Ever wondered, "Is there an AI to see how your baby looks?" Well you're not alone! OurBabyAI is an app that shows how your future baby may look.
In a quaint bar on the outskirts of Catania (Italy), as whiskey glasses clinked and muted conversations blended into a […] The post Aging Code appeared first on Vadim Kravcenko.
In the world of finance, there are a myriad of strategies employed by corporations to optimize their tax liabilities. One such method, known as transfer pricing, has become increasingly prevalent in recent years, raising concerns about fairness and equity in the global tax system.
As I suspected my energy for writing in August was diverted to more important things. Plenty of energy to read, though. With a respite in September, I should soon be able to write a bit on the Greek philosophers I have been reading. The Cynics, Epicureans, and Stoics work well as a cluster. Then later a bit on Plutarch and the little philosophy project is a wrap. PHILOSOPHY Meditations (c....
New experiments show that the brain distinguishes between perceived and imagined mental images by checking whether they cross a “reality threshold.” The post Is It Real or Imagined? How Your Brain Tells the Difference. first appeared on Quanta Magazine
A quasi-monthly feature. Recent blog posts and news stories are generally omitted; you can find them in my links digests. I’ve been busy helping to choose the first cohort of our blogging fellowship, so my reading has been relatively light. All emphasis in bold in the quotes below was added by me. Books Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (1990). I’ve...
Today, in the Calculated Risk Real Estate Newsletter: Lawler: More Ruminations on the “Neutral” Rate of Interest A brief excerpt: When talking about the so-called “neutral” interest rate, many financial commentators, financial analysts, and even monetary policymakers talk about the nominal interest rate. However, the theoretical “neutral” interest rate is a real, or inflation-adjusted interest...
Everything about the Black Magic's acquisition + May 2023 updates
and other updates from me in Mar 2023
Rest of World's staff favorites, from around the globe to add to your must-read pile.
What Larry David's legendary sitcom can teach about creativity and work.
I recently discovered Syncthing, an open-source tool for syncing files across multiple machines. Setting up Syncthing on my personal devices was easy, but I went on an interesting journey deploying it to a cloud server. Why run Syncthing in the cloud? Syncthing synchronizes files peer to peer. That means that at least two of my devices have to be online and running Syncthing simultaneously to stay...
Lessons from building and growing Copylime to 6 figures all in public
Note: Mortgage rates are from MortgageNewsDaily.com and are for top tier scenarios. For deaths, I'm currently using 4 weeks ago for "now", since the most recent three weeks will be revised significantly. Note: "Effective May 1, 2024, hospitals are no longer required to report COVID-19 hospital admissions, hospital capacity, or hospital occupancy data." So I'm no longer tracking...
There are a growing number of AI coding tools that are alternatives to Copilot. A list of other popular, promising options.
Google Colossus Explained Simply
Jason Cohen’s 2013 Microconf talk, Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business with Jason Cohen, is one of the most valuable resources I’ve found for bootstrapped founders. I watched it for the first time in 2020, and I’ve revisited it repeatedly since then. If you’re new to the world of bootstrapped software business, or you’re struggling to gain traction with your business, I highly recommend this...
Lessons from building AudioPen to 600+ paid users to clinching #1 on Product Hunt
Today is exactly 2 years since I quit my job and become a full-time indie hacker.
small updates from me in July 2023
Mike Cardona is a solo founder who has managed to build a $200k online business by specialising in automation content and consulting
All ye readers, buckle up. Today, I'm giving you 14 non-fiction books I believe everyone should read. For each book, I've provided a brief summary. Now it's up to you to decide if it's worth your time. Let's dig in. This book dives deep into the world of trauma, discussing its effects on the mind, body, and daily life. If you want to know everything about trauma and how to deal with it, this is...
In 2005, Joel Spolsky’s software company, Fog Creek, filmed a documentary about their summer internship program. The film is called Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks with Geeks, and it follows four college interns as they design, implement, and launch a completely new software product. That’s not the interesting part. Looking back on this documentary 18 years later, it’s striking how many interviews it...
Lessons from building RadReads and helping over 40,000 professionals in public
Want to find the best no-code newsletters for learning about what you can build without coding? You came to the right place!
Traveled to Bali and Sydney, some updates on Typing Mind, and a new product.
I put my M1 Pro against Apple's new M3, M3 Pro, M3 Max, a NVIDIA GPU and Google Colab.
<p> A bit over a year ago, I wrote <a href="https://valsopi.com/setting-sail">a post</a> in which I talked about embarking on a journey to financial freedom. Specifically speaking — I took out a personal loan so I could focus on solely building products. </p><p> With that announcement, I decided to open up all my finances for anyone to see how it really was to chase a dream like...
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $60-80k/month in revenue and employs six other people. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and my professional life overall. Highlights I’ve started the process of...
Note: Mortgage rates are from MortgageNewsDaily.com and are for top tier scenarios. Existing Home Sales for December from the National Association of Realtors (NAR). The consensus is for 4.20 million SAAR, up from 4.15 million. University of Michigan's Consumer sentiment index (Preliminary for January).
Seven years ago, I built my first home server. It made my software development work faster and more enjoyable, so I’ve gotten more into the home server scene. I built a custom storage server, another development server, and a dedicated firewall. At some point, my wife gently observed that my office was filling with unsightly wires. “What?” I asked. “This is a normal amount of wires.” But then I...
This year, I decided to build my first ever home storage server. It’s a 32 TB system that stores my personal and business data using open-source software. The server itself cost $531, and I bought four disks for $732, bringing the total cost to $1,263. It’s similar in price to off-the-shelf storage servers, but it offers more power and customizability. In this post, I’ll walk through how I chose...
One of the most exciting things a startup CEO in a business-to-business market can hear from a potential customer is, “We’re excited. When can you come back and show us a prototype?” This can be the beginning of a profitable customer relationship or a disappointing sinkhole of wasted time, money, resources, and a demoralized engineering […]
I always run into issues installing Jellyfin on TrueNAS core. I fix them, and then I forget a few months later, so these are just my notes to myself of how to install Jellyfin on TrueNAS core. Instructions Install based on these instructions: https://github.com/Thefrank/jellyfin-server-freebsd/blob/main/Installation_TrueNAS_GUI.md#the-advanced-way We need to follow the advanced instructions...
I have a bad habit of changing my computing setups all the time. I tend to see new gear, then I get some new ideas, and then I obsessively think about it for weeks and months until I just buy it. And then the cycle repeats. I’ve had time to think about why that keeps happening and I think I’ve got it. I keep changing the goals, constantly, and with that I kept optimizing my setup in a different...
My friend Cory Zue has been publishing his live coding sessions, so I decided to watch one and record my notes. My background vs. Cory’s I’ve read a lot of Cory’s blog. We’re both Python developers, but he specializes in Django, whereas I’ve always worked with thinner frameworks like Flask. I have no experience with Django, but I’m comfortable in Python. Dev environment Timestamp 0:10 OS: Ubuntu I...
I sold Xnapper, here is a quick update about the acquisition details
When she wrote the following entry in her journal and imagined fleeing college to venture into the unknown, Susan Sontag was a precocious sixteen-year-old studying English at the University of California, Berkeley. By the end of the year she had indeed left—not on a bus to an undecided destination, but to the University of Chicago […]
My current ISP provides an internet connection over a copper wire. To use it, I have a crappy modem (Technicolor CGA2121, DOCSIS 3.0). It’s running in bridge mode, meaning that all it does is convert the signal running over the coax cable into plain old Ethernet. My main networking device is a TP-Link Archer C7 v5. It runs OpenWRT. This router/Wi-Fi AP box connects to the modem and handles...
<p>Growing up I was always told to work hard, wait my turn, and good things will happen.</p><p>However, I've been the most successful when I didn't wait.</p><p>The "waiting room" is the worst place to be in. </p><p>You're at the mercy of someone else letting you in.</p><p>Working hard is important. However, it's smarter to know what you're "working hard" towards.</p><p>Working hard and...
After months of contemplating I finally pulled the trigger and got myself a Fairphone 5. The fact that iPhone X stopped receiving major iOS updates certainly helped make that decision. “But why? My Xiaomi/Oneplus/Samsung/other glued-together device is like so much cheaper and faster and makes better photos and the software is good after I completely format it and install a custom ROM! And...
Nix is a tool for configuring software environments according to source files. I’ve been hearing more and more about Nix on Hacker News and Twitter. The idea of it appeals to me, so I’ve been tinkering with it over the past few weeks. My history with infrastructure as code Ten years ago, I discovered Salt, a tool that allows you to define a computer system’s configuration in source code. I loved...
Hey Siri, set a reminder for 365 days.
Lessons from building HeyGen from 0 to $1m ARR in 7 months
A great deal of building maintenance expenses are the result of simple inaccessibility. Cleaning the windows are your house is a trivial chore, but cleaning the windows on a skyscraper is serious undertaking that needs specialized equipment and training. To make exterior wall tile inspection efficient and affordable, the GLEWBOT team turned to nature for […] The post GLEWBOT scales buildings like...
I also curated 300+ Black Friday deals for you
For the past few months, I’ve been curious about two technologies: the Zig programming language and Ethereum cryptocurrency. To learn more about both, I’ve been using Zig to write a bytecode interpreter for the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Zig is a great language for performance optimization, as it gives you fine-grained control over memory and control flow. To motivate myself, I’ve been benchmarking...
It's my first product launch of the year!
Over the past six months, I’ve been transitioning the fulfillment processes at my e-commerce business to a third-party logistics (3PL) vendor. I didn’t know anything about 3PLs before starting this process, so there were a lot of things I didn’t know to ask about. Here are the list of questions that I recommend e-commerce merchants ask a 3PL if they’re considering working with them for...
I recently bought my first-ever managed networking switch, a TP-Link JetStream TL-SG3428X. The main feature of a managed switch is that it lets you segment your network into VLANs. I was excited about this functionality, but it took me hours of trial and error to get VLANs working. I found TP-Link’s VLAN documentation lacking, so I’m sharing my notes in case they’re helpful to others. Background...
See you again soon
Going viral, my thoughts, and updates from me in October 2023.
A FAQ of sorts
Using the same strategies I've used to build millions of subscribers across multiple newsletters, you can do it too. The post How To Build A Profitable Newsletter In 2024 appeared first on Scott DeLong.
May 17, 2024.
Immigrating from Indonesia to the US and building Typedream in public
How does the Glove80 stack up against similar keyboards like the Moonlander and Ergodox? I share my impressions after the first few weeks of use.
Interactive robots always bring an element of intrigue, and even more so when they feature unusual parts and techniques to perform their actions. Mr. Wallplate, affectionately named by Tony K on Instructables, is one such robot that is contained within an electrical wall plate and uses a servo motor connected to an Arduino UNO Rev3 for mouth […] The post Meet Mr. Wallplate, an animatronic wall...
Full story on my latest role at Paddle, the new AI program, and what it means for you
Rod is a founder who has successfully monetized a directory showing websites for finding a job. He has made $20k from his Job Board Search site.
Lessons from building and growing Potion to its acquisition all in public
Architecture and interior design studio Archisphere collaborated with Carbone & Kacerovsky to design a ‘Cyclist’, a modern cafe at the Hotel Andaz am Belvedere Vienna. Archisphere drew inspiration from the movement, freedom, and enjoyment associated with cycling. In addition to this, the spirit of the art collector Prince Eugen, whose influence can be found throughout […]
A little bit of magic, but mostly just practice
<p><i>Context: Read <a href="https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chatgpt-making-things-faster-and-easier/" target="_blank">Nick Cave's letter</a> first.</i></p> <p><i></i>—</p> <p>ChatGPT (or similar) are just tools!</p> <p>Nothing more.</p> <p>They're akin to when tools like Photoshop came out.</p> <p>It made designers better at what they did.</p> <p>It didn't create for them but helped...
Some things have been made nearly impossible to search for. Say, for example, the long-running partnership between Epson and Catalina: a query that will return pages upon pages of people trying to use Epson printers with an old version of MacOS. When you think of a point of sale printer, you probably think of something like the venerable Epson TM-T88. A direct thermal printer that heats small...
People talk about you the way you talk about yourself.
When I work in my own repositories these days, I always add a Nix flake to the repo so that I can spin up a working development environment on any system with a single command. What do I do when I’m working in someone else’s repo and they don’t want to adopt Nix flakes? Normally, I’d just add the file to my copy of the repo and gitignore it locally so I don’t commit my personally-specific files...
Imagine selling a website you made for $10,000. Pretty great, huh? Well that's exactly what Dmytro did
Some quick updates from me in June 2023
Surreal and otherworldly.
For those of you who are members of the Matrix project, I wanted to let you know that I am running for the Governing Board, and a bit about why. For those of you who are not, I hope you will forgive the intrusion. Maybe you'll find my opinions on the topic interesting anyway. I am coming off of a period of intense involvement in an ill-fated government commission, and I wanted to find another way...
My first two years as a bootstrapped founder went poorly. I could barely find any paying customers, and all of my businesses lost money. I began questioning my decision to quit my cushy Google job. In mid-2020, yet another of my businesses had flopped, and it was only kind of COVID’s fault. Desperate for a distraction, I made a little contraption that controlled my home servers through my web...
A monthly feature. As usual, recent blog posts and news stories are omitted from this; you can find them in my links digests. In all quotes below, any emphasis in bold was added by me. Books Thomas S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760–1830 (1948). A classic in the field, concise and readable. Crafts (see paper below) cites this work as pointing out “the links between scientific thought and...
Lessons from building Tally.so from 0 to $40k MRR all in public
I turn 30, built a new app, and other updates in December 2023
Why not make this Christmas a little darker? The post Ho Ho Horror appeared first on The American Scholar.
Canadian design firm Level Studio has shared photos of a loft apartment located in a building that was once home to offices but has been converted into residential apartments.
Early computers faced unexpected failures, and that gave us graceful degradation. But on the web, we needed something different. We needed progressive enhancement. The post Progressive enhancement brings everyone in appeared first on The History of the Web.
No you can't "have it all." You can have two things, but not three.
(A Lengthy Vacation Post-Mortem)
No update this month I’m skipping my normal retrospective this month, as I sold TinyPilot and am taking some time to figure out my next project. Retrospectives will hopefully resume in a month or two!
<p>March was an absolutely insane month for <a href="https://blogstatic.io/">blogstatic.io</a>. The majority of this spike I can attribute to the <a href="https://blogstatic.io/blog/pricing-2024">price change announcement on March 1st</a> and customers were rushing to lock in their price.</p><h2>The customers</h2><p>At the risk of sounding corny and salesy, I can't say enough about how grateful I...
And other updates in April 2023
AI is strange. We need to learn to use it.
There are two things from our announcement today I wanted to highlight. First, a key part of our mission is to put very capable AI tools in the hands of people for free (or at a great price). I am very proud that we’ve made the best model in the world available for free in ChatGPT, without ads or anything like that. Our initial conception when we started OpenAI was that we’d create AI and use it...
Hello everyone! This is Tony 👋 Hello Hacker News! For context, this post is the latest issue of my monthly newsletter where I share the progress building BlackMagic.so & DevUtils.app. Check my previous issues to see more details about the products and my journey. Cheers!
I was thrilled to see recently Alex Isora make $800k by selling Unicorn Platform, a website builder, as I previously interviewed him about learning to code without a CS degree. Alex has stayed on at Mars, the company which has acquired him and unlike a lot of founders, will stay
Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2m ARR in public
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $60-80k/month in revenue and employs six other people. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and my professional life overall. Highlights TinyPilot began shipping a...
Designed by Dixon Baxi, London.
A personal guide to Singapore for foreign friends visiting.
One of the great paradoxes of business is that management is prediction, but entrepreneurship ... isn't. What a theory of expertise in entrepreneurship tells us about creating new things in business.
Reached $10K MRR, launched Xnapper (#1 of the week), went on Indie Hackers podcast (😱), and other updates in Aug 2022...
Blog post that probably has an audience of one, myself. Introduction Zephyr Ravenna - Confusing Information Two PCBs - Control Board & Switch Assembly Switch of the Breaker!!! Glass Canopy Removal Duct Cover Removal Swapping the Control Board Reassembly Conclusion Introduction Our kitchen has a Zephyr Ravenna kitchen hood that started to behave erratically: the LED strip didn’t want to switch off...
Also in October: Speak at JOM Launch Asia 2022, and the thing about Elon Musk.
This post isn’t a detailed line-by-line tutorial on how to set up each individual piece of the setup as those types of guides tend to get out of date really easily, but if you know your way around Linux and the command line, then you can definitely replicate this setup on your own. Over the past few years I’ve been interested in learning about how much energy my computing setup and home appliances...
I’m a blogger, and I often commission custom illustrations for my blog posts like this one: An example of an illustration I commissioned for the blog, part of my year-in-review series The blog’s previous illustrator was the awesome Loraine Yow, who worked with me for six years. She recently changed careers, so I’m looking for someone who can take over as the blog’s official illustrator. Benefits...
The Justice Department worries about the stability of Ethereum, DCG tries to bilk their subsidiary's creditors, and Biden threatens a crypto veto.
Hello everyone, it’s Tony again 👋 These days time flies so fast to me! I’m having so many updates in May that I want to share with you all. Let’s go! Welcome 128 new subscribers since the last issue! If you are new here, this is a monthly newsletter of my indie hacking journey. I try to document everything happened in the last month and share my insights and knowledge as much as I can.
Let's Get Right To the Point
Also in this issue: one-off purchase vs. subscription, selling Xnapper, and other updates from me in Feb 2024
I’m a bootstrapped founder of a six-person company, and I spent this week testing different tools for hiring candidates. This post summarizes my experience with the applicant tracking systems (ATS) I found and how well they serve small, bootstrapped businesses. Note: This isn’t affiliate blogspam where I give fake reviews to push you to sign up for whoever gives me a commission. I have no business...
"IBM's first computer"
All kinds of songs get stuck in your head. Famous pop tunes from when you were a kid, album cuts you’ve listened to over and over again. And then there’s a category of memorable songs—the ones that we all just kind of know. Songs that somehow, without anyone’s permission, sneak their way into the collective The post Whomst Among Us Let The Dogs Out (Again) appeared first on 99% Invisible.
Zig is a new, independently developed low-level programming language. It’s a modern reimagining of C that attempts to retain all of C’s performance benefits while also taking advantage of improvements in tooling and language design from the last 30 years. Because Zig is designed to replace C, one of the first-class features is that you can call into C libraries from a Zig application. I couldn’t...
And some prompts that might be useful when it does.
I found it eye-opening in terms of understanding how municipal governments work in practice and how perverse incentives lead to poor community outcomes. It had a huge impact on the way that I think about where to live and what policies I support in local government. This book complements Happy City in that both books explore what characteristics of a city make it attractive for residents to live...
Highlights TinyPilot had its best sales month ever, with $69k of total revenue. I’m now five months and $32k over budget on a website redesign. I launched PicoShare, and it’s the fastest-growing project I’ve ever published. Goal Grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Publish TinyPilot Pro 2.4.0 Result: Released TinyPilot...
https://youtu.be/qJ8aRl1UNgw I'm on an old man rant today. The world's a shitfest, and something needs to be said: Opinions are like assholes, everyone's got one, and most are full of shit. So, here's my argument: people need to have fewer fucking opinions. The problem is that we're all drowning in information, and this overload causes us to mistake the quantity of knowledge for the quality of...
I’ve decided to intentionally take more time to play video games this year, since it’s a relatively healthy way to escape from the real world once in a while. A friend recommended one game in particular: Control: Ultimate Edition. During the Steam summer sale of 2023, I went ahead and bought it. I have liked it more than I expected to. What prompted me to cover this game wasn’t the captivating...
This was almost a post on why millennial motherhood is so challenging, but turned into tactical food hacks.
The temperature in the Middle East got even hotter in April, with Israel and Iran trading attacks on each other’s sovereign buildings/territory. Somehow World War III has never really seemed in danger of breaking out but it is a reminder that only change is constant. Over in New York Donald Trump was falling asleep in… Continue reading April ’24: Juggling cash as new UK tax year begins →
And then there were two.
