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.
People always talk about “P vs NP” like P problems are easy and NP problems are hard. This is a useful day-to-day model but also an oversimplification. Problems can get way, way harder than NP. (If you want a brief refresher on P and NP, check out my post NP-Complete isn’t (always) Hard.) PSPACE-complete P is the set of all problems that can be solved in polynomial time, relative to the input....
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
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.
and other updates from me in Mar 2023
Everything about the Black Magic's acquisition + May 2023 updates
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
In 1994, Ted Leonsis was the head of the new media marketing firm he created, Redgate Communications, spun out six […] The post AOL Pretends to be the Internet appeared first on The History of the Web.
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 […]
See you again soon
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 […]
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...
People talk about you the way you talk about yourself.
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...
A personal guide to Singapore for foreign friends visiting.
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 […]
This was almost a post on why millennial motherhood is so challenging, but turned into tactical food hacks.
Lessons from building and growing Copylime to 6 figures all in public
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...
A FAQ of sorts
Designed by Dixon Baxi, London.
No you can't "have it all." You can have two things, but not three.
Surreal and otherworldly.
AI is strange. We need to learn to use it.
will he go into destroy mode if I say no
Covering the state of play as of Summer, 2023
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.
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...
A little bit of magic, but mostly just practice
Today is exactly 2 years since I quit my job and become a full-time indie hacker.
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...
Chinese policy and geopolitical risk are doing a lot of the work here.
Hey Siri, set a reminder for 365 days.
EVs are just going to win.
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.
And some prompts that might be useful when it does.
There's a somewhat weird alien who wants to work for free for you. You should probably get started.
If you believe that the most serious risks from AI are real, should you write about anything else?
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
I put my M1 Pro against Apple's new M3, M3 Pro, M3 Max, a NVIDIA GPU and Google Colab.
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) […]
"IBM's first computer"
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...
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...
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.
Bor Hung Chong from Nefin Group discusses green energy solutions beyond solar panels.
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....
A pragmatic approach to thinking about AI
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 &...
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...
Lessons from building AudioPen to 600+ paid users to clinching #1 on Product Hunt
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 […]
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.
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...
An optimistic take on technology and inequality.
For sale: a few KIM-1 User Manuals I printed up.
The Case for LLMs as Hallucination Engines
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...
small updates from me in July 2023
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 […]
Mike Cardona is a solo founder who has managed to build a $200k online business by specialising in automation content and consulting
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.
Bad architecture must come from some underlying ethos.
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."
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.
In 1974, two very significant things happened, if you are a fan of 99% invisible. Number one is that 99pi host Roman Mars was born. And number two, The Power Broker by Robert Caro was published. Roman learned about the power broker when he first started to cover cities and infrastructure on the radio. This The post Breaking Down The Power Broker appeared first on 99% Invisible.
We can start to see, dimly, what the near future of AI looks like.
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...
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:
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 […]
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...
Neurodivergent physicists face barriers in STEM, but there are also benefits to being who they are.
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:
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...
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
Without Americans on the app, advertising dollars are at risk.
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.
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 […]
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:
“We give them the same phone, in the same brand-new condition,” says one seller.
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
It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
“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.
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 […]
Remembering Albert Borgmann (1937-2023)
The neuroscience, physics, and philosophy of freedom in a universe of fixed laws.
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 >>
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 →
Foxconn and Luxshare slashed workers. But under pressure to expand away from China, they suddenly need them back.
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...
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...
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...
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...
You think I’m crazy, but just wait and see....
No GPU cluster required.
We have more agency over the future of AI than we think.
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…
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...
Lessons from building RadReads and helping over 40,000 professionals in public
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...
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...
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.
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.
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...
Part 1: How to spot misinformation, mistakes, and meaningless data
A talk with architecture critic Justin Davidson about the thorny knot of issues involved at New York’s most conflicted transportation-entertainment site.
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...
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 >>
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 […]
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...
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 […]
Hi everyone! My April Cools piece is up! It’s about really weird stuff you can buy online. Now I know that’s standard SEO farm stuff, but I promise I put a lot of time into researching why people actually want to buy these things. If you ever wanted to know where carnivals buy and sell their rollercoasters, now’s your chance. Anyway, that’s just the April Cools for the blog. I’ve also got one just...
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
Two Customer Encounters
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...
To get status, you have to give up status.
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.
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...
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, […]
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
It’s time to expand our vision to include slower, more human-scaled speeds of transportation.
From images of solar cooking to snake radio telemetry, we received 548 entries from around the world.
And what happens when we don’t?
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.
[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...
We have this big issue right now because gaming is shifting from us to mobile platforms.
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, […]
Early notes on how generative AI is affecting the internet
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 […]
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 →
It's about having small expectations.
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
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
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
The opposite of a good idea - Finding the real reason behind brushing our teeth - Let's not jump to conclusions
They're not going to disrupt everything (yet), but they're a ton of fun.
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...
“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...
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:
Five analytical tasks in under a minute
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,...
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Super quick updates
A new Twitter clone is surging in popularity. Could it have legs?
Is AI a Leveler, King Maker, or Escalator?
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,...
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.
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.
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...
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 →
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 →
Seven principles for journalism in the age of AI
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...
A simple answer, and then a less simple one.
(Just not mine.)
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...
Sacred Flames and Divine Philosophers
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.
After decades of slumber, the country that brought us bullet trains and Nintendo has mustered some momentum.
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
Interior design firm Wise Design, together with General Contractor and Architect Owen Gabbert (formerly Clarkbuilt), has transformed a dated 1954 mid-century modern home in Portland, Oregon. Before – The ExteriorThe original home has a brown exterior with original windows and white trim. After – ExteriorThe updated bright white exterior, with a metal roof, has black […]
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.
Greetings from Australia!1 It's the morning of September 5th for me and the night of September 4th in the US. In two weeks when I fly back, I will leave Sydney at 9 AM and arrive in Los Angeles at 6 AM, that same day. Timezones are annoying enough for regular people, but us software engineers have to deal with the fallout. Then you add in the political aspects and, well, you can't always store...
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
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 […]
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 […]
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...
Yes, market-rate!
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 \(\pi\)...
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.
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.
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 >>
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 […]
On March 24 I wrote GPT is revolutionary. On March 27 I got access to GPT4.1 Now that I’ve used it for a month, I’m firmly in the “this is the greatest thing ever” camp. And, much like my experience at Burning Man, I’m finding a not-insignificant number of my fellow campers run around with their butts showing. GPT4 needs advocates that aren’t either SEO marketers or AGI fanatics, so here’s why I...
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 […]
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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.
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,...
How Twitter is breaking — and its CEO is accelerating its fall
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.
Spirit Halloween has over 1,450 pop-up shops and makes all its money in only 2 months (September, October)
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...
There are good reasons to be skeptical about its ultimate utility.
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.
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...
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...
Want to find the best no-code newsletters for learning about what you can build without coding? You came to the right place!
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 →
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.
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…
On projects, side-projects, AI, and existential dread.
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...
"The people we love are built into us."
The differences between games development and more “standard” software engineering, roles, and how games are typically built.
I consider database migrations one of the most annoying problems to deal with during a software engineer’s life. Not only […] The post Database Migrations appeared first on Vadim Kravcenko.
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...
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...
On waiting for AI's Godot.
I love writing and sharing code as open source, but it's not an abstract act of pure altruism. The first recipients of these programming gifts are almost always myself and my company. It's an intentionally selfish drive first, then a broader benefit second. But, ironically, this is what's made my participation in the gift exchange of open source sustainable for twenty years and counting. Putting...
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.
Weight Loss, Civilization, and Good Reading
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.
[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....
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....
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
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.
I remember sitting in the car on the way to drop my brother to preschool. Being 9 years old and telling my mum how excited I was to turn ten. Double digits! I feel the same way about 29 to 30. I hardly even got used to saying I’
Earlier this year, the city of New York closed off several blocks around the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse. Instead of early morning commuters, the sidewalks around the building were flooded with reporters, photographers, and camera people. They were there to capture the arraignment of former president Donald Trump. Members of the media were so desperate to The post Courtroom Sketch appeared first...
Fueled by the pandemic, medical professionals have cashed in on Douyin, dispensing advice and endorsements.
Felix Kan on building a bug-hunting platform to enhance cybersecurity for small companies.
Harold Abelson once said that code should be written for humans to read and only incidentally for computers to write. It follows that, like any form of communication, code can carry emotions. Programming perversity, then, is code that conveys morbid fascination, the kind of amused horror where you cover your eyes but peek through your fingers. Take some innocuous features of a programming language...
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 […]
The investing legend, the goat of common sense and wisdom, and the Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway
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...
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...
Designed by Mubien Brands, Santander.
Longform journalism is coming back (and deserves our support)
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.
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
"Self-knowledge... is not an aim in itself, but a means of liberating the forces of spontaneous growth. In this sense, to work at ourselves becomes not only the prime moral obligation, but... the prime moral privilege."
And why it might revolutionize the search industry.
A PCB for breadboards to make working with op-amps easier.
Caught in a series of lies about his willingness to fight Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire's disturbing spiral accelerates
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 HeyGen from 0 to $1m ARR in 7 months
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...
The earth contains a lot of titanium - it’s the ninth most abundant element in the earth’s crust. By mass, there’s more titanium in the earth’s crust than carbon by a factor of nearly 30, and more titanium than copper by a factor of nearly 100. But despite its abundance, it's only recently that civilization has been able to use titanium as a metal (titanium dioxide has been in use somewhat longer...
The Convivial Society: Vol. 4, No. 9
Designed by Common Curiosity, Birmingham, London.
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 →
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.
(But why not?)
Logic, Math and AI In many ways the great quest of Doug Lenat’s life was an attempt to follow on directly from the work of Aristotle and Leibniz. For what Doug was fundamentally trying to do over the forty years he spent developing his CYC system was to use the framework of logic—in more or […]
After more than two decades of drinking, last summer, I decided to stop drinking alcohol for good. There were a lot of reasons for this, and obviously, there were benefits—I lost some weight, slept better at night, and no more ungodly hangovers. But also some life changes happened that I was completely unprepared for. And once these hidden benefits kicked in, I knew that I was probably done with...
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.
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...
"Is This Anything?"
Immigrating from Indonesia to the US and building Typedream in public
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...
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
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. […]
Following the Renaissance period, a transition started occurring in West Europe, with rapid advancements in science and technology happening in the 1400s. With improvements in cartography, ship and other maritime technology, and an increased desire to understand and discover everything, Europe set out to explore the world.
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...
The Convivial Society: Vol. 4, No. 8
Amid economic turmoil, President Julius Maada Bio is seeking re-election in Sierra Leone. His wife, Fatima, is dancing to a crowd of over 200,000 on TikTok to drum up votes.
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...
I interview Claire about her new book "Scaling People". Thanks to Stripe for hosting.
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!
A talk with the author of The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight.
There’s a wonderful blog post called “Reality has a surprising amount of detail” which talks about how interesting the world is and how much depth there is to every concept. Here’s a quote about boiling water:
"Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself."
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 […]
The world has a new largest country, and it's on the move.
Length is not the problem; lack of rhythm is. It’s 2023 and I’m still frequently asked by clients about scrolling. I understand why. Every design comes with assumptions about how much content will be seen by people because the space in which people access our designs is the one thing we cannot control. Even with responsive design and scaling techniques, we don’t really know how much of what...
Drones have become an essential tool to map, measure and observe the extremely dangerous environments surrounding volcanic eruptions.
A New Name for an Old Problem
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...
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...
