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....
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...
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
Everything about the Black Magic's acquisition + May 2023 updates
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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.
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
Lessons from building and growing Copylime to 6 figures all in public
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...
Today is exactly 2 years since I quit my job and become a full-time indie hacker.
Lessons from building AudioPen to 600+ paid users to clinching #1 on Product Hunt
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
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 […]
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!
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 […]
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...
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...
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...
<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...
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.
Hey Siri, set a reminder for 365 days.
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...
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...
See you again soon
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...
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...
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 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 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...
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...
People talk about you the way you talk about yourself.
A FAQ of sorts
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...
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 […]
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...
I sold Xnapper, here is a quick update about the acquisition details
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...
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...
Surreal and otherworldly.
<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...
A personal guide to Singapore for foreign friends visiting.
Lessons from building HeyGen from 0 to $1m ARR in 7 months
A little bit of magic, but mostly just practice
Telemedicine (and mobile health generally) accumulated a hunk of public mindshare during the pandemic emergency, but speaking as someone with a day job in public health for almost two decades, it's always been a buzzword in certain corners of IT with enough money sloshing around that vendors repeatedly flirted with it. Microsoft, of course, is no exception, and on at least one occasion in the late...
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...
May 17, 2024.
No you can't "have it all." You can have two things, but not three.
It's my first product launch of the year!
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...
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 also curated 300+ Black Friday deals for you
Why not make this Christmas a little darker? The post Ho Ho Horror appeared first on The American Scholar.
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...
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.
Going viral, my thoughts, and updates from me in October 2023.
Designed by Dixon Baxi, London.
(A Lengthy Vacation Post-Mortem)
Immigrating from Indonesia to the US and building Typedream in public
AI is strange. We need to learn to use it.
Lessons from building and growing Potion to its acquisition all in public
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...
I turn 30, built a new app, and other updates in December 2023
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.
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.
<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...
Imagine selling a website you made for $10,000. Pretty great, huh? Well that's exactly what Dmytro did
Let's Get Right To the Point
Full story on my latest role at Paddle, the new AI program, and what it means for you
Some quick updates from me in June 2023
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...
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.
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...
Lessons from building Tally.so from 0 to $40k MRR all in public
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.
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...
This was almost a post on why millennial motherhood is so challenging, but turned into tactical food hacks.
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...
For sale: a few KIM-1 User Manuals I printed up.
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!
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!
will he go into destroy mode if I say no
Reached $10K MRR, launched Xnapper (#1 of the week), went on Indie Hackers podcast (😱), and other updates in Aug 2022...
Lets build a simple virtual pinball controller to bring more immersion to your game.
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...
Also in October: Speak at JOM Launch Asia 2022, and the thing about Elon Musk.
"IBM's first computer"
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...
Covering the state of play as of Summer, 2023
And some prompts that might be useful when it does.
And other updates in April 2023
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...
The Justice Department worries about the stability of Ethereum, DCG tries to bilk their subsidiary's creditors, and Biden threatens a crypto veto.
Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2m ARR in public
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
And then there were two.
And why it might revolutionize the search industry.
Super quick updates
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 →
The second in a series of posts about scripting Visual Pinball tables.
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.
If you believe that the most serious risks from AI are real, should you write about anything else?
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.
The first in a series of posts about scripting Visual Pinball tables.
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...
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...
Four questions to ask your organization.
<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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
A pragmatic approach to thinking about AI
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...
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…
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...
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
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.
Five analytical tasks in under a minute
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....
It was a such a short month!
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...
all images courtesy Gaku Yamazaki Gaku Yamazaki, a 21-year old college senior, spends his spare time traversing Japan in search of what he has dubbed ikei-yajirushi, or ‘unusual arrows.’ There are thousands of these abnormal road signs dotted across Japan and while drivers might find them confusing or even annoying, Yamazaki has developed a certain […] No related posts.
A PCB for breadboards to make working with op-amps easier.
All images © Kenta Hasegawa courtesy Suppose Design Office “Buy a vacation home that doubles as a hotel.” That’s the tagline for ‘Not A Hotel,’ a real estate start-up founded by Shinji Hamazu. The company challenges the traditional hotel model by treating it as a timeshare and selling it to 12 people, each receiving 30 […] Related posts: Stay in Artist Designed Hotel Rooms at the Park Hotel Tokyo...
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...
<![CDATA[I wrote Interpinkie, a basic Finger client in Interlisp that runs on the Medley environment. This is the main window of the program: Main window of the Interpinkie Interlisp Finger client. It was a fun challenge considering I couldn't use Medley's TCP/IP stack. I always wanted to do some network programming with Medley. But the bitrot of its TCP/IP stack left it in a non working state...
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...
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,
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...
“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 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…
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May 10, 2024.
Not the usual monthly update, just a small update about Xnapper - my latest product
We can start to see, dimly, what the near future of AI looks like.
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 →
A new set of cases for two concept sequences, and the end of the Data Driven Series.
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 […]
There's a somewhat weird alien who wants to work for free for you. You should probably get started.
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...
Chinese policy and geopolitical risk are doing a lot of the work here.
Here's a crash course on the rising trend of building in public
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...
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."
Why everyone should learn about machine learning
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...
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...
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
Humans are really the ones to be scared of
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
"Ownership" means ten different things to ten different people. Let's talk about what we actually want.
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) […]
GPT-4o, Google I/O, Fugaku LLM, Prep for Machine Learning Interviews, and more
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...
EVs are just going to win.
This post wraps up the sound work on Teacher's Pet.
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 $112k...
MathJax.Hub.Config({ jax: ["input/TeX", "output/HTML-CSS"], tex2jax: { inlineMath: [ ['$', '$'], ["\\(", "\\)"] ], displayMath: [ ['$$', '$$'], ["\\[", "\\]"] ], processEscapes: true, skipTags: ['script', 'noscript', 'style', 'textarea', 'pre', 'code'] } //, //displayAlign: "left", //displayIndent: "2em" }); Introduction Inside the...
I’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...
A simplified high-level overview of primary machine learning algorithms for anyone to understand
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.
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.
What does it mean for AI to be better than a human? And how can we tell?