Today's interview is with Iron Brands (he's Dutch, that is his actual name), who joined a privacy analytics startups as a co-founder after it had already launched. We talked about how he met the original founder of Simple Analytics, how they negotiated the new ownership structure,
Hello everyone 👋 It’s Tony again with another monthly update! 😄Thanks for reading Tony Dinh’s Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Phu Yen Province, Vietnam Welcome 313 new subscribers since my last issue! 👋 If you are new here: My name is Tony Dinh. This is a monthly newsletter of my indie startup journey. I try to document everything that happened in the...
And why it might revolutionize the search industry.
I tend to grasp math concepts better from books written for other fields. Take linear algebra for example — I developed a stronger understanding and appreciation for it after reading the book Modeling Life. Similarly, the investing book What I Learned About Investing from Darwin gave me deeper insights on how base rates, sensitivity, and…
Covering the state of play as of Summer, 2023
It was a such a short month!
Hello everyone, this is Tony! 👋 Today is a special day. I want to share with you all this post I originally posted on Indie Hackers, but I think you all will also be interested! It’s a long post about my journey growing Black Magic to $2K MRR in the last 2 months.
For sale: a few KIM-1 User Manuals I printed up.
A pragmatic approach to thinking about AI
Rethinking the Role of PPO in RLHF TL;DR: In RLHF, there’s tension between the reward learning phase, which uses human preference in the form of comparisons, and the RL fine-tuning phase, which optimizes a single, non-comparative reward. What if we performed RL in a comparative way? Figure 1: This diagram illustrates the difference between reinforcement learning from absolute feedback and...
TLDR: It’s a useless technology demo. Introduction Rules of Engagement Test Ride 1: from Kings Beach to Truckee (11 miles) Test Ride 2: I-80 from Truckee to Blue Canyon (36 miles) Test Ride 3: from West-Valley College to I-85 Entrance (1 mile) Conclusion Introduction In the past months, Tesla has been offering a free, one-month trial of their full self-driving (FSD) system to all current owners....
Do birds of a feather flock together, or do opposites attract? These are both common aphorisms, which means that they are commonly offered as generally accepted truths, but also that they may by wrong. People like pithy phrases, so they spread prolifically, but that does not mean they contain any truth. Further, our natural instincts […] The post How Much Do Couples Share Traits? first appeared on...
Here's a crash course on the rising trend of building in public
Lets build a simple virtual pinball controller to bring more immersion to your game.
This is the 10th post in my series on building a toy GPT. Read my earlier posts first for better understanding. I asked ChatGPT to complete the sentence given the phrase: “I chose that bank for”. It completed the sentences sensibly. Here are the four sentences it generated: In order to generate the right words…
William / Kaven Architecture has sent us photos of a home they completed in Portland, Oregon, that’s part of a collection of private residences perched on several steeply sloped sites within Forest Park, a 5,000-acre woodland. A simple material palette of dark steel, concrete, glass, and custom bronze-black cladding grounds the house within the surrounding […]
ThinkPad keyboards were once well known for their great layouts, feel and functionality. This included the media playback control keys. On the ThinkPad T430, the new chiclet keyboard layout moved the media keys to the function row. Still there, but less convenient to access. The ThinkPad L390 Yoga doesn’t have any visible function keys for controlling media playback. However, I found that the...
For the past few years, I have been running Home Assistant to make my apartment a smart home. It’s become such a hobby of mine that I’ve even started coding add-ons for it. While there are other popular automation platforms, Home Assistant’s versatility blows the rest out of the water. It connects to everything I […] The post My Home Assistant setup (2023 edition) appeared first on Style over...
Super quick updates
Four questions to ask your organization.
Not the usual monthly update, just a small update about Xnapper - my latest product
will he go into destroy mode if I say no
One of the many new features announced at yesterday’s OpenAI dev day is better support for generating valid JSON output. From the JSON mode docs: A common way to use Chat Completions is to instruct the model to always return JSON in some format that makes sense for your use case, by providing a system … Continue reading Experimenting with GPT-4 Turbo’s JSON mode →
If you believe that the most serious risks from AI are real, should you write about anything else?
A new set of cases for two concept sequences, and the end of the Data Driven Series.
Results of a four month accelerated expertise experiment in Judo. Or: "I expected to learn about deliberate practice but instead learnt a ton about my mental shortcomings."
May 10, 2024.
by Enda Harte For me, there are six important first steps that I prioritized for practicing Stoicism (referenced in the diagram above), and I wanted to use this opportunity to go over each of these in a little more detail. Hopefully you’ll get an understanding of what they mean, and why it’s important to practice Read More >>
A lot of otherwise talented people are too pessimistic to actually do anything. They are paralyzed by risks that don’t exist and greatly exaggerate them where they do, preventing them from being one of the best. Consider this lightly edited excerpt from a conversation between Charlie Rose and Magnus Carlsen that argues it’s better to … The post The Winner’s Edge appeared first on Farnam Street.
<p><i>For context, read <a href="https://valsopi.com/setting-sail">this article</a> first.</i></p><p><i>TLDR: A year ago, I took out a loan and went all–in pursuing my financial freedom. The words below are an update a year on the day.</i></p><hr><h2>Poetically speaking</h2><p><i>Here I am, one year later.</i></p><p><i>I am somewhere in the open ocean.</i></p><p><i>Doing...
“Most heists target gold, jewels or cash. This one targeted illegal seeds. As the British established their sprawling empire across the subcontinent and beyond, they encountered a formidable adversary — malaria. There was a cure — the bark of the Andean cinchona tree. The only problem? The Dutch and the French were also looking to The post The Fever Tree Hunt appeared first on 99% Invisible.
I recently built my first home TrueNAS server. I use it to store the bulk of my personal and work data, so I’ve been learning how to make the most of TrueNAS and its filesystem, ZFS. Today, I want to tell you about backing up encrypted data. My homelab TrueNAS server One of the neat features of ZFS is that you can make backups of encrypted data while it’s still encrypted.
The second in a series of posts about scripting Visual Pinball tables.
What does it mean for AI to be better than a human? And how can we tell?
A PCB for breadboards to make working with op-amps easier.
I’m still a Nix beginner, and one thing I couldn’t figure out until recently was how to keep parts of my configuration.nix file under source control. My goal I’d like for my Nix configuration files to be modular and reusable, so depending on the system or flake, I can pull in only the configuration files I need. I’d like all my Nix configuration files to be under source control so that different...
The first in a series of posts about scripting Visual Pinball tables.
Humans are really the ones to be scared of
Introduction Removing the panels Swapping a Rotary Encoder Putting it all back together End Result Introduction I recently bought a TDS 684B for cheap at a government auction. With 1 GHz BW and 5 Gsps sample rate, it can be used for those cases where my 350 MHz/2Gsps Siglent 2304X runs out of steam. It only had one issue: one of the rotary knobs on the front panel had erratic behavior. Not...
Five analytical tasks in under a minute
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $60-80k/month in revenue and employs six other people. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and in my professional life overall. Highlights TinyPilot generated $112k...
We can start to see, dimly, what the near future of AI looks like.
There's a somewhat weird alien who wants to work for free for you. You should probably get started.
Uncapped safe notes misalign incentives in first rounds… let me explain why
Below the surface of any body of water, harmful amounts of toxic gases and contaminates can accumulate, which leads to a loss in fish and plant populations if not fixed quickly. But because most water testing, especially in aquariums, is done primarily on the surface, vital information gets missed. Kutluhan Aktar’s automated testing system aims to address […] The post Assess your aquarium’s health...
TypingMind.com is launching tomorrow on Product Hunt!
GPT-4o, Google I/O, Fugaku LLM, Prep for Machine Learning Interviews, and more
Maker culture has always been a major part of magic performance. Some tricks are well-rehearsed slight of hand, but many of them rely on clever engineering to sell an illusion. And modern technology offers a great deal of interesting possibilities. That is the idea behind Peter Boie’s Engineering Wonder “STEM infused magic show.” That show […] The post A drone remote designed to enhance magic...
Why everyone should learn about machine learning
Social proof is a powerful concept in marketing. It's the idea that as consumers, we are influenced by what others do, especially people we admire. If you have ever seen a website mention its number of users, a review from a customer, or company logos, you've
You’re Cletus Kubernetus: a software developer, and a proud Fedora Linux user.1 You know Kubernetes, especially after the time you migrated some services to it. Everything is calm. Your pods are running. Your service is up. Business as usual. You release some minor changes to production. Everything is still working. Great! But then you receive a message from a colleague. Oh no, something has gone...
"Ownership" means ten different things to ten different people. Let's talk about what we actually want.
Google DeepMind releases AlphaFold 3, KANs, LLM Benchmarks are being looked at more critically, Apple is bringing their AI chips to data centers, StackOverflow partners with OpenAI, and more
Mathematical proofs based on a technique called diagonalization can be relentlessly contrarian, but they help reveal the limits of algorithms. The post Alan Turing and the Power of Negative Thinking first appeared on Quanta Magazine
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $60-80k/month in revenue and employs six other people. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and my professional life overall. Highlights I left the country for two...
Hello everyone! 👋 I’m happy to share that this newsletter has now reached 2,000 subscribers. Yay! 🥳 I’m very grateful to have your support, and I hope what I shared here has been helpful for you! Let’s dig in. Here is what happened in March 2022. 📊 Reached $5K MRR, but it's slowing down
This is the first in a series of posts about new LLM-related technology associated with the Wolfram technology stack. "Color" with something like: When you set up a plugin, it can contain many endpoints, that do different things. And—in addition to sharing prompts—one reason this is particularly convenient is that (at least right now, for security reasons) […]
I recently read Julia Evans’ latest zine about git, and one of her tips was to configure your terminal shell prompt to show the git status. Julia’s terminal prompt looks like this: ~/work/homepage (main) $ main is Julia’s current git branch. When she’s in the middle of a git operation like bisect or merge, the terminal changes to this: ~/work/homepage (main|MERGING) $ It had never occurred to me...
I stumbled upon this Hardware Haven video about the Zimaboard recently. I liked it a lot. I finally bought one. In short, Zimaboard is a small single-board computer that is relatively affordable and comes with an interesting selection of ports, which includes an exposed PCI Express port. Before we get down to the build, here’s a list of aspects that I want to see in my dream home server: low power...
Hello everyone! It’s me again – Tony 👋 Time flies! February 2022 marks the 6 months milestone of me going indie hacking full time! 🥳 In this issue, I’ll share my regular updates from February and some thoughts on the first 6 months of my journey. Let’s go!
Over the last decade, few platforms have declined quite as rapidly and visibly as Facebook and Instagram. What used to be apps for catching up with your friends and family are now algorithmic nightmares that constantly interrupt you with suggested content and advertisements that consistently outweigh the content of people
An answer to a puzzle: why is that some businesses go down the Deming path, become data driven, achieve operational excellence, and die, and others acquire Process Power and win?
Highlights I’ve launched a new TinyPilot product and debuted a new logo. TinyPilot’s revenue finished the year strong at $55k for December. I’ve learned to manage design projects more aggressively. Goal Grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Launch the Voyager 2 Result: Launched the Voyager 2 Grade: A After many months of...
some of you may know I've recently started a new company. I'm not ready to talk about -that- yet, but I did want to capture some notes on logistical stuff I have had to ramp up on as a first time founder. hopefully this helps somebody out there.
A simplified high-level overview of primary machine learning algorithms for anyone to understand
A simple answer, and then a less simple one.
James and his partner Danielle have an enviable working set-up - they live and work on a sailing boat!
Correction: a technical defect in my Enterprise Content Management System resulted in the email having a subject that made it sound like this post would be about the classic strategy game Go. It is actually about a failed website. I regret the error; the responsible people have been sacked. The link in the email was also wrong but I threw in a redirect so I probably would have gotten away with the...
This is my 3rd post summarizing the key takeaways I got from reading the book Modeling Life. I recommend reading my earlier posts first to get a good grounding on the foundations covered in the book. A system can exhibit three different types of behavior: equilibrium, oscillation, and chaos. The E. coli bacteria we encountered…
What, exactly, is the skill of capital? What does it consist of? How do you recognise it? We walk through three stories, and then talk about the shape of the skill in practice.
Chinese policy and geopolitical risk are doing a lot of the work here.
One of the stumbling blocks I ran into when trying out NixOS was that I couldn’t run it under Proxmox, my preferred virtual machine server. Through some trial and error, I figured out how to install NixOS as a Proxmox container. Download the NixOS container image First, download the latest NixOS x86_x64 container image. For other hardware architectures, see this Github comment. At the time of this...
'The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.' Teilhard de Chardin 💡Broken Hips This feels like one of these problems that most people have accepted as inevitable but that will be solved soon and we will look back and think how crazy we allowed this to happen for so long.
I read Simon Willison’s post about using Llamafile to experiment with open-source chatbots / LLMs. He made it sound so easy, so I decided to try it out. One of my longtime hobby projects is WanderJest, a site for finding live comedy. One of the challenges of that site is that the canonical information about an upcoming show is often the poster for it. Here’s an example: I’ve been scraping this...
EVs are just going to win.
I gained 1,500 new users, but how many will convert? And other updates in July 2022...
What will we do if Wikipedia falls to the type of AI-generated garbage that seems to be proliferating on the web? The number one thing you can do is learn to edit, and I will walk you through how to get started in only 30 minutes.
This post wraps up the sound work on Teacher's Pet.
This is the best media player for children. In the month before the pandemic shut everything down, I was in the midst of some research on how designers — and other kinds of creative experts and consultants — can best communicate results. I was looking at a variety of case study models and trying to devise a system that would best suit my clients goals and abilities. That’s when I found myself...
Highlights The TinyPilot website redesign is finally done. I’ve learned to make Debian packages, and it’s surprisingly simple. I’ve given up on Vue and frontend frameworks in general. Goal Grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Publish a blog post and video about building a homelab NAS server with TinyPilot Result: Published...
MathJax.Hub.Config({ jax: ["input/TeX", "output/HTML-CSS"], tex2jax: { inlineMath: [ ['$', '$'], ["\\(", "\\)"] ], displayMath: [ ['$$', '$$'], ["\\[", "\\]"] ], processEscapes: true, skipTags: ['script', 'noscript', 'style', 'textarea', 'pre', 'code'] } //, //displayAlign: "left", //displayIndent: "2em" }); Introduction Inside the...
I’ve been interested in functional reactive programming (FRP) for about a decade now. I even wrote a couple of blog posts back in 2014 describing my experiments. My initial source of inspiration was Elm, the Haskell-like language for the web that once had FRP as a core part of the language. Evan Czaplicki’s Strange Loop 2013 talk really impressed me, especially that Mario demo. From there,...
Earlier this year, I created an open-source app called PicoShare. It’s a simple Golang web app for sharing files. I use it to send files that are too large to be email attachments, but I don’t want the recipient to deal with Dropbox or Google Drive. A few months ago, I started seeing my PicoShare server die every few days. When I checked the logs, I saw an out of memory error:
Democratizing educational technology... and more
This is not the monthly update, just a quick announcement 😄
Here's a list of some of the best Black Friday discounts for entrepreneurs and developers. This page contains affiliate links. Courses Grow and Monetize your Newsletter - 60% off Monetize Your Newsletter - 60% off Grow Your Newsletter - 60% off WesBos - Beginner JavaScript - 50% off
James McKinven is an entrepreneur who has succeeded in making money from podcasts - no easy feat. He earns money by editing podcasts for companies
Also in September: $12K MRR, built a small new app, SEO, and other updates...
<p> Some super </p> <p class="top-button"> <a href="#top">🔝</a> </p>
They're not going to disrupt everything (yet), but they're a ton of fun.
what a year it's been
No GPU cluster required.
We have more agency over the future of AI than we think.
When Steve Jobs spoke about the intersection of liberal arts and technology, he did not envision crushing symbols of art and culture.
The Company Rockwell International has been around for quite a while. Willard Rockwell started the company in 1919 to sell a newly designed truck axle bearing. Over the years, Rockwell acquired businesses in many different fields, including defense, industrial electronics, automotive components, and more. They built both the Apollo spacecraft and the Space Shuttle program. In 1967, they merged...
Hello everyone, this is Tony! 👋 In January 2022, I released a new DevUtils version, added a lot of features for Black Magic, reached $4K MRR, and learned a ton! Here comes the monthly update! Hope you like it! 🧩 New DevUtils release: 1.13 The latest release of DevUtils comes with a brand new integration with Alfred and Raycast. These are the features people requested the most. I’m a happy user...
Agilent has made the 8656A Signal Generator Operating & Service Manual available as a PDF, but the schematics of chapter 8 are all spread over 3 or 4 pages, which makes them hard to follow. I spent a good evening extracting the schematics pages, cutting-and-pasting them together into single-page schematics, and then merging them in a new schematics-only PDF file. The result is here: 8656A Signal...
Across the United States, streets are taking on a strange hue at night. Purple. Purple streetlights have been reported in Tampa, Vancouver, Wichita, Boston. They're certainly in evidence here in Albuquerque, where Coal through downtown has turned almost entirely to mood lighting. Explanations vary. When I first saw the phenomenon, I thought of fixtures that combined RGB elements and thought...
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $60-80k/month in revenue and employs seven other people. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and my professional life overall. Highlights I think through what it...
The Binance CEO's sentencing draws near, and prosecutors have been busy chasing down other crypto criminals. Also, lawmakers take another stab at stablecoin regulation.
This post is a short overview of my experience at a career day in Valga, Estonia, hosted with the help of GreenDice. I’ve never spoken at a career day before nor attended one as a student, which is why I instantly agreed to going to one when GreenDice reached out to me. Why? I never had opportunities like that as a student myself, which is why I try to do my part in making sure that future...
It’s been a few months so I wanted to say hey to the 7 of you who follow this blog and share a few updates about what I’ve been up to. Quick recap At the start of 2023 I quit consulting to go full time on Preceden, my SaaS timeline maker, after growing it on … Continue reading It’s Time to Build →
April 26, 2024.
Sometimes, when I am feeling down, I read about failed satellite TV (STV) services. Don't we all? As a result, I've periodically come across a company called AlphaStar Television Network. PrimeStar may have had a rough life, but AlphaStar barely had one at all: it launched in 1996 and went bankrupt in 1997. All told, AlphaStar's STV service only operated for 13 months and 6 days. AlphaStar is...
The process behaviour chart is the easiest way to differentiate between routine and exceptional variation. This is everything you need to know to use it well.
How pricing experiments helped me reach $6,000 MRR
(Just not mine.)
Dear friends, There is a commonplace opinion that technology and the natural world, or that technological pursuits and natural pursuits, are at odds. An example: I think this is a false position. But if this kind of sentiment is so often repeated, its worth thinking about why it feels true.
I was watching the Steven Spielberg 1977 classic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with the family last night and nerded out when I saw a character that claimed to be a cartographer. I always do. It was the cartographer who recognized that the signals the aliens sent were coordinates. This is how they knew …
IPL is one of the greatest entertainments for a cricket lover like me. Chennai Super Kings (CSK) is my favorite team. Ruturaj Gaikwad, the new CSK captain for the IPL 2024 season, lost 10 out of 13 tosses: LLLLWLLLLLLWL. The probability of seeing the sequence LLLLWLLLLLLWL is 0.513 or 0.00012. Unsurprisingly, the odds of seeing…
A talk with architecture critic Justin Davidson about the thorny knot of issues involved at New York’s most conflicted transportation-entertainment site.
The Case for LLMs as Hallucination Engines
Tucker Carlson's move to Twitter led him to celebrate it as the last preserve of free speech. But his relation to speech was long slippery, best reflected on the heuristic display of the 2016 electoral map that was the logo of the pundit's nightly show's and its guiding rationale. Continue reading →
Four years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own self-funded software company. For the first few years, all of my businesses flopped. They all operated at a loss, and none of them earned more than a few hundred dollars per month in revenue. Halfway through my third year, I created a network administration device called TinyPilot. It quickly caught on, and it’s been my main...
One of my favorite Lovelace interface cards for Home Assistant is the mini-graph-card by kalkih. It’s the card running most of the graphs in our smart home‘s dashboard. Surprisingly, mini-graph card is actually not included in Home Assistant by default – honestly, it should be, it’s so good – but you can easily install it […] The post Adding night shading to a Home Assistant mini-graph-card chart...