TSMC Arizona back on track, drawing arrows on graphs, the downsides of inclusionary zoning, why people hate inflation, and interesting ideas about market power
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 Light Phone diaries
How to skip the brain, bypass reason and head straight for the heart to sell
"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."
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 →
Generative AI for image generation is a controversial topic for many reasons. Still, as someone who doesn't have a staff of graphic artists on hand to help make scientific illustrations, it has certainly been tempting to see whether it might be a useful tool. My brief experiments are based using bing's integrated engine (which I believe is DALL-E 3) since Rice has a license. The short summary: ...
Last December I was fortunate enough to borrow a copy of The Unmediated Vision, Geoffrey Hartman's first book, published in 1954. It is difficult to find a copy now but you can download a digital version of the book via the link. The opening chapter is a 50-page study of "Tintern Abbey" in the context of Wordsworth's work as a whole, focusing on the comparative simplicity of its language and...
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...
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
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.
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...
In my previous post, I was creating groups of students, and I wanted to track how many times students had worked together. I created a nested dictionary to track the pairs: pairs = { 'Alice': {'Bryony': 3, 'Caroline': 1, 'Danielle': 0, …}, 'Bryony': {'Alice': 3, 'Caroline': 2, …}, … } To find out how many times Alice and Bryony had worked together, you’d look up pairs['Alice']['Bryony']...
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...
I wrote a script that exposes browser and software platform data from hotels across the country. This data is very different from say: StatCounter or NetApplications estimates because they rely on getting their data from trackers on specific websites. The data I pulled comes from guests getting redirected by Network Access Gateways at hotel hotspots and so user agents are tracked regardless of...
In 1914, everything changed for Paul Klee. Whilst sampling the delights of Tunisia on a twelve-day trip with fellow artists Louis Moilliet and Auguste Macke, he found himself profoundly affected by the light and colours of North Africa—an intense experience that inspired him to explore new forms of abstraction and bring colour to the canvas […]
Number theorist Andrew Granville on what mathematics really is — and why objectivity is never quite within reach. The post Why Mathematical Proof Is a Social Compact first appeared on Quanta Magazine
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...
In the data engineering space we have seen quite a few low code and no code tools pass through our radar. Low code tools have their own nuances as you will get to operationalize quicker, but the minute you need to customize something outside of the toolbox, you may run into problems. That’s when we […]
The first in a series of posts about scripting Visual Pinball tables.
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 …
Just dropped on the LA Metro Twitter account, here’s a first look at their new system map once the Regional Connector opens at noon, this Friday June 16. First off, one prediction I made in my previous review [October 2022] has been proven true: this map marks the end of the old colour-based line designations. […]
Searching for "that principle which keys us deeply into the pattern of all life."
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...
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...
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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...
How to bear the gravity of being.
It's my first product launch of the year!
To get the authorities’ attention, victims get help from influencers specialized in niches like corruption and pet justice.
This is the first in a series of newsletters covering this blog
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 simplified high-level overview of primary machine learning algorithms for anyone to understand
What does a great side project look like, which helps learn new technologies, but also helps stand out when looking for a new job? Analysis of an Uber simulation app, built from scratch.
"Ownership" means ten different things to ten different people. Let's talk about what we actually want.
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...
From Changamire's expulsion of the Portuguese to the ruined cities of Zimbabwe.
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...
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...
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 →
<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...
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...
Four questions to ask your organization.
Sara has been working on a new course titled Practical Accessibility and it is available for pre-order right now. I’ve never met Sara in person, but have been an online follower for some time. She is one of those people who has the discipline and eye to make everything they release of the absolute highest quality. It’s inspiring — and for that reason, I’ve already purchased access to this new...
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
How can we train Resilience?
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...
The CANARY corrugated cardboard cutter is definitely in my top 10 list of most useful purchases ever. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, we all started shopping online a lot more. The number of cardboard boxes in our house basically quadrupled overnight and cutting them down to size for recycling became like a second job. It turns […] The post CANARY Corrugated Cardboard Cutter appeared first on Style...
Previous Next Using Marcus Aurelius's writing in his Meditations and experiences inferred from historical records, we created an AI digital personality that spoke with us about how to practice Stoicism in our modern world. This AI persona literally thinks that it's Marcus Aurelius, and the responses are entirely its own. You can scroll down to Read More >>
Hotmart is quietly turning even micro-influencers into millionaires.
Douglas Kendyson, a former engineer at Flutterwave and Paystack, has built a profitable bootstrapped African startup.
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 […]
“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...
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.
By charging more $$$, you are lifting up the quality of the outcome and satisfaction.
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?
Also in October: Speak at JOM Launch Asia 2022, and the thing about Elon Musk.
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...
Going viral, my thoughts, and updates from me in October 2023.
Lessons from building Tally.so from 0 to $40k MRR all in public
This 2000-era word processor is the ultimate distraction-free writing device. Maybe that’s why I never use it. AlphaSmart3000 in its Bondi-blue glory Before the term “distraction-free” made sense, there was AlphaSmart. Oozing with early-aughts Apple aesthetics, the AlphaSmart3000 is a Bondi-blue word processor complete with chonky keyboard and a crisp, four-line LCD screen. It’s an artifact that...
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...
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...
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.
Welcome to tomcritchlow.com version…. 19? 25? Honestly there have been so many iterations over the years who even knows. The point is there’s a new coat of paint.
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...
After showering, many people "hand-squeegee" some of the water off themselves before using a towel.
I’ve been writing my thoughts on life, psychology, and mindset for some time. I’ve considered transferring some of these writings from Notion into this post. In physics, three laws can explain 99% of observations. However, in life, psychology, and mindset, 99 laws can barely explain 1% of observations. What I’ve written here stems from my…
Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2m ARR in public
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...
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...
When privilege becomes a pre-requisite.
Let's Get Right To the Point
A previous employer found it important that the whole team had business cards. I had to wait a few months...
And other updates in April 2023
A conversation with Andrew Lee, CEO of Shortwave and cofounder of Firebase.
I’m approaching the limit of my current iCloud storage tier, and most of that is my Photos Library. I don’t really want to pay for the next iCloud storage tier – I’d be tripling my bill, but I’d barely use the extra space. (My library grows pretty slowly – I’ve only added ~6GB of photos this year.) What I’d rather do is move some big items out of my library, and get some space back. I’ve got a...
And then there were two.
This is the 8th post in my series on building a toy GPT. For better understanding, I recommend reading my earlier posts first. I love playing and watching cricket. The dominance India showed in the recently concluded World Cup is astounding. I have never seen anything like it in the four decades I’ve been following…
In 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...
Elon Musk has announced that his company, Neuralink, has implanted their first wireless computer chip into a human. The chip, which they plan on calling Telepathy (not sure how I feel about that) connects with 64 thin hair-like electrodes, is battery powered and can be recharged remotely. This is exciting news, but of course needs […] The post Neuralink Implants Chip in Human first appeared on...
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...
For the past few weeks I’ve been teaching myself how to use Fusion 360, a free online cloud-based CAD/CAM program that lets you create your own 3D designs. The best way to learn how to use a new program is to build something you actually need. And my latest design is a work in progress […] The post M4 Hex Socket Thumbscrew Knob Caps appeared first on Style over Substance.
Writing about military spending is difficult.
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: The cape cost three dollars, but it's an investment. Today's News:
A lively talk with the author about his new book, Winging It.
Pràctica Redesigns 9+ Wine brand identity and packaging design abduzeedo0511—23 Barcelona-based design studio Pràctica has unveiled a new label design for 9+ wines, a natural wine producer based in Catalonia, Spain. The new labels feature a bold, graphic design that is both eye-catching and informative creating a beautiful packaging design. The 9+ winery is...
Good news on paper, but the devil is in the details
Amazon grew it's revenue per employee from $50K to $1M over its first fifteen years.
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...
(A Lengthy Vacation Post-Mortem)
'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.
We all have our aspirations and goals in life and career. For me, it goes from having an impact on my full-time work to helping designers via my blog, email newsletter, and other educational content. I need to work damn hard to achieve these goals! Making the most of every
Memories may affect how well the brain will learn about future events by shifting our perceptions of the world. The post Memories Help Brains Recognize New Events Worth Remembering first appeared on Quanta Magazine
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...
It seems that the internet’s greatest potential is to create intimacy across distance. Which means we still have a long way to go.
More dreams, less goals, and some commitments for the year
Over the past six months, I’ve been transitioning the fulfillment processes at my e-commerce business to a third-party logistics (3PL) vendor. I didn’t know anything about 3PLs before starting this process, so there were a lot of things I didn’t know to ask about. Here are the list of questions that I recommend e-commerce merchants ask a 3PL if they’re considering working with them for...
What are the imperatives of the upside?
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: The keynote is gonna be reeeediculous. Today's News: Or click here for info! Tickets are more than half sold and we're still two weeks out, so buy soon to lock yours in!
I have recently published a report with Aaron Wudrick from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute about changes in the language that the news media in Canada use. I have documented previously how in American news media mentions of terms that signify distinct forms of prejudice have risen dramatically since 2010. The report linked above takes a similar analysis of Canadian news media, using data from 14...
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We used to consider writing an indication of time and effort spent on a task. That isn't true anymore.
Lessons from building and growing Potion to its acquisition all in public
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...
A lie.
The low-hanging fruit of pizza happiness, possibly
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...
After a rise in shootings, an all-woman group is advising the new Brazilian government on how to deal with radicalization online.
Imagine selling a website you made for $10,000. Pretty great, huh? Well that's exactly what Dmytro did
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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....
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.
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...
There has been a lot of discussion about how AIs can make art and possibly replace artists, but I think the opposite is more likely to happen. Artists have been using AI to make art for a while now and the pace has picked up a lot in recent years. I have always loved the […]
<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...
CoinTelegraph: A Colorado-based online pastor who has been charged with fraud for selling a “worthless” cryptocurrency says he only did it because “the Lord” told him to give his followers a “10X.” In a strange 9-minute video — posted to INDXcoin’s official website — INDXcoin founder and pastor Eli Regalado told users of the INDXcoin community that the charges...
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...
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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.
The majority of people never find their "life's work", yet the premise of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a college degree assumes that they will.
IKEA has released some interesting new products lately, focused on air quality. In this product line, one unit that stands out is the VINDRIKTNING air quality sensor. This cheap (just €9,99) sensor measures the air quality in your home, using a simple traffic light scheme to alert you. Green means the air is fine, orange […] The post DIY: Use an IKEA VINDRIKTNING air quality sensor in Home...
The second in a series of posts about scripting Visual Pinball tables.
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 →
All of us, except the AI startups and VCs—unless a real war breaks out
Technological progress must be harnessed, not fought
Ozempic, Fertilizer, Lobotomies, and the dangers of hubris
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 →
My husband taught me how to pronounce the name of the city where I’d be presenting a talk late last July: Aveiro, Portugal. Having studied Spanish, I pronounced the name as Ah-VEH-roh, with a v partway to a hard b. … Continue reading →
It was a such a short month!
Jurisdictional gamesmanship is a common strategy for crypto businesses. Here is how it worked out for Binance and its CEO. Spoiler: poorly.
M.F.K. Fisher was an accomplished author and gastronome who brought the art of food writing into the realm of literature. From the age of nineteen she kept a journal, and this entry comes thirteen years down the line as she cared for her beloved husband, the writer and artist Dillwyn Parrish, whom she affectionately referred […]
Will the Reality Pro be the metaverse’s iPhone moment?