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 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.
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...
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...
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...
A simple answer, and then a less simple one.
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
If you want to escape the hustle and bustle of touristy Kyoto, head to this newly opened oasis of books and coffee. Located slightly north of central Kyoto is the Donkou Kissa Fang, a serene cafe and private book collection built inside immaculately crafted townhouse and garden. Donkou means ‘slow thinking’ in Japanese, and is […] Related posts: Kaikado’s Tea and Coffee Cafe in Kyoto The Book &...
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?
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
No GPU cluster required.
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!
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...
(Just not mine.)
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...
TypingMind.com is launching tomorrow on Product Hunt!
Uncapped safe notes misalign incentives in first rounds… let me explain why
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.
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.
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…
April 26, 2024.
Democratizing educational technology... and more
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...
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...
A talk with architecture critic Justin Davidson about the thorny knot of issues involved at New York’s most conflicted transportation-entertainment site.
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.
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 →
The Case for LLMs as Hallucination Engines
When Steve Jobs spoke about the intersection of liberal arts and technology, he did not envision crushing symbols of art and culture.
We have more agency over the future of AI than we think.
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 […]
James and his partner Danielle have an enviable working set-up - they live and work on a sailing boat!
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...
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...
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, […]
They're not going to disrupt everything (yet), but they're a ton of fun.
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 […]
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 >>
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....
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 […]
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.
Bor Hung Chong from Nefin Group discusses green energy solutions beyond solar panels.
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.
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:
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.
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...
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...
James McKinven is an entrepreneur who has succeeded in making money from podcasts - no easy feat. He earns money by editing podcasts for companies
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...
I gained 1,500 new users, but how many will convert? And other updates in July 2022...
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....
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...
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...
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.
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 […]
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.
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...
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...
A selection of fifteen formerly paywalled articles
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...
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
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...
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 […]
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...
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.
This is not the monthly update, just a quick announcement 😄
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...
Is AI a Leveler, King Maker, or Escalator?
Interest rates, Passive investing, Ben Graham as a young man, Daniel Kahneman, Ken Langone, Lawrence Cunningham, Reed Hastings, Steve Eisman
Also in September: $12K MRR, built a small new app, SEO, and other updates...
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
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...
“We give them the same phone, in the same brand-new condition,” says one seller.
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...
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
You probably know more about machine learning math than you think
Time for some humor
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
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...
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 […]
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.
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...
We’re aging too fast (AKA my entire AI/robotics investment thesis)
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 →
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 →
<p> Some super </p> <p class="top-button"> <a href="#top">🔝</a> </p>
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...
The neuroscience, physics, and philosophy of freedom in a universe of fixed laws.
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
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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 […]
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 …
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...
The post Us appeared first on The Perry Bible Fellowship.
How pricing experiments helped me reach $6,000 MRR
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...
A few big changes are making the online world a more boring place to hang out.
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…
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:
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…
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
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
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...
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 →
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...
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...
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,...
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 […]
Lessons from building Senja.io to $4,000 MRR in Public
April 19, 2024.
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...
Hello everyone! It's Tony again with another monthly updates.
Trying some unconventional techniques to create a pop-art print of a Cherry Mash candy bar.
How the Chatbot Arena leaderboard for LLMs works and why it’s important to understand
According to statistics, Tokyo is home to over 1800 Shinto shrines. You have your major shrines like Meiji-Jingu and Hie Shrine but there are many other tiny shrines, often unstaffed and nestled in the depths of back streets and behind buildings. Tearing down a shrine would be considered incredibly bad luck so many smaller shrines […] Related posts: Exploring Japan’s Historical Landmarks and...
May 3, 2024.
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 →
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…
An optimistic take on technology and inequality.
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.
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. […]
Two Customer Encounters
Rest of World’s four Labor x Tech fellows reflect on their year reporting about the global tech industry’s impact on its workers.
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...
Without Americans on the app, advertising dollars are at risk.
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...
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:
And a consideration for choosing a language
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 …
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:
Neurodivergent physicists face barriers in STEM, but there are also benefits to being who they are.
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...
Thankbox is a successful B2C bootstrapped website created by Valentin Hinov which is now doing $30-35k a month.
Bad architecture must come from some underlying ethos.
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
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.
Indie updates, B2B vs B2C, Black Friday, surfing, skimboarding, hardware.
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 >>
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
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 […]
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
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...
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.
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...
All of us, except the AI startups and VCs—unless a real war breaks out
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,...
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 →
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…
For everyone to have access to AGI, everyone must also have access to the compute to use it
Yes, market-rate!
Inside Stability AI's roster of AI models.
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?
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 →
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...
I'm not a fan of mandatory investor education classes. The issue was brought up recently by former chair of FDIC, Sheila Bair, who sees such classes as ways to stop future FTX-style disasters. The model of finance I've been using for many years is the fairly dismal dark forest model. The financial industry is a shadowy forest full of sly foxes waiting to prey on retail investors. The list of sly...
Some light Visual Pinball debugging and the world of DOF. New to DOF? Read on.
A new model opens up new possibilities
fuzzy processors are entering mass production
Remembering Albert Borgmann (1937-2023)
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 →
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...
Designed by Mubien Brands, Santander.
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...
Imagine having a Swiss Army Knife for your community use cases
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 case for customizable AI systems as an alternative to one-size-fits-all AI systems
March 15, 2023.
Note: In May, I spent some time traveling through England. This is the first of maybe several posts from that trip. In York, England a snickelway is a narrow passageway variously referred to as a"snicket", "gimmel" or "alleyway", the word being a combination of all of these. Mark Jones mapped the snickelways and wrote a guide book to them. I took this photo as an example of a snickelway. His...
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 →
(just a quick announcement...)
And why direct forms of communication will always be super valuable
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
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
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...
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.
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...
Lessons from building Tailscan in public to $500 MRR
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,…
Most founders dream of making $10,000 in monthly revenue. One founder who has made that dream a reality is Benjamin Houy
An argument for legal and technical safe harbors for AI safety and trustworthiness research
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:
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.
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...
Discovering virtual pinball, a hobbyist community devoted to it, and building a full-size virtual pinball cabinet.