The Spring Lisp Game Jam 2024 ended one week ago. 48 games were submitted, a new record for the jam! This past week has been a time for participants to play and rate each other’s games. As I explored the entries, I noticed two distinct meta-patterns in how people approached building games with Lisp. I think these patterns apply more broadly to all applications of Lisp. Let’s talk about these...
Milan (Preceden’s designer) and I recently wrapped up a project to redesign Preceden’s pricing page. Here’s the previous above-the-fold content: And here’s how the new design turned out: Few things to highlight: Very happy with how it turned out. Kudus to Milan for suggesting we work on it and for the fantastic design work. The […]
The Gaza Strip’s spatiality continues to puzzle and fascinate–as much as the pressing question of its sovereignty. The two are of course intertwined, and the boundaries of Gaza are historically defined. The perimeter around the Gaza Strip was in a … Continue reading →
Friends and colleagues, it’s time once again for the survey that Aly Ollivierre and I conduct every two years. We ask people who do freelance mapping work about their fees and other business practices, in order to help bring more transparency to our little niche of the world, and empower our fellow freelancers to better … Continue reading Take the 2024 Freelance Mapper Survey →
Recently I switched to a new calorie counting app, Cronometer. I’m quite happy with it. It’s a huge improvement over MyFitnessPal (MFP) or Lose It and is not exploitative like Noom. The key improvement with Cronometer is accuracy, particularly good data sources for nutrition information. MFP offered obviously wrong entries from random people, sapping my confidence. Also it’s quicker to log things...
People often say things like "become data driven" without explaining what that means or how to do it. This is everything you need to know to actually become data driven, from scratch, using the same first principles that Amazon, Koch, and Toyota used back in their day.
Highlights I published my fourth annual retrospective about being a bootstrapped founder. TinyPilot sales continue running strong despite a delay in launching our next product. I analyze how I’m spending my time and figure out ways to allocate my hours better. Goal Grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Launch Voyager 2: PoE...
Hey everyone 👋 Here’s a powerful quote to kick us off into the Thanksgiving week: “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more.” - Melody Beattie I’m grateful for many things this year including my son’s birth
As computer vision researchers, we believe that every pixel can tell a story. However, there seems to be a writer’s block settling into the field when it comes to dealing with large images. Large images are no longer rare—the cameras we carry in our pockets and those orbiting our planet snap pictures so big and detailed that they stretch our current best models and hardware to their breaking...
Is AI a Leveler, King Maker, or Escalator?
Hello everyone! It's Tony again with another monthly updates.
We’re aging too fast (AKA my entire AI/robotics investment thesis)
Nuclear weapons are complex in many ways. The basic problem of achieving criticality is difficult on its own, but deploying nuclear weapons as operational military assets involves yet more challenges. Nuclear weapons must be safe and reliable, even with the rough handling and potential of tampering and theft that are intrinsic to their military use. Early weapon designs somewhat sidestepped the...
Lessons from building Senja.io to $4,000 MRR in Public
In 1974, two very significant things happened, if you are a fan of 99% invisible. Number one is that 99pi host Roman Mars was born. And number two, The Power Broker by Robert Caro was published. Roman learned about the power broker when he first started to cover cities and infrastructure on the radio. This The post Breaking Down The Power Broker appeared first on 99% Invisible.
We’re excited to announce the release of IoT Remote v3.0.0, featuring a native tablet version (available for both Android and iOS platforms) optimized for unlocking the full potential of larger screen sizes. What is the Arduino IoT Remote app? The Arduino IoT Remote app allows you to interact with your devices connected to the Arduino […] The post Arduino Cloud is now natively supported on...
A selection of fifteen formerly paywalled articles
This is my 2nd post summarizing the key takeaways I got from reading the book Modeling Life. I recommend reading my earlier post first to get a good grounding on the foundations covered in the book. A system can exhibit three different types of behavior: equilibrium, oscillation, and chaos. The shark-tuna system we saw in…
In 2009, Microsoft released an enormous 200lb coffee table with an embedded 30-inch touchscreen called Surface. Although the iPhone had been around for a little while, the larger screen made Surface feel absolutely futuristic: in the Photos app, you could toss around pictures like they were physically in front of you. It cost $10,000. Very few people ever bought it. A little more than a year...
Imagine having a Swiss Army Knife for your community use cases
People were really kind and seemed to enjoy my 3D printable Apple Vision Pro stand, a stand I designed in Fusion 360 with the goal of being visually appealing and compact as it stored the headset vertically so it wouldn’t take up too much space on your desk. Turns out there were quite a few folks requesting a similar style stand for their Meta Quest 3 so this weekend I set aside a bit of time to...
We all know avocados are healthy, and coke is bad. Yet we can’t help but gulp down a coke with a plate full of french fries. It takes an enormous amount of energy to break bad habits. I’ve broken bad habits under two conditions: (a) it’s a do-or-die situation, or (b) you have a device…
Around a year ago, I started noticing some spammy timelines being created on Preceden, my SaaS timeline maker tool. I’m honestly surprised it took spammers so long: Preceden is a freemium product (meaning people can sign up and try it for free), the product makes it very easy to create link-filled user generated content, I […]
It’s not an understatement when I say no-code practically changed my life and my career. In 2018, I was a different KP. Stuck at a corporate job where I felt like I was a tiny cog in a huge wheel, surrounded by uninspiring peers who I didn’t resonate with, bringing home a paycheck that was not even 1/3th of my income today, things weren’t looking bright and enthusiastic. Ironically, I took way too...
Homer's epic poem tells the story of how Odysseus struggled to return home after the Trojan War. It is one of the greatest stories in history.
There is something delightful about riding a bicycle. Once mastered, the simple action of pedaling to move forward and turning the handlebars to steer makes bike riding an effortless activity. In the demonstration below, you can guide the rider with the slider, and you can also drag the view around to change the camera angle: Compared to internal combustion engines or mechanical watches,...
The emotional rollercoaster I experience in art supply stores can be summarised in one word: greed. I want every single pen, every brush, every quill, and a sheet of every paper, ranging from crude cardboard to magnificent handcrafted Japanese washi. And yes, I need papyrus. And no, I don’t know what for. I want it all! Which one should I pick? Here is how to find your perfect partner in crime....
It’s time to take stock of the year have just lived through and get oriented for the year ahead. Here, we review the events of 2024 and our own contributions to the fight for a better world. A year that began amid genocide in Palestine and war in Ukraine and Sudan is concluding as Donald Trump prepares to return to power. This has grim implications in the United States, where Trump has explicitly...
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $60-80k/month in revenue and employs seven other people. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and my professional life overall. Highlights I’m trying to figure out...
Four mathematicians have found a new upper limit to the “Ramsey number,” a crucial property describing unavoidable structure in graphs. The post A Very Big Small Leap Forward in Graph Theory first appeared on Quanta Magazine
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $80-100k/month in revenue and employs six other people. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and my professional life overall. Goal Grades At the start of each...
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $60-80k/month in revenue and employs six other people. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and in my professional life overall. Highlights TinyPilot had a new...
Hey everyone 👋 Welcome to the Build In Public Hub , a beginner-friendly newsletter to help you go from zero to pro in the art of building in public. Curated & created with love ❤️ by The ‘Build In Public’ Guy → KP Starting Jan 2023, this newsletter will have a combination of:
More than 2,000 years ago, an actor in Greece botched a line in a play. In an inflection error, he said “weasel” when he meant to say “calm sea.” As a result, he was mocked by Sannyrion and then Aristophanes and others. He never worked again. The lesson might be that one innocent slip and […]
Here’s why I worry about AI. We know that people can get away with anything to pursue their goals (of profit, power, etc.) as long as they know they can get away with it, without negative consequences. We have had Hitlers, and insider traders. But the world keeps them in check via law and guns.… Read More The post You can’t jail an AI appeared first on Inverted Passion.
Bor Hung Chong from Nefin Group discusses green energy solutions beyond solar panels.
Thankbox is a successful B2C bootstrapped website created by Valentin Hinov which is now doing $30-35k a month.
Interest rates, Passive investing, Ben Graham as a young man, Daniel Kahneman, Ken Langone, Lawrence Cunningham, Reed Hastings, Steve Eisman
Creative Union Network Inc. has designed a small laneway house in Toronto, Canada, that was originally built as a garage. The building occupied a prominent location on the corner of the lane and main street. The original structure, although rundown, was a well-loved structure that made an outsized impact on the neighborhood’s collective memory. The […]
Hello everyone! Welcome 150 new subscribers since my last issue. I’m glad to have you here! 👋 Here is a quick update from me in April 2022. This should make a nice thumbnail for this page! 😁 🔻 Suffered from high churn In early April, Black Magic observed
I recently busted out my old ThinkPad T40, the last of the OG IBM ThinkPads. I picked it up some time around my university days because I liked collecting ThinkPads at the time, and it was a nice complement to my existing ThinkPad T60 and T430. The battery is dead, but everything else still works. Checking a few online listings, I’m surprised that I can still find batteries sold for this model....
Highlights I announced a new product and then discovered it was a mistake. I simplified the TinyPilot website to focus on a single device. I tried taking my first real vacation from TinyPilot with mixed results. Goal Grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Train local staff members to assist with customer support Result: Local...
Indie updates, B2B vs B2C, Black Friday, surfing, skimboarding, hardware.
I was quite vain when I was younger due to a low self-esteem which led to a high level of insecurity. That insecurity made me feel ugly and that I was never...
May 3, 2024.
At the beginning of the year I quit consulting to focus full time on Preceden, my SaaS timeline maker tool. I also started working on a new side project, Emergent Mind, an AI-powered AI news site. My last update on how things were going was after 3 months which provides more background for anyone interested. […]
In the summer of 2023, we went on an amazing trip through Portugal. We’d already visited Lisbon on a short city trip a few years earlier, and that experience was so good we knew we had to return. This time, we decided to take a full three weeks and see the sights. We were planning […] The post Our favorite places to eat and drinks during our Portugal vacation appeared first on Style over...
The world was plunged into darkness on 1st September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, an act of aggression that led France and the United Kingdom to declare war. Amidst this global turmoil, a young Albert Camus, then a journalist for socialist newspaper Alger-Républicain, found himself wrestling with the unfolding chaos, haunted by the memory of […]
More than ever, we’re pushed to have certainty. Strong opinions, tightly held and loudly proclaimed. And then, when reality intervenes, it can be stressful. The software stack, business model, career, candidate, policy, or even the social network habits that we had as part of our identity let us down. It’s not easy to say, “I […]
I’ve been feeling more down these days. I am not sure if it is pms, covid, both, or just responding to reality in general. I don’t really get why people are not...
Political pollsters have a problem. Certain groups in the population are much happier to talk to pollsters than others, so if you call up 1000 people to ask who they're planning to vote for, the results you get won't really represent the voting intentions of the
You probably know more about machine learning math than you think
Marcus Aurelius is one of the best-known figures of the Roman Empire, thanks to his writings on Stoic philosophy and his place in history as "the last good emperor." His face is famous, too, even though he lived long before photography. The many surviving statues of Marcus Aurelius provide a vivid portrayal of his curly Read More >>
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<p>blogstatic's <a href="https://www.producthunt.com/products/blogstatic#blogstatic" target="_blank">first PH launch</a> (documented <a href="https://valsopi.com/launching-on-product-hunt">here</a>) was in December of 2022, three months after the <a href="https://x.com/valsopi/status/1579798717867122694">rebranding and its public launch</a> and deciding to give blogstatic a <a...
After World War I, in Frankfurt, Germany, the city government was taking on a big project. A lot of residents were in dire straits, and in the second half of the 1920s, the city built over 10,000 public housing units. It was some of the earliest modern architecture — simple, clean, and uniform. The massive The post The Frankfurt Kitchen appeared first on 99% Invisible.
It was only a year after first meeting, in 1895, that Marie and Pierre Curie became husband and wife. Together, they made groundbreaking contributions to science, not least the discovery of two new elements, polonium and radium, and in 1903 they were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Tragedy befell the couple in 1906 […]
Today’s language models are more sophisticated than ever, but they still struggle with the concept of negation. That’s unlikely to change anytime soon. The post Chatbots Don’t Know What Stuff Isn’t first appeared on Quanta Magazine
As a programmer and CTO, I've developed a rough rule of thumb when it comes to scaling systems. When you scale your inputs (users, page views, messages, etc) by 10x, something breaks. Usually, it's something pretty fundamental. And the end result is that you need to replace a critical component or rearchitect the system entirely.
Well-known URLs are pretty neat. I’ve even dared propose one before here on my blog. And now I’m here to propose another: .well-known/avatar The idea is: anybody that owns a domain can put their avatar in a well-known location. I’ve already implemented this for my own site[1]. You can see it here: jim-nielsen.com/.well-known/avatar In some ways, this is really just for me. I often find myself...
Ruby on Rails, or 'Rails' for short, is a framework for making websites with the programming language Ruby. The idea behind it is to simplify how programmers create websites and it caused a storm amongst developers when it was released in August 2004 by software engineer David Heinemeier
In the math of particle physics, every calculation should result in infinity. The set of techniques known as “resurgence” points toward an escape. The post How to Tame the Endless Infinities Hiding in the Heart of Particle Physics first appeared on Quanta Magazine
April 19, 2024.
I’ve had the opportunity to try out another new laptop at work. I’ve used a brand new laptop recently, and it was horrible. But this time I’m pleasantly surprised. The Lenovo ThinkPad P14s gen 4 has great specs: CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U (8 cores, 16 threads, up to 5.1 GHz) GPU: AMD Radeon 780M (integrated) RAM: 32GB DDR5, soldered SSD: 1 TB NVMe Display: 1920x1200 resolution Two USB-C ports Two...
“We give them the same phone, in the same brand-new condition,” says one seller.
I’m a fan of Mat Ryer’s work, and his blog posts have had a significant impact on the way I program in Go. I found the book hit or miss. Some chapters were fascinating and taught me valuable Go lessons, while others felt boring and got too bogged down in the minutiae of third-party libraries. Overall, I’d still recommend it to anyone who considers themselves a beginner or intermediate Go...
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Sometimes I save a rant for 10 years and finally decide it's not a thinkpiece, it's a stupid joke. Today's News:
In the first quarter of 2024, Meta made $36.45 billion dollars - $12.37 billion dollars of which was pure profit. Though the company no longer reports daily active users, it now uses another metric: “family daily active people.” This number refers to “registered and logged-in
Inside Stability AI's roster of AI models.
Consulting firms rank brands on value. Marketers promise to increase it. But brand value has little to do with whether a company is famous or even profitable. The accurate measure of brand value is the premium that consumers will spend over the generic. What time, money or risk will they take for a valuable brand […]
I used to drive 200 miles to Boston once a week or so. After a few trips on the highway, my subconscious figured out that getting behind a few trucks for the entire ride enabled me to spend four hours without using much conscious effort on driving. Every day, we make decisions. These require effort, […]
Among all of the visual information published by the U.S. government, there may be no product with a higher information density than the Federal Aviation Administration’s aviation maps.
How the Chatbot Arena leaderboard for LLMs works and why it’s important to understand
The discipline of design is the commitment to structuring and systematizing good ideas. Ideas don’t stand on their own. When a good idea turns into a good thing, it’s because structure and systems — ones that existed before the idea — made it happen. There’s this myth in creative spaces that systems are where good ideas go to die. That innovation almost always means breaking free of...
Time for some humor
Many people ask why I became a theoretical physicist. The answer runs through philosophy—which I thought, for years, I’d left behind in college. My formal relationship with philosophy originated with Mr. Bohrer. My high school classified him as a religion … Continue reading →
It’s almost impossible to safely drive a car while only looking in the rear view mirror. Only seeing where you’ve been is a terrible way to figure out where to go. But it’s really unsafe to go forward with no idea of what came before. AI plods along into the future, using machine learning to […]
It was a 2012 evening, and I was driving home from the office. I was worried about finishing a big project at work on time. I’d made the journey from the office to my home so many times, my car almost seemed to know the way by itself. My hands were on the wheel, but…
All the details about the process and the cost of getting SOC 2
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $60-80k/month in revenue and employs six other people. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and my professional life overall. Highlights TinyPilot is facing a supply...
A recurring topic of discussion on the OpenAI forums, on Reddit, and on Twitter is about what ChatGPT’s knowledge cutoff date actually is. It seems like it should be straightforward enough to figure out (just ask it), but it can be confusing due to ChatGPT’s inconsistent answers about its cutoff month, differences from official documentation, … Continue reading Exploring ChatGPT’s Knowledge Cutoff...
Have you ever used archive.org’s Internet Wayback Machine? It’s a free tool that’s been archiving the web since 1996. So, if you want to see what Google looked like in 1999, they’ve got it. Internet Archive capture of Google from April 22, 1999 ArchiveBox is like your own, personal Internet Wayback Machine. It’s free and open-source, and you can use it to archive most websites. ArchiveBox is a...
(just a quick announcement...)
A few big changes are making the online world a more boring place to hang out.
fuzzy processors are entering mass production
Zig is a new, open-source programming language designed to replace C. I’m still a Zig beginner, so I’m trying to learn the language by using Zig to rewrite parts of existing C applications. One of the first challenges I encountered with Zig is understanding strings. I couldn’t find detailed documentation about how Zig strings work when calling C code, so I’m sharing my findings in case they’re...
By imbuing enormous vectors with semantic meaning, we can get machines to reason more abstractly — and efficiently — than before. The post A New Approach to Computation Reimagines Artificial Intelligence first appeared on Quanta Magazine
In steganography, an ordinary message masks the presence of a secret communication. Humans can never do it perfectly, but a new study shows it’s possible for machines. The post Secret Messages Can Hide in AI-Generated Media first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Cypress is an open-source tool for testing web applications end-to-end. I first saw Gleb Bahmutov demo Cypress at a 2018 web dev meetup in New York, and I was blown away. I’ve been using Cypress since I saw it demoed at a dev meetup in 2018. Before discovering Cypress, I had begrudgingly used Selenium. Cypress was a refreshing leap forward, as it offered elegant solutions to tons of pain points...
Hey everyone 👋 Let’s open this newsletter with a powerful quote ⬇️ Luck surface area. Aka serendipity. Aka helping relevant and like-minded people find you through your content. That’s what building in public is all about. With that said, get ready for October’s community edition highlighting key launches and wins from founders, makers, and creators in the #buildinpublic community.
For many people the first word that comes to mind when they think about statistical charts is “lie.” – Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information I wish we could all agree: pie charts should die. I know this is unreasonable. And pie charts are only part of the problem. The problem is data visualizations that show what’s already obvious. After spending some time learning about...
Or is it?
Grids are very, very useful. I just published an essay on how anchoring the most important information on a web page to the Y-axis will help viewer’s focus on it and pay closer attention. It’s a pretty basic idea, really, but somehow I found myself writing over 1,000 words to describe it. I won’t do that here. Instead, I want to provide some very brief direction on using grids. Grids are a...
From pioneering ambient music and ever-evolving light paintings to innovating production styles, installations, and strategies of surrender, Brian Eno’s work occupies a rare space in this world with an imprint as deep as it is wide. For the Roxy Music founder, art is the kind of surrender we all benefit from, especially when it helps us digest what science discovers. In this vein, he co-founded...
The post Us appeared first on The Perry Bible Fellowship.
It’s been a while since my last post! Since then, I’ve been focusing on growing Remote Rocketship. I’m super excited to announce that it’s reached $2,000 MRR! 🥳 You may recall from the last post that I mentioned that the only sustainable channel to grow the website is SEO and that I was learning how to do it from scratch (and it’s now getting 19,000 monthly search clicks!). In this post, I want...
The first day of cicada chasing exceeded expectations and we hoped for similar results on the second. However the weather began to change overnight with downpours possible during daylight hours. Local meteorologists predicted a line of thunderstorms rolling through the Midwest, approaching from the west. It would hit Peoria, Illinois mid-morning and St. Louis, Missouri […] The post Cicada Chase,...
And a consideration for choosing a language
Ever thought if 50 is too old to start your own business? Devan is proof it's not. He was 50 when he created his startup and at 56 years old, he has made a million-dollar business! Can you tell us about HR Partner and your achievements? HR Partner
The neuroscience, physics, and philosophy of freedom in a universe of fixed laws.