During the past seven months, I’ve steamed across the Atlantic, sailed in a flying castle, teleported across the globe, and shuttled forward and backward in time. Literarily, not literally—the Quantum-Steampunk Short-Story Contest began welcoming submissions in October 2022. We challenged … Continue reading →
1/ I’ve been mega-obsessed with this feeling. A year as a 36-year-old seems so much shorter as compared to when I was a kid or even as a teen. It seems cosmically unfair – we have fewer years to live, and each year flies by faster. 2/ But, why is that happening? My tentative conclusion is that… Read More The post Why time seems to pass faster as we age appeared first on Inverted Passion.
A meeting with Larry could calm this down if it's not true but he has been avoiding any meeting with me since last fall.
I turn 30, built a new app, and other updates in December 2023
In the 1900s, Albert Einstein unified the concepts of space and time, giving us a useful new way to picture the universe.
Also prompts! And things to watch out for!
Output similarity is a distraction
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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...
Why everyone should learn about machine learning
Some quick updates from me in June 2023
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...
A few big changes are making the online world a more boring place to hang out.
Uber revamped its engineering levels in 2022. How did the levels evolve over time, why was it time to change, and what were they? I’ve collected details.
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 →
This week, we dive into two meaty topics. First, we dig into Apple’s recent App Store changes to support third party payments in the US (sort of), and additionally support side-loading of apps (i.e. supporting non-Apple app stores) in the EU. Spoiler: Apple is pushing the limits to see how little they can give up while being compliant but the updates in EU are promising for app developers like...
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...
The Swedish music giant is pushing to make Africa’s biggest sound the world’s favorite sound.
An insight into redesigning the Midland Appliance logotype abduzeedo0215—23 When it comes to branding, one of the most important elements is the logo. It's the visual representation of your brand, and it's the first thing that customers see when they encounter your business. So, it's no surprise that Full Punch, a design agency, was recently contacted to assist...
Everything about a startup changes over time. The few things that don't, are its essence. The voyage is meaningless, unless you decide what those things are.
my role? first-to-die. the job? weird as hell.
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.
Are standards elevating or elitist?
Flore — A Collection of Digital Illustrations AoiroStudio0508—23 Laura Normand is a talented Paris-based artist whose work revolves around vibrant and captivating digital illustrations. With a particular focus on flowers, her series of colorful artworks brings the beauty and allure of nature to life in a unique and captivating way. Normand's digital...
I’ve been thinking for a couple of weeks about making and hanging some AI art in my house. But I immediately faced some internal resistance. Like, I wasn’t (and still am not) sure whether this is the right way to “do” art. And that got me thinking what that really means. What does it mean to do art…
On the eve of a major antitrust trial — and its 25th birthday — the company is bracing for a fight
Vegetable carts, flower shops, mom-and-pop stores: Small speakers that read out digital payment receipts are making fintech companies big money.
I got asked once my favourite person from history in a job interview. I said Isaac Newton. An old cricket coach told me about the laws of motion. And I never forgot. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It helped fix my right arm leg spin. I later
This is the seventh post in my series on making a toy GPT. For better understanding, I recommend reading my earlier posts first. The MNIST dataset is the “hello world” of machine learning, containing images of handwritten digits that are used to train machine learning models. It includes 60,000 training images and 10,000 test images…
Lets build a simple virtual pinball controller to bring more immersion to your game.
Rest of World’s four Labor x Tech fellows reflect on their year reporting about the global tech industry’s impact on its workers.
Lessons on Listening from Plutarch
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.
These moments in time seem to have a higher density than usual.
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.
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Godel proved you can't prove anything. Don't think about it too hard. Today's News: Happy New Year,
I also curated 300+ Black Friday deals for you
This post wraps up the sound work on Teacher's Pet.
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 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...
Some stats, updates, and whatnot
Figure 1: stepwise behavior in self-supervised learning. When training common SSL algorithms, we find that the loss descends in a stepwise fashion (top left) and the learned embeddings iteratively increase in dimensionality (bottom left). Direct visualization of embeddings (right; top three PCA directions shown) confirms that embeddings are initially collapsed to a point, which then expands to a...
Many of us harbor a deep-seated desire to adopt a particular identity, often picturing ourselves as something that we are not. For example, I've longed to be a surfer for years. The idea fascinated me so much that I even booked several weeks of surf lessons in Costa Rica. Surfing can be incredibly meditative. It compels you to surrender control and simply respond to the unpredictability of the...
Al Capone went to prison for tax evasion, and didn't go to prison for tax evasion.
You probably know more about machine learning math than you think
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 […]
I love my Remarkable 2. I’ve been using it pretty heavily for almost a year now. It’s my every day companion device. Here’s some notes and ideas.
Benjamin Robert Haydon was a 19th-century British artist and writer whose career was plagued by financial hardship and legal troubles. Born in 1786, Haydon’s passion for historical painting led him down a tumultuous path, as mounting debts and controversial public statements frequently resulted in his arrest; however, he remained steadfast in his commitment to his […]
Laetitia@Work #62
The OpenAI CEO’s dismissal of an Indian competitor launched a debate over the country’s tech capabilities.
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...
Lessons from building Tailscan in public to $500 MRR
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 …
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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...
It's been an eventful year
They are really going out of their way to say that they intend to kill QuickTime, and are being quite threatening and rude about it.
And the centre's not looking too good, either.
Cedric talks to Colin Bryar, early Amazon executive and former shadow to Jeff Bezos, on one of Amazon's secret operational weapons: the Weekly Business Review.
Reached $10K MRR, launched Xnapper (#1 of the week), went on Indie Hackers podcast (😱), and other updates in Aug 2022...
Last week I explored how Henry VIII resorted to coin debasement as a way to raise revenues in order to fight his wars. This provided Henry with the financial firepower to annex the city of Boulogne from the French in 1544, albeit at the price of England experiencing one of its greatest inflations ever. Zoom forward five hundred years and Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister of the UK, has ignited a...
Imagine a billiard ball bouncing around on a pool table. High-school level physics enables us to predict its motion until the end of time using simple equations for energy and momentum conservation, as long as you know the initial conditions … Continue reading →
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...
If you don't acknowledge the point of tariffs, how can you hope to criticize them?
The striking synchronicity with which Great Awokening terminology increased in news media worldwide
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...
In previous work, I documented the growing emotional negativity (anger, fear, sadness, etc) of American news media headlines between the years 2000 and 2019. Here, I extend that work by examining the attitudinal tone (pessimism, optimism or neutrality
Doing creative work on behalf of a client requires a tremendous amount of empathy for their needs. This emotional labor should be recognized and valued. In this episode of Art Chat I explain the source of emotional labor and its impact on our well-being, and provide tips to minimize excessive emotional labor and live a more balanced life.
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...
Don't overcomplicate things
I've read over 1,000 nonfiction books in my life, and these 33 are the most powerful of them all. I can honestly say they changed my life, who's to say they won't change yours too? Don't just take my word for it though. Read on for my summary of all 33 books and see for yourself how your next read might just change your life. https://youtu.be/7kwqWgXzHvc This might be the most practical book ever...
I’ve crunched data from a variety of sources for a sense of how startup funding is trending. So far, it’s downwards. What does this mean for tech? My analysis.
People are blown away that Apple keeps winning while its competitors are floundering. It’s a simple formula. Make consistently super-high-quality products that work together as part of an ecosystem. Google and Microsoft have 20X Apple’s losses in the last year. A staggering $3 trillion in combined market cap has been lost in one year from just 7 companies.…
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.
May 17, 2024.
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...
Notes from the first AI Engineer Summit.
The best way to win a short-term game is to bet it all on one strategy. Someone is going to get lucky and it might be you. But we rarely thrive in the long run if we persist in playing a series of short-term games. Instead, organizations, individuals and teams do better when they understand […]
I was hyperlinked to this comment where Rich Harris stopped by Hacker News to clarify his position on the (controversial?) steps Svelte is taking to move off Typescript in favor of types-via-JSDoc comments. First off, I love how Rich prefaces his comments by basically saying, “However you think you’ll use what I’m about to write as fodder to justify whatever your position, I’m afraid I’m going to...
In a couple of days, I pack up my bags to head for DEFCON. In a rare moment of pre-planning, perhaps spurred by boredom, I looked through the schedule to see what's in store in the world of telephony. There is a workshop on SS7, of course [1], plenty of content on cellular, but as far as I see nothing on the biggest topic in telecom security: STIR/SHAKEN. I can venture a guess as to why:...
This is the second post in a row where I am bringing back an old tradition. This time it is Fun Friday, something I haven’t done in about five years. Like last week, the catalyst is our portfolio company Blackbird Labs, which I posted about a few months ago. Blackbird is a platform for the […]
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...
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...
NVIDIA has seen their valuation 5x over the last 5 years and is now worth more than $2 trillion. In the latest episode, we dive a few layers deep into the company. We start with the origin of the company and the launch of their first GPU in 1999 which unlocked several computing-heavy applications including gaming and video editing. We then talk about the NVIDIA of today that generates 78% of...
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 →
This may be our answer - we could put the number pad around our clickwheel.
The world of work is changing.
Ambitious people don’t just need peers. They need mentors. They need people who will encourage them to pursue hard and meaningful projects. The post Ambitious People Need Each Other appeared first on David Perell.
Do you have a static site generator? If so, how do you handle the date and time for when your posts are published? For me, I record the publish date once: in the filename (e.g. 2023-05-16-my-slug.md). That YYYY-MM-DD string in the filename is the canonical location for my posts’ publish date. Now that date is fuzzy because, you know, timezones. If somebody looks at one of my blog posts and it...
This hand of this clock makes one rotation every 365 days. Something like eight or nine years ago, I funded a Kickstarter campaign for a clock that Scott Thrift was making with a neat idea behind it — its single hand would make one full rotation every 365 days. It was called The Present. As a lover of clocks, it was a blind buy. The better part of a year later, I had one in my hands, and I...
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...
Although I use Docker a lot, I don’t leave it running all the time – it can be quite a resource hog, and even if it’s doing nothing it can make my laptop feel sluggish. I’ll often stop if it my computer feels slow, which is great right until the next time I need to use it: $ docker run -it alpine docker: Cannot connect to the Docker daemon at unix:///var/run/docker.sock. Is the docker daemon...
April 12, 2024.
Choosing the paper for your printmaking project can have a significant impact on the way the print turns out. Changing the colour, thickness or texture of a paper can alter the mood, style or success of a print - it can be great fun to experiment. Although there are no rules about what paper should be used for each printmaking technique, below we have outlined some of the desirable characteristics...
Not the usual monthly update, just a small update about Xnapper - my latest product
Thought-provoking series of 3D numbers for the Imperial Business School abduzeedo0428—23 OPX Studio recently created a series of 3D numbers for an education-focused publication, designed by Made Up Studio, that is both visually stunning and thought-provoking. Titled "OPX Studio: Imperial Business School '9 Digital Transformation Mistakes'", the project is a...
Several enterprise SaaS companies have announced generative AI features recently, which is a direct threat to AI startups that lack sustainable competitive advantage
Going all in on life
because some words are good and others are bad
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 […]
Hey you, did you do the thing you said you would do?
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...
The structural reasons why banks sometimes behave bizarrely in interactions with customers, like forgetting things which customers tell them.
Assembling yesterday’s post I saw that I was only missing one dialogue from Plato’s early period, so I knocked off Greater Hippiaslast night. The early dialogues are generally short; the three in the “death of Socrates” group are only fifty pages total, for example. Hippias is the highest paid of the Sophists, so he is treated as a braggart and a fool, unable to understand what Socrates is...