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, […]
What do I like about Byzantine coinage? Most people probably admire the Byzantine solidus, a gold coin that maintained its weight and purity for over 600 years, which is quite remarkable for a coin. The solidus was exported all over the world, including to Europe, which lacked gold coinage at the time, making it the U.S. dollar of its day. That's neat, but it's not the solidus that impresses me....
👋 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!
Or is it?
Hard to believe that those dumb hobbits risked their lives walking all the way to Mordor when they could have just taken the Orange Line. Oh wait, the tunnel under the mountain is closed so they would have had to switch to the Red Line at Bree and then made another transfer to get to Mount Doom. Still that seems like a minor inconvenience when compared to risking imprisonment by nasty...
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.
Then they stealth edited the piece. They knew they'd committed libel.
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...
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...
How employees and CEOs alike can plan for the future.
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...
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...
After decades of slumber, the country that brought us bullet trains and Nintendo has mustered some momentum.
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...
Another correction
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 […]
The mystery of why we don't dream of building perfect societies anymore
Back to basics for AI startups and others
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.
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...
Restore Order (to your printer)
When privilege becomes a pre-requisite.
<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...
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...
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
TSMC Arizona back on track, drawing arrows on graphs, the downsides of inclusionary zoning, why people hate inflation, and interesting ideas about market power
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,...
Laetitia@Work #70
Mature technology companies are establishing regular quarterly dividends. Is this a positive or negative development for shareholders?
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.
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...
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:
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...
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...
April 12, 2024.
The clocks have sprung forward and the spring chicks are chirping: yes, April has arrived. But it’s not only those longer, lighter evenings luring us out of the house; this month’s brilliant list of cultural and culinary must-dos and -sees is equally tempting – even […]
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 […]
Early access to some software we've built to make XmR charts more accessible.
Just when PowerSeeker thought they had nowhere to go...
Scaling will run out. The question is when.
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
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...
This silver pfennig from the Archbishopric of Magdeburg (1152-1192) was subject to a policy of renovatio monetae. Twice a year whoever held it had to bring it in to be changed for new coins at a rate of four old coins to three new coins. That suggests an annualized tax rate on coinage of 44%. Image source: British Museum This is another post in a series that explores how European monarchs...
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:
(But why not?)
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 →
<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...
In the context of valuing companies, and sharing those valuations, I do get suggestions from readers on companies that I should value next. While I don't have the time or the bandwidth to value all of the suggested companies, a reader from Iceland, a couple of weeks ago, made a suggestion on a company to value that I found intriguing. He suggested Blue Lagoon, a well-regarded Icelandic Spa with a...
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
Some hints about what the next year of AI looks like
Open AI announcements, DeepSeek-v2, and TSMC Arizona
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 →
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....
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...
Two letters from Thomas Jefferson to his nephew, Peter Carr, illustrate Jefferson's views on education, ethics, religion, and many other subjects.
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
<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...
It’s time to expand our vision to include slower, more human-scaled speeds of transportation.
Quanta magazine this week published an article about two very recent papers, in which different groups performed quantum simulations of anyons, objects that do not follow Bose-Einstein or Fermi-Dirac statistics when they are exchanged. For so-called Abelian anyons (which I wrote about in the link above), the wavefunction picks up a phase factor \(\exp(i\alpha)\), where \(\alpha\) is not \(\pi\)...
An simple overview of temperature and its effect on LLM output
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
...and other updates in January 2022 from me
As election season kicks into high gear, we need to watch how cryptocurrency companies are influencing US politics.
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...
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 →
The crypto industry jumps on the Trump train.
I was planning to finish my last two data updates for 2024, but decided to take a break and look at the seven stocks (Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla) which carried the market in 2023. While I will use the "Magnificent Seven" moniker attached by these companies by investors and the media, my preference would have been to call them the Seven Samurai. After all, like their...
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.
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 took over two years for the Emancipation Proclamation to reach Galveston, Texas. Specifically June 19, 1965 hence the Juneteenth holiday. Galveston was the largest slave market west of New Orleans. The newly emancipated fled Galveston to Freedmen's Town and other parts of Houston that had large African American communities. via Texas Highways In 2019 the US House of Representatives passed...
Your assets are the government's collateral.
You think I’m crazy, but just wait and see....
Also, we have a prompt library!
If you don't acknowledge the point of tariffs, how can you hope to criticize them?
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 >>
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...
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The tasks AI can do well are expanding rapidly
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...
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...
Everything you need to know about the Amazon Weekly Business Review: how it works, why it works, and how it helps Amazon win.
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:
It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
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 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...
[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...
Abandoning the idea of building a Slack Alternative
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.
The 2024 Kei-Truck Gardening Contest took place over the weekend. In what is perhaps the most-Japanese contest, professional gardeners and landscapers compete to create a beautiful, seasonal, and unique landscape , all within the bed of their kei-trucks. This contest originated in 2011 after a landscapers association came up with the idea to promote a […] Related posts: The Japanese Mini Truck...
Talking to Jordan Schneider from ChinaTalk about China's technological ascent
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?
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...
We have this big issue right now because gaming is shifting from us to mobile platforms.
Check cashing, as a business, is a poorly understood "alternative" financial service.
A new Twitter clone is surging in popularity. Could it have legs?
I have not read Ulysses by James Joyce, few people have. Even fewer have understood it. To honor the annual Bloomsday festival going on right now, here is a map showing the wanderings and locations within the book. The map about as easy to understand as the plot itself. I have not found much information on the map's author, Aimee Stewart. Her company seems to have disappeared from the...
A quiet evening reading from Tanquerey’s The Spiritual Life, first published in 1923
Title insurance is grossly overpriced relative to actual risks involved. Why is that?
Building a unified experience with Slack instead of trying to replace it all at once
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...
Crypto enthusiasts protest the trial of Alexey Pertsev As the multiple Tornado Cash legal cases wend their way through courts in the Netherlands and the U.S., we continue to learn how society's money laundering laws will be applied to some of the more unique financial entities being created on the new technological medium of blockchains. Last month Alexey Pertsev, a co-creator and...
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...
Seven principles for journalism in the age of AI
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...
