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Every time I have given up on America, it has been a mistake. And yet, America has never, ever given up on me.
I turned 40 today. For my 35th I did principles, but for my 40th, I wanted to offer perhaps more useful reflections.
I first started compiling "How To Thought Lead" in my notes 5 years ago, at first as an ironic parody and then slowly becoming sincere, and never published it, 1) because I don't know if I ever really nailed it / have a complete picture, 2) I was somewhat worried if I published it then others might diminish the techniques through overuse.
You are of course aware that attention spans are shrinking. YouTube -> Shorts, Instagram Reels, Tiktoks, etc have taken over the world.
Through my 4 (!) podcasts I obviously have built up a lot of opinions on podcasting over the years. Here's some of them. The two outlier podcasts of our time are Dwarkesh and TBPN, and I will explain my mental model of them to the end - the following advice is what I strongly believe for the "average" podcast that wants to do well but not necessarily being full time top tier influencer level. Also, this is primarily for professional/technical interview guest-led podcasts, but I also do have opinions on non-guest-led podcasts as well.
More in programming
Say hello to apps.chofter.com, the new home for everything I build. The speed at which I ship new things has massively increased with the advent of AI, and I’ve been encouraged by the fact that, as I approach my sixth decade, new ideas for useful & fun things to build still come at me apace. These no longer fit on my personal homepage, which is a combination of work experience, interests, things I made long ago that are no longer relevant (but still interesting), and of course, the many apps & tools I have out there in the wild right now. The site was 100% built using Claude Code, which did an amazing job of inspecting all the various websites, app stores and code bases and constructing a site in 30 minutes or so. I had to push it to make the site more SEO friendly, pre-rendered to HTML rather than over relying on client side rendering, but that was it. So there we go, enjoy the delightful and hopefully useful apps that I’ve already built and will continue to build in the future
New in the SumatraPDF pre-release builds: DDE commands accept arguments Commands sent via DDE can take arguments, the same as in custom shortcuts (#5383). Loading message in tab While a document loads, its tab shows a “loading” message instead of the home page (#5385). Install 32-bit on 64-bit Windows The installer lets you install the 32-bit version on 64-bit Windows (#5379). Changes for this day · Full changelog
Kagi is ending development of Orion for Linux and Windows and open-sourcing both so the community can carry them forward. Our small team will now focus fully on making Orion for macOS and iOS faster, more stable, and more capable.
A clip of me singing a funny song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore back in 2013
In this video, we look at why fork() needs copy-on-write, how it works inside the kernel, and a memory usage problem that Instagram encountered with Python.