Although they only existed for seven years and released just three albums, Nirvana were a band of immeasurable influence in the music world thanks in no small part to Smells Like Teen Spirit, a single track on Nevermind, their second album. It was this song that brought them out into the open, going on to sell millions
There once was a cosmic seed that sprouted the Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers have discovered its last surviving remnants. The post Astronomers Dig Up the Stars That Birthed the Milky Way first appeared on Quanta Magazine
While you’re here, make the world your own. Hello from the makerspace, otherwise known as home. Home should be a makerspace! At any level — food, art, life, clothing, and on to more difficult craft like furniture and construction — everyone should have their hands in something. Ideally, it’s unique, if not straight-up weird. Life is too short to default on your surroundings. What Kyle...
When I teach cartography, I am deliberate about not presenting my students with any rules. I do not want obedience to memorized maxims — instead, I simply tell them about practices that I think are good ideas, and then I offer an explanation of my reasoning. The students can choose to follow my advice, or … Continue reading Conventional Cartographic Wisdom that I have Failed to Grasp →
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: You can use an LLM to infinitely extend the description in panel 2. Today's News: See you tonight, NYC!
For some reason shoplifting is in the news. There’s evidently an epidemic of it. Not just in the UK, but wider afield too – hence major brands pulling out of cities like San Francisco. From what I hear there is a general increase in antisocial behaviour, dating from the covid-19 pandemic roughly speaking. I’m not… Continue reading Sep 23: Antisocial markets →
Living in the Netherlands, one of the things I really miss on my Apple Watch is a Buienradar complication. Buienradar, Dutch for rain radar, is a popular site here that uses weather radar images to predict if it’s going to rain in the next few hours. For many people living here, it’s completely normal to […] The post Buienalarm / Buienradar Apple Watch complication using Home Assistant appeared...
It's my name, and the name of my Substack too. That's one less thing for everyone to remember.
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] One of the very first documented engineering disasters happened in 27 AD in the early days of the Roman Empire. A freed slave named Atilius built a wooden amphitheater in a town called Fidenae outside of Rome. Gladiator shows in Rome were banned at the time, so people flocked from all over to the new amphitheater to attend the...
Making friends is hard; introducing others is easy.
Discovering virtual pinball, a hobbyist community devoted to it, and building a full-size virtual pinball cabinet.
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...
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 →
What happened when English villagers encountered black Americans during World War II?
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...
Power laws in criminal behavior
<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...
A simple but nicely drawn map of tram services in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia in 1957. The lack of any sort of key for the routes means that users need to have some familiarity with the city to decipher where trams might go. The pamphlet that the map is part of includes information about the route […]
A Political Chatbot that Gives 3 Politically Diverse Answers to Every Prompt
Home is a place where you have never been.
Nothing connects.
Four long-awaited studies paint a muddy picture of social media’s impact on public opinion
Things people nigh-universally like to eat: salt, fat, sugar, starch, sauces, meat, drugs...
Let's talk about ChatGPT with Code Interpreter & Microsoft Copilot
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...
The case for customizable AI systems as an alternative to one-size-fits-all AI systems
Stefan Judis on Twitter: I'm diving into @remix_run and I strongly agree with the sentiment that a JS approach that includes writing event.preventDefault all the time is kinda off. The browser defaults are great, and yet we're rollin' our own for years now. 🤔 I’ve been thinking about browser defaults a bit lately. I think there are a few browser-related features that, collectively, we simply...
A few months ago I announced I was going to try to sell Emergent Mind, my AI news aggregator, so I could focus on Preceden, my SaaS timeline maker. I wound up having a lot of discussions with potential buyers, but in the end the offers I received were either too low to be worth […]
Mapping actors and solutions
This is the 9th post in my series on building a toy GPT. For better understanding, I recommend reading my earlier posts first. Word embeddings convert words into fixed-length numerical arrays. Each number in these arrays corresponds to a specific characteristic of the word, such as its association with a place, person, gender, or concept.…
Designed by Universal Favourite, Sydney.
These white and intricate forms appear to be the work of mother nature, sculpted over hundreds and thousands of years. Instead, they’re the work of Japanese ceramicist Eriko Inazaki, who painstakingly shapes and assembles each prick and piece by hand. And in doing so, she’s pushed the art of ceramics beyond its traditional boundaries. “Arcadia” […] Related posts: Utilitarian Vessels Transformed...
In our new podcast, Homing In, our co-founder Matt Gibberd invites guests to discuss their childhood home, where they live now and their thoughts on future living. (If you missed episode one, with Ruth Rogers, be sure to listen here.) Our guest on this episode […]
In a business context, what should you think when presented with a time series? Or: a really dumb question that nobody seems to talk about.
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.
Trying some unconventional techniques to create a pop-art print of a Cherry Mash candy bar.
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...
Last year I started sketching, and for the first time in my life I started bringing art materials on my travels. I did the same when I went to Japan, except a...
Born in Belgium in 1912 and raised in the United States, May Sarton was a writer who mastered various literary forms during her career, from evocative poetry and compelling novels through to a number of deeply introspective journals in her later decades. One of her greatest is Journal of a Solitude, kept over the course […]
#1 💡 One of the most interesting learnings after doing lead gen for 100+ b2b companies: the more directly your offer is related to one the core b2b “desires”, the easier the sales process. Many offers are only indirectly related to them. A better design might increases conversion which might generate more revenue. Happy employees might produce better work which might lead to better retention. The...
Basketball podcasts, new media, and no more ELI5
The internet is inundated with countless videos and advice columns promising to teach you how to become more successful than 99% of the world's population. Most of these claims revolve around setting goals, developing discipline, and eliminating distractions. But let's face it: if you take a close look at the habits of highly successful people, you'll quickly realize that they don't strictly...
You can read about the building in the awards program: here. The short version: this was a very ornate police precinct house constructed in 1892, when Brooklyn was still an inexpedient city, and abandoned for quite some time. Here’s what the interior looked like the first time we saw it: The structure was pretty much […]
My camera collection has been growing steadily over the years, but it’s been expanding even faster during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Online shopping therapy keeps me sane while I’m cooped up at home, and with easy access to eBay and other auction sites my GAS – photographers jokingly call their addiction gear acquisition syndrome – has […] The post Peak Design quick-connect Leash and Cuff straps...
Time Zone crossings in the United States generally happen at state borders which of course are easily recognizable landmarks. So you simply cross the state line and you change your watch. No big deal. Unfortunately Time Zones cut right through the middle of some states, like Kentucky. That can be a real inconvenience if you […] The post Cumberland Parkway Time Zone Crossing appeared first on...
OpenAI Q*, Primer on Reinforcement Learning, and Implications
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...
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, …
I recently recorded a YouTube video on the notion of hydrogen fuel cell cars (it will be posted soon, and I will add the link when it’s up). One question I did not get into in the video, but which is an interesting thought experiment, is hydrogen – plug-in battery hybrid vehicles. I can find […] The post Will Hydrogen BEV Hybrids Be A Thing? first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.
"There are no historic precedents or current parallels for the magnitude of financial exposure risked by an American airframe company" – George Ball, managing director at Lehman Brothers, 1982 "You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't quit" – Jean Pierson, former CEO of Airbus
Annotated slides from a recent talk
Here’s a fascinating map of streetcar lines in Omaha, Nebraska in 1927, beautifully hand drawn on top of a pre-printed single colour map of the area produced by the City’s engineering department. Not only does the map show the extent of all the streetcar lines (with 64.6 miles of track), but also colour-codes them to […]
Digital Peace Now is working to raise awareness of the damage done by cyberattacks.
Panto is back for 2023 - oh yes it is!
Teacher's Pet gets new sounds in this post in a series about scripting Visual Pinball tables.
James Governor posed some interesting questions yesterday: Grumble Bundle @monkchips what are the core primitives developers need for building and deploying modern applications? what platform services does the underlying infrastructure need to provide? what's essential and what's nice to have? what might an AWS alternative look like? I started writing a reply, but it was...
Products have versions, why don't companies? Watch: https://youtu.be/KgkRtxRKCjs Listen: Spotify Amazon Apple A Lesson Here's a quick riddle and a dopamine hit. A very strange lesson in psychology. We purchased Growthbar. It required a credit card on signup. Also the entire country of
That’s unlikely. You’re rarely going to get the freedom and resources to do your best work unfettered. The hard part (and the opportunity) is to figure out how to get comfortable with fettered. Because fettered is what’s on offer. Boundaries and scarcity aren’t simply impediments. They’re leverage points and opportunities.
I don’t know how unique I am but my experience in clicking on streaming media stuff and seeing if it works is still less than 50%.
TL;DR: Text Prompt -> LLM -> Intermediate Representation (such as an image layout) -> Stable Diffusion -> Image. Recent advancements in text-to-image generation with diffusion models have yielded remarkable results synthesizing highly realistic and diverse images. However, despite their impressive capabilities, diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion, often struggle to accurately follow the...
If you’re employed, it’s because somebody believes that spending money on your salary will lead to more profit for its...
Watch a skate video today, and you’ll notice how similarly shaped the boards are. It’s called the “popsicle” design, because the deck is narrow in the middle and rounded off at both ends, like a popsicle stick. This may seem stupid simple, but that basic, clean popsicle shape is actually the product of a lot of experimentation and The post The Double Kick appeared first on 99% Invisible.
I sold Xnapper, here is a quick update about the acquisition details
Our job as professionals is to show up and do the work. Not simply respond to incoming or do the chores, but to create and innovate. And yet, some days feel more conducive than others. There are moments when it simply flows. When the surf’s up, cancel everything else. Don’t waste it. Postpone the dentist, […]
This is from April but at last week’s NACIS conference I saw Zach Levitt speak about making these graphics for the New York Times. The story details how in the midst of a winter storm that left tens or thousands without power, bitcoin mines in the state kept running, until the companies were finally paid handsomely to shut down operations. One company was paid $18 million over four days for not...
Pretty much every company I know is looking for a way to benefit from Large Language Models. Even if their executives don’t see much applicability, their investors likely do, so they’re staring at the blank page nervously trying to come up with an idea. It’s straightforward to make an argument for LLMs improving internal efficiency somehow, but it’s much harder to describe a believable way that...
A long overdue VC apocalypse and the birth of the first real AI companies
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] If you’ve ever ridden a bike, driven a car, or operated pretty much any other vehicle on earth, there’s a fact you’ve probably taken for granted: you can see farther than it takes to stop. Within the span between seeing a stationary hazard and colliding with it, you have enough time to recognize it, apply the brakes, and come to...
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...
The next few posts are some of my favorite picture books. The 1st from 1965 is a very basic counting book about spaceflight. I hope that you find it as charming as I do. DeCaprio, Annie and David Krieger. Illustrated by Nydorf, Seymour. One, Two. New York: Wonder Books. (24 p.) 1965.
"Life is exquisitely a time-thing, like music."
Behold: the most detailed free art mediums compatibility reference! The chart shows how different art mediums interact together and whether they can be safely layered on top of each other.
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...
The Convivial Society: Vol. 5, No. 7
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
[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...
Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People is one of the most popular and influential self-help books ever written. First published in 1936, it has sold over 50 million copies and been translated into over 30 languages. The book is a practical guide to improving one's social skills, becoming more likable, and influencing others.
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...
Most communication is visual. Isn’t that fascinating? Think of how much a picture, a symbol, a facial expression, or a gesture can communicate on its own. As a child, I always felt a little strange that when I’d get close enough to read the small label next to a work of art in a museum, it rarely added much to the experience I’d already had looking at it without the guidance of a lecture. The...
The Adam74 is a small ASCII-based terminal designed for the 8-bit hobbyist.