All of us, except the AI startups and VCs—unless a real war breaks out
Lessons from building Tailscan in public to $500 MRR
I’ve been searching for new startup ideas and problem areas to tackle. It’s quite difficult to do, especially when you begin adding constraints to the criteria such as “Am I excited about this problem space?”. The internet is filled with helpful ways to come up with startup ideas and below is the summary of what I’ve learned on the topic during the last few months.
👋 Hello everyone, it’s Tony again. Lots of things happened in October 2021. I released DevUtils 1.12, worked on a new exciting feature for Black Magic, moved back to Vietnam, and other small updates. Just want to say this quickly: Thank you all so much for following my journey! I hope my newsletter is helpful to you, I really enjoy writing it, and I hope you enjoy reading it too!
Vitally important, rarely taught, easily messed up. In order to go onto the next thing, which we all do (unless you’re still wearing pajamas with feet and taking ballet lessons), we need to walk away from the last thing. Wrap it up, learn from it, leave it in good hands. And we also need to […]
Visualising what your design will look like when printed can be the hardest thing about designing a repeat pattern. We have a good method for sketching out your initial design to see how it will work when it has been printed. For this project, we will be using a mounted lino block as we plan to use this block to print onto fabric. Start by drawing around your block four times as shown below....
A new model opens up new possibilities
Here’s a map of the Puget Sound area that I made a couple years ago for presentations to folks in the US northwest. Recently I wanted to work some more at labeling in a 3D environment and found this to be a handy target. Additionally, I thought it would be fun to make more use …
Then they stealth edited the piece. They knew they'd committed libel.
Another correction
“Clap on! Clap off! Clap on! Clap off! The Clapper!” This 1980s earworm of a jingle touted a gadget to turn your lights, your TV, or any other electrical device on or off with the clap of your hands. If you watched any amount of American television back then, you probably saw the Clapper’s repetitious and yet oddly endearing ad, and perhaps you, like many others, felt compelled to give it a...
For everyone to have access to AGI, everyone must also have access to the compute to use it
It seemed like just yesterday that Twelve Mile Circle chronicled the kid who designed an imaginary town and counted various forms of transportation. Now my elementary aged student is all grown up, a newly-minted university graduate. Those interceding years passed much more quickly than I could have possibly imagined. Michigan State University is huge (~50,000 […] The post Graduated appeared first...
Rest of World’s four Labor x Tech fellows reflect on their year reporting about the global tech industry’s impact on its workers.
Open AI announcements, DeepSeek-v2, and TSMC Arizona
Canada's recent federal budget has sent ripples through the investment and real estate communities. A key change: a looming increase in capital gains tax on sizeable transactions. This has many wondering – should I sell assets before June 25th, 2024, to avoid the taxman's bite? Let's dive into the situation and explore the best course of action for different scenarios.
Hello everyone! This is Tony 👋 I just had my best month ever in my entire indie hacking journey, and I’m excited to share it with you all! 🤑 I made $23K in November 2021 as a solo dev Here is the full breakdown: Revenue: $23,109.02 Sales Tax: $1,726.13
The mystery of why we don't dream of building perfect societies anymore
Without Americans on the app, advertising dollars are at risk.
Thirty-eight years since the launch of e-filing, the IRS will pilot its own tax filing system ending two decades of Intuit's regulatory capture of the tax software market
Free covid treatment for everyone in the US, a novel orthopox virus, a really big machine, cameras used for good and evil, ant heaven now, and more.
What’s it like to be in the top 1%? According to the statistics, most of the readers of my blog are among the highest earning and/or richest people in the UK. I bet however that not many of you feel that way. Let’s start with income To be in the top 1% of earnings in… Continue reading The richest person you know →
<p>blogstatic had another above $1K month.</p> <p>$1,208.38 to be exact.</p> <p>This was the third +$1K month overall, since <a href="https://valsopi.com/blogstatic-chance">rebranding</a> back in 2022.</p> <figure><img src="https://editor.blogstatic.io/web/assets/uploads/318c129ca4ad11bf57aa49776076d10d.png" id="/tmp/phprp8o2Z" data-image="/tmp/phprp8o2Z" width="760" height="277" alt="a list of...
Two Customer Encounters
Bad architecture must come from some underlying ethos.
I spend a couple of weeks every February keeping up with my investments, timing it to coincide with the release of Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders. I found something interesting while performing this ritual this time. I came across Aswath Damodaran’s website, where he has compiled data on the S&P 500 index, including earnings, dividends,…
In today's Canadian housing market, the age-old question of renting versus buying feels more pressing than ever. Soaring property values and rising interest rates have created a complex landscape, leaving many wondering: is homeownership still the golden ticket to building wealth?
Trying some unconventional techniques to create a pop-art print of a Cherry Mash candy bar.
I love the “carry-on only” traveling style, it’s cheaper and you don’t have to worry about airlines losing your stuff. Outside of requiring a bit more planning, what’s not to love? Turns out this is a beloved product category with a passionate community behind it, and as a result a lot of manufacturers are making really awesome bags. As a result you see different bags with different strategies,...
I seem to have accidentally come up with a method for duplicating a centuries-old terrain representation technique. If you’ve looked at old maps, you’ve probably seen hachures: lines that run up and down along the slope of terrain features. There were a wide variety of approaches to doing hachuring, with different rules. But, in all … Continue reading Automated Hachuring in QGIS →
Most founders dream of making $10,000 in monthly revenue. One founder who has made that dream a reality is Benjamin Houy
Domination through iteration. Be sure to continue adapting and maximize your current audience rather than chase more pageviews. The post Weeks 35-39: A $526 Day and a Breakthrough appeared first on Scott DeLong.
Even if you don’t recognize the name, you probably recognize the saguaro cactus. It’s the archetype of the cactus, a column from which protrude arms bent at right angles like elbows. As my husband pointed out, the cactus emoji is … Continue reading →
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Also, in this model, everything is flat and it's the same everywhere and eventually all the stars are dead! Today's News:
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: People on patreon seemed to be traumatized by this, and I guess what I'm saying is for a couple bucks a month, you could've been traumatized a day early. Today's News:
My psychology around money has changed significantly over the last two years. While some of that is captured in my monthly portfolio updates, I thought it was worth recording some of my emotions while they are still fresh. Two years ago Turning the clock back, my financial situation was, in word, ‘flush’. The stock market… Continue reading Feeling broke →
...and other updates in January 2022 from me
Scaling will run out. The question is when.
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $80-110k/month in revenue and employs six other people. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and my professional life overall. Highlights I worked with the TinyPilot...
Neurodivergent physicists face barriers in STEM, but there are also benefits to being who they are.
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer, and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $60-80k/month in revenue and employs six other people. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and in my professional life overall. Highlights TinyPilot had its...
In 2022, two decades after their founding, creative agency Squint/Opera joined forces with fellow studios ICRAVE, 59, and VMI Studio under the banner of Journey, a "superpowered organization" bridging physical and digital design. Long before the merger, Squint/Opera had envisioned a world where media architecture would enrich urban life and reshape how we interact with the built environment....
You will sometimes hear someone say, in a loose conceptual sense, that credit cards have money in them. Of course we know that that isn't the case; our modern plastic card payment network relies on online transactions where the balance tracking and authorization decisions happen within a financial institution that actually has the money (whether it's your money or credit). There is an alternate...
Rónán is the founder of Deutsch Gym, an online community for learning German. He's making thousands in revenue from his startup which he made after moving to Berlin and wanting to improve his German language skills. Read on for his tips on making a
An argument for legal and technical safe harbors for AI safety and trustworthiness research
Yes, market-rate!
Mature technology companies are establishing regular quarterly dividends. Is this a positive or negative development for shareholders?
Elsa Binder was twenty when, in October of 1941, German forces carried out a brutal massacre of thousands of Jews in her hometown of Stanislawów, Poland. Two months later, she and her family were compelled to enter the Stanisławów Ghetto, joining 20,000 others in a harrowing fight for survival. It was in this time of […]
Highlights TinyPilot’s sales jumped to $57k, and it might be sustainable. I’m just about to launch TinyPilot’s new product and branding. I reduced Google Cloud Platform fees by 90% on my side projects. Goal Grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Complete TinyPilot’s website rebrand Result: The rebrand is 95% done, but we...
There is an ongoing culture war, and not just in the US, over the content of childhood education, both public and private. This seems to be flaring up recently, but is never truly gone. Republicans in the US have recently escalated this war by banning over 500 books in several states (mostly Florida) because they […] The post The Fight over Education first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.
Remembering Albert Borgmann (1937-2023)
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Just gently closing the door on ever giving a TED talk there. Very nice. Today's News:
Two years ago, I created a website for my business. By combining my terrible design skills with a decent-looking template, I created a site that looked okay. I told myself that if the business took off, I’d hire a real designer to make it look professional. TinyPilot website, before design changes A year later, the business was generating $45k/month in revenue, but my website still looked like a...
YR Architecture + Design has shared photos of a modern 575 square foot (53 sqm) live/work studio in Columbus, OH, that was once a 2-car garage. The homeowners were determined for their two-car garage to be an asset, with the couple seeking to maximize their property, and at the same time, offer options for leasing […]
Highlights I hired TinyPilot’s first support engineer. I learned that hiring a support engineer is even harder than I expected. I’m evaluating platforms for paying international contractors. Goal Grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Launch Voyager 2: PoE Edition Result: I finally launched Voyager 2 PoE Grade: A Oh, boy....
The crypto industry jumps on the Trump train.
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/valsopi/status/1680156076036030464" target="_blank">Monthly tweet update</a></p><p>Looking back at the tough June, I thought I should clear up a few things as the much better July is almost over.</p><ul><li><b>🫣 Bummer:</b> June tanked with the lowest revenue to date ($216.61) since the <a href="https://valsopi.com/blogstatic-chance">re-launch</a> back in...
Submitted by Leo, who says: On September 24, the Casablanca tramway network nearly doubled in length with the opening of T3 and T4. The Casatramway network, operated by RATP, is depicted in the new map alongside the Casabusway BRT lines currently under construction. The map leaves something to be desired. I find the coastal outline […]
And why direct forms of communication will always be super valuable
How employees and CEOs alike can plan for the future.
One day, early this spring, I found myself in a hotel elevator with three other people. The cohort consisted of two theoretical physicists, one computer scientist, and what appeared to be a normal person. I pressed the elevator’s 4 button, … Continue reading →
Abandoning the idea of building a Slack Alternative
The case for customizable AI systems as an alternative to one-size-fits-all AI systems
By Michael McGill The Stoics had a name for a person who fully realized the virtues of Stoicism. A person who overcame all of their personal defects to achieve a life of complete tranquility and goodness. The perfect Stoic, if you will. They referred to this person as the Stoic Sage. Now, the Stoic Sage Read More >>
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] Building a dam imparts a stupendous change to the environment, and as with any change, there are winners and losers. The winners are usually us, people, through hydropower generation, protection from flooding, irrigation for farming, and a stable water supply for populated areas. But, we've known for a long time, probably since...
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: I read a lot of Perry Bible Fellowship, desperately afraid that somewhere I'd amnesia-stolen this script. Today's News:
6 months ago, I had just finished creating my first SaaS: the French Together app. My goal was simple: launch it and reach $20k MRR. Writing this, I can’t help but laugh. $20k MRR for a first SaaS? Really? Only 2 types of people would set such an ambitious goal: Someone who never launched a SaaS Someone who launched hundreds of SaaS Let’s find out how it went, shall we?
As election season kicks into high gear, we need to watch how cryptocurrency companies are influencing US politics.
Altos reports that active single-family inventory was up 1.2% week-over-week. Inventory always declines seasonally in the Winter and usually bottoms in late January or February. If two weeks ago was the seasonal bottom, that would be very early in the year, but that has happened before. The first graph shows the seasonal pattern for active single-family inventory since 2015. Click on graph...
March 15, 2023.
It occurs to me that I have been Blendering for a long time. In fact, it’s been almost exactly a decade since I gave my first public presentation on the technique of generating shaded relief using Blender. And in that time, the method has been adopted far more widely than I could have ever anticipated … Continue reading My Decade with Blender →
An optimistic take on technology and inequality.
I have a question: has anyone ever tried to standardize an RSS feed in HTML? I can’t find any discussion around it — but I’d love to read more about the idea because it intrigues me. The OG RSS was an XML feed. Later we got JSON feeds. So why not an HTML feed standard? (I know, I know, obligatory xkcd link.) At this point, I think it’s fair to say HTML has won. As Yehuda says: HTML…is humanity's...
It seems like everything that happens in a kitchen requires exact timing. Whisk the batter for three minutes, knead the dough for 15 minutes, bake for 30 minutes, and so on. A timer is a necessity for cooking and baking, but there is no reason you need to use your phone or a boring egg […] The post Vintage rotary phone becomes stylish kitchen timer appeared first on Arduino Blog.
An simple overview of temperature and its effect on LLM output
Early access to some software we've built to make XmR charts more accessible.
The Symmatricom 58532A Opening up the 58532A Voltage Regulation Result What about the other 58532A variant? References The Symmatricom 58532A As part of a package deal, I got my hands on a Symmetricom 58532A L1 GPS antenna. Microchip, which acquired Symmetricom in 2013, doesn’t seem to have antennas in its product line anymore, but the data sheet is still available on their website. There are...
Some light Visual Pinball debugging and the world of DOF. New to DOF? Read on.
Designed by Mubien Brands, Santander.
Highlights I learned a few techniques that make it easier for me to record videos for my course. I’ve decided I don’t need to use a Merchant of Record service. I’ve integrated htmx into my standard toolkit for making web applications. Goal Grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Record publishable versions of four lessons from...
Back to basics for AI startups and others
We live in an era in which maps (and plenty of other graphics) are made with digital tools. Workflows vary, but the end result is that a lot of us base our cartography entirely on clean vector shapes and neat raster grids. For example, I talked earlier this year about a map I made of … Continue reading On the Practice of Wobbling →
Two letters from Thomas Jefferson to his nephew, Peter Carr, illustrate Jefferson's views on education, ethics, religion, and many other subjects.
Zig is a new, independently developed low-level programming language. It’s a modern reimagining of C that attempts to retain C’s performance while embracing improvements from the last 30 years of tooling and language design. Zig makes calling into C code easier than any other language I’ve used. Zig also treats unit testing as a first-class feature, which the C language certainly does not. These...
The stock market cycle is a crucial concept for investors aiming to navigate the financial markets effectively. It represents the period from a market low to a peak and back again. Understanding the dynamics behind these cycles can help investors maintain their strategies during downturns and manage expectations during upswings. This blog post delves into the intricacies of market cycles, drawing...
It's a one-party state. They hold elections, but the Party always wins.
The second to the last update is focused and short. I have just one goal: convert subscribers into paying customers. The post Weeks 40-43: A $5k Month and Billion Dollar Idea appeared first on Scott DeLong.
Ch Daniel is a 25 year old founder who is making $200,000 in annual revenue from a variety of websites.
Several tech companies face a fresh problem after cutting jobs: their rating on Glassdoor nosedives. But there’s a way they can fix this. I show what companies are doing - and why.
Douglas Kendyson, a former engineer at Flutterwave and Paystack, has built a profitable bootstrapped African startup.
Building a unified experience with Slack instead of trying to replace it all at once
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: If heroes would just check the betting markets before fighting they could make much better choices. Today's News:
Talking to Jordan Schneider from ChinaTalk about China's technological ascent
Hi everyone, welcome to the latest spotlight edition of the Build In Public newsletter. Every week, I interview one prolific creator or founder and unpack insights, strategies, and actionable advice from their story that can be helpful in your own journey.
Your assets are the government's collateral.
Hey everyone 👋 Hope you had a great week. In today’s edition, I wanted to feature Andrew Barry. Andrew’s a friend/creator/former colleague that you may already be familiar with on Twitter. I’ve admired his work from afar and always enjoy conversing with him on topics of transformational educational experiences. I’ve previously tweeted that it is my conviction that we will see tons of successful...
Part 1: How to spot misinformation, mistakes, and meaningless data
We are still very much in the hype phase of the latest crop of artificial intelligence applications, specifically the large language models and so-called “transformers” like Chat GPT. Transformers are a deep learning model that use self-attention to differentially weight the importance of its input, including any recursive use of its own output. This process […] The post Have Current AI Reached...
Did you know that Cyanotype prints don't always have to be blue? They can be toned and even bleached to alter their colour. The key is to use anything with a high tannin content. Tannins are commonly found in the bark of trees, leaves, buds, stems, fruits, seeds, roots, and plant galls. For this process, you could use tea of different varieties, red wine and even make your own tannin solutions...
Held in Hawaii this year, the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) hosted its annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) that focuses on the latest developments in human-computer interaction. Students from universities all across the world attended the event and showcased how their devices and control systems could revolutionize how we interact with […] The post Check out...
Andrew Kamphey is a creator who has made $200k from teaching people how to use Google Sheets over the past three years. Think 'Miss Excel' but he's a beardy guy who doesn't dance in his videos. In this interview Andrew shares his marketing wins,
Discovering virtual pinball, a hobbyist community devoted to it, and building a full-size virtual pinball cabinet.
April 12, 2024.
I just spent a week talking with some exceptional students from three of the UK’s top universities; Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial College. Along with UCL, these British universities represent 4 of the top 10 universities in the world. The US - a country with 5x more people and 8x higher GDP - has the same number of universities in the global top 10. On these visits, I was struck by the...
After decades of frustration, researchers have finally determined how an airborne scent molecule links to a human smell receptor. The post How a Human Smell Receptor Works Is Finally Revealed first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Check cashing, as a business, is a poorly understood "alternative" financial service.
Ever wondered about what happens when banks are closed or why some apps have operating hours? It's fascinating.
Everything you need to know about the Amazon Weekly Business Review: how it works, why it works, and how it helps Amazon win.
Have you ever wanted your very own vending machine? If so, you likely found that they’re expensive and too bulky to fit in most homes. But now you can experience vending bliss thanks to this miniature vending machine designed by m22pj, which you can craft yourself using an Arduino and other materials lying around the […] The post A desktop-sized DIY vending machine for your room appeared first on...
Romantic relationships get all the attention, but I'd argue that friendships are just as important—if not more so—for our health and happiness. Just like with romantic relationships, creating fulfilling, lasting friendships as an adult can be really hard. But… Why? I mean, sure, there's the logistical side of it. As we age, our lives get more complex and filled with responsibilities, making it...
When privilege becomes a pre-requisite.
Trying to make an AI model that can’t be misused is like trying to make a computer that can’t be used for bad things
In this blog “I have no idea what I’m doing” I’ll be chronicling the progress and discoveries I make as I build a startup for the first time. The name of this blog comes from a talk in 2015 by former Facebook engineer Graham Lee. In his talk, he admits that although at the time he was helping build a platform that supported 1 billion people, he had no idea what he was doing. Never before had he or...
The philosophy and lessons behind "a moneymaking machine like no other" (with a cumulative trading profit of $100B +).
Last week, I was listening to the CoRecursive podcast interview with PowerShell’s lead architect, Jeffrey Snover. One moment in that interview has been stuck in my head the whole week is when Snover argues that graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are inherently “antisocial”: I realized that — you know, that the mouse is antisocial. The GUI is antisocial. So what’s that mean? You have a problem to...
Sparked by progress in Large Language Models (LLMs), there’s a lot of chatter recently about AGI, its timelines, and what it might look like. Some of it is hopeful and optimistic, but a lot of it is fearful and doomy, to put it mildly. Unfortunately, a lot of it is also very abstract, which causes people to speak past each other in circles. Therefore, I’m always on a lookout for concrete analogies...
Laetitia@Work #70
(But why not?)
