The court filings in the past case painted Nicholas as a ruthless entrepreneur who slipped drugs to competitors without their knowledge, who threatened the lives of employees he believed had turned against him, who had the means and motive to flee beyond the reach of justice in his private jet.
His start was in researching ICs, and later that’s what Broadcom sold. He was given awards for his research. He’s like a walking contradiction, trying to save his name with his philanthropy while making wildly bad decisions. File under downfalls.
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”
It’s always fun when the MDN documentation doesn’t tell us what the options are within the methods page, I you have to dig deeper into the constructor. The TypeScript bindings don’t always make sense.
Anyways, I needed a datetime string with the date, time in hours and minutes, and the timezone. I’ve made the timezone explicit and came up with this snippet.
Chicago is known as the windy city, not because of its wind, but because of its terrible politics. That said, if you visit between late September to April, bring winter wear.
Also, some of my information may be out of date. I lived in Chicago for the summer of 2014, and went back for a week in 2015 and 2017. I would love to make plans to come back.
Where to Stay
If you’re looking for a cultural area to stay in, Little Village is known for Chicano culture and was highlighted in a talk Morgan and I went to at her sociology conference
I’ve stayed in Lincoln Park, Lakeview, and Skokie
Lincoln Park is a rich area, so if you’re willing to pay more for a nice lake view, that’s a great area
Lake View is the neighborhood from the TV show “Family Matters” with Urkle. It’s next to Wriglyville, so if you’re looking to stay next to the ballpark and a bunch of nightlife and bars, that’s where it’s at
Skokie - Unless you are going to Evanston where Northwest is, or have any business being in the suburbs, there isn’t much to do
Other notable areas
Logan Square - if you’re looking for a multicultural neighborhood full of community, nightlife, food and drinks, this is the place to be.
Boystown / Northalsted - a great LGBTQ+ community much like the Castro. During pride month, there’s a lot of celebrations
one of the most country’s inclusive LGBTQ+ communities and the oldest officially recognized gay neighborhood in the United States. It’s known for its welcoming vibe, nonstop nightlife, LGBTQ-owned businesses, and excellent dining options. It’s also the center of some of Chicago’s most popular events and festivals.
Avoid: South Side, unless you’re going with someone who lives there
Exploring
Chicago is super walking and transit friendly. Since the city sold their parking meters to a bank, it’s super expensive to park around the loop (i.e. the downtown and Millennium Park). I recommend CTA’s L Train to get most anywhere you need to go and walk from there. If you stay in any of the above, there’s a huge chance the L will run near it.
Cultural and Seasonal
I already mentioned Pride month. During the summer, you’ll find block parties as well.
Music is huge in Chicago, whether that’s music festivals like Lolapallooza, Riot Fest, Pitchfork, or checking out the House of Blues, and far too many music venues to list.
There are so many cultural enclaves when you explore Chicago.
Chinatown - I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it. It’s certainly not bay area big, but it’s notably big for the mid-west. Again, that’s not saying much as I thought this should have been bigger. I’ve had dim sum here as well as a haircut, and they were pretty comparable to the Manhattan Chinatown. But not Flushing. That’s a whole lot bigger.
Greek - I accidentally stumbled into the greek festival, and they’ve got their own community. Also, My Big Fat Greek Wedding takes place in Chicago.
Polish - I was surprised how prominent polish people were in Chicago. I had my first Pierogis here. I think I went to Polombia, which combines Polish and Colombian food.
Ukrainian Village - I didn’t know this existed before. I’ve been meaning to check it out
Little Village - I mentioned it in the places to stay. “La Villita” is also worth exploring for the art, food, and nightlife.
If you’re a comedy fan, there are great live shows from Second City. There are many prominent names who’s come out of here, including Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Tina Fey, and Amy Poehler.
If you want theater, they have their broadway and off-broadway shows as well.
Year Round Places to See
Navy Pier - Like Santa Monica Pier, and less dingy than Coney Island
Field Museum - I loved this museum. Sectioned off into many exhibits. Worth it.
Art Institute of Chicago - I’ve heard a lot of good things from others about this, but haven’t been myself
Logan Square
Millennium Park and the Bean - during the summer, I recall they have movie in the park. Of course, you can get up close to the bean
The Waterfront - If you love running, this is probably the best place to run. It runs adjacent to Lake Michigan, and is quite a site to view all of Chicago’s skyscrapers
Foodies Beware
Chicago is a food hub for some serious high-end restaurants, as well as some great local staples. Since you have to reserve far in advance for some of these, I’ll leave the high end ones at the front.
Alinea - Chef Grant Achatz’s innovation to modernist cuisine has been universally praised. It’s a restaurant where the kitchen is far bigger than the dining area, and they have limited seats per night.
As an aside, they also have off-shoots, like cocktail bars called the Aviary and The Office. I’ve heard great things about this
Girl and the Goat - Chef Stephanie Izard’s restaurant known for its roasted pig’s face. If you’re seeking a restaurant known for cooking with the whole animal, it’s this place.