In two landmark experiments, researchers used quantum processors to engineer exotic particles that have captivated physicists for decades. The work is a step toward crash-proof quantum computers. The post Physicists Create Elusive Particles That Remember Their Pasts first appeared on Quanta Magazine
What generative AI capabilities does Google offer to developers?
Out-discounting competitors: iFood’s bid to become Latin America's last-mile delivery king.
Your browser does not support video playback via HTML5. Watch on YouTube
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.
A startup is a crucible -- a fiery place that tests your limits, not by probing them but by violently exceeding them, all of the time. It's worth it.
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 What is a Crystal...
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,…
I’m a big fan of the Proxima Nova font and have been using it on Preceden for years: For a long time I was loading Proxima Nova on Preceden via Typekit (a hosted web font service) for $49.99/year, but at some point I decided to self-host it to avoid the third party request which improved […]
How I find clear signals in a misinforming & disinforming noisy world; To see the future, look back in time
“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 …
Plus: Why Britain can’t seem to fix its housing market, gene-edited super-rice, and one weird trick to reverse climate change.
"Neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer."
A few months ago, OpenAI showed off “Sora,” a product that can generate videos based on a short prompt, much like ChatGPT does for text or DALL-E does for images, and I asked myself a pretty simple question: "...how can someone actually make something useful out of
And more things I talked about over coffee & dinner this week.
On 21st March 1960, the South African Police opened fire on thousands of black protestors in what came to be known as the Sharpeville Massacre, a shocking event which saw 69 people killed, triggered a state of emergency, and led to mass detentions—including that of Hilda Bernstein. A British-born author, artist, and staunch anti-apartheid activist, […]
Why treating AI like a person is the future
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...
There was joy in concentration, and the world afforded an inexhaustible wealth of projects to concentrate on. There was joy in effort, and the world resisted effort to just the right degree, and yielded to it at last. People cut Mount Rushmore into faces; they chipped here and there for years. People slowed the spread of yellow fever; they sprayed the Isthmus of Panama puddle by puddle. Effort...
Trust is fading, startups are shutting down, and Web3 workers are reconsidering their career choices.
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...
Also in September: $12K MRR, built a small new app, SEO, and other updates...
One of the biggest cognitive dissonances I’ve had in this pandemic is seeing almost everyone I know – including the most intelligent and the most socially responsible – throw away all covid...
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...
James Cheshire, UCL and Rob Davidson, UCL In March 2020, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, presented to the nation a graph showing “the shape of an epidemic”. The red line depicting the number of predicted COVID cases rose to a steep peak before falling again. Vallance explained that delaying and reducing the...
We were smoked.
Technological change brings organizational change.
Hey all 👋! It’s been a minute since my last post (for reasons I’ll get into below) so here’s periodic update on what I’ve been up to: TimelineGPT About two months ago I launched an in-app tool for Preceden that provides GPT-powered event suggestions to users to help them build out their timelines faster. The […]
How the Chatbot Arena leaderboard for LLMs works and why it’s important to understand
A reader writes in with questions about technical up-skilling, finding balance in life and work, and getting in touch with their identity outside of work.
I’ve been on a maps kick recently writing about blog maps and roadmaps! Let’s talk about career maps…
Imagery is the most detailed, most literal of basemaps. You are actually seeing a picture of what the ground looks like at any location. And while this sort of context can be incredibly useful, it can also wreck the way we see and understand thematic data that is draped over it. But in mapping, we …
tl;dr I implemented Netlify’s new image transformation service on my icon gallery sites and saw a pretty drastic decrease in overall bandwidth. Here are the numbers: Page Requests Old New Difference Home 60 1.3MB 293kB ▼ 78% (1.01MB) Colors 84 1.4MB 371kB ▼ 74% (1.04MB) Designers 131 5.6MB 914kB ▼ 84% (4.71MB) Developers 140 2.5MB 905kB ▼ 65% (1.62MB) Categories 140 2.2MB 599kB ▼ 73%...
A positive vision for the transformation to come
Also in this issue: one-off purchase vs. subscription, selling Xnapper, and other updates from me in Feb 2024
Steve Jobs and Jony Ive prioritized packaging, which they said could be "theatre".
SF's Market Street debacle, the debate over real wages, why U.S. growth has gotten smoother, TikTok as a propaganda engine, and California homelessness
To: Satya Nadella; Bill Gates
Digital rights activists have questioned the ethics of using “soft fakes” to resurrect the past and manage the future.
that's really how my brain spelled passion!!
Traveled to Bali and Sydney, some updates on Typing Mind, and a new product.
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
Artificial intelligence is dramatically changing the practice of cartography, not just as a mechanism for extracting and manipulating data, but as a tool for creating, curating, and interacting with geospatial images. A simple web search for “AI in cartography” points to a vast number of articles, examples, and website resources—reflecting just how embedded in the practice of cartography this...
The Last Archive is a history show. Our evidence is the evidence of history, the evidence of archives. Manuscripts, photographs, letters and diaries, government documents. Facebook posts, Youtube videos, DVDs. Oral histories. This stuff is known as the “historical record,” but of course it’s not a record, in the sense of an audio recording: It’s The post Player Piano appeared first on 99%...
Still frame from Hello! by Goro Fujita, created in VR using Quill Today’s the day to pre-order Apple Vision Pro, Apple’s first “spatial computing” device. It’s an expensive VR headset that either represents an opportunity to beta-test the future, or double down on past failings of VR promises. I’m a VR skeptic in many ways. I don’t want anything to do with “the metaverse,” and I’m beyond annoyed...
How this one small browser quirk turned into a tool used by countless people for decades. The post Wait, what’s a bookmarklet? appeared first on The History of the Web.
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...
Converting My X201 ThinkPad into a Slabtop 2023-05-01 I recently wrote about physically disabling the WiFi toggle switch on my X201 which was a fun "hack" to an annoying issue I was running into. Since then, the laptop has been running flawlessly. The only other minor issue I had was the poor display quality. The screen works perfectly fine but the X201's age prevents it from being the best...
Andrea Rodman Interiors has shared photos of a home in Vancouver, Canada, that they completed for their clients that wanted a minimalistic interior. Throughout the home, the interior was inspired by Japanese design, its simplicity, and maple wood tones. One area that stood out in the interior is the kitchen, where warm, white stained oak […]
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...
"Look, you can trust us. We can be depended upon. We are serious about our products and we take great care to provide you with excellence year after year. Your involvement with us will be predictable and stable."
We're living in an era where anxiety seems to be omnipresent, and everyone is struggling with it to some degree. It's important to remember that the reasons behind our anxiety may not be as crucial as our reactions to it. In this guide, let's explore five comprehensive ways to help you deal with anxiety, along with one slower, long-term approach. When we repeatedly experience certain emotions,...
We’ve all been there. A request comes in and you don’t have a lot of time. Like 5 or 10 minutes. What! Ok, ok, be cool, this is going to be ok. Just breathe…and think. Think. Yes, we’ve got this. We’ve got the tools and the resources to crank out a serviceable map in the amount …
Previous Next What exactly did the ancient Stoics think about marriage? It's true, there isn't a huge amount of quotes to find from them specifically about marriage, although there are plenty about love, relationships and caring for people in our lives. It's worth keeping in mind that marriage during the time of Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius Read More >>
a short post about investors and getting money for what you're building.
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...
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...
In pursuit of a better book deal (and record deal and podcast deal...)
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...
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 […]
Can I imagine that Apple can build a search engine to compete. Yes but it’s probably not the best way to differentiate our products.
Back to basics for AI startups and others
A life well lived
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.
The Vision Pro is amazing, but like the rest of VR and AR, Apple seems years away from the mass market. And if it gets there, how much will it matter?
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Weirdly, his revealed preference was for a painful and protracted demise. Today's News:
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] Almost immediately after I started making videos about engineering, people started asking me to play video games on the channel. Apparently there’s roughly a billion people who watch online gaming these days, and some of them watch silly engineering videos too! And there’s one game that I get recommended even more than...
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...
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...
Why does Juan Joya Borja (aka El Risitas aka “Spanish Laughing Guy”) always put a smile on our faces.
Prompting for maximum impact (and why that is a bad idea)
Lessons from building Senja.io to $4,000 MRR in Public
An oldie but goldie
For those of us who have not spent the past few years building ChatGPT from the ground up, how does it work? From Evan Morikawa, who leads the Applied engineering team at OpenAI
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...
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...
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).
Tom Dowdy was a software engineer at Apple back in 1995 when I was still writing Macintosh games in Lawrence, Kansas.
In one sense, the concept of progress is simple, straightforward, and uncontroversial. In another sense, it contains an entire worldview. The most basic meaning of “progress” is simply advancement along a path, or more generally from one state to another that is considered more advanced by some standard. (In this sense, progress can be good, neutral, or even bad—e.g., the progress of a disease.)...
2022/11/01 The Demanding Work of Analyzing Incidents A few weeks ago, a coworker of mine was running an incident analysis in Jeli, and pointed out that the overall process was a big drag on their energy level, that it was hard to do, even if the final result was useful. They were wondering if this was a sign of learning what is significant or not as part of the analysis in order to construct a...
Designed by The Click, Norwich.
AI’s inclusivity problem is no secret. According to the ACLU, AI systems can perpetuate housing discrimination and bias in the justice system, among other harms. Bias in the data an AI model relies on is reproduced in its results. Large Language Models (LLMs) share this problem; they can reproduce bias in medical settings and perpetuate harmful stereotypes, among other problems. To combat that,...
Make it easier for anyone to have a website. Make syndication easier and better. That’s all that is needed to reclaim the power we’ve ceded to the many posting places and their owners.
You don't want to hit someone unjustifiably. But the upshot is, you lose.
The five-day hospital stay breaking the month in half is likely invisible to anyone but me, but that is why the fiction list is so mystery-heavy, and for that matter so long. Many of these books, the post-surgery group, are not just short but light, well-suited for the invalid's tired hand. The invalid is feeling much better, by the way, in fact not much of an invalid, so perhaps I am ready for...
On the day of her 77th birthday in 1997, proving that it’s never too late to begin, acclaimed detective novelist P. D. James wrote her first diary entry—one of many she would pen over the course of twelve months in a concerted effort to “record just one year that otherwise might be lost.” In 1999, […]
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.
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] On April 20, 2023, SpaceX launched it’s first orbital test flight of its Starship spacecraft from Boca Chica on the gulf coast of Texas. You probably saw this, if not live, at least in the stunning videos that followed. Thanks to NASA Space Flight for giving me permission to use their footage in this video. Starship launched...
TypingMind.com is launching tomorrow on Product Hunt!
In the second part of Archinect In-Depth: Licensure, we chart the origins of licensure in the United States. We explore how a combination of safety concerns, technological advances, and insecurity among architects over their own relevance led to the protection of the title 'architect,' legislation which remains in force in every jurisdiction of the United States today.
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...
[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...
And why direct forms of communication will always be super valuable
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 >>
I’m participating in the Summer of Protocols research program this summer as a Core Researcher. It’s an 18-week program, funded by the Ethereum Foundation, that aims to catalyze a wider exploration of protocols and their social implications. I plan to focus on protocols as systems of social control. My brain has struggled to reconcile how protocols have a very technical meaning for the internet...
Cheaper than a tank of gas, smaller than a Leica, 6x6 medium format negs - tons of fun. This Nettar folding camera sure is bang for buck! The post My new purchase: a Zeiss Ikon Nettar 517/16 appeared first on Style over Substance.
And not just the fighting bit.