TSMC Arizona back on track, drawing arrows on graphs, the downsides of inclusionary zoning, why people hate inflation, and interesting ideas about market power
Today's interview is with Ruurtjan, a Dutch founder whose two sites get 500,000 users a month. Ruurtjan quit his job to go all in on his business
Some hints about what the next year of AI looks like
The new Historical Topo Map Explorer is out of beta and ready for you to dive into a collection of over 180,000 beautiful vintage USGS topo maps! Use this updated Living Atlas app to geographically browse, download, export, and even animate, these cartographic objects of joy. Here’s how… 0:00 Adventurous introduction0:23 Navigating the map and finding topos0:40 …
I didn’t get much time to wander around Seoul like I did in Tokyo. Every day was a work day and it was a brief stop. So I was confined mostly to what I could see from the windshield as we drove through the city or from the hotel. However, this was my first trip […] The post Asia-Pacific, Part 6 (South Korea: Seoul) appeared first on Twelve Mile Circle - An Appreciation of Unusual Places.
We spend almost no time teaching toddlers about freedom. Instead, the lessons we teach (and learn) for our entire lives are about responsibility. It’s easy to teach freedom, but important to teach responsibility. Because if you get the responsibility taken care of, often the freedom will follow. When someone points out a lack of responsibility, […]
May 24, 2024.
Allison Seboldt is the founder of PageFactory, a service which helps websites grow their content and reach with programmatic SEO.
Title insurance is grossly overpriced relative to actual risks involved. Why is that?
Over its more than 40 year journey from conception to completion, Boston’s Big Dig massive infrastructure project, which rerouted the central highway in the heart of the city, encountered every hurdle imaginable: ruthless politics, engineering challenges, secretive contractors, outright fraud and even the death of one motorist. It became a kind of poster child for The post The Big Dig appeared...
Highlights TinyPilot generates $58k/month in revenue yet somehow loses money. It’s more important than I thought to have low-latency insight into developers’ hours. I’m trying paid advertising again for the first time in almost two years. Goal Grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Publish a blog post and video about building...
The Trust Deficit, EU Regulations, Medicare Advantage scams, Munger soldiered on, The cult of Silicon Valley, Self-esteem and outer scorecards, MMT's founder is worried about deficits
Are closed source AI models doomed?
The tasks AI can do well are expanding rapidly
March 29, 2024.
When I first found my people online, forums were the main way people gathered to discuss shared interests. Web-based bulletin boards allowed members to have ongoing, asynchronous conversations over days or weeks as participants logged in to read and respond on their own schedule. Topics were neatly divided into threads, which made it easy to follow specific conversations. Unlike...
Just when PowerSeeker thought they had nowhere to go...
In my last post, I talked about how I going about searching for a new idea to work on. I’ve now landed on Remote Rocketship, a job board for remote roles. In this post, I’ll talk about how I got there, what I’ve been up to and how I’m thinking about moving forward.
Crypto-related litigation is in full swing, as the Terra civil fraud trial has kicked off and two other cases against crypto companies have survived motions to dismiss.
A brief overview of knowledge distillation and its capabilities
Lessons from building, growing and selling SaaS Products all in public
A note before we start: I don’t know how much of this I believe. I’m sketching out some feelings in this post and thinking through whether it actually makes any sense. I’d be curious where other folks land on this. I’m not sure I totally understand this impulse we have on the web to override the default style and appearance of fundamental computing controls. Everyone wants their own checkboxes,...
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $80-100k/month in revenue and employs six other people. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and my professional life overall. Highlights TinyPilot had its...
Mentorcruise is an impressive mentor marketplace which has grown to 20,000 users.
Hey everyone, It’s been a while since I sent a new edition of this newsletter. There’s a good reason behind my delay. Let me share what I’m up to via a string of fun announcements today. Let’s get to it. BIG ANNOUNCEMENT: I launched something fun for the larger founder ecosystem today.
In deciding what startup to start, I’ve been thinking about what problem space I want to tackle. An area that’s drawing my attention is team communication and collaboration, especially for knowledge workers. This is for several reasons: With the trend towards distributed/hybrid teams, effective communication is becoming increasingly important.
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $80-100k/month in revenue and employs six other people. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and my professional life overall. Highlights I think about how I can do...
These Python scripts help me write 3x faster and go from loose ideas to first draft in minutes.
Refactoring the business entity, thoughts on marketing and building
Last week, I gave a 30 minute talk to a group of CTOs and VP Engineerings in San Francisco about measuring engineering organizations. This talk was essentially this blog post, and here are the slides. A few topics worth highlighting: Measurement educates you, and your audience, about the area being measured. Even flawed measures can be very effective educators. Don’t get caught up on not measuring...
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Humans are the only social animal that is creating fake partners so they don't have to be social anymore. Today's News:
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Is this the most or least pessimistic comic yet? Today's News:
Bargain with the devil and you may wind up with a golden fiddle, supernatural guitar-playing ability, or a room full of gleaming alchemized straw. Whoops, we misattributed that last one. It’s actually Rumpelstiltskin’s doing, but the by-morning-or-else deadline that drives the Brothers Grimm favorite is not dissimilar to the ultimatum posed to disgraced medieval monk […]
Changpeng Zhao's sentencing, FOIA requests reveal past FBI investigations into Coinbase, and the SEC is on a Wells notice bender.
I am more worried about privacy than crypto crime.
Julien Nahum caught my attention on Twitter by pulling in $22k MRR with his Notion form app, Notion Forms. Back in August he was at $10k MRR
"We think you're gonna LOVE it"
After decades of slumber, the country that brought us bullet trains and Nintendo has mustered some momentum.
I haven't written anything for a bit. I'm not apologizing, because y'all don't pay me enough to apologize, but I do feel a little bad. Part of it is just that I've been busy, with work and travel and events. Part of it is that I've embarked on a couple of writing projects only to have them just Not Work Out. It happens sometimes: I'll notice something interesting, spend an evening or two digging...
Restore Order (to your printer)
Competition tends to eliminate high profits resulting from business models that have worked spectacularly well. Will Berkshire's playbook continue to perform well in the future?
and how I’m using their feedback to change my approach
One of several highlights for me in January was visiting Salisbury cathedral, which I did on an impulse while travelling back from the Coastal Folly. My main frame of reference to the cathedral being those notorious Russian nerve agent assassins citing it as their reason for visiting England, something which to a Londoner had as… Continue reading Jan ’24: A giant tax bill lands →
The Monaco Grand Prix is just days away and will likely be one of the most exciting races of the season. While most fans can’t participate directly — except as spectators — they can celebrate their passion through DIY projects. That’s why we’ve scoured the community to find the best of those builds for every […] The post Kick off the Monaco Grand Prix weekend with these Formula 1-inspired Arduino...
'Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion' That Works
Introduction What is a GPSDO? The TM4313 GPSDO Power Consumption Inside the TM4313 The TM4313 Schematic Frequency or Phase Lock Loop? OCXO Temperature The Curious Case of the MAX6192 Voltage Reference The Discrete Tuning DAC GPS Module Microcontroller instead of NMEA Serial Port GPSDO Performance Conclusion References Footnotes Introduction It’s a generally accepted truism that once you’ve...
<p>One thing I've gotten really good at over the years is using time in terms of how it affects my product-making process.</p><p>Back in the day, when I was greener, I used to rush things, not just for the sake of rushing to get them out of the door — but I would get to the "being happy with it" stage way too soon.</p><p>In other words, I fell too quickly in love with my creation just to...
In November 2020, I read the book Apollo’s Arrow after hearing Dr Christakis on NPR’s Fresh Air. Somewhere midway through this book, this paragraph stood out to me: “Either way, until 2022, Americans will live in an acutely changed world—they will be wearing masks, for example, and avoiding crowded places. I’ll call this the immediate […]
What generative AI capabilities does Google offer to developers?
On waiting for AI's Godot.
In the years leading up to my conversion, I gradually became fascinated by Thomas á Kempis’s devotional text, The Imitation of Christ. I encountered it first in the letters of the young Samuel Beckett, and next in the interviews of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, and then in all kinds of other unexpected places. Among them, this 1877 letter from Vincent Van Gogh to his beloved brother, Theo…
If you are wanting to sell your startup but aren't sure where to do that, here are all your options. There's lots of choice here for you
Why speed and multimodality is becoming the name of the game.
Letters and ligatures creating intricate logo designs abduzeedo0428—23 Hungarian graphic designer KissMiklós has created a stunning series of typography compositions that showcase the beauty of serif fonts, letters and ligatures. While they may not all be logos in the traditional sense, they are undoubtedly works of art in their own right. Miklós' passion for...
As a real estate developer, one of the big decisions you need to make is whether you will rent or sell the buildings you've built. Income from rentals flows in steadily over years, while income from sales hits all at once. This essential difference is simple but has many implications for your risk profile, upside potential, capital requirements, and business model. The following post is a...
Being able to monitor the weather in real-time is great for education, research, or simply to analyze how the local climate changes over time. This project by Hackster.io user Pradeep explores how he was able to design a simple station outdoors that could communicate with a cloud-based platform for aggregating the sensed data. The board Pradeep selected is […] The post Monitoring the weather with...
The birth of Sony, and the possibility that private corporations and private individuals can change broader business ecosystems.
June was busy. I travelled more than usual in June. Partly in the UK – visiting Glasgow, the west country, the south coast and the Isle of Wight; partly overseas – I visited Ibiza for a few days of R&R. Meanwhile, the election campaigns were in full swing. Nigel Farage did his Nth U-turn, and… Continue reading June ’24: Election fever →
Small improvements can lead to big changes
A quiet evening reading from Tanquerey’s The Spiritual Life, first published in 1923
Also, we have a prompt library!
I think I first clocked Warren Buffett’s (and Charlie Munger RIP’s) Berkshire Hathaway around the year 2000. I loved the story. Starting from, as the story was told back then, humble beginnings and a paper round, Warren Buffett (and Charlie – who I will stop mentioning but absolutely deserves practically half the credit) had built Berkshire… Continue reading In praise of Berkshire Hathaway →
And my notes on why they’re important
Dynamic pricing, Greenback emissions, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Working too hard, Ozempic's effect on the brain, Race and cardiovascular disease, Inflation's effect on insurance pricing
Why treating AI like a person is the future
Thoughts on risk, Berkshire recap, Graham's first investment, Marks on debt, Electricity demand, How to spend your days, AI and productivity
Blame the clients. And blame the conditions. But then, you’re on the hook to get better tools, find better clients and work in better conditions. It’s not convenient, but it’s possible. If it’s not worth the effort, we can simply accept what we’ve chosen and get back to work.
With HBO walking away from Disney+ Hotstar, shows like Succession, The Last of Us, and Game of Thrones can no longer be streamed in the country.
And how ML helps software engineers in their daily work
I got a Steam Deck. Only took me a year or so of contemplating getting one, and trying out HoloISO, the unofficial SteamOS installer finally convinced me to get one.1 It took another year to actually get down to writing down my thoughts on it. This post is written from the perspective of a software developer who used to play video games a lot as a teenager, less so as an adult, and as someone who...
I had a good time. GREEK PHILOSOPHY The Nicomachean Ethics (4th C. BCE), Aristotle - a post, however shallow, should appear soon. FICTION Joseph in Egypt (1936), Thomas Mann The Long Valley (1938) & The Grapes of Wrath (1939), John Steinbeck - I last read this probably forty years ago. The great turtle chapter is still great. It's not Moby-Dick, but the mix of rhetorical modes is brilliant...
Fifteen years ago, when I worked in the “social innovation” field, there was a world-view that was very popular among my colleagues about what was wrong with society and how to fix it. The idea was that people and governments needed to stop seeing economic growth as a good thing, and that by doing so, we could build a world that paid more attention to important things like environmental...
AI caught everyone’s attention in 2023 with Large Language Models (LLMs) that can be instructed to perform general tasks, such as translation or coding, just by prompting. This naturally led to an intense focus on models as the primary ingredient in AI application development, with everyone wondering what capabilities new LLMs will bring. As more developers begin to build using LLMs, however, we...
As a big fan of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, I was interested in this book. 70 years after it was published, I still see people recommending it, so I had high hopes. Sadly, the book fell short of my expectations. When I read How to Win Friends and Influence People, every chapter felt relevant and useful. In contrast, only about 20% of How to Stop Worrying and Start...
While benchmarks (and leaderboards) are useful tools, they are but a small facet when it comes to evaluating large language models. Often, they're not the best indicators of real-world utility - and I want to dig into why (and what other approaches exist).
I’ve enjoyed March. I managed to enjoy a few days’ skiing, despite less snow than any of us would like, in the Austrian alps. Back at home, the sun has been getting stronger, and the evenings have been getting lighter – and now with Summer Time we will enjoy lovely late evenings for six months.… Continue reading Mar ’24: A towering influence →
The rise of AI is creating both crisis and opportunity
It’s time to expand our vision to include slower, more human-scaled speeds of transportation.
Intelligence, of a sort, is going to be all around us
Over the past year, AI startups have raised some impressive amounts of money. OpenAI raised $10 billion, Anthropic did $6 billion, Inflection AI raised $1.3 billion, and dozens of companies closed rounds in the hundreds of millions.
You think I’m crazy, but just wait and see....
Maintaining balance and achieving personal contentment has been a pressing concern for people throughout history. From ancient Greek philosophers to modern-day wellness coaches, experts have offered diverse approaches to balance the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions of life. One such philosophy that has received renewed attention in recent times is Stoicism. Understanding...
Over the last month, I’ve been exploring a new idea in the cold outbound sales space. The idea is to generate personalized cold emails at scale using AI. Currently, there is a trade-off between quantity and quality when it comes to sending cold emails: Either you spend lots of time researching a prospect and crafting a personalized email, or you send generic emails in bulk to a large group of...
Taking AI timelines seriously
The ultimate destination was Dayton, Ohio and it took about seven and a half hours to get there. However we didn’t just sit in Dayton for an entire week. If I had to drive all that way you better believe I would do some County Counting along the way too. At this point I’ve already […] The post Dayton, Ohio Part 4 (Venturing North) appeared first on Twelve Mile Circle - An Appreciation of Unusual...
I've run this business for three years now, and I'm only just now starting to *get it*.
If you don't acknowledge the point of tariffs, how can you hope to criticize them?
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: You're gonna wish the conditions of your birth were altered so ass to prevent this unpleasant occurrence while leaving your identity largely intact, bro! Today's News: OK, so my new favorite compliment to receive is 'I tried to blurb this book but it was so good I lost track of time.'
I spent Labor Day weekend reading about this beaten down retailer. This article provides some initial thoughts about the company as well as the overall retail landscape.
The Dayton trip came to an end but I still had a bunch of stuff to talk about that didn’t fit into any of the earlier articles. Naturally I’ve collected them all together within this final compilation to serve as a wrap-up. Then we can call this one done and move onto the next travel […] The post Dayton, Ohio Part 7 (Hodgepodge) appeared first on Twelve Mile Circle - An Appreciation of Unusual...
<p>I first started "building in public" back in 2017.</p> <p>Not sure if the term existed back then, but I started talking about my newest product at the time (Claritask), which I ended up <a href="https://bootstrapping-saas.transistor.fm/episodes/claritask-sold" target="_blank">selling</a> in 2021.</p> <p>The reason why I started sharing my work publicly was to slowly get back in the...
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] Do you remember the summer of 2022 when a record drought had gripped not only a large part of the United States, but most of Europe too? Reservoirs were empty, wildfires spread, crop yields dropped, and rivers ran dry. It seemed like practically the whole world was facing heatwaves and water shortages. But there was one video...
Employment Insurance (EI) is a social insurance program in Canada that provides temporary financial support to eligible individuals who lose their jobs through no fault of their own. While this is the most commonly understood purpose of EI, the program offers various benefits beyond situations of job loss, extending its reach and impact on individuals and society as a whole.
We tend to perceive symmetrical elements as being connected, even if they are not. The Gestalt Principles of Design are a set of concepts and guidelines drawn from gestalt psychology, which theorizes that the mind tends to process organized groups of things as a whole, rather than a number of individual things. These concepts can help to integrate a better understanding of perception into the...
And more things I talked about over coffee & dinner this week.
A glimpse into the biggest challenge in the world of AI, why it matters to you, and why it's worth so much
Stoicism is a philosophy that has been around for over two thousand years. The ancient Greeks developed it as a way to live a good life, free from the distractions of emotions, desires, and material possessions. Stoicism has been embraced by many people throughout history, including Roman emperors, Enlightenment thinkers, and modern-day entrepreneurs. But what Read More >>
How I used AI in my book about AI
When I wrote about open-air dining in seoul I thought nobody would care, but surprisingly I got quite a bit of comments and DMs from fellow covid-cautious travellers. I would keep on...
Daily Journal and Berkshire Hathaway have little in common aside from Charlie Munger's influence. Recent development at Daily Journal raise concerns.
Designed by Gold Front, San Francisco.
A reader has generously shared his notes from the Daily Journal annual meeting which took place in Los Angeles on February 15, 2024.
With a little bash scripting, a modern reverse proxy like Traefik, and Docker Compose, we can put together a fairly robust and simple approach to zero-downtime deployment. Moreover, this approach is flexible and scalable, even for dynamic container backends.
Different Kinds of Difference At Work
Enhance your IoT projects with our special offer! Get 20% off a yearly subscription to the Arduino Cloud Maker Plan using code CLOUD20MAY. Valid until the end of May, this deal saves you $14.38, reducing the price from $71.88 to $57.50. Benefits of the Maker Plan: What is Arduino Cloud? Arduino Cloud is the next […] The post Save 20% on Arduino Cloud Maker Plan this May! appeared first on Arduino...
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $60-80k/month in revenue and employs seven other people. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and my professional life overall. Highlights We’ve completed...
Investors have been debating the dividend question for decades. So far, shareholders have been well served by Warren Buffett's reluctance to send out dividend checks.
I’ve had quite a lot of culture to enjoy in February. Aside from some travel for the Six Nations rugby, I’ve been to two shows – one in London’s Royal Opera House and one on the south coast. Both events were either full or practically full. Covid feels fully behind us now. But the prices… Continue reading Feb ’24: Envyidia →
Why does Google suck so much, Microsoft Co-Pilot Everywhere, and Sam Altman
[Hardware] Illuminated circuit inside a hypodermic
Are US legislators warming to crypto? The SEC approves Ethereum ETPs, and a crypto bill gets through the House.
Many yearn for the “good old days” of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.
In the 1450s, German inventor Johannes Gutenburg designed the movable-type printing press, the first practical method of mass-duplicating text. After various other projects, he applied his press to the production of the Bible, yielding over one hundred copies of a text that previously had to be laboriously hand-copied. His Bible was a tremendous cultural success, triggering revolutions not only...
I hope to stay longer than 72 hours the next time I visit Germany. I don’t recommend such a short visit. However I went there for work as I do occasionally, and I had no choice. So that’s what I did. I landed in Frankfurt on Monday, drove down to Kaiserslautern, stayed through Thursday morning, […] The post Kaiserslautern appeared first on Twelve Mile Circle - An Appreciation of Unusual Places.
Earlier this week, we featured the 99-year-old Dick Van Dyke’s performance in Coldplay’s new music video, full of visual references to the sitcom that made him a household name in the early nineteen-sixties. And a household name he remains these six decades later, though one does wonder how many of those who appreciate his extreme […]
Incentive-based lead generation is a game changer and record days continue to become the new normal. But it's not all good. The post Weeks 19-21: Fortunately, I Wasn’t Lying appeared first on Scott DeLong.
Why you’re getting this: I’m Jason Nguyen. I run Bloomstory.co.uk and The Mailroom. This is my newsletter. I used to write this every week, but now I send this out when I can — life got in the way. Updates on what’s been going on in my life are at the bottom of this newsletter.
Hey everyone, Some of you know my story but if I have to summarize the last 3 years in 10 bullets of inflection points, here’s how it would look like: Jan 2018, I was a nobody in startups, stuck in a dead-end corporate job due to visa challenges Oct 2018, read a book called Atomic Habits and in 5 days shipped my 1st no-code project which became
Every so often, I come across a transit map that is just so unfit for purpose that all I can do is scratch my head and ponder, “Just why?” This is one of those maps. Produced by (or on behalf of) Newark International Airport, it purports to show regional rail services that you can connect […]
Overall, this was an interesting read, but I found it hard to apply the lessons to my product. The book contains compelling case studies and ideas from the field of meta-learning, but most of the ideas were either too theoretical or too specific to large companies.