Foxconn and Luxshare slashed workers. But under pressure to expand away from China, they suddenly need them back.
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...
These Python scripts help me write 3x faster and go from loose ideas to first draft in minutes.
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:
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Is this the most or least pessimistic comic yet? Today's News:
And more things I talked about over coffee & dinner this week.
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...
May 24, 2024.
It's the Memorial Day holiday weekend and it's time for a little deferred maintenance, especially on those machines I intend to work on more in the near future. So we'll start with one that's widely considered to be a remarkable cul-de-sac in computing history: the Canon Cat. work processor" because of its built-in telecommunications, modem and word processor even though Jef Raskin, its...
March 29, 2024.
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 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 →
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).
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...
Different Kinds of Difference At Work
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...
Test-Fly A $20 Million Jet On An Apple? Yes. With MicroSPEED
"We think you're gonna LOVE it"
All the details about the process and the cost of getting SOC 2
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…
Turkish banks halted transactions with Russian banks last month and are only slowly reintroducing payments for a narrow range of products that are on a so-called "green list," reports Ragip Soylu. This broad debanking of Russia by Turkey is part of the fallout from President Biden's first round of secondary sanctions, announced on December 22. Ukraine/sanctions watchers around the world are...
From images of solar cooking to snake radio telemetry, we received 548 entries from around the world.
[Hardware] Illuminated circuit inside a hypodermic
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?
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
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...
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...
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.
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...
Payments companies are regularly punished for engaging in money laundering. MoneyGram, for instance, has has to pay multiple fines. Western Union was famously busted in 2017. Meanwhile, Cash App is being probed as we speak for inadequate anti-money laundering controls. In the future, these companies may have in their grasp a very simple techno-legal trick that allows them to deal with dirty money...
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.
'Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion' That Works
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
Live Hangs, Early Chapters, Cut Material, and more…
As soon as the sun comes out on a bank holiday, it feels like half of London heads down to the south coast, and Brighton in particular. And though that town certainly has a lot going for it, not least a thriving restaurant and pub/wine scene that can show you a great time at all budgets, I'm afraid the thought of fighting my way through those narrow Lanes alleyways on the hottest days of the year...
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,
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....
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.
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...
I am more worried about privacy than crypto crime.
Why treating AI like a person is the future
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.
Taking AI timelines seriously
On waiting for AI's Godot.
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...
The Convivial Society: Vol. 5, No. 7
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
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.
Allison Seboldt is the founder of PageFactory, a service which helps websites grow their content and reach with programmatic SEO.
March 1, 2024.
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
Felix Kan on building a bug-hunting platform to enhance cybersecurity for small companies.
What generative AI capabilities does Google offer to developers?
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...
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
Lessons from building, growing and selling SaaS Products all in public
that's really how my brain spelled passion!!
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 →
"Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself."
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.
Ever wondered about what happens when banks are closed or why some apps have operating hours? It's fascinating.
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.
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 …
Douglas Kendyson, a former engineer at Flutterwave and Paystack, has built a profitable bootstrapped African startup.
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.
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.
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.
Teacher's Pet gets new sounds in this post in a series about scripting Visual Pinball tables.
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,...
Mentorcruise is an impressive mentor marketplace which has grown to 20,000 users.
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.
Changpeng Zhao's sentencing, FOIA requests reveal past FBI investigations into Coinbase, and the SEC is on a Wells notice bender.
The rise of AI is creating both crisis and opportunity
The birth of Sony, and the possibility that private corporations and private individuals can change broader business ecosystems.
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...
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
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
It's about having small expectations.
Simple and common acts of nature often inspire brilliant design. Such is the case with “Puddle,” a series of flower vessels that mimic a puddle of water. Using properties of transparency and surface tension, these whimsical vessels create the illusion of a single plant growing from a puddle. Created by Japanese design duo YOY (Naoki […] Related posts: This Piece of Wall Art Doubles as a...
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
It's a one-party state. They hold elections, but the Party always wins.
Good news on paper, but the devil is in the details
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.
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’
Output similarity is a distraction
Thoughts on risk, Berkshire recap, Graham's first investment, Marks on debt, Electricity demand, How to spend your days, AI and productivity
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...
Applications to our new residential seminar close this coming Friday, 31st May
Last week the U.S. government expanded the coverage of its secondary sanctions to encompass most of Russia's banks. It's a very big step, one that has been long-awaited by sanctions watchers, and will likely have significant repercussions for Russia and its trading partners. Here's a quick explainer. Stepping back, we can think about the U.S.'s sanctions war on the Putin regime as an effort...
A brief overview of knowledge distillation and its capabilities
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...
Why speed and multimodality is becoming the name of the game.
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
<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...
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.
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...
Thoughts on planning and letting go of expectations
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 →
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.
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,...
And my notes on why they’re important
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 →
Unpopular large companies, Dopamine culture, Buffett's cheapest stock, Investing in vertical SaaS, The bear case for China, Chris Davis, Michael Mauboussin
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...
How I used AI in my book about AI
Early notes on how generative AI is affecting the internet
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...
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 […]
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...
fine fine I'll write about AI
What Bluey can teach us about machine learning
Landevenneg is a small village in Finistère, Brittany. It is famous for its Benedictine abbey and its religious history. Landevenneg...
Ch Daniel is a 25 year old founder who is making $200,000 in annual revenue from a variety of websites.
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.
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,...
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...
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...
Are closed source AI models doomed?
My thoughts on the new edition with a focus on inconsistency avoidance, one of the twenty-five psychological tendencies that can cause human misjudgment.
And isn't that we're all going to lose our jobs
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 […]
The hype is not supported by current evidence
Okay, promises, promises. Here's the first of my bucket list projects I'm completing which I've intermittently worked on for literally two decades. Now that I've finally shaken out more bugs, tuned it up and cleaned it off, it's time to let people play with the source code. real serial port) and has expanded RAM with 16K of addressing space, all on an unexpanded stock Commodore 64. It's almost...
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...
Are US legislators warming to crypto? The SEC approves Ethereum ETPs, and a crypto bill gets through the House.