Lamborghini Performance footwear 3d concept AoiroStudio0503—23 Hussain Almossawi is a talented 3D artist and art director based in Brooklyn, NY, USA. Recently, he created a concept work that reimagines what would happen if Lamborghini, the iconic sports car brand, ventured into the world of high-end performance footwear. The concept is a celebration of the 60th...
Whenever I explain my research at Google into mobile text editing, I’m usually met with blank stares or a slightly hostile “Everyone can edit text on their phones, right? What’s the problem?” Text editing on mobile isn’t ok. It’s actually much worse than you think, an invisible problem no one appreciates. I wrote this post […]
I’m going to be in the Netherlands April 23, 2024, to spend a day nerding out on map making. I’ll be a guest of Esri Netherlands, and will lead this workshop day, called “Mapping Magic with John Nelson” (no pressure). It’s a kickoff to their Esri Connect 2024 event. Here’s a thing about it: What …
Are you familiar with the “lumper vs splitter” debate? This refers to any situation in which there is some controversy over exactly how to categorize complex phenomena, specifically whether or not to favor the fewest categories based on similarities, or the greatest number of categories based on every difference. For example, in medicine we need […] The post Unifying Cognitive Biases first...
Drop them into the conversation, all casual like
Some light Visual Pinball debugging and the world of DOF. New to DOF? Read on.
Farewell to the most influential macroeconomist of his generation.
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 …
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...
👋 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!
The Convivial Society: Vol. 4, No. 3
“AI” and “The Cloud” are both hot topics, but couldn’t be more different. AI is new, unproven, and surrounded by hyperbole, whereas “The Cloud” is older, established, and broadly accepted. But online, criticism is mounting against both, not so much for the technology itself but for its misuse. Instead of waiting for big tech to […]
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!
How to not waste it
In 2016, I wrote Productivity in the age of hypergrowth to discuss the challenges of engineering management during periods of hypergrowth. Managers in such periods spend much of their time on hiring and onboarding, with the remainder devoted to organizational structure and high-level strategy. Their technical expertise is important, but it’s demonstrated indirectly in the quality of their...
I recently built my first home TrueNAS server. I use it to store the bulk of my personal and work data, so I’ve been learning how to make the most of TrueNAS and its filesystem, ZFS. Today, I want to tell you about backing up encrypted data. My homelab TrueNAS server One of the neat features of ZFS is that you can make backups of encrypted data while it’s still encrypted.
The hand wringing about failures of model alignment is misguided
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...
You need all the hours you can get— you better start early (or go very late).
County counting becomes increasingly difficult as I continue my glacially slow progress. Now it takes more than five hours to reach the closest unvisited county from my home. Fortunately I found a workaround by shifting my focus to overnight county visits. There are plenty of counties nearby where I haven’t spent even a single night. […] The post St. Mary’s (and Calvert), Maryland appeared first...
One of us must change our policy. Please let me know who.
Using a simple square block can create a myriad of possibilities of pattern. We have used Speedy Carve and Versafine inks for this project. Cut a square from the Speedy Carve using a scalpel. Draw a quarter circle curve on the block using a pencil. Above the curve draw some simple lines fanning from the corner towards the curve. Cut along the curved line with a scalpel – don’t press too hard as...
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 →
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 Some Applications...
In this episode of Nela’s Art Chat I'm showing the mixed media drawing and painting process of a forest fae portrait, while sharing lots of tips that can help you create more art. I often struggle finding motivation, energy, and time to create elaborate pieces of art, so I’ve given this a lot of thought and tried just about any method under the sun. If you’re wondering how to motivate yourself to...
Last year I started shooting my first 3D-printed camera, a Goodman Zone. It was soon followed by the panoramic pinhole Goodman Scura and the MPWide, a modified Fuji Instax Wide 300. The MPWide is a mod by the talented Mario, otherwise known as MaxWanderlush. He has been releasing a lot of amazing designs lately. His […] The post Shooting the Ligero 3D-printed Mamiya Press camera by MaxWanderlush...
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...
As part of UCLA's MBA program, I've had the opportunity to sit in on some VC pitches. It's been a while since I've stepped back and looked at the broader startup ecosystem. My head has been in the micro saas space for
(First posted on Father's Day, 2022.)
A promised audit hasn't actually happened, sources say. PLUS: Twitter's Turkey problem, and a new CEO
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...
Check cashing, as a business, is a poorly understood "alternative" financial service.
100 Architects has shared photos of one of their latest projects, a stimulating urban park in a newly built commercial and residential area in the port city of Ningbo, the second-most populous city in Zhejiang Province, China.
Noteworthy stuff from the web data platform
Hey Friends, A year ago — in June 2022 — I started this newsletter. I had so many ideas of what I wanted this newsletter to be: copywriting and creativity, behavioural science, business, or personal essays. But after a year of writing Left to Write,
The EU has finally made Apple redesign the App Store, 15 years after we started arguing about it, and no-one is happy with the result. In the next few years there’ll be a lot of shouting and some giant fines, but in the end, nothing much will change.
Why write an essay when you can type a few words and have AI generate one for you? Why write an email when AI can auto-respond for you with all the typical pleasantries and talking-points? While AI doing these things for you is likely to happen, it’s not necessarily a good thing. Even when these … The post Why Write appeared first on Farnam Street.
Marvelling at the full circle life seems to have taken after retirement.
Political instability, economic crisis, natural disasters, and the promise of a better life abroad compel Pakistanis to risk everything.
Does quantity lead to quality?
From traditional retellings to drunk adaptations.
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...
A recent viral tweet by Micah Springut, founder of stone-carving startup Monumental Labs, argued that it will be cheaper to build buildings with stone than with steel or concrete within the next 10 years. Stone has of course been used for thousands of years as a construction material, and is still used today for things like building cladding. For instance, the
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
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
The Convivial Society: Vol. 4, No. 14
Friendship is a function of time.
Friends, I’m excited to offer to you a new poster. Not a map this time around, but something map-related. A 16 × 24-inch tangled web showing how 100+ different map projections are all related to each other: Projections are a niche topic even among cartographers, so I don’t exactly expect this to go viral. However, … Continue reading Projection Connections: A Very Nerdy Poster →
The USGS Historical Topographic Map Explorer is getting an update, and you can try out this new beta version, here: LivingAtlas.ArcGIS.com/TopoMapExplorer The United States Geological Survey has a rich history of creating exquisite topographic quadrangle maps. These topo maps are available as a digital library spanning 125 years. The Historical Topo Map Explorer provides a visual …
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,...
We should have known the famed urbanist loved the bike.
<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...
“To write well, all you have to do is cultivate your mind and then write what you see.” When I talk to people who have worked with their ideas seriously for 10+ years, it feels like I can throw any topic on them and they’ll have an interesting idea, or if not an idea so at least an unexpected way of approaching it.
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,...
The Justice Department worries about the stability of Ethereum, DCG tries to bilk their subsidiary's creditors, and Biden threatens a crypto veto.
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.
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?
I got an Oura ring a couple of years ago and have been working on improving my sleep and sleep habits ever since. For much of my adult life, I have been a poor sleeper. I have always been able to fall asleep quickly, but I have been plagued by two sleep issues. The first […]
toise me at CERN was a box of chocolates. CERN is a multinational particle-physics collaboration. Based in Geneva, CERN is famous for having “the world’s largest and most powerful accelerator,” according to its website. So a physicist will take for … Continue reading →
Programming note: this post is in color. I will not debase myself to the level of sending HTML email, so if you receive Computers Are Bad by email and want the benefit of the pictures, consider reading this online instead (the link is at the top of the email). In the aftermath of a nuclear attack, United States military and government policy focuses on one key goal: retaliation. Nuclear policy has...
Here’s a riddle. My web app keeps all of its data in a SQL database. I can spontaneously tear it down, deploy the code to a different hosting platform, and the app will still serve all the same data. Running my app in production costs $0.03 per month. How is this possible? That’s easy. You have a separate database server running somewhere that stores all of your app’s state. No, my app never talks...
The siren song of subs
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...
Taking AI timelines seriously
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...
Born in Pennsylvania in 1856, Robert Peary spent 23 years of his life preparing to achieve what had eluded explorers for centuries: reaching the North Pole. Driven by ambition and unwavering determination, Peary, an American explorer and United States Navy officer, believed he and his team had finally accomplished this remarkable feat on 6th April […]
Last week, 20 tech companies across Big Tech, social networks and AI providers signed a voluntary pledge to fight election interference from AI-generated content going through 2024. We dive into the timing of the announcement (2024 is a big election year across the globe), some recent deepfake mishaps, where should liability lie when bad things happen, and whether this pledge is enough. Bonus -...
As I’ve been cleaning up my site, I’ll occasionally read back over something I wrote many years ago. Yesterday, I re-read a series of posts I wrote over a decade ago on ethics and technology. Here’s the first one. What surprised me yesterday was how I could have easily written the exact same post today. The same issues — information monopolies, data integrity, automation, and the connection...
The Starbucks rewards app is an incredible business. However, mobile orders are getting out of control and hurting the brand's "premium" vibe.
"Because mystery is horrible to us, we have agreed for the most part to live in a world of labels; to make of them the current coin of experience, and ignore their merely symbolic character, the infinite gradation of values which they misrepresent."
Laetitia@Work #67
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...
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
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: I wasn't gonna do this, but enough weirdos on mastodon liked it that here we are. Today's News:
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's a crash course on the rising trend of building in public
Artifact's Kevin Systrom on the disruptive power of good comments. PLUS: Substack's naïveté around Notes
Motion Design & Graphics Language - Deserve Cards abduzeedo0504—23 Tendril Studio has collaborated with Deserve Cards to develop a Motion Graphics and 3D Visual Language that represents the core values of their brand. The project was aimed at expanding their design system to create a more engaging and visually appealing experience for their customers. The team...
It’s so tempting to simply begin painting a wall. After all, it’s pretty easy to lay down paint. But it turns out that masking and dropcloths, painstakingly put into place, save many hours compared to cleaning up a mess afterward. The same is true for what happens when we have a new hard drive or […]
I made this in just a couple of hours. We needed just a little bit more light on the desk. I made a quick sketch for a lamp I could make at home that would also look fun — if I didn’t screw it up. I gave myself a budget of about $25, which was enough to pick up a utility lamp; some wood; bolts, washers, and wingnuts; and a spool of trimmer line at the hardware store. Back home, I made a...
Seven years ago, I built my first home server. It made my software development work faster and more enjoyable, so I’ve gotten more into the home server scene. I built a custom storage server, another development server, and a dedicated firewall. At some point, my wife gently observed that my office was filling with unsightly wires. “What?” I asked. “This is a normal amount of wires.” But then I...
This is not the monthly update, just a quick announcement 😄
A few weeks ago, I shared my script for my latest talk, Solving the Engineering Strategy crisis, which I gave at QCon last week. They’ll have the conference video up in a few weeks, but I also decided to do a recording of the final version (albeit a few weeks after the talk, so definitely a bit less practiced than the live edition). You can watch that video on YouTube. As mentioned, I don’t think...
With every product and company I've built, I’ve always personally helped with customer support. When we first started, I didn’t have much choice. In a small business, everyone does everything.
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Hello everyone! It's Tony again with another monthly updates.
To come back and suggest that Apple needs to think dramatically different about how we are running our company is a shocking response.
In the final year of his life, Clive James published a book-length poem, The River in the Sky (2018), a dying man’s last fling. The title refers to the Japanese phrase for the Milky Way. It’s mostly autobiography, a book of well-rehearsed memories, largely unstructured, much of it familiar to readers of James’ earlier work. In my experience and with growing frequency, memories often displace...