The month of May seems a little while ago, so I’d better get on and write it up. This will be quick. The big news in the UK was Rishi Sunak, the outgoing PM, calling a general election for 4 July. Independence-from-the-Tories Day. May was also the month that u-turner/blowharder Nigel Farage also confirmed he… Continue reading May ’24: UK election called →
Thoughts on planning and letting go of expectations
Here are a few flavors of a technique, illumination cartography, that uses data to shed light on its underlying basemap. There’s something satisfying about presenting a phenomenon as revealing geography rather than obscuring it. Love, John
On re-rearchitecting.
Dipping my toe in enterprise sales
March 1, 2024.
Brutalist architecture is raw, powerful, emotional, and unapologetically honest. It rejects ornamentation and architectural devices designed to make its inhabitants feel comfortable, instead creating a visceral, primal experience. Brutalism is a feeling—a bold statement that doesn’t need to justify itself. Composed of raw, unrefined materials, it strips architecture down to its essence, evoking...
Test-Fly A $20 Million Jet On An Apple? Yes. With MicroSPEED
I’ve reached a point in my setup where most of the devices that I use are based around the coveted USB-C port. This meant that I had a valid reason to get a few extra because I didn’t yet have a stockpile of good USB-C cables. That’s when I found out that there exist cables that have little screens on them that show the power consumption of the connected device. This is a great little addition to...
Launching a small business is a thrilling entrepreneurial adventure, but selecting the appropriate legal framework can feel like traversing a complex maze. This guide sheds light on the merits and drawbacks of the three primary options: sole proprietorship, partnership, and incorporation,
I've raised $12M for my company + hired amazing people -- and until very recently, whenever anyone would ask me my 10-year plan I would flat out say "I have no idea".
Output similarity is a distraction
From images of solar cooking to snake radio telemetry, we received 548 entries from around the world.
When Google Glass launched in 2013, the public opinion seemed to be “interesting technology, but the world isn’t ready yet.” Now that more than a decade has passed, the world may finally be ready — especially with the omission of controversial features like video recording. If that appeals to you, then Akashv44 has a great […] The post Create your own affordable Arduino-powered smart glasses...
Applications to our new residential seminar close this coming Friday, 31st May
Goal Representations for Instruction Following Figure title. Figure caption. This image is centered and set to 50% page width. --> A longstanding goal of the field of robot learning has been to create generalist agents that can perform tasks for humans. Natural language has the potential to be an easy-to-use interface for humans to specify arbitrary tasks, but it is difficult to train robots...
Felix Kan on building a bug-hunting platform to enhance cybersecurity for small companies.
Growing and monetizing the email list is what these weeks were all about. Plus, things I would do differently. The post Weeks 22-25: It’s A Growth Hacker’s Paradise appeared first on Scott DeLong.
Productized services are growing rapidly in popularity. For founders, they offer a way to make a six figure salary relatively quickly. For companies, it means paying top talent without the downsides of hiring an employee like paying for a recruiter, paying extra taxes etc. What are productized services? A productized
My thoughts on the new edition with a focus on inconsistency avoidance, one of the twenty-five psychological tendencies that can cause human misjudgment.
Five years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own bootstrapped software company. For the first few years, all of my businesses flopped. None of them earned more than a few hundred dollars per month in revenue, and they all had negative profits. Halfway through my third year, I created a device called TinyPilot. It allows users to control their computers remotely without...
I tried building a monolith.
<p>Sort of without fail and unplanned, every year in December, I usually think of a word that I want to live by the upcoming year.</p> <p>Depending on what kind of year I have had, the Word for the upcoming one should represent the practical step ahead for me.</p> <p><b>Example:</b> If I feel that my current year has been very hard, the Word for the next year would be "Revival." And that...
It turns out that operational excellence results from the pursuit of a certain form of knowledge. This is Part 3 of the Becoming Data Driven series, and the result of a deep dive into the field of statistical process control.
The Bureau of Land Management wants to pay you $1,000 to adopt a wild horse. But the program has been criticized by animal rights advocates and subject to scrutiny by Congress.
Substantial political homogeneity in Large Language Models (LLMs) responses to questions with political connotations
Some free software to create, modify, experiment with and share XmR charts. Unlock the ability to become more data driven today.
It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
Unpopular large companies, Dopamine culture, Buffett's cheapest stock, Investing in vertical SaaS, The bear case for China, Chris Davis, Michael Mauboussin
One of us must change our policy. Please let me know who.
Note: In my last newsletter, I said that my next post would be the second part of my Facebook autopsy. Don’t worry, that’s still coming, but given the recent drama between Sam Altman, OpenAI, and Scarlett Johansson, I felt the need to write something. Don’
Live Hangs, Early Chapters, Cut Material, and more…
If you haven't been able to keep up with my blistering pace of one blog post per year (if that), I can't blame you. There's a lot going on right now. It's a busy time. But let's pause and take
This is the 4th post in my series summarizing the key takeaways from reading the book Modeling Life. I recommend reading my previous posts first to gain a solid understanding on how to model dynamic systems. This post focuses on how linear algebra is employed in modeling dynamic systems. Black bears are a highly adaptable…
The ThinkPad T430 is not a remarkable laptop. It’s thick, bulky and built like a tank. I got mine in 2016 when the first university scholarship money dropped, and it’s still my backup laptop of choice. Around 2017 I did something every reasonable poor computer science student would do: I got an eGPU adapter for it to play some games. I never ended up playing many games, but I loved tinkering with...
The Convivial Society: Vol. 5, No. 7
And definitions for the most important terms you should know
July 5, 2024.
On Thursday evening Chris Ingraham, a journalist with 100k followers on Twitter, shared a screenshot of the now-famous “african country that starts with k” Google Quick Answer, which quickly went viral, garnering over 82k likes and 3 million views as of the time of this writing on Monday morning: Preceden’s designer, Milan, saw it on […]
<p>Coming from <a href="https://valsopi.com/blogstatic-numbers-october-2022">October</a>, November was again another solid month.<a href="https://valsopi.com/blogstatic-numbers-october-2022"></a></p> <table><tbody><tr><td><b>blogstatic</b></td><td><b>October '22</b></td><td><b>November '22</b></td><td><b>Growth</b></td></tr><tr><td>Total...
From: TazTo: FvL Hi FvL I’ve read your blog on and off for the past year or three. I graduated from the London School of Economics in 2017 after which I went through the hardest few years of my life mentally and ended up unemployed or in dead-end low paid jobs. I currently work in… Continue reading I’m 28, and can’t figure out how to start on FatFIRE – what would you do in my shoes? →
The hype is not supported by current evidence
This post is a list of books that I read in the first quarter of 2024, most notably The Diary of Anne Frank, Endurance, Crime and Punishment, and the Iliad.
Hi, everyone – it’s been a while! Quite a few people have written in lately wondering why I haven’t updated the blog in a while, so I thought I should address that. Firstly, for those that were concerned something was wrong, I’d like to reassure you that I’m a-okay and everything is fine. I’ve just […]
What is your biggest fear? What would it mean if you could overcome that fear, once and for all? In this article, I'm going to help you do exactly that by teaching you five tactics to conquer anything you might be afraid of. Heights, spiders, small spaces, strangely-shaped clouds—whatever makes your knees turn to water and keeps you up at night. These five tactics are universal and proven. In...
We shouldn't be certain about what is next, but we should plan for it
The reasons behind my decision to discontinue paid subscriptions.
Jurisdictional gamesmanship is a common strategy for crypto businesses. Here is how it worked out for Binance and its CEO. Spoiler: poorly.
We have this big issue right now because gaming is shifting from us to mobile platforms.
And a step-by-step guide to train a machine learning model on your Mac
This is the 8th post in my series on building a toy GPT. For better understanding, I recommend reading my earlier posts first. I love playing and watching cricket. The dominance India showed in the recently concluded World Cup is astounding. I have never seen anything like it in the four decades I’ve been following…
In creating the tutorial, “Installing NixOS on Raspberry Pi 4,” I ran into a ton of paths that didn’t work. I’ve collected them here for the sake of saving others time retrying the same steps. The standard NixOS aarch64 image doesn’t work When I checked the NixOS download page, I saw that they offered 64-bit ARM images. NixOS offers bootable images for 64-bit ARM systems “Wonderful!” I thought to...
It’s when, not if, for these kinds of new technologies
A new Twitter clone is surging in popularity. Could it have legs?
And the impact it'll have for decades to come
Continuous Improvement sounds simple, even obvious. And yet there's a profound secret at its heart that doesn't seem to get talked about.
Tax time can be intimidating, but understanding how your income gets taxed is key to financial savvy. Let's crack open the code with a deep dive into the 2023-24 tax brackets and rates! Imagine your taxable income as climbing a ladder. Each rung represents a tax bracket, and as you ascend, the tax rate (the percentage owed) increases. But here's the good news:
What spending $2,000 can tell us about evaluating AI agents
Of course maps are just the most fascinating and information dense graphical information products around…in my unbiased opinion. I can, and do, go on and on about the deep and pervasive benefits of spatial representations. But…well…sometimes a map, strictly speaking, can have some issues. That’s ok though, because maps are here to fix the problem …
Kieran Bell is a founder specializing in teaching people how to use the no-code software Bubble.
Several areas of physics suggest reasons to think that unobservable universes with different natural laws could lie beyond ours. The theoretical physicist David Kaplan talks with Steven Strogatz about the mysteries that a multiverse would solve. The post Are There Reasons to Believe in a Multiverse? first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Seven principles for journalism in the age of AI
Teacher's Pet gets new sounds in this post in a series about scripting Visual Pinball tables.
All original writing and images on this blog are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. That means you can republish the content or adapt it as long as you honor the license. What you’re allowed to do Republish the content in any medium or format, even for commercial purposes. Adapt the content by changing the wording, translating it to other languages, or...
Woorkeri Raman, a former Indian cricketer and former coach of the India women’s national cricket team, has two non-negotiables. As an offspinner, you must never get cut, and you must never get driven through the covers. Even when Ravichandran Ashwin takes five wickets, Raman will still point out if he got cut or driven off…
Addictive algorithms fuse social networking with shopping and entertainment.
that's really how my brain spelled passion!!
Sam Bankman-Fried maintains that his crimes were victimless and resulted in zero losses, and therefore warrant only six years of imprisonment. Prosecutors argue that 40–50 years are justified.
What Bluey can teach us about machine learning
Good news on paper, but the devil is in the details
The Birth of Computer Operating Systems
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: The weird part is that the second panel is a fantasy too. Today's News:
https://youtu.be/kDqQGogavmY What if I told you there's a hidden treasure trove of personal traits that could turn your life around? Are you curious? Are you dying to know what they are? Are you wondering why I'm asking so many questions instead of getting to the point? OK, OK—fine. Here, I'll uncover the five good qualities that I think will help you make it through this chaotic, unpredictable,...
Foxconn and Luxshare slashed workers. But under pressure to expand away from China, they suddenly need them back.
Governments seize huge quantities of bitcoin, and a few people seem to be yearning for the days of peak crypto mania.
Scars, scratches and wounds abound in these photos as encounters with unknown creatures and boat propellers leave their marks, imprinting a story of close escapes and cheating death.
Highlights TinyPilot reached an all-time high of $74k in revenue. I’m trying to figure out the best approach to software licensing. I’m still searching for a web framework I can love. Goal Grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Create a self-contained tarball for installing TinyPilot Result: We now have a working tarball...
Ilya Strebulaev at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Director of the Stanford Venture Capital Initiative just came out with a book that should be on your reading list – The Venture Mindset. The books premise is that Venture Capitalists (who were responsible for the launch of one-fifth of the 300 largest U.S. public […]
How even legendary conglomerator Henry Singleton got caught out by competitive arbitrage at the end of his career.
The magic of compounding was evident when I recently compared my lifetime gross wage income to my current net worth.
By charging more $$$, you are lifting up the quality of the outcome and satisfaction.
It's about having small expectations.
What it's like being data driven in the restaurant business ... and what it tells us about becoming data driven in business more broadly.
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Literally everyone would be happy about this. We should be building NOW Today's News:
And isn't that we're all going to lose our jobs
My second day of county counting focused west of Dayton, once again targeting five new counties. This time I planned to capture Butler and Darke counties in Ohio; and Union, Fayette, and Randolph counties in Indiana. Hopefully this excursion would also take about three hours like the previous day. Unfortunately I knew that it wouldn’t […] The post Dayton, Ohio Part 5 (Venturing West) appeared...
Here we go again: I'm so tired of crypto web3 LLMs. I'm positive there are wonderful applications for LLMs. The ChatGPT web UI seems great for summarizing information from various online sources (as long as you're willing to verify the things that you learn). But a lot fo the "AI businesses" coming out right now are just lightweight wrappers around ChatGPT. It's lazy and unhelpful. Probably the...
From megaFLOPS to mega flops.
Happy Friday everyone, Below is the story of: how I found an artist to collaborate and mint my 1st ever NFT project on the theme of “build in public” how it all came together on Twitter DMs how we plan to auction/sell it to a thoughtful buyer how we intend to donate all the proceeds to the
On learning screencasting, cleaning up tech debt, and focus
[Concept] Tuning forks that talk
Selling a property can be a significant financial event, and understanding the tax implications is crucial. This article delves into capital gains tax in Canada, explaining how it works, how it's calculated, and how to potentially reduce your tax burden.
Sure, everyone loves a good raised area-of-interest effect. But what about a peeled edge area of interest? It’s a snazzy trick and maybe just the sort of flair that your map needs! And it’s simpler than maybe you’d guess. To give your area of interest a peeled edge effect, you just combine a dark gradient …
Mathematicians have disproved a major conjecture about the relationship between curvature and shape. The post Strangely Curved Shapes Break 50-Year-Old Geometry Conjecture first appeared on Quanta Magazine
We’re starting a new school near Singapore for the dark talent of the world. Apply online at ns.com/apply.
Adding precision to the debate on openness in AI
On building table-stakes features, and breaking through a plateau.
Hi I’m Hazel, I live in Cornwall. I moved down just before Covid, very lucky me! And spent lockdown cutting Cornish Landscapes and really getting into my printing. My background is Fashion and Textiles, St Martins School of Art and I think my love of pattern shows in my work. Describe your printmaking process. I mostly work in reduction linocut which means cutting away each colour from the same...
fine fine I'll write about AI
The war around Gaza is not for territory, but rather for the destruction of the presence of a terror network that has entrenched its power base deep underground. In many case, deeper than thought. While Israel has been pretty clear about … Continue reading →
Back in 2014, USV got subpoenaed by the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) over our web3 investing activities. We hired a law firm, answered the subpoena, and that ultimately landed me in public testimony in front of the DFS staff. In my testimony, I explained to the DFS staff that the difference […]
On failing customers, failing to ship a new feature, learning sales, and giving up on ads.
Unlike many indie founders, I’ve never shared revenue numbers for Preceden, my SaaS timeline maker tool. Even if they were remarkable – which they are not really – I just don’t think there are many good reasons to publicly share revenue numbers, and there are lots of downsides. However, below I’ll share a chart showing … Continue reading My Indie SaaS Revenue has Grown 37% per Year for 13 Years →
FollowTheCrypto.org: A new project to track cryptocurrency industry spending to influence 2024 elections in the United States.
Herman Wouk was researching for a novel he planned to write about World War II. He interviewed several physicists at Caltech who had worked on the bomb, including Richard Feynman. After the interview, Feynman asked Wouk if he knew Calculus. “No,” said Wouk. To which Feynman replied, “You’d better learn it. It’s the language God…
A collection of 100,000 striking high-resolution aerial photos of glaciers, photographed over 40 years with a 63-pound WW II surveillance camera.
About two and a half years ago I planned to capture three unvisited counties at the far northeastern corner of Ohio. Unfortunately it didn’t happen due to a snowstorm that dumped about a foot of snow on the target area. So instead I changed my plans and focused on Michigan’s thumb. Now, finally, I had […] The post Detour to Ashtabula appeared first on Twelve Mile Circle - An Appreciation of...
Fresh water from snow, at 70 below!
June 14, 2024.
The ability of LLMs to execute commands through plain language (e.g. English) has enabled agentic systems that can complete a user query by orchestrating the right set of tools (e.g. ToolFormer, Gorilla). This, along with the recent multi-modal efforts such as the GPT-4o or Gemini-1.5 model, has expanded the realm of possibilities with AI agents. While this is quite exciting, the large model size...
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Pro Wrestling is the most realistic form of entertainment, in that nothing means anything, but everyone still gets hurt. Today's News:
The X220 ThinkPad is the Best Laptop in the World 2023-09-26 The X220 ThinkPad is the greatest laptop ever made and you're wrong if you think otherwise. No laptop hardware has since surpassed the nearly perfect build of the X220. New devices continue to get thinner and more fragile. Useful ports are constantly discarded for the sake of "design". Functionality is no longer important to...
Introduction Some Words about HDCP Inside the Monoprice Blackbird 4K Pro The Test Digging Deeper: UART Transactions Decoding HDCP I2C Transactions The Legality of It All References Footnotes Introduction I got my hands on a Monoprice Blackbird 4K Pro HDCP 2.2 to 1.4 Converter. According to the marketing copy it “is the definitive solution for playback of new 4K HDCP 2.2 encoded content on 4K...
Those of you who follow my blog using the RSS feed might have seen that new, incomplete posts popped up around the time I published my FOSDEM 2024 post. Oops. I recently tried looking for an alternative to writing blog posts in IntelliJ and out of all the options I stuck to MarkText. Well, it does things a bit differently and what was once a front-matter containing all sorts of metadata, including...
Designed by Common Curiosity, Birmingham, London.
Whether it's the joy of self-employment or the burden of payroll decisions, every business owner faces unique financial considerations. One critical choice arises early on: to pay yourself a salary or take dividends? Understanding the pros and cons of each path empowers you to optimize your income tax position, secure important benefits, and navigate the complex world of corporate and personal...
The new Kino app recording ProRes Log with a custom preview LUT. Yes we’re still talking about shooting video on iPhones. But I also want to talk about digital cinema shooting in general, in a world where top camera makers are battling to give filmmakers everything we want in a small, affordable package. How does the DV Rebel spirit — born of camcorders and skateboard dollies — live on in a time...
The world’s largest anime streaming service is opening its second local office, working with Bollywood stars, and adding dozens of shows per quarter.
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Please consult yesterday's comments (we have comments now) for the excellent post by Hans Rickheit. Today's News: We have them, like it's the 90s again! Please don't be a dick - I would like to keep moderation light. Also, if you have mod experience, please email me.
What artificial intelligence can do, what it can't, and how to tell the difference
To get status, you have to give up status.
I love thinking about thinking. Give me a research paper on rationality, cognitive biases or mental models, and I’ll gobble it up. Given the amount of knowledge I’ve ingested on these topics, I had always assumed that I’m a clear thinker. Recently, though, it hit me like a lightning strike that this belief is counter-productive.… Read More The post How to be a messy thinker appeared first on...
A conversation with Andrew Lee, CEO of Shortwave and cofounder of Firebase.
Hi! I’m Jo, working as a printmaker under the name 'Strangford' in Northern Ireland - though I’m originally from South London. Describe your printmaking process. I make large, bright, unusual relief prints from my home studio; mostly of animals. I carve into flooring lino - it’s a pain to sand but it comes in huge rolls. I roughly sketch out an outline of the design directly onto the lino, but I...
The hand wringing about failures of model alignment is misguided
Ever transferred assets between brokerages? Impressive, terrifying machinations happened in the background. No cats were harmed.
In a previous episode, I discussed audio transports and mention that they have become a much less important part of the modern home theater landscape. One reason is the broad decline of the component system: most consumers aren't buying a television, home theater receiver, several playback devices, and speakers. Instead, they use a television and perhaps (hopefully!) a soundbar system, which often...
Highlights My blog post about redesigning the TinyPilot website became my second most popular article of all time I’m exploring ways to preserve more knowledge on my blog I’ve lowered TinyPilot’s prices in an effort to reduce inventory Goal Grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Finalize plans for managing TinyPilot licenses...
I’m teaching a small-group, live course about attracting readers to your blog through Hacker News. Sign up by Monday (June 24th) to reserve your slot. Why take a class with me? My blog receives 300k-500k unique readers per year. After Google, Hacker News is the primary way that new readers find my writing. My blog receives 300k-500k unique readers per year, with Hacker News largely connecting me...
