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I, like so many other people in the Tyler Cowen / Stripe Press extended universe, have deeply enjoyed Dan Wang's annual letters over the past years. And I was delighted to see that he returned to writing in the form of a long-form book, largely about the same subject. In writing my thoughts on this book, I returned to some of his earliest letters, which I found had aged like wine: I cannot recommend enough carving out an afternoon to read them.
Long Story Short, feels like in many ways a synthesis of everything Raphael and Lisa have been trying to do and say, packaged in a slightly more mature and restrained way than the excesses of Bojack Horseman and their respective written fiction (everyone should read Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory).
After what has felt like a long winter of habitual reliance on my existing tools, I’m finally playing around with some new ones. This is a healthy habit—so long as you don’t convince yourself that you’re just one more App Store download away from a previously unimaginable level of personal satisfaction and joy.
More in technology
I love Letterboxd, but I hate how they show you the cast on the web app. Here's the cast of The Batman on the web. I mean, that's them, but I'm often going to this page wondering who played someone, and that is an
If you visit, someone someone will inevitably tell you: “The Day of the Dead parade isn’t a real tradition!
In short: I use iOS Shortcuts to run a Mastodon bot. I run a Mastodon bot that posts random quotes from The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. (The writing in that game is so charming!) I used to run it off a server, but for the past few days, it’s used an iOS Shortcut on my phone. How it works The bot is called Ulrira, named after a beloved Link’s Awakening character. Ulrira (the bot, not the character) samples a line from the text dump, then makes an HTTP request to post it. Here’s a screenshot of the full thing: As you can see, everything here is hard-coded, from the server credentials to the file name. (It probably wouldn’t be hard to make this more generic, but I didn’t bother.) This used to be a short, hand-written Bash script. I used the new AI-powered Shortcut creator and prompted this into existence. I said something like, “Here’s a Bash script. Turn this into a Shortcut.” Like a lot of LLM output, it wasn’t quite right, but it was useful for getting started. Shortcuts doesn’t seem to have an elegant way to express something like “run this every 6 hours”, so I created four additional scheduler Shortcuts that call the main one. They run at 12am, 6am, 12pm, and 6pm. That means there are five shortcuts in total: one to actually make the post, and four to schedule the main Shortcut at different times. Why do it this way? I didn’t want to pay for my server anymore, nor did I want to maintain it. When I went looking for alternatives, they either (1) cost money (2) had some significant limitation (for example, GitHub Actions requires me to update the repo every 60 days). This solution runs on a device with high uptime and is effectively free. If you’re a pro software genius, you might complain that this is not reliable! It doesn’t work if my phone is offline, for example. Or what if I change timezones? But in the words of Link’s Awakening: You’re good! You’re a pro, aren’t you? ………… Well, beat it! Pros aren’t allowed in here! Follow the bot here.