Honestly, I can’t list them all, so here’s a primer list.
For more common day food, Chicago has a lot to offer.
If you’re looking for that Chicago deep dish, the easiest place to find it is in a chain of restaurants called Lou Malnati’s. Order ahead, as it may take up to 30 minutes for them to bake it. There’s of course a ton of other options. I know on my list to check out is Burt’s Place where they serve it to you in the pan.
The other prominent Chicago-esque food is the Chicago Dog. I personally don’t care for it as much as others do, but if you like this pickle hot dog contraption, check out Fastso’s Last Stand. Also, other places.
Resources
Wikivoyage - Chicago - I think WikiVoyage has some great breakdowns of major metro hubs. Chicago is very diverse, and you should get to know its different neighborhoods before going. Setup a short itinerary as it can be a lot to take in.
If May was a happy time in our lives, then June erupted with a rude awakening. My wife and I caught COVID for the first time, which is surprising we didn’t catch it sooner. The first week hit me hard, the second week I lost my sense of taste. It was the weirdest thing as I was cooking some stew, I felt lost without my sense of smell. I know there were some viral moments during the pandemic of people showing how they could eat the weirdest combinations, and it was bizarre, but that seemed like a blip in history. When I lost my sense, it dawned on me how much we rely on our olfactory to navigate the world. I burned a candle and couldn’t smell it, convincing me if I was in a burning building, I’d have to rely on my sense of touch over smell.
I was mostly recovered by the third week. I dread anyone suffering through long COVID. Let me know how your COVID experience went if you’ve caught it. And if you haven’t, my goodness, keep it up.
Yuzu in front of Mission Santa Clara
Crafting Around
After a short hiatus, we are back to posting my weekly notes.
Sometimes, you’ll see me posting on my personal stream. I’m thinking of adding Webmentions to the website so I can tie these into federated social networks. If you have experience around this, please let me know 😀
On my “build list” is a small AI app to allow students to ask questions about their class given their syllabus. I shared my notes about RAG understand the topic.
Boz breaks down his system, Inbox Ten. “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.” Personally, I try to stick to clean my digital house weekly via a weekly review.
“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.” Some of the ethos in this blog is to have a beginner’s mindset, and this piece of writing embodies that by Peter Gray on his newsletter post, In Praise of Amateurism.
Nadia Asparouhova explores jhanas. “Jhanas are like swirling the paintbrush of your consciousness across a palette of altered sensations. These states vary in intensity; some are comparable to psychedelics, MDMA, or dissociatives.” I’m extremely interested and will be diving deeper.
Kent Beck writes “Make the Change Easy Then Make the Easy Change” in his post Hinge.
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’”.
While both are true, I would rather have the shorthand, as that’s what we have strictly for eslint rules. This Github Issue helped describe the solution on how to implement in your transform file.
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.
where 7382225350710824222 is the video id you get from TikTok from this example link: https://www.tiktok.com/@_jen_hamilton_/video/7382225350710824222.
The TikTok v1 player has a bunch of controls that you can use to modify from this documentation.
There’s still some wonky height issues, and I suspect this is the default height Obsidian has on the container around the editor. I gave it a good enough viewable height of 50vh, which should be enough.
As the world fell, young Furiosa is snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers and falls into the hands of a great Biker Horde led by the Warlord Dementus.
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
This method is particularly valuable in fields like chatbot development, where the ability to provide precise answers derived from extensive databases of knowledge is crucial.
RAG fundamentally enhances the natural language understanding and generation capabilities of models by allowing them to access and leverage a vast amount of external knowledge. The approach is built upon the synergy between two main components: a retrieval system and a generative model. The retrieval system first identifies relevant information from a knowledge base, which the generative model then uses to craft responses that are not only accurate but also rich in detail and scope.
Types of RAG
Vector-based RAG - the most common type of RAG.
You convert text into “embeddings” and store them in a vector database.
Overview showing RAG with a Vector DB
Vector databases enable search functions that are much better than typical keyword searches. If users are looking for data that has semantic similarity, a vector database can often help them find those data points, even if there isn’t a literal keyword match
The downside is the context can be lost, especially when its relational context between data points. When chunking vectors, they use data-point similarity based on nearness. See KNN (k-nearest neighbors) and ANN (Approximate Nearest Neighbor)
Graph-based RAG
Instead of using a vector database, you use a Graph Database. A Graph DB contains vector information where links also store data. This allows relational information from retrieval
Extremely esoteric bug. I’ve had an open issue for the past three months related to this other issue. I couldn’t figure out why npm’s registry would pull an older version of d3-scale-chromatic when I upgraded the @observable/plot library. As a future note for myself, if I run into this issue again, I’ll have to go into the package-lock.json file and update d3-scale-chromatic to v3.1.0.
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”
From this ACM paper, On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots, the hypothesis is maybe these LLMs are parroting back what we already know and aren’t learning. We can probably, maybe, safely say that is no longer the case.