Continuing a recent theme, here comes along another example of excellent restaurant pedigree producing a fantastic place to eat. The Buxton is a smart and buzzy spot halfway down Brick Lane, within trotting distance of sister restaurant the Culpeper which is also a lovely (if often wildly oversubscribed) modern British bistro with rooftop kitchen garden. The same guys also run the Green in...
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...
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.
Hey you, did you do the thing you said you would do?
Daily Journal and Berkshire Hathaway have little in common aside from Charlie Munger's influence. Recent development at Daily Journal raise concerns.
Adding precision to the debate on openness in AI
And definitions for the most important terms you should know
And how ML helps software engineers in their daily work
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 […]
By charging more $$$, you are lifting up the quality of the outcome and satisfaction.
I interview Claire about her new book "Scaling People". Thanks to Stripe for hosting.
and how I’m using their feedback to change my approach
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 […]
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...
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:
The reasons behind my decision to discontinue paid subscriptions.
Intelligence, of a sort, is going to be all around us
The Tax Break You've Been Looking for !
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...
From megaFLOPS to mega flops.
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.
April 5, 2024.
Some free software to create, modify, experiment with and share XmR charts. Unlock the ability to become more data driven today.
There are good reasons to be skeptical about its ultimate utility.
A glimpse into the biggest challenge in the world of AI, why it matters to you, and why it's worth so much
Jurisdictional gamesmanship is a common strategy for crypto businesses. Here is how it worked out for Binance and its CEO. Spoiler: poorly.
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...
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...
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...
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,
Things I know
A reader has generously shared his notes from the Daily Journal annual meeting which took place in Los Angeles on February 15, 2024.
Substantial political homogeneity in Large Language Models (LLMs) responses to questions with political connotations
“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...
The Convivial Society: Vol. 4, No. 9
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
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...
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 →
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.
a triptych by Toyokuni Utagawa depicting an excursion to gather bamboo shoots (early 1800s) According to Japan’s ancient calendar of 72 microseasons, right now is microseason 21: the time of year when “Bamboo Shoots Sprout.” Known as takenoko in Japan, these voracious plants have numerous uses in Japan, both as building materials but also edible vegetables. […] Related posts: 20,000 Bamboo...
I want to write about a recently published paper, but to do so on an accessible level, I should really lay some ground work first. At the primary school level, typically people are taught that there are three states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas. (Plasma may be introduced as a fourth state sometimes.) These three states are readily distinguished because they have vastly different mechanical...
Harakado, opened on April 17, 2024 at the Jingumae intersection along Omotesando Street in central Tokyo. The shiny, brand new facility was designed by architect Akihisa Hirata, whose interest in tangled, organic structures, is on full display in his rendering of the facade and outdoor spaces. The reflective surfaces are a nice complement to its sister […] Related posts: An archive of...
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...
Last month American provocateur Tucker Carlson visited a Russian grocery store. Because it was filled to the brim with food, Carlson claims that western sanctions placed on Russia aren't having an effect. "We've been told sanctions on Russia have had a devastating effect on its economy," writes Carlson. "We visited a grocery store in Moscow and found a very different situation." Tucker Carlson...
Sacred Flames and Divine Philosophers
Refactoring the business entity, thoughts on marketing and building
We got it in 1983, I think, so it only took me about 41 years to get around to it. This Tomy Tutor isn't a replacement system I secondarily acquired, nor is it a Ship of Theseus Frankenstein rebuild. This is my actual first computer, in its original case, on its original components, with the Federated Group sticker still on the original box. And it still works. His High Holy Munificence Fred R....
Continuous Improvement sounds simple, even obvious. And yet there's a profound secret at its heart that doesn't seem to get talked about.
Ed McCracken and Jim Clark talk about their hardware and the future of 3D
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...
That’s what makes it worthwhile
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 …
What makes DEI important and where it fails
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
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 →
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...
<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...
Don't get stuck in neutral
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 […]
A long overdue VC apocalypse and the birth of the first real AI companies
<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...
Why does Google suck so much, Microsoft Co-Pilot Everywhere, and Sam Altman
The opposite of a good idea - Finding the real reason behind brushing our teeth - Let's not jump to conclusions
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.
A conversation with Andrew Lee, CEO of Shortwave and cofounder of Firebase.
To get status, you have to give up status.
An Interview With Star Wars Animator Larry Cuba
Designed by Gold Front, San Francisco.
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...
OpenAI Q*, Primer on Reinforcement Learning, and Implications
Designed by Common Curiosity, Birmingham, London.
Can audio engineering ideas help us deal with life in the city?s
Operating Systems Come in Many Flavors But QNX Can Take the Heat
First off, apologies for a quiet month as I've been dealing with family matters which hopefully are now on a better footing (more articles are in the hopper). Unfortunately, the same apparently can't be said for the once-great Living Computers Museum + Labs in Seattle, established by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and closed in 2020 during the COVID pandemic after his death, at least...
The 21st century direct-to-TV game console: a dirt-cheap toy dragging poor ports of cherished games to a more downmarket age. If you couldn't afford the real device, your alternative was these inexpensive, inadequate facsimiles faithful only to one's gauzy recollection. As their chipsets are generally grossly underpowered and optimized solely for cost, the vast majority didn't even try to run the...
What are the imperatives of the upside?
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...
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.
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.
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.
But is AI different than other technologies?
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…
[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...
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
[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....
And a step-by-step guide to train a machine learning model on your Mac
It Could Have Been a Lot Worse - His Data is BLOWGUN Protected!
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: Absolute Midden is copyright SMBC Enterprises 2024 all rights reserved. Today's News:
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.
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".
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...
I've run this business for three years now, and I'm only just now starting to *get it*.
If you are a paid subscriber, voting is open for one week
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
And the impact it'll have for decades to come
The hand wringing about failures of model alignment is misguided
What happened when English villagers encountered black Americans during World War II?
What artificial intelligence can do, what it can't, and how to tell the difference
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.
What spending $2,000 can tell us about evaluating AI agents
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...
How even legendary conglomerator Henry Singleton got caught out by competitive arbitrage at the end of his career.
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…
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 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...