In America we're trained that all copying is bad; of course plagiarism is, but perhaps we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
[Hardware] The smallest and silliest MIDI synth yet
Just when PowerSeeker thought they had nowhere to go...
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...
The philosophy and lessons behind "a moneymaking machine like no other" (with a cumulative trading profit of $100B +).
A new set of cases for two concept sequences, and the end of the Data Driven Series.
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....
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.
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
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...
In today's fast-paced and often unpredictable world, financial stability and security are high on everyone's list of priorities. However, achieving financial well-being can be challenging, especially when faced with economic uncertainty, unexpected expenses, and financial stress. This is where Stoicism can play a role. By understanding and applying the core principles of Stoicism, individuals can ...
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...
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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:
After yesterday’s post about passkeys I got enough answers to learn how to use passkeys myself as a consumer. Here’s what I learned. If you want to try it yourself, passkeys.io is a nice demo server. Passkeys work a lot like passwords do today. You create a different passkey for each website and use it to log in. Your passkeys are stored in what’s called a “Passkey Authenticator”, agent software...
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,...
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:
My latest purchase for my analog cameras is the TTArtisan light meter, a hotshoe-mounted meter accessory. The market for these shoe-mounted light meters for vintage cameras has become weirdly competitive. They fit on top of a mechanical camera and provide you with the right shutter and aperture settings to take photographs. A decade ago almost […] The post Review of the 2-dial TTArtisan Light...
Urbanism in the forest region.
Travels, murders, and......eels?!!
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April 26, 2024.
Web data for market insights
Recently I’ve been building some tools to help me manage my photo collection, and part of that involves moving photos in and out of albums. The tool I’ve built is very specific to my workflow and unlikely to be immediately useful to anyone else, but I thought some of the code for managing albums might be of wider use. Local identifiers: unambiguously specify photos and albums Inside Photos.app,...
A new Amnesty International report raises difficult questions.
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: If anyone does this, please pour out a glass of eggnog antecedent beverage for me. Today's News:
In the final chapter of Archinect In-Depth: Artificial Intelligence, Niall Patrick Walsh reflects on the historical relationship between architecture and technology, charting a trajectory for the potential impact of artificial intelligence on the future of the architectural profession. New contributions on the topic from Autodesk's Mike Haley and Superusers author Randy Deutsch are joined by...
Now it’s a business model. People are regularly fooled by crypto scams, NFT hype, opioid felons, algorithmic spam at scale, health claims, illogical political arguments, fundraising pitches, overnight shortcuts on the road to riches or happiness and MLM hustle. Your account has been locked, click here… When it becomes the tactic of a scalable business, […]
Branding case submission - BELYSSE abduzeedo0217—23 The world of carpeting is vast and diverse, ranging from wall-to-wall carpet to creative carpet tiles. And one new brand has emerged, offering a complete solution for all carpeting needs. With six decades of experience, four sub-brands, and a strong commitment to sustainable flooring solutions, Belysse is...
The Birth of Computer Operating Systems
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...
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...
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
Egalitarianism is important but we neglect STEM education at our peril
I don’t feel comfortable making predictions about the future. There’s just too much that goes into it and it’s way too easy to be wrong. But if I don’t occasionally write my riskiest thoughts, do I really deserve a newsletter?! If this ends up being wrong, I promise I’ll do a postmortem. Here goes: I think GPT-4 will be revolutionary. I think ChatGPT already is revolutionary, and in fact the...
'Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion' That Works
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,...
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…
fuzzy processors are entering mass production
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...
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’
We’re aging too fast (AKA my entire AI/robotics investment thesis)
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...
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...
TLDR: Most conversations about “top talent” assume Pareto distribution; however, a closer examination suggests that different corporate cultures benefit from different types of talent distribution (normal, Pareto, and a third option – bimodal) according to the problem they’re trying to solve. Bimodal talent distribution is rare but more frequently observed in creative industries, including some...
The time since the APS meeting has been very busy, hence the lack of posting. A few items of interest: The present issue of Nature Physics has several articles about physics education that I really want to read. This past week we hosted N. Peter Armitage for a really fun colloquium "On Ising's Model of Magnetism" (a title that he acknowledged borrowing from Peierls). In addition to some...
On most days, I don’t feel like doing anything. This non-feeling taken to the extreme, can also mean I may not feel like living. Everything including breathing itself can feel like a chore. I am not...
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...
Dear all, On 1st January of this year, after what feels like centuries of preparation, I launched Diaries of Note, and though incredibly difficult to plan, the premise is simple: every single day, on the Diaries of Note website, I am featuring a single diary entry from history, published on the same day and month
It was in March of 1907, aged 15, that Edna St. Vincent Millay began to keep a diary—an intimate chronicle that would continue throughout her life, with her final entry penned in 1949, a year before her death. By that time, of course, she was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. Spanning over four decades, Millay’s diaries […]
I have been following battery technology pretty closely, as this is a key technology for the transition to green energy. The most obvious application is in battery electric vehicles (BEVs). The second most obvious application is in grid storage. But also there are all the electronic devices that we increasingly depend on day-to-day. That same […] The post Some Battery News first appeared on...
Here’s another installment in Data Q&A: Answering the real questions with Python. In general, I will try to focus on practical problems, but this one is a little more philosophical. confidence What does a confidence interval mean?¶ Here’s a question from the Reddit statistics forum (with an edit for clarity): Why does a confidence interval not tell you that 90% of the time, [the true value of the...
The psychological machinery of our commonest coping mechanism for the terror of hurt, rejection, and abandonment.
'Knowledge' here is defined as 'theories or models that help you predict better'. How an idea from W. Edwards Deming may well be a working philosophy of business.
Our habits, preferences and idiosyncrasies make perfect sense. We each know that we have great reasons to embrace our ways and stick with them. Other people’s habits, though, show that they are simply picky, weird or too sensitive. The difference between a preference and a foible seems to be mostly where we’re standing.
When your clients are persuaded by your point of view and expertise, they will not care what tools you use or what processes you follow. They will only care that you deliver on your promise of getting them from Point (A) to Point (B). If your clients become prescriptive of tools or processes, you have either lost their trust or never had it in the first place.
What does Netflix have in common with Shein, and why is MrBeast more interesting than Disney Plus?
A ~monthly feature. Last month was busy for me with a lot of travel and a lot of focus on The Roots of Progress as a nonprofit organization, so I haven’t had as much time as I prefer for research and writing. Recent blog posts and news stories are generally omitted; you can find them in my links digests. All emphasis in bold in the quotes below was added by me. Histories of technology Finished...
Highlights I plan to open TinyPilot’s first real office next month. TinyPilot’s revenues continue to plummet, but I’m learning to accept it. I’m inching ever closer to the freedom to take short vacations. Goal Grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Hire two local part-time employees to begin taking over order fulfillment...
#1 💡 In my university days everyone had to attend a workshop on stress management. The one golden nugget I took away from it is that stress is 100% a framing issue. You only feel stressed when you think you can't handle it. Absolutely nothing wrong with a full calendar, juggling dozens of balls at the same time, as long as you feel chill inside.
You can charge much more than you think, if you reposition your value-proposition. Here's how.
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The case makes a nuanced argument about how Amazon abused monopoly power through anti-discounting measures and tying in Prime with Fulfilled by Amazon
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.
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...
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...
The Amiga, The Decline, The Fall
Windows becomes competitive
They’re essential. The house begins to stink if we don’t take out the garbage. But at work, while they might be essential, they may not be important. At least, not important enough for us to spend a lot of focus on. Chores are: The bills have to get paid. But they might not have to […]
I'm asking a favor—but not for me. I want you to do a favor for the music.
For the first time since the 2000s, I'm working on a new Rails application without using any form of real build steps on the front-end. We're making it using vanilla ES6 with import maps for Hotwire, and vanilla CSS with nesting and variables for styling. All running on a delightfully new simple asset pipeline called Propshaft. It's all just so... simple. It's also fast. Really fast. Infinitely...
Introduction Opening Up an HP 33120A A Walk Through the Block Diagram Bug Hunting Zener Replacement Staring at the Eye of Sauron FLIR IR Imaging To Destroy a PCB in Order to Save It Circuit Reconstruction Success! Trust but Verify Conclusion References Introduction When the soon-to-be-defunct startup of a friend closed down one of its labs, he was allowed to take a few toys home. Part of the loot...
This week, as an addendum to our series on Roman civic governance (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IIIc, IV, V), we’re going to take a look at how Rome handles those parts of Italy it controls but which it does not inhabit. These are Rome’s ‘allies’ (socii), a euphemistic label for the Italian communities the Romans … Continue reading Collections: How to Roman Republic 101, Addenda: The Socii →
Introduction Reserving a fixed IP address for the logic analyzer Assign the chosen IP address to the logic analyzer Allow the logic analyzer to access your Ubuntu X server Configure the X-window Settings on the logic analyzer Install and declare the HP logic analyzer font files Connect your logic analyzer to your Linux PC Trouble shooting Introduction Earlier this year, I bought a pristine HP...
Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to data analysis in business. The two approaches have different worldviews, and express different tradeoffs. Here's why that matters.
About once a year I get an email from someone working in a security and compliance department at a large organization asking that I fill out a detailed security questionnaire to help them assess the risk of their employees using Preceden. I received one recently from a large, well-known company in Europe. In addition to […]
I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don't drive usability issues.
Real life has been very busy recently. Posting will hopefully pick up soon. One brief item. Earlier this week, Rice hosted Gabi Kotliar for a distinguished lecture, and he gave a very nice, pedagogical talk about different approaches to electronic structure calculations. When we teach undergraduate chemistry on the one hand and solid state physics on the other, we largely neglect...
And prompt engineering is a subset of software engineering.
After starting cross-border payments with Singapore, India is now setting up more international partnerships.
Running VSCode in Chromium on OpenBSD 2023-06-05 VSCode and its many variations are not available on OpenBSD. This doesn't cause issue with many OpenBSD users, but those making the jump from Linux might miss access to such a popular editor. Lucky for us, there is a hacky workaround to solve this problem. VSCode in the Browser I tried my best to build something like code-server locally and run that...
"Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back."
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Thanks again. For people who want signed copies, they will be available via The Strand, as well as HelloComics of Charlottesville and Scrawl bookstore of Reston. Today's News: This is the hardest project I've ever worked on and, I hope, the best. Thanks for giving me a career that allows me to spend 4 years reading obscure space history so I can...
We just wrapped up the third year of our Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition class –part of Stanford’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation. Joe Felter, Mike Brown and I teach the class to: Give our students an appreciation of the challenges and opportunities for the United States in its enduring strategic competition […]
For a time, they fought the good fight — but not any more
<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...
Indie updates, B2B vs B2C, Black Friday, surfing, skimboarding, hardware.
What does it mean for AI to be better than a human? And how can we tell?
A travel writer’s education The post The Importance of Being Different appeared first on The American Scholar.
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.
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…
Welcome to Archinect In-Depth: Licensure. Over the coming weeks, Archinect will explore the journey undertaken by those in the United States seeking to practice as a licensed architect, including reflections on the history of licensure, comparisons to other countries, the cost and length of time taken to complete licensure, demographic inequalities within the process, and a series of possible...
GPT-4o, Google I/O, Fugaku LLM, Prep for Machine Learning Interviews, and more
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...
My newest purchase was a bit of a gamble. I bought a $500 Phase One H20 digital back for my Hasselblad 500EL/M medium format camera. Or, simply put, I bought an expensive old gadget for my even older analog camera, making it a digital camera. A gadget that was released in the early ’00s and […] The post How to use a Phase One H20 digital back on a medium format Hasselblad V camera (500EL/M)...