The first year where I managed to keep my focus entirely on a single project.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, Ernie Smith’s newsletter, which hunts for the end of the long tail. Personal computing has changed a lot in the past four decades, and one of the biggest changes, perhaps the most unheralded, comes down to compatibility. These days, you generally can’t fry a computer by plugging in a joystick that the computer doesn’t support. Simply put,...
That’s what makes it worthwhile
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $60-80k/month in revenue and employs seven other people. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and my professional life overall. Highlights I failed to sell recurring...
As this challenge comes to an end, it feels good to be at a point where I'm about as immune as possible to looming threats The post Weeks 44-47: The end is near appeared first on Scott DeLong.
For many investors, both seasoned and new, choosing between Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) and mutual funds can be a head-scratcher. Both offer diversification, professional management options, and access to a variety of asset classes. However, they differ significantly in how they are bought, sold, and priced. Understanding these differences is crucial to selecting the right investment vehicle for...
One of the great joys of working here at Esri is the opportunity to collaborate with amazing people. Recently I had the opportunity to present at the User Conference about thematic mapping, with Sarah Bell and Kenneth Field. It was a lot of fun and we all surprised each other with what we made from the same source …
This article was written by Scott Jenson and Michael DiTullo and published at Core77 in April 2024 A few recent tech writers have leaked that the new AirPods case will likely have a touch screen. Other earbud makers have tried this as well but it’s Apple, so people will naturally have strong opinions, and we’re no […]
What are the imperatives of the upside?
"Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself."
There was a great discussion on Twitter recently that began with Daniel Vassallo calling out a SaaS for not refunding an accidental annual payment he made on their service. He intended to purchase the monthly plan, but due to an unclear UI and poor copy, he unintentionally purchased the annual plan, and the business refused […]
Some stats, updates, and whatnot
Hey you, did you do the thing you said you would do?
Blues Wireless and Arduino have joined forces to create the game-changing Blues Wireless for Arduino Opta, unveiled this week at the Automate Show in Chicago. The expansion module is an affordable solution to enhance connectivity options for Arduino Opta micro PLCs, and marks a significant milestone in PLC technology and in making technology more easily […] The post Expanding possibilities: Blues...
Magic: The Gathering, poker, and business strategy all have something in common: they're vulnerable to a cognitive bias known as results-oriented thinking. But to optimize for success, we should avoid this bias and strive to replace it with sound strategy.
How will recent Supreme Court decisions affect the crypto world? Also, more absurdity from the crypto lobby, and some new regulatory actions.
There I was, standing in the middle of a buzzing tech event that our company organized, feeling like a fish […] The post Networking as an introvert CTO appeared first on Vadim Kravcenko.
What makes machine learning infra so important and why I find it so interesting
Attending New Year’s service in an Oxford Orthodox synagogue, I paused when the ritual prayer book I held–a Machzor-moved smoothly from prayers to George VI (it was an old one) to prayers for the Israel Defense Forces. The rabbi, who … Continue reading →
Landevenneg is a small village in Finistère, Brittany. It is famous for its Benedictine abbey and its religious history. Landevenneg...
Generalization is one of the most important tools in a map maker’s tool kit. Sometimes the complexity of our geometry needs to be smoothed out to best visually represent a place or appear best at various scales. Here is a way (complete hack, but surprisingly effective) to generalize polygon features on-the-fly, using symbol effects…deviously. Because …
Don't get stuck in neutral
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Absolute Midden is copyright SMBC Enterprises 2024 all rights reserved. Today's News:
Invest in long term, Diversify, Don't stress to time the market, Stay calm ... It is not that complicated.
Solving hard problems in new ways
It's been fun (kinda). Here's where it ended up and where I'm going next. The post Weeks 48-52: My Final Update appeared first on Scott DeLong.
Announcing the ML Road Map-Turbo
There are good reasons to be skeptical about its ultimate utility.
A comprehensive summary of W. Edwards Deming's ideas, whose System of Profound Knowledge is one of the most powerful things you'll find on the Operations side of the business expertise triad. Read this, so you don't have to read multiple books to apply his ideas.
And effective ways to mitigate it
OpenAI Q*, Primer on Reinforcement Learning, and Implications
Daily Journal, The Oresteia, Elon's compensation, TSMC, Banks in disguise, Reading about stupidity, Zweig on Ben Graham's continued relevance, 3G Capital, Morgan Housel, Christopher Tsai
If the COVID pandemic showed us anything, it is that our public spaces are overflowing with opportunity for germ transmission. In 2019, most people didn’t think twice about touching a gas pump handle or an ATM touchscreen, but it quickly became apparent that such contact presents a genuine risk. We have technology to detect interaction […] The post Synjets provide non-contact haptic feedback...
But is AI different than other technologies?
We trace Michael Dell's skill at the art of capital in business, and use it to examine how skill at capital allows you to make moves that aren't available to a novice business operator.
The Convivial Society: Vol. 4, No. 9
One of the oldest surviving books provides advice that is just as relevant to our lives today as it was 2,700 years ago.
Can audio engineering ideas help us deal with life in the city?s
I feel like I used to spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with suspect hard drives. I mean, like, back in high school. These days I almost never do, or on the occasion that I have storage trouble, it's a drive that has completely stopped responding at all and there's little to do besides replacing it. One time I had two NVMe drives in two different machines do this to me the same week. Bad...
Ah, it’s that time of year when we geographers pour ourselves a steaming mug of hot coffee and place a stroopwafel over it until the caramel is nice and gooey and take the hand of other nearby geographers and sing O Denneboom together. Say, what’s with all the Dutch references? Oh, that’s because this year I’ve teamed …
Early notes on how generative AI is affecting the internet
Consulting can be easy money. Fleecing clients for cheap tricks. Clients have problems, you have powerpoints. It’s easy to flip a few quick slides into a chunk of cash and cackle off into the mountains.
Things I know
Sacred Flames and Divine Philosophers
I don't have answers
What makes DEI important and where it fails
April 5, 2024.
A long overdue VC apocalypse and the birth of the first real AI companies
Humans excel at processing vast arrays of visual information, a skill that is crucial for achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI). Over the decades, AI researchers have developed Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems to interpret scenes within single images and answer related questions. While recent advancements in foundation models have significantly closed the gap between human and...
For decades scientists were confused by Antarctic sea ice. Climate models predict that it should be decreasing, and yet it has been steadily and slowly increasing. It also made for a great talking point for climate change deniers – superficially it seems like counter evidence to the global warming narrative, and at least paints scientists […] The post Antarctic Sea Ice Hits Record Low first...
Drones have become an essential tool to map, measure and observe the extremely dangerous environments surrounding volcanic eruptions.
When I first visited the site, I felt overwhelmed. The entrance from the parking lot was elevated, exposing the interior,...
There have been two main periods of subway (or “metro”) building in the US. The first was during the late 19th century and early 20th century, when Boston, New York, and Philadelphia all built subway systems
The Tax Break You've Been Looking for !
Using MagSafe for portable battery packs has so many niceties versus Qi1: Increased communication with the device, allowing for better efficiency due to better thermal management and charging Easily view the charge percentage of the external battery when first attaching it, and at any other point right from the OS Reverse-wireless-charging, so if you charge your phone while the pack is attached,...
The structure of Ghostbuster, our new state-of-the-art method for detecting AI-generated text. Large language models like ChatGPT write impressively well—so well, in fact, that they’ve become a problem. Students have begun using these models to ghostwrite assignments, leading some schools to ban ChatGPT. In addition, these models are also prone to producing text with factual errors, so wary...
Many weeks ago I saw an achingly beautiful bit of AI-generated terrain art shared by Esri’s glorious instagram account. Initially I was a bit intimidated by the robots; it was so charming and tactile and wondrous and dreamlike and sinuous. But also…inspiring. I wondered if I could take a crack at re-creating this aesthetic in ArcGIS Pro, …
How speculation gets laundered through pseudo-quantification
Product market fit is a crapshoot. Here's what's actually useful in the hunt for a new business idea.
This is a placeholder post! I’m a huge fan of Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools site and have loved their recommendations for years. So much, so that I even started a Pinterest board filled with my own recommendations. But after a few years of running into the limitations of the form, I feel such a project […] The post Guy’s Cool Tools appeared first on Style over Substance.
#1 💡 Andrej Karpathy announced that he’s building an AI + education company.
Founded in 1975 and headquartered in Madison Heights, Michigan, Galco is a leading e-commerce distributor that specializes in providing a wide range of industrial and commercial electrical and electronic products, focusing on maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO). Known for strong expertise in sourcing hard-to-find, high-quality products and guaranteeing exceptional customer service –...
A few years ago, I compiled a PDF of various small odds-and-ends mapping projects that I’d done. Now, I’ve done it again. Please enjoy Another Atlas of Minor Projects, which houses a few dozen cartographic items that needed a home. These are all small, mostly-quick projects that never really merited their own blog post or … Continue reading Another Atlas of Minor Projects →
I haven’t spent much time playing around with the latest LLMs, and decided to spend some time doing so. I was particularly curious about the usecase of using embeddings to supplement user prompts with additional, relevant data (e.g. supply the current status of their recent tickets into the prompt where they might inquire about progress on said tickets). This usecase is interesting because it’s...
I interview Claire about her new book "Scaling People". Thanks to Stripe for hosting.
Controlling the space between text styles is as important as differentiating the styles themselves. Whenever I review design documentation, there are a few things I look for in the first few seconds. All of them have to do with how scannable a page or screen’s layout is. In fact, I was reading Design School Layout by Richard Poulin the other day and was reminded how good his definition of...
I last reviewed email services in 2019. That review focused a lot of attention on privacy. At the time, I selected mailbox.org as my provider, and have been using them for these 5 years since. However, both their service and their support have gone significantly downhill since, so it is time for me to look … Continue reading Review of Reputable, Functional, and Secure Email Service →
Highlights A redesign of TinyPilot’s website seems to have increased sales. TinyPilot now has a European distributor. After three years, I’ve earned back my investment in Zestful (and I might sell it). I’m still ruthlessly delegating every task I can. Goal Grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Help TinyPilot’s EU distributor...
How do immature egg cells maintain genetic quality for decades before they mature? Scientists find unusual safeguards in this quiescent cell that may inform research into fertility. The post How ‘Idle’ Egg Cells Defend Their DNA From Damage first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Despite everyone’s focus on hardware, the software of AI is what protects NVIDIA
The bitcoin "halving" looms, and that may not be as good news as coiners hope. Also, Terra committed fraud and Uniswap got a Wells notice.
New FOIA records from the FAA shed light on the frantic effort in 2015 to rename navigation waypoints related to Donald Trump and reveal the list of naughty waypoint names that were changed over the years.
A Political Chatbot that Gives 3 Politically Diverse Answers to Every Prompt
Once you use your plates every day, they cease to be the good china. Of course, the plates didn’t change. Your story did. The way you treat them did. The same goes for the red carpet. If you roll it out for every visitor or every customer, it ceases to be red.
Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started. Cohesive teams, the right combination of calmness and urgency, and unreasonable commitment are how things get finished. Long-term orientation is in short supply; try not to worry about what people think in the short term, which will get easier over time. It is easier for a team to do a hard thing...
Warren Buffett is concerned about the performance of Berkshire's railroad
Many startups fail despite identifying a real problem and building a product that solves that problem. This explains why, so you can avoid their fate.
Ed McCracken and Jim Clark talk about their hardware and the future of 3D
When Earlonne Woods and Nigel Poor came up with the idea for Ear Hustle, the podcast they’ve hosted together since 2017, Earlonne was serving a prison sentence of 31 years to life—the result of California’s three-strikes law. The two met at San Quentin State Prison where Nigel, a lifelong artist and photographer, was volunteering in the media center. For 13 seasons, Earlonne and Nigel have been...
The opposite of a good idea - Finding the real reason behind brushing our teeth - Let's not jump to conclusions
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Disappointed with myself that I haven't don't a creationism joke in years. Six years is like 0.1 percent of the past. Today's News:
A family member has a Canon PIXMA MP250 printer, originally released in 2009. It has been a very reliable piece of hardware, especially for a printer. Then came Windows 10. The printer would not work out of the box with it and the official drivers got stuck during installation. Fiddling with the printer in device manager, trying to install drivers via Windows Update and stars aligning got the...
And an overview of LLM security issues
This week, we discovered that GitHub.com’s RSA SSH private key was briefly exposed in a public GitHub repository. – GitHub’s “We updated our RSA SSH host key” blog, 2023-03-23 Once you git push, nothing is private. Private info in git only stays private on your laptop. But once you schlep it out to a remote: all bets are off. As GitHub’s incident last week demonstrates—private repos are, at best,...
The true state of the global financial system, in ten charts.
June 21, 2024.
I’m working with git and make a big boo-boo. Now I’m facing a situation where I’ve deleted a local branch with all my work and there’s no backup on GitHub. “This is git. There has got to be a version of this things still on my computer somewhere, right? RIGHT?!” So I start searching online: “how to recover a deleted branch in git?” A few results later, I find this gist. Not one to copy/paste CLI...
In which I pay for people to check out OnlineOrNot to test my landing pages.
zombie mysteries, historical fiction, pirate adventure tales, and westerns. science fiction. The publishers of Astounding Science Fiction approached Hubbard to write stories that focused on people, rather than robots and machines. His first story, “The Dangerous Dimension,” was a light-hearted tale about a professor who could teleport anywhere in the universe simply by thinking “Equation C.” How...
Google has announced yet another price increase for Google Workspace. Here's what we've done to avoid paying anything at all.
Annotated slides from a recent talk
Digital rights activists have questioned the ethics of using “soft fakes” to resurrect the past and manage the future.
The Year of the Plague #2
I was on Twitter since 2007, and built a meaningful part of my career on it, and I won’t be posting at all for the foreseeable future
Interior design firm Wise Design, together with General Contractor and Architect Owen Gabbert (formerly Clarkbuilt), has transformed a dated 1954 mid-century modern home in Portland, Oregon. Before – The ExteriorThe original home has a brown exterior with original windows and white trim. After – ExteriorThe updated bright white exterior, with a metal roof, has black […]
Caught in a series of lies about his willingness to fight Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire's disturbing spiral accelerates
Italian Terraces will also be restored and replanted with wildflowers.
The investing legend, the goat of common sense and wisdom, and the Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway
Corita Kent was an artist with an innovative approach to design and education. She worked in the Immaculate Heart College Art Department, above, c. 1955. (Photo/Fred Swartz, courtesy of the Corita Art Center) “Sometimes you can take the whole of the world in, and sometimes you need a small piece to take in,” says Sister … The Legacy of Corita Kent Read More » The post The Legacy of Corita Kent...
This part 2 of the Secret History of Polaroid and Edwin Land. Read part 1 for context. Kodak and Polaroid, the two most famous camera companies of the 20th century, had a great partnership for 20+ years. Then in an inexplicable turnabout Kodak decided to destroy Polaroid’s business. To this day, every story of why […]
When people have asked, I’ve told them with a straight face that we didn’t go to Daytona for Spring Break, no, we went to Dayton. As in Ohio. As in probably the least likely Spring Break destination in the United States. We managed to avoid warm weather, sandy beaches, and southern hospitality for… a bunch […] The post Dayton, Ohio Part 1 (The Wright Stuff) appeared first on Twelve Mile Circle -...
Cedric talks to Lesley Sim about her experience coaching the Singaporean Ultimate Women's World Championship Team in 2020, her approach to skill acceleration, and why a teaching technique designed for dogs and dolphins works just as well on humans!
The world of work is changing.
The timeline and why OpenAI’s actions are a big deal
And other practical guides to understand machine learning
Blind embossing is a beautiful way in which to add light and shadow to your prints. Embossing adds subtle texture and interest. Emboss prints ‘blind’ (without ink) or combine with inked lino for a complex final print. Prepare the design. These white pencils are brilliant for drawing designs onto traditional lino. The marks show up beautifully and there’s no danger of transference onto white...
Back in 1935, they seized the gold. But now, digital gold is back.
Choosing the paper for your printmaking project can have a significant impact on the way the print turns out. Changing the colour, thickness or texture of a paper can alter the mood, style or success of a print - it can be great fun to experiment. Although there are no rules about what paper should be used for each printmaking technique, below we have outlined some of the desirable characteristics...
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] This is Waterloo Park in downtown Austin, Texas, just a couple of blocks away from the state capitol building. It’s got walking trails, an ampitheater, Waller Creek runs right through the center, and it has this strange semicircular structure right on the water. And this is Ladybird Lake, formerly Town Lake, about a mile away....
<p>One of the things I'm most proud of in 2022 was that I stuck to some personal habits like going to the gym, eating well, and meditating.</p> <p>I believe these habits helped me get more in tune with myself and get the confidence necessary to take bold steps, like taking out a loan to focus on my products and put myself on the road to <a href="https://valsopi.com/setting-sail">financial...
Everything that we covered in 2023, and what to expect now that Commoncog has a new direction.
In the mid-1960s, Robert Kahn began thinking about how computers with different operating systems could talk to each other across a network. He didn’t think much about what they would say to one another, though. He was a theoretical guy, on leave from the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a stint at the nearby research-and-development company Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN)....
A new benchmark to measure the impact of AI on improving science
A life well lived
A talk with the author of The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight.
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] The essence of a bridge is not just that it goes over something, but that there’s clear space underneath for a river, railway, or road. Maybe this is already obvious to you, but bridges present a unique structural challenge. In a regular road, the forces are transferred directly into the ground. On a bridge, all those forces on...
You get smarter by studying foolishness—so here's how I'd teach a 12-week course on stupidity
After enduring decades of failed modernism, the residents and politicians of Sweden’s second-largest city, Gothenburg, want to see more new traditional architecture. This has led architects and officials to call for a crisis meeting. During the 1960s and 1970s, Gothenburg underwent a dramatic transformation, which led to the loss of many historic buildings. This period,... The post Architects call...
It Could Have Been a Lot Worse - His Data is BLOWGUN Protected!
At the beginning of 2023 I went full time on Preceden, my SaaS timeline maker business, after 13 years of working on it on the side. A year has passed, so I wanted to share an update on how things are going and some lessons learned. Preceden My main focus in 2023 was building AI … Continue reading Reflecting on My First Year as a Full Time Indie Founder →
The internet is inundated with countless videos and advice columns promising to teach you how to become more successful than 99% of the world's population. Most of these claims revolve around setting goals, developing discipline, and eliminating distractions. But let's face it: if you take a close look at the habits of highly successful people, you'll quickly realize that they don't strictly...
Spirit Halloween has over 1,450 pop-up shops and makes all its money in only 2 months (September, October)
The United States Patent and Trademark Office has a system of 1,400 descriptive "design codes" allowing you to search for trademarks with “Rickshaws”, “Centaurs” or “Mechanical women”.
A lesson in why data science matters and what makes it so complex
This was the trip we wanted to take last summer before our plans abruptly changed. Instead we went to Costa Rica for reasons I talked about before, and all of us had a wonderful time. Even so, I still felt bad that the younger kid lost out on the original destination. He wanted to go […] The post England, Day 1 (Do-Over) appeared first on Twelve Mile Circle - An Appreciation of Unusual Places.
Today is my 40th birthday. When I turned 30 a decade ago, I wrote an article sharing life lessons to survive your 20s and crowd-sourced advice on how to excel in your 30s. And apparently you guys loved it. So, here's more of the good stuff: 40 life lessons I now know at 40 that I wish I knew at 20. Dig in. If you treat yourself with dignity and respect, then you will only tolerate others who treat...
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $60-80k/month in revenue and employs six other people. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and in my professional life overall. Highlights I’m doing a thought...
New benefits for paid subscribers, support Society's Backend for just $1/mo, a referral program, and more
What would be a good present for someone who just graduated from college with a degree in entomology? Well, how about a quick trip to the Midwest to hunt for bugs? May 2024 marked a special occasion that was well-reported (maybe over-reported) by the mainstream media: the emergence of two distinct periodical cicada broods at […] The post Cicada Chase, Day 1 appeared first on Twelve Mile Circle -...
If you are a paid subscriber, voting is open for one week
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Actually if you can run the trolley into ALL humans, the notion of sadness ceases to have meaning, so it's all good. Today's News: Fun interview about A City on Mars with Jordan Harbinger.