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 […]
And an overview of LLM security issues
In my last post, I looked at equities in 2023, and argued that while they did well during 2023, the bounce back were uneven, with a few big winning companies and sectors, and a significant number of companies not partaking in the recovery. In this post, I look at interest rates, both in the government and corporate markets, and note that while there was little change in levels, especially at the...
Despite Camberwell's increasing reputation for all kinds (and all budgets) of great food, it still seemed unlikely that this bare-bones pub, just opposite the Walworth bus depot and furnished, as far as I could tell, with tables and chairs nicked from the local secondary school, could house anywhere worth eating at, never mind somewhere worthy of a special journey. Sure, the beer selection was...
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.
[Hardware] Army of Robot Slide Whistles
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...
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...
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Literally everyone would be happy about this. We should be building NOW Today's News:
[Concept] Tuning forks that talk
I tried building a monolith.
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...
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.
A cool Japanese clamtop
As science evolves, so does the Science Museum. The Secret Life of the Home. This much-loved corner of the basement, where the life of the domestic appliance is quirkily celebrated, closes forever on Sunday 2nd June. I went for a last look round with a wall-to-wall smile, and if you want to do the same you have three weekends left. Children's Gallery opened in 1931, revamped in 1969 with...
I don't have answers
Small improvements can lead to big changes
Some stats, updates, and whatnot
On projects, side-projects, AI, and existential dread.
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...
Governments seize huge quantities of bitcoin, and a few people seem to be yearning for the days of peak crypto mania.
And effective ways to mitigate it
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.
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
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,...
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...
You can still buy 6502s from Western Design Center and others, but Zilog's getting out of Z80s (PDF), announcing earlier this week that after June 14th you won't be able to buy them anymore (specifically the last-part-standing Z84C00 which comes in various speeds from 6-20 MHz) and what you buy you can't return. This covers the Z84C0006VEG, Z84C0006PEG, Z84C0010PEG, Z84C0008AEG, Z84C0020VEG,...
The Birth of Computer Operating Systems
Something must have come over me, says Kohei Ohmori, reflecting on the 280 hours or roughly 5 months spent drawing a hyper realistic composition of a metallic bolt and nut using just pencils. The 30-year old artist, who has publicly discussed his struggles with OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), has managed to overcome what is often […] Related posts: Dense Pencil Drawings of Retro-Future...
On re-rearchitecting.
One of the oldest surviving books provides advice that is just as relevant to our lives today as it was 2,700 years ago.
The philosophy and lessons behind "a moneymaking machine like no other" (with a cumulative trading profit of $100B +).
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: The weird part is that the second panel is a fantasy too. Today's News:
A life well lived
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
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...
It’s when, not if, for these kinds of new technologies
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...
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
Drones have become an essential tool to map, measure and observe the extremely dangerous environments surrounding volcanic eruptions.
A talk with the author of The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight.
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
The magic of compounding was evident when I recently compared my lifetime gross wage income to my current net worth.
June 14, 2024.
What makes machine learning infra so important and why I find it so interesting
A Political Chatbot that Gives 3 Politically Diverse Answers to Every Prompt
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...
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 […]
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...
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 …
Dipping my toe in enterprise sales
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 –...
Ever transferred assets between brokerages? Impressive, terrifying machinations happened in the background. No cats were harmed.
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...
"The people we love are built into us."
Imagine you could go back in time to the ancient world to jump-start the Industrial Revolution. You carry with you plans for a steam engine, and you present them to the emperor, explaining how the machine could be used to drain water out of mines, pump bellows for blast furnaces, turn grindstones and lumber saws, etc. But to your dismay, the emperor responds: “Your mechanism is no gift to us. It...
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...
because some words are good and others are bad
Laetitia@Work #68
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...
Digital rights activists have questioned the ethics of using “soft fakes” to resurrect the past and manage the future.
[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...
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
July 5, 2024.
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)....
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...
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....
Kieran Bell is a founder specializing in teaching people how to use the no-code software Bubble.
Spirit Halloween has over 1,450 pop-up shops and makes all its money in only 2 months (September, October)
Back in 1935, they seized the gold. But now, digital gold is back.
Fresh water from snow, at 70 below!
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 …
THE UNLOST RIVERS OF LONDON River Wogebourne Shooters Hill → East Wickham → Abbey Wood → Thamesmead (5 miles) The Wogebourne is a five mile tributary of the River Thames in the southeast London boroughs of Greenwich and Bexley, that flows generally in a northeasterly direction, from its source in Oxleas Wood in Shooter's Hill, to Thamesmead where it joins the Thames. The Wogebourne has appeared...
Invest in long term, Diversify, Don't stress to time the market, Stay calm ... It is not that complicated.
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.
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.
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...
An English penny minted by William the Conqueror, who brought monetagium to England. Source: History in Coins The way that a modern mafia protection racket works is the mafia starts doing very bad things to regular folks, say you and your business. To stop the damage, you pay them a regular fee. Both sides come out ahead. The mafia earns a tidy stream of income. Your suffering comes to an...
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? →
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.
<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...
How Twitter is breaking — and its CEO is accelerating its fall
As I reveal my ignorance about TikTok trends, social media celebrities and Gen Z slang, my children are quick to point out my age, and I accept that reality, for the most part. I understand that I am too old to exercise without stretching first or eat a heaping plate of cheese fries and not suffer heartburn, but that does not stop me from trying occasionally. For the last decade or so, I have...
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...
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!
On failing customers, failing to ship a new feature, learning sales, and giving up on ads.
I mentioned earlier that while I prefer specializing in non-x86 laptops, that doesn't mean I don't collect interesting or unusual x86 laptops, like the Brother GeoBook NB-60 (I finally tracked down a mostly working NB-80C, the top of the line model, which will be the subject of a future restoration). However, this one is a unit I've had since about 1998 when they were getting rid of it at the...
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 Federal judge ruled last week that the emergency banking measures taken to end the Ottawa convoy protest in 2022 contravened the protestor's rights. In this post I want to provide my reading of this particular ruling and what is at stake for Canadians and their bank accounts. To be clear, Justice Mosley's ruling touched on far more than the banking measures, and extended to the broader legality...