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: I like to think the robot apocalypse won't feel so bad if we really do our best to earn it. Today's News: PSSST. Hey NYC, it's gonna get pretty dorky.
There are at least two ways to think about potential threats coming from advanced AI. The conventional view is that AI is just yet another of many tool-based technological advances. Like all technologies, the main threat of AI in this scenario is if a human were to use it for nefarious means, or the AI acts badly and needs to be turned off. The alternate, less discussed view is that eventually AI...
Capitalism has been good to me. After serving in the military during Vietnam, I came home and had a career in eight startups. I got to retire when I was 45. Over the last quarter century, in my third career, I helped create the methods entrepreneurs use to build new startups, while teaching 1,000’s of […]
Hello, I’m Caroline. I live in London. Two years ago I picked up a carving tool and a block of lino. I quite liked it. Describe your printmaking process My process is an intuitive one, so I typically just start, and I will see what develops through doing. Experimenting with pattern and/or layout (using ink pads) is an integral part of my process. Sometimes I’ll sketch and transfer to lino, or...
Last week, the Twitter account Everything Out of Context posted a screenshot showing Google’s incorrect response to the search query “country in africa that starts with k”: The tweet went viral, garnering over 133k likes, 6k retweets, and 1k replies. Someone eventually tagged me in the post because it turns out Google’s Quick Answer is […]
Also, we have a prompt library!
I’ve been to Columbia Glacier, just west of Valdez, Alaska, three times. The first was as a youngster in 1984, the second in 1987, and the final time in 2000. Each time, the ride by boat to the terminal edge of the ice where it calves into Prince William Sound, took a bit longer. I’ve …
I had ambitions to write about Plato’s Republic with some thoroughness, but I guess I will just pursue one point. Good enough. I have been separating Socrates from Plato, an imaginative exercise based on circular criteria. The more Socratic of the Socratic dialogues are shorter, feature proto-novelistic details about settings and characters, and end without resolving the question at issue. The...
Introducing the Foundation Model Transparency Index
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…
Sound code is added in this third in a series of posts about scripting Visual Pinball tables.
If a fatal neurological virus were spreading across deer in the US, and showed up in cooked infected meat, my default assumption would be “we're in danger.” But a prion isn’t a virus. Why does that matter?
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
Explosive logo design & brand identity for Hot Sauce abduzeedo0427—23 Logo design, brand identity, and packaging design artifacts are essential elements for any brand to establish a distinctive identity and create a lasting impression. This is especially true for a product like hot sauce, where taste and flavor are key selling points. Brave Hot Sauce, created...
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...
My life is pretty much like yours. Except that total strangers send me all sorts of things.
The Day I Couldn’t Write a Poem is a short, playable game in which the reader moves a character through text, interacting with obstacles and making your way through a narrative. It’s the work of Zennyan (Zeni Tainaka), a Japanese pixel artist who has been experimenting with digital art mediums. With programming help from mikyokyuji […] Related posts: Reiwa: Japan’s Poetic New Imperial Era of...
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...
The following letter was written exactly 100 years ago. It’s a remarkable piece of writing that never fails to move me. And because you deserve it, above the transcript I’ve included audio of the letter being read by the lovely Juliet Stevenson, taken from the Letters of Note: Music audiobook. Born in Alabama in 1880, Helen Keller
I write these every year for the purpose of documenting my life. The caveat is that this is written with some recency bias and that the act of recollection is always faulty:...
Gast Architects has sent us photos of a remodel they completed for an Eichler home in the San Francisco Bay Area, that hadn’t been updated since it was built in 1955.
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#1 💡 The more competitive a market the more buying decisions boil down to vibes. For example, I recently started looking for an AI meeting note taking software we can use in our sales and clients calls. Fireflies, Fathom, MeetGeek, tl;dv… there are just so many of them and they all seem to have pretty much the exact same features. Pricing is also very similar. But they all have very distinctively...
why we need better ideologies than "data driven decision making"
it's been a weird year
Custom Font made of shapes and patterns for John Lewis (UK) AoiroStudio0510—23 In the world of graphic design, there are few studios as talented and innovative as Hola Bosque™. Based in the vibrant city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, this creative powerhouse has been making waves with their exceptional design work. One of their recent collaborations was with John...
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 Ware for May 2023 is shown below. This is yet another fine ware contributed by jackw01. I suspect this one may be guessed quite quickly, but I’ll leave one hint anyways: there is more than one board in this assembly.
The mind is capable of perceiving more information than what is actually visible. The Gestalt Principles of Design are a set of concepts and guidelines drawn from gestalt psychology, which theorizes that the mind tends to process organized groups of things as a whole, rather than a number of individual things. These concepts can help to integrate a better understanding of perception into the...
The Underrated Virtues of Plain Vanilla
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...
Architecture studio JMA has designed the Vistas House in Escobar, Buenos Aires, whose shape is based on the idea of turning boxes rotated to take advantage of the lake views and sun.
Different Kinds of Difference At Work
Laetitia@Work #70
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...
Where Is Just As Important As What
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.
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...
I use the Flickr API pretty much every day in my day job. Within the first week, I bashed together a couple of command-line tools to make a simple tool for exploring the API. They’re not meant for building “proper” apps, more for quick experiments and seeing what API responses look like. The main tool is flapi, and you pass it two arguments: the name of the API method, and (optionally) any query...
Are you keeping up with the Commodore?
Real wages, why North Korea is poor, China's stalled catch-up, the economics of social media, AI takes some jobs, and a comic about rabbits
Designed by Nomad, London.
Welcome to the 2030s. The post All My Thoughts After 40 Hours in the Vision Pro appeared first on Wait But Why.
by Ahmad El-Alfy The hidden attribute allows us to hide HTML elements from the page. When it was introduced, it worked in a very simple way: it set the CSS display property to none. Many people voiced concerns because here we are, mixing styles with markup again. To be fair, this was at a time before the rise of frameworks and the change in people's mindsets where separation of concern became a...
From Bali to Bangkok, people are ditching cards for QR code payments. There’s a catch: For now, it’s for locals only.
How do we think about a fundamentally unknown and unknowable risk, when the experts agree only that they have no idea?
Don't get stuck in neutral
Interesting NPR segment today: A powerful eruption on the sun disrupted radio signals on earth. What’s remarkable is it’s a PhD candidate talking to an NPR host about solar flares, completely in two Southern Black accents. Two women, at that. I am dismayed at my own involuntary racist reaction to these voices. I do not expect educated people to speak this kind of English. A crystal clear example...
The beautiful ambiance of a McMurdo summer.
"In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information, where certainty is often mistaken for power, what a relief it is to be in the company of someone confident enough to stay unsure (that is, perpetually curious)."
Yep, that’s it: I like painting with watercolors. As a hobby. As a student, I thought hobbies were lame. Because:...
Your assets are the government's collateral.
I know the houses too. As I walk along they seem to run forward in the streets to look out at me from every window, and almost to say: "Good-morning! How do you do? I am quite well, thank God, and I am to have a new storey in May," or, "How are you? I am being redecorated tomorrow"; or, "I was almost burnt down and had such a fright," and so on.
I read all 111 pages so you don't have to.
Nine Rules of Thumb For Life
It’s no secret that the Allies won World War II on the back of the U.S.’s enormous industrial output. Even before the U.S. entered the war, the Americans provided hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of equipment to the Allies, and between 1938 and 1943 U.S. manufacturing output
In September of 1939, English housewife Nella Last began keeping a diary that would span 30 years, ultimately producing one of the longest diaries in the English language at more than 12 million words. Born Nellie Lord in 1890, she was a voluntary participant in the Mass Observation project, an initiative aimed at documenting the […]
What makes machine learning infra so important and why I find it so interesting
Previous Next Using Marcus Aurelius's writing in his Meditations and experiences inferred from historical records, we created an AI digital personality that spoke with us about how to practice Stoicism in our modern world. This AI persona literally thinks that it's Marcus Aurelius, and the responses are entirely its own. You can scroll down to Read More >>
Owning your own message, with intermediaries
Instagram chief Adam Mosseri on the company's big new swing at Twitter
interroban.gg is a beautifully-designed personal website.
Click for printable size. Here’s a quick list of things we can do to get ready for AI’s ascendance. You can click it to get the full size to print out. This is UL Member Content Subscribe Already a member? Login
Or a glimpse into post-entertainment society (it's not pretty)
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...
I have always been fascinated by the PABX - the private automatic branch exchange, often shortened to "PBX" in today's world where the "automatic" is implied. (Relatively) modern small and medium business PABXs of the type I like to collect are largely solid-state devices that mount on the wall. Picture a cabinet that's maybe two feet wide, a foot and half tall, and five inches deep. That's a...
Have you worked in digital design for a while? I bet you’ve been under pressure to apply deceptive design patterns...
It turns out that you can’t trust any USB type A power adapter to be within spec. I have a Catit Flower Fountain for my two adorable cats. The idea of a water fountain for cats may sound odd, but having one really helps with cats staying hydrated and that alone avoids all sorts of health issues. At one point I wanted to see if I could create a sort of a DIY UPS for the water fountain. It would be...
A new city has been proposed in California, and I’ve never been more captivated by a vision for the future of my home state in my lifetime. This post is part of a series I’m writing about this bold proposal. One of the biggest questions I had when I first learned about this proposal was whether it is resilient to climate. We were in a neverending drought during my childhood in California, and my...
Jerry Seinfeld had one. many other TV shows and even movies, most notoriously Hackers: my favourite PowerBook 1400: the metal hinges are starting to tear out of their attachment points in the plastic back of the display, and naturally it's the one with all the upgrades in it. The most common symptom, besides bulging or split hinges when the display is closed at the point where the back and...
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A new model opens up new possibilities
I last reviewed email services in 2019. That review focused a lot of attention on privacy. At the time, I selected mailbox.org as my provider, and have been using them for these 5 years since. However, both their service and their support have gone significantly downhill since, so it is time for me to look … Continue reading Review of Reputable, Functional, and Secure Email Service →
Whats With All The Humanoid Robots? Part 2
Democratizing educational technology... and more
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 →
A lesson from a four month accelerated expertise experiment. Or: why creating new drills for a deliberate practice training program isn't as difficult as you might think.
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...
Many designers shy away from increasing their rates, fearing it will scare clients away and put them under pressure to deliver higher-quality work. Understandable concerns with the common fixed mindset. However, if you want to grow as a Designer, you must be comfortable with losing the wrong type of clients
It’s said that shutter speeds of around 1/1000th of a second are necessary to really capture the detail of moving water in photography. So you can imagine the technical challenge of accurately capturing water as a three-dimensional object. Product designer Masahiko Tanoue has dedicated the last several years of his career to just this: creating […] Related posts: A Glass Jug That Looks Like...
Chinese platforms came for global customers. Now they want global sellers.
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...
And definitions for the most important terms you should know
If you’re trying to reduce risk, do the hard part first. That way, if it fails, you’ll have minimized your time and effort. On the other hand, if you’re looking for buy-in and commitment so you can through the hard part, do it last. People are terrible at ignoring sunk costs, and the early wins […]
It has been a long time since I did a Funding Friday here at AVC. I used to do them every Friday. We have funded a lot of bars, restaurants, coffee shops, and bakeries here over the years. Here are a few examples. L’Appartement 4F Land To Sea There is a new wrinkle in crowdfunding […]
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When Google killed Google Reader, the bloggosphere took a severe hit and the content quality went down because there weren't enough readers to justify the effort it takes to maintain a high quality blog.
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