feed from MySpace and early Facebook. What I didn’t realize was how much I would miss the RSS feed aggregator once it was killed.

But why was Google Reader killed? The Verge wrote an excellent article going over the inception and ultimate demise of the website. It reminds me of the website, KilledByGoogle which chronicles over 200 products Google killed since its inception.

I was one of those die-hard Google Reader users. Once I caught wind of it, I immediately exported my data. I tried alternatives like Feedly and The Old Reader, but it didn’t feel the same. There were serious limitations, like limited subscriptions, unless I paid for the premium versions. And that leads me to a much more serious problem that I was facing: over-consumption.

The Feeds Take Over

I think I’ve been faced with this information over-consumption more times than I can count. If Google Reader started my addiction to short-lived information, then social media certainly made things much worse. My mind was craving the constant attention of an infinite scroll — a feed that will never stop. With Google Reader, at least I could control the RSS feeds that were coming in. I remember one time, I wanted to be informed by the world news events so I subscribed to BBC, but it backfired quickly to give me a deluge of distractable information. Facebook and Twitter feeds were no better. They started innocently but quickly turned into what an algorithm wants me to read. And that loss of control quickly turned me off.

In more recent years, I thought I could substitute this with email newsletters. What I quickly learned was email is no substitute for a personal feed. I was overwhelmed with 50, then 100, then 1000 unread messages. There were newsletter articles I was extremely interested in reading combined with many others I had no interest in. On top of that, when I needed to reply to an email, I’d be distracted by something I needed to read.

I’ve heard Cal Newport call this the “Hyperactive Hive Mind” in his book A World Without Email. What I’ve come to interpret this as is a constant need to be distracted without an off switch. Every single social media with a feed has given me this same problem. I remember the top three subreddits I would mindlessly scroll, the YouTube feed with an endless “Watch Later” playlist, and the email feed with newsletters left unread. What it always ended with was going cold turkey. Uninstall Reddit. Place time limits on YouTube. Stop reviewing emails for weeks at a time. It wasn’t a permanent solution.

Confessions of an Information Hoarder

Another thing Google Reader started me off with is information hoarding. Like copying a whole article I want to read to make notes and a summary about it later, but never returning to it. My Evernote became cluttered with many unrealized things in life I wanted to experience, but can’t do because there’s limited time. I’m reminded of tsundoku, a Japanese word that means “to pile up”. I have a pile of books that are left unread for the moment I can pick one up and start reading. For the pile of articles, the stack is so high, it’s a chore to go through and just find the articles I want to read. More time is spent sorting through the ones I know I should read.

Prioritization has never been a strong suit. I tend to spread out my efforts across multiple projects rather than focus on one. With reading, I’m the same way. I constantly have 2 or 3 books I’m reading concurrently. With articles, forget them. I have found when I rely solely on a feed to make decisions for me, I waste the most time on it.

The Rise of the “Slow Feed”

I talked at length about these problems, and minor band-aids on how I’ve fixed it. At the root of it, the problem is my behavior interacting with the feed. Unless the feed is short and filtered down, I’ll spend more time in it than what I think is normal (but hey, what is normal anyway?). So I propose the “Slow Feed”.

While I can’t stop myself from browsing feeds, there is a limit on how much I can save for later. The “Slow Feed” has a hard limit of 15 or fewer items, taking a lesson from the quick line at the grocery store. If I can’t through this feed, I can’t add more items. It means I must be very picky and choosy with what I consume.

I’m not didactic about the other feed though. To make it to the “Slow Feed”, it must be an article or video I want to “save it later”, go into my Readwise Reader feed, then go into my shortlist, which serves as my “Slow Feed”. I get the best of both worlds. I limit the time spent in the mindless scrolling portion (the endless feeds) and make time to read the longer articles. It’s like curing myself of FOMO, without really curing it.

Got any ideas on how to improve this? Email me and let me know!

Errata

I read The Information Diet by Clay Johnson years ago and may be time to scan it over and see if I can find other ways to improve this.

The book that prompted me to read more consciously is Chris Bailey’s book, How to Calm Your Mind, which has a section about anxiety in the age of information overload. As part of my “Year of Intentions”, this is one of the things I’m working on.