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 >>
When I was a kid, I used to take allowance money and occasionally buy rubber-band-powered balsa wood airplanes at a local store. Maybe you've seen these. You wind up the rubber band, which stretches the elastomer and stores energy in the elastic strain of the polymer, as in Hooke's Law (though I suspect the rubber band goes well beyond the linear regime when it's really wound up, because of the...
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 […]
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 →
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 Underrated Virtues of Plain Vanilla
FollowTheCrypto.org: A new project to track cryptocurrency industry spending to influence 2024 elections in the United States.
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 →
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...
“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 …
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 →
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 -...
The majority of US states have something called a "Department of Motor Vehicles," or DMV. Actually, the universality of the term "DMV" seems to be overstated. A more general term is "motor vehicle administrator," used for example by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators to address the inconsistent terminology. Not happy with merely noting that I live in a state with an "MVD"...
Announcing the ML Road Map-Turbo
We shouldn't be certain about what is next, but we should plan for it
On learning screencasting, cleaning up tech debt, and focus
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,...
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...
Milan Design Week—Coachella, but for furniture—is running this week from April 16-21. All the biggest names and brands in the design world descend upon the Italian city, which sees its population swell by nearly 25%. Now in its 62nd iteration, the design extravaganza is an opportunity for the aesthetically ambitious to showcase their latest ideas […] Related posts: Canon at Milan Design Week 2010...
Tether, a stablecoin, has been in the news for offering sanctioned actors such as Hamas a means to participate in the global payments ecosystem. In this post I want to explore in more depth how Tether is being used to dodge sanctions. I'm going to avoid drawing on the Hamas example, which has been controversial, and will instead dissect the U.S. Department of Justice's recent indictment of group...
An early draft of Probably Overthinking It included two chapters about probability. I still think they are interesting, but the other chapters are really about data, and the examples in these chapters are more like brain teasers — so I’ve saved them for another book. Here’s an excerpt from the chapter on Bayes theorem. In 1889 Joseph Bertrand posed and solved one of the oldest paradoxes in...
You get smarter by studying foolishness—so here's how I'd teach a 12-week course on stupidity
December 1, 2023.
Everything that we covered in 2023, and what to expect now that Commoncog has a new direction.
In January 1993, I was valuing a retail company, and I found myself wondering what a reasonable margin was for a firm operating in the retail business. In pursuit of an answer to that question, I used company-specific data from Value Line, one of the earliest entrants into the investment data business, to compute an industry average. The numbers that I computed opened my eyes to how much...
New benefits for paid subscribers, support Society's Backend for just $1/mo, a referral program, and more
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
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 […]
On building table-stakes features, and breaking through a plateau.
#1 💡 Andrej Karpathy announced that he’s building an AI + education company.
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.
Annotated slides from a recent talk
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.
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...
Hey, this is Jakob Greenfeld, author of the Business Brainstorms newsletter - every week I write this email to share the most interesting trends, frameworks, opportunities, and ideas with you. Let's dive in! #1 💡 It's cool that smartphones have become all-in-one devices. But at the same time, there’s a reason why people buy Kindle devices.
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
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.
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...
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.
[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...
This post previously appeared in EIX. In the early stages of a startup your hypotheses about all the parts of your business model are your profound beliefs. Think of profound beliefs as “strong opinions loosely held.” You can’t be an effective founder or in the C-suite of a startup if you don’t hold any. Here’s […]
One of the most difficult situations that a person can face is to have a loved-one in a critical medical condition and have to make life-or-death medical decisions for them. I have been in this situation many times as the consulting neurologist, and I have seen how weighty this burden can be on family members. […] The post Predicting Outcome in Severe Brain Injury first appeared on NeuroLogica...
And it comes from you
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...
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...
Writing about military spending is difficult.
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.
Osaka Station just got a little more bizzare. Manga artist Hirohiko Araki, known best for his epic saga Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, has installed his first-ever public art piece at Osaka Station’s West Gate. Titled “Fountain Boy,” the circular, back-lit sculpture pays homage to the history and tradition of Osaka Station by taking inspiration from a […] Related posts: Get Lost in the World of Manga...
Technological change brings organizational change.
The timeline and why OpenAI’s actions are a big deal
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 instructions below set up Time Machine using the Apple File Protocol (AFP). After publishing this blog post, I’ve been told that this is now deprecated and that Samba should be used instead. I’ll update this blog post in the near future. Introduction The HP t520 Thin Client Backup Storage: Internal or External? Install Bodhi Linux Update Bohdi Linux and Install a Few Tools Create a...
And other practical guides to understand machine learning
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, …
The world of work is changing.
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...
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...
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...
Longform journalism is coming back (and deserves our support)
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...
Warren Buffett is concerned about the performance of Berkshire's railroad
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...
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:
In building Juno, a visionOS app for YouTube, a question that’s come up from users a few times is whether it supports 360° and 180° videos (for the unfamiliar, it’s an immersive video format that fully surrounds you). The short answer is no, it’s sort of a niche feature without much adoption, but for fun I wanted to take the weekend and see what I could come up with. Spoiler: it’s not really...
Notes for myself, and maybe you too.
A collection of 100,000 striking high-resolution aerial photos of glaciers, photographed over 40 years with a 63-pound WW II surveillance camera.
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 …
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[Hardware] The smallest and silliest MIDI synth yet
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.
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...
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.
Russia is sometimes described as the world's most sanctioned nation. And while that's true, the long list of sanctions that the G7 coalition has placed on Russia in response to its attack on Ukraine are surprisingly light compared to the fewer but far more-draconian sanctions placed on Iran over the last decade or so. This ordering of sanctions precedence is a mistake. With its all-out invasion of...
I would prefer that Omid do it verbally since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later? Not sure about this.. thanks Eric
The first year where I managed to keep my focus entirely on a single project.
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...
a rendering of Manga Apartment VUY, for which occupancy will begin in March 2025 For many years, a model has existed in Japan in which subsidized housing supports manga artists who are early in their career and have not yet established an audience. One of the earliest was the Tokiwa-so Apartments in Tokyo which, from […] Related posts: Real Life Tokyo Streets and Manga Merge in Milestone Campaign...