How do we know which food is best for us? We might start a low-carb diet. Then we switch to whole grains, or even go fully vegan—only to return to a low-carb diet yet again. We constantly change our minds. Even scientists keep revising their perspectives. Why is it so difficult to be certain on issues like these? The Scottish philosopher David Hume answered this question almost 300 years ago....
Introduction What was the SyncServer S200 Supposed to be Used For? IMPORTANT: Use the Right GPS Antenna! The SyncServer S200 Outside and Inside Installing the Missing BNC Connectors Setting Up a SyncServer S200 from Scratch Opening up the SyncServer S200 The SyncServer File System on the Flash Card Cloning the CompactFlash Card Reset to Default Settings Setting the IP Address Accessing the Web...
An Interview With Star Wars Animator Larry Cuba
because some words are good and others are bad
On cleaning up the shop.
The new year dawns, not just with fresh resolutions, but also the opportunity to reassess and optimize your tax strategy. While taxes may not be the most exhilarating topic, savvy planning can significantly reduce your liability and boost your financial well-being. So, grab your financial acumen and join us as we explore key strategies to dominate your 2024 tax return.
By Sayash Kapoor, Rishi Bommasani, Percy Liang, Arvind Narayanan Perhaps the biggest tech policy debate today is about the future of AI, especially foundation models and generative AI. Will AI be open or closed? Will we be able to download and modify these models, or will a few companies control them? The stakes couldn’t be higher. A closed path could lead to a concentration of power never before...
Took mum to her childhood home Sunday just gone to see Papa. We walked in and mum saw Nana and they both started to cry. Papa, Alan, Alby, my grandfather was quite sick. The room was quiet and somber but had an unshakable aura of warmth and love. Everyone was
July 12, 2024.
Operating Systems Come in Many Flavors But QNX Can Take the Heat
For longtime readers of American book journalism, scrolling through the New York Times Book Review’s just-published list of the 100 best books of the twenty-first century will summon dim memories of many a once-unignorable critical fuss. At one time or another over the past 25 years, some of us felt as if we could hardly […]
What happened when English villagers encountered black Americans during World War II?
I tried out Noom, the weight loss and cognitive behavioral therapy program. The app is more like CBT for upselling customers than CBT for weight loss. Now I’m hoping they’ll delete my sensitive medical data and refund the $3 they tricked me out of. (They did, quickly in response to my support email.) I was excited to try Noom. I’ve used basic calorie counters in the past and was hoping for...
A cool Japanese clamtop
Sample language model responses to different varieties of English and native speaker reactions. ChatGPT does amazingly well at communicating with people in English. But whose English? Only 15% of ChatGPT users are from the US, where Standard American English is the default. But the model is also commonly used in countries and communities where people speak other varieties of English. Over 1...
And prompt engineering is a subset of software engineering.
The United States has an official web design system and a custom typeface that belongs to the people. This thoughtful public design system aims to make government websites not only look good, but to make them accessible and functional for all.
We’re excited to announce a powerful new feature that we have been working on in collaboration with the MicroPython team! Starting with the upcoming release (v1.23), MicroPython will offer support for Asymmetric Multiprocessing (AMP) on multi-core microcontrollers, based on the industry standard OpenAMP framework (see the MicroPython openamp module documentation for more information). This...
Photography by Stetson Ybarra Multi-disciplinary design studio Daniel Joseph Chenin, Ltd. has shared photos of a modern home they completed on the edge of the Las Vegas Valley that has views of Red Rock Canyon. Photography by Stetson Ybarra Commissioned for a family embracing an active lifestyle of immersive environmental experiences, the home has a […]
Dayton is decently sized place with about 130,000 residents in the city proper and about 800,000 in the larger metropolitan area. So that makes it large enough for some attractions and urban amenities, but nobody would mistake it for a city that never sleeps. I figured I might run out of things to do before […] The post Dayton, Ohio Part 2 (Take a Walk) appeared first on Twelve Mile Circle - An...
Submitted by Jakob, who says: The M4 branch extension to Copenhagen South has just opened, and with it, a much improved map compared to 2019 [My review of the 2019 map can be found here – Cam]. The Circle Line is now more spacious, junctions are labeled more clearly, and metro lines have a strikethrough […]
Andrew Davison is a British founder who built and sold an app by learning to code with ChatGPT. He had a problem with exporting multiple tables from Airtable databases so he built a tool to help him automate the process. Andrew used new tools like ChatGPT and Replit to a)
This blog is running on a home server again. I have once again gained access to a competent internet connection1, and I think I have figured out the IPv6 setup as well2, leading to this change. The IP address is dynamic, there are occasional power outages and I might just mess up my configuration and bring it all down, but I get to brag about this setup so it all balances out. it’s fiber,...
[Hardware] Army of Robot Slide Whistles
On how I left a 'prestigious' consulting job to start from scratch as a React developer
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Quick thankyou to patreon subscriber/friend Dave Luebke for making this joke more legible. Today's News:
Laetitia@Work #68
(To be clear: I don't know how to make good decisions under stress)
When you’ve created an aluminium or zinc plate etching, you’ll want to have a go at pulling your first print. To do this, you’ll need to learn how to prepare your paper and how to set the correct pressure on your press. This blog is part of a series featuring tips and techniques to get you started with aluminium or zinc plate etching. This post will demonstrate how to prepare your papers and how...
Laetitia@Work #74
Berkshire Hathaway Energy, John Neff and Peter Lynch on investing, Charlie Munger on parenting, Damodaran on key person risk, Microsoft's IPO, Howard Marks and Annie Duke on risk
Highlights TinyPilot had its highest-revenue month ever. One of TinyPilot’s competitors raised $800k almost overnight. I’m working with a design firm to improve TinyPilot’s brand and website. Goal Grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Publish a sample chapter of Refactoring English Result: Made progress but didn’t publish a...
Scan eyeballs first, ask questions later.
Memories may affect how well the brain will learn about future events by shifting our perceptions of the world. The post Memories Help Brains Recognize New Events Worth Remembering first appeared on Quanta Magazine
“AI” and “The Cloud” are both hot topics, but couldn’t be more different. AI is new, unproven, and surrounded by hyperbole, whereas “The Cloud” is older, established, and broadly accepted. But online, criticism is mounting against both, not so much for the technology itself but for its misuse. Instead of waiting for big tech to […]
Breakfast cereal is controversial. Milk or cereal first? Best cereal to milk ratio? Favorite cereal? Most attractive mascot? The opportunities for debate never end. But we can all agree that consistency is key when it comes to the milk:cereal ratio — nobody changes that up from day to day. To ensure that every pour is […] The post This Arduino-controlled machine dispenses the perfect bowl of...
“I want to see mountains again, Gandalf, mountains. And then find somewhere where I can rest.” In this 4-part series we’ll walk through the reckoning of a Lord of the Rings style fantasy map, right in ArcGIS Pro. We map-makers get to breathe honest to goodness geographic life into the seminal aesthetic found in the …
July 19, 2024.
In the 1900s, Albert Einstein unified the concepts of space and time, giving us a useful new way to picture the universe.
Emily Shore was just nineteen when she died of tuberculosis—a short life, but one brimming with intellectual curiosity. Born in Suffolk, England in 1819, her now-celebrated journal contains not just her intricate observations of the natural world, but also thoughtful reflections on literature, religion, her family, and her impending death. In May of 1835, when […]
John Conway’s Game of Life, a famous cellular automaton, has been found to have periodic patterns of every possible length. The post Math’s ‘Game of Life’ Reveals Long-Sought Repeating Patterns first appeared on Quanta Magazine
And it comes from you
Ask your friends about their favorite games at the arcade and the most common answer will likely be Skee-Ball. But while many other popular arcade games have viable at-home alternatives, Skee-Ball doesn’t — at least not unless you’re willing to spend a serious amount of money. Luckily, you can get your Skee-Ball fix with a […] The post This rolling ball game brings Skee-Ball-style fun from the...
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] In March of 1989, Earth experienced one of its strongest geomagnetic storms in modern history. It all started when scientists observed a cluster of sunspots—active, magnetic areas on the sun's surface—emerging on its horizon. Over the next few days, the sun slowly rotated until the region began to point directly at Earth. Just...
If you’re employed, it’s because somebody believes that spending money on your salary will lead to more profit for its...
Every year, the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab graduates some of the most talented and innovative minds in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Our Ph.D. graduates have each expanded the frontiers of AI research and are now ready to embark on new adventures in academia, industry, and beyond. These fantastic individuals bring with them a wealth of knowledge, fresh...
Siri versus the machine god?
AI can be kind of useful, but I'm not sure that a "kind of useful" tool justifies the harm.
On projects, side-projects, AI, and existential dread.
Last year, I started a photography hobby. Soon after, I've created a place where I can share some of my work, without any attention-driven algorithms dictating the terms. Here's a technical write-up of my journey. Table of contents: Motivation Inspiration Design Implementation Content management Loading performance Navigation RSS Accessibility Pipeline Preparation Metadata update Content...
Highlights TinyPilot’s EU distributor is on track to begin sales by the end of August. I’ve freed up time by delegating responsibilities to my teammates. I miraculously became unstuck on two tasks that have been blocking work for months. Goal Grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Get my EU partner ready to begin sales by the...
In four months, I’ll embark on the adventure of a lifetime—fatherhood. To prepare, I’ve been honing a quintessential father skill—storytelling. If my son inherits even a fraction of my tastes, he’ll soon develop a passion for film noir detective stories. … Continue reading →
Or: Mainstream media still isn't great at covering tech and AI ideologies
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] The Earth is pretty cool and all, but many of its most magnificent features make it tough for us to get around. When the topography is too wet, steep, treacherous, or prone to disaster, sometimes the only way forward is up: our roadways and walkways and railways break free from the surface using bridges. A lot of the...
In one sense, the concept of progress is simple, straightforward, and uncontroversial. In another sense, it contains an entire worldview. The most basic meaning of “progress” is simply advancement along a path, or more generally from one state to another that is considered more advanced by some standard. (In this sense, progress can be good, neutral, or even bad—e.g., the progress of a disease.)...
Introduction Hideo Okawara’s Mixed Signal Lecture Series Frequency/Phase Movement Analysis by Orthogonal Demodulation Misc Introduction While researching a DSP related topic, Google dug up an excellent article, written by Hideo Okawara, that is just one part of a series of ~53. I was ready for more! Originally written for Verigy, the series is now hosted by Advantest. But hosting it pretty much...
When looking at data engineering for your projects, it is important to think about market segmentation. In particular, you might be able to think about it in four segments Small Data – This refers to scenarios where companies have data problems (organization, modeling, normalization, etc), but don’t necessarily generate a ton of data. When you […]
"The people we love are built into us."
So… What Happened? Today is my birthday—for the 65th time. Five years ago, on my 60th birthday, I did a livestream where I talked about some of my plans. So… what happened? Well, what happened was great. And in fact I’ve just had the most productive five years of my life. Nine books. 3939 pages […]
The day must come when electricity will be for everyone, as the waters of the rivers and the wind of heaven. It should not merely be supplied, but lavished, that men may use it at their will, as the air they breathe. - Emile Zola, “Travail”, 1901
Here’s a long-form article I co-authored on the state of the no-code that I thought you might enjoy. Let me know if you have any feedback or questions :) Much like Shopify ‘armed the rebels’ by allowing anyone to build an e-commerce store, a slew of no-code tools are empowering people to build
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Lot of people are gonna say we can't build Star Trek teleporters, but we can do the first half, which is pretty good. Today's News:
Sure, I visited the various Wright Brothers museums, historical sites, and memorials but they weren’t the totality of Dayton’s remarkable legacy. It wasn’t even the reason why we visited. I mentioned the younger kid’s interest in all things aeronautical earlier and it traced back to that. Honestly the only place we had to see was […] The post Dayton, Ohio Part 3 (Museums) appeared first on Twelve...
“Everyone eats. There's so much beauty in realizing that humaneness and that oneness.” This is the ethos of Luke Zahm. The James Beard-nominated chef, host of the hit PBS show Wisconsin Foodie, and owner of the widely acclaimed Driftless Café in Viroqua, Wisconsin, believes food is a powerful force for connection. Here, he opens up about breaking down colonial mindsets around food, and his drive...
Technological change brings organizational change.
Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold3 and other deep learning algorithms can now predict the shapes of interacting complexes of protein, DNA, RNA and other molecules, better capturing cells’ biological landscapes. The post New AI Tools Predict How Life’s Building Blocks Assemble first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Nix is a broad product with a steep learning curve. It’s capable of everything from installing a single package to managing every file and application on your OS. One useful thing you can do with Nix, even as a complete beginner, is manage your dev environments. Nix lets me have multiple projects on the same system that each have their own independent view of what dependencies are available. I can...
Biden's Withdrawal and Limits of Gaslighting, The CrowdStrike Crash, Munger and Franklin, Steve Jobs in 1983, Microsoft deep dive, Marks on risk, Luca Delanna on ergodicity, Guadalcanal
For those of us who have not spent the past few years building ChatGPT from the ground up, how does it work? From Evan Morikawa, who leads the Applied engineering team at OpenAI
December 1, 2023.
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: I think if we just convince AI that it committed an original sin, we can get it to feel guilty. Today's News:
Disclosure: Waterfield sent this in exchange for a review. Yeah, that probably colors something on a deep-down, subconscious level, but I won’t say anything that I don’t truly believe. Unlike a phone or laptop, the Vision Pro is one of those products that is particularly tricky to take around without a case. I’ve got around this by wrapping it in a hoodie and throwing it in my backpack, but I was...
The earth contains a lot of titanium - it’s the ninth most abundant element in the earth’s crust. By mass, there’s more titanium in the earth’s crust than carbon by a factor of nearly 30, and more titanium than copper by a factor of nearly 100. But despite its abundance, it's only recently that civilization has been able to use titanium as a metal (titanium dioxide has been in use somewhat longer...
On the back of US salary transparency regulations, two new salary transparency websites have launched, built by the creators of Levels.fyi and Layoffs.fyi. I talked to both teams to learn how they were developed.
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Godel proved you can't prove anything. Don't think about it too hard. Today's News: Happy New Year,
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: The part of the impression that gets the most laughs is when the robot imitates living an entire life pursuing other people's dreams. Today's News:
Submitted by Browne, who says: UTA, the primary transit provider for northern Utah, has officially launched its newest BRT service, and with it, a new transit map. The OGX is a new BRT route from Ogden Central Station, downtown, Weber State University, and down to McKay-Dee Hospital. Besides the new BRT line, there are subtle […]
Of course Alaska and Hawaii are glorious places, beloved by all for their lovely inhabitants and majestic natural environs. It would be an error of omission should they not appear in a map of the United States, but it would also be a shame to shoe-horn them in looking sad with an inappropriate coordinate system. …
Last week, someone leaked a spreadsheet of SoundThinking sensors to Wired. You are probably asking "What is SoundThinking," because the company rebranded last year. They used to be called ShotSpotter, and their outdoor acoustic gunfire detection system still goes by the ShotSpotter name. ShotSpotter has attracted a lot of press and plenty of criticism for the gunfire detection service they provide...
I finally went to FOSDEM. I’m sleep-deprived, completely exhausted, but incredibly excited about the whole experience. I’ve split this post into three separate sections. overall notes on the conference and the city less technical, but sheds light on the FOSDEM experience the hallway track and stands the thing you probably came to FOSDEM for my notes on the sessions I attended plus sessions that I...
I’ve been writing my thoughts on life, psychology, and mindset for some time. I’ve considered transferring some of these writings from Notion into this post. In physics, three laws can explain 99% of observations. However, in life, psychology, and mindset, 99 laws can barely explain 1% of observations. What I’ve written here stems from my…
Mapping actors and solutions
Still from Apple’s “Let Loose” video. Apple unveiled their new line of iPads yesterday in a pre-recorded video titled “Let Loose.” As with the previous “Scary Fast” MacBook Pro launch video, “Let Loose” ends with a tag proclaiming “Shot on iPhone” — this time adding “Edited on Mac and iPad,” and the fine print: “All presenters, locations, and aerial footage shot on iPhone.” During the live stream...
Jeez The post The 2024 Trump-Biden Debate appeared first on Wait But Why.
March 8, 2024.
Out-discounting competitors: iFood’s bid to become Latin America's last-mile delivery king.
It’s the start of a calendar year. Let’s take a look at what 2023 did to me financially. I’m following the same structure I’ve used for the last few years (2022, 2021, and 2020). Overall, 2023 was a good year on almost all measures – thanks in particular to Q4 which saw the US stock market drag… Continue reading Dec ’23 – 2023 in review →
A positive vision for the transformation to come
In the software development realm, asking questions isn’t just a right—it’s a downright necessity. Let’s cut the crap and dive […] The post Asking questions the right way appeared first on Vadim Kravcenko.
Apple Intelligence and aggregation puts Apple in a dominant AI position
Yesterday on X, I shared a post about some responses I was getting from the ChatGPT 3.5 API indicating that it was refusing to summarize arXiv papers: There has been a lot of discussion recently about the perceived decrease in the quality of ChatGPT’s responses and seeing ChatGPT’s refusal here reinforced that perception for a … Continue reading Is the ChatGPT API Refusing to Summarize Academic...
Dorset’s Isle of Purbeck isn’t an island it’s a peninsula. It was probably more isolated and difficult to reach in previous centuries. So maybe it felt like an island to people back when the English Channel was the primary “road” to the outside world. Even now it’s a time-consuming overland drive so I can appreciate […] The post England, Day 5 (Isle of Purbeck) appeared first on Twelve Mile Circle...
This article presents a discussion of "Prometheus Bound", a play by the Greek Tragedian Aeschylus dating back to the fifth century BC.
Juno’s been a really fun project to build, and it’s been so great hearing how other people have been enjoying Juno since its launch, as well as providing awesome feedback and input to improve it. Today I’m releasing Juno 2.0, which incorporates a ton of that community feedback, and truly brings the app to the next level through extensive improvements and new features. Using it over the last little...
I am building a personal web. My name is Chris and I am a data hoarder personal archivist. Current status of my “_archive” volume: 741,637,054,464 bytes (741.64 GB on disk) Audio: 267,269,859,244 bytes (267.29 GB on disk) for 8,902 items Images: 24,176,297,844 bytes (24.19 GB on disk) for 7,650 items Texts: 3,944,901 bytes (6 MB on disk) for 793 items Video: 183,328,027,677 bytes...
For anyone interested (you there in the phone box), here's a PDF of the 39 Books series. 39 Books: PDF As the introduction explained, the books were chosen from those on my books-read lists that I hadn't written about before. I thought it might be instructive to contrast the books I did write about for each year. Before 2007, I wrote elsewhere and almost all reviews are now behind paywalls or...
A programming note: I am looking at making some changes to how I host things like Computers Are Bad and wikimap that are going to involve a lot more recurring expense. For that and other reasons, I want to see if y'all would be willing to throw some money my way. If everyone reading this gave $3 a month, we could probably buy Jimbo Wales a nice lunch or something. I do not intend to paywall...
For many approaching retirement, the question of "how much can I safely withdraw?" looms large. Enter the 4% rule, a popular guideline that suggests retirees can withdraw 4% of their retirement savings in the first year and adjust for inflation thereafter. But is it a guaranteed path to a worry-free retirement, or simply a starting point? Let's delve deeper into the history, mechanics, and...
A lesson in ignoring economics
Part of our 80/20 series sit on a cushion for 20 mins per day focus on your sensory experiences (touch, sight, smell, sound). Try to perceive them as accurately as possible [1] [2] [3] footnotes: is that really all? on one level, yes -- both in the sense that
It's been an eventful year
A lively talk with the author about his new book, Winging It.
[Hardware] The smallest and silliest MIDI synth yet
Canada's housing market has become a national concern. Soaring prices have pushed homeownership out of reach for many, and even renters struggle to find affordable options. The pandemic exacerbated this pre-existing crisis, highlighting the urgent need for solutions. This article explores the root causes of the crisis and proposes a multi-pronged approach to achieving housing affordability.
Panto is back for 2023 - oh yes it is!
Weekly updates and resources 7/15/24
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