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...
As the Mayoral election approaches, all sorts of parties are announcing all sorts of policies on all sorts of things. manifesto to be released, that of Green Party candidate Zoë Garbett, a 134-page monster which was launched yesterday. And because transport is one of the areas Mayors have most control over, let's dig into some of her more intriguing transport policies. Set an ambition to flatten...
Caught in a series of lies about his willingness to fight Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire's disturbing spiral accelerates
How will recent Supreme Court decisions affect the crypto world? Also, more absurdity from the crypto lobby, and some new regulatory actions.
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...
AI can be kind of useful, but I'm not sure that a "kind of useful" tool justifies the harm.
In my last three posts, I looked at the macro (equity risk premiums, default spreads, risk free rates) and micro (company risk measures) that feed into the expected returns we demand on investments, and argued that these expected returns become hurdle rates for businesses, in the form of costs of equity and capital. Since businesses invest that capital in their operations, generally, and in...
“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...
Christi Belcourt is a Metis artist who "indigenized" the regional maps and surveys of Albert Salter into a map called "Good Land". One side of the map has the English text that most people are familiar with, while the other side uses indigenous place names and commentary. This level of commentary can be seen in this zoomed in image showing Toronto and areas to the north. Highway 401, running...
Mixing REAL Time With REAL UNIX Is Not Magic...It Is Technology.
I want somewhere to put my Vision Pro when not in use. Many people use the original box, and there’s beautiful stands that exist out there, but I was looking for something more compact and vertical so it would take up less room on my desk. So I opened Fusion 360 (which I am still very much learning), grabbed my calipers, and set out to design a little stand. There was interest when I showed the...
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 […]
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:
Investing in creativity is incremental effort and cumulative reward. Investing in creativity is incremental effort and cumulative reward. I realized this in two ways this year. 1 — More Input > More Output I made a resolution as 2023 closed out to make more art. Rather than thinking of “more” as a greater number of works of art, I instead thought of it as more time making art. This has...
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 -...
I recently learned about the IKEA SKÅDIS series, which is a pegboard that supports a variety of extras. During my self-hosting journey having to figure out the best place for putting all my compute stuff to has always been at the back of my mind, especially due to limited floor space at my home. This pegboard gave me an idea. Note that this idea also applies to other types of pegboards that you...
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...
A lesson in ignoring economics
This is the first in a series of newsletters covering this blog
If you’re employed, it’s because somebody believes that spending money on your salary will lead to more profit for its...
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”.
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.
Or: Mainstream media still isn't great at covering tech and AI ideologies
June 21, 2024.
Introduction What is a pulse modulator and what are they used for? The HP 11720A Pulse Modulator Inside the HP 11720A Measurement Setup for a Quick Testing Session Pin Modulator Power Measurements with HP 432A Cable Loss Measurements with HP 432A Cable Power Measurements with Spectrum Analyzer Final Remark References Footnotes Introduction Lew had 2 RF pulse modulators for sale: $25 for one, $30...
Sound code is added in this third in a series of posts about scripting Visual Pinball tables.
Out-discounting competitors: iFood’s bid to become Latin America's last-mile delivery king.
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)
Despite everyone’s focus on hardware, the software of AI is what protects NVIDIA
Stereophonic or two-channel audio is so ubiquitous today that we tend to refer to all kinds of pieces of consumer audio reproduction equipment as "a stereo." As you might imagine, this is a relatively modern phenomenon. While stereo audio in concept dates to the late 19th century, it wasn't common in consumer settings until the 1960s and 1970s. Those were very busy decades in the music industry,...
https://youtu.be/c3uoyCNIa5c You've probably never heard of Kazimierz Dąbrowski. He was a psychologist from the 1940s with a fascinating background. He studied with Freud's contemporaries in Vienna, worked with mentally ill patients, participated in the Polish resistance during World War II, was captured and tortured in a prisoner of war camp, and lost many friends and family members in the...
How to bear the gravity of being.
What do a Dutch chocolate chip cookie and a thousand-year-old teahouse in Kyoto have in common?
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...
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...
rebeccatoh.co is a really nice personal website. Something about the chunkiness of Karla at 700 weight is just ideal, and the colors Rebecca has chosen are unique and gentle. It is all just perfectly simple and lovely to read.
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...
Are you keeping up with the Commodore?
And what happens when we don’t?
The term "VHF omnidirectional range" can at first be confusing, because it includes "range"---a measurement that the technology does not provide. The answer to this conundrum is, as is so often the case, history. The "range" refers not to the radio equipment but to the space around it, the area in which the signal can be received. VOR is an inherently spatial technology; the signal is useless...
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
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 →
I place a lot of value on creativity in my life, and this has been pretty consistent throughout my various life stages. For a long time it was tied to my identity...
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...
A lively talk with the author about his new book, Winging It.
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...
Does quantity lead to quality?
"Is This Anything?"
"Faithfulness to the moment and to the present circumstance entails continuous surrender... Only unconditional surrender leads to real emptiness, and from that place of emptiness I can be prolific and free."
The differences between games development and more “standard” software engineering, roles, and how games are typically built.
Time for some levity. The following comics were all found in the August 1983 issue of Today magazine. Enjoy! What computer ads would you like to see in the future? Please comment below. If you enjoyed it, please share it with your friends and relatives. Thank you.
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
10 Centuries In 1 Day may not have been a very good walk. London's a Roman city, can we do 20 centuries? 16th-21st century This is the easy bit. 21st century Gherkin (2004) I'm going to pick The Shard (2013). It's still the tallest building in western Europe. 20th century Barbican yesterday so let's go elsewhere. I was tempted by Battersea Power Station (1933), the Post Office Tower (1965) and...
[Hardware] Tiny volumetric display
There are few things more important in the success of a restaurant than pedigree. If you are able to launch one good restaurant, you're more than likely to be able to make a good go of a second. And then a third, and so on. Well, up to a point. You don't want to spread yourself too thinly (just look what happened to Byron, or Jamie's Italian) but if you - and the people around you - know...
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.
A previous employer found it important that the whole team had business cards. I had to wait a few months...
My Q&A with Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross
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