Ever wondered, "Is there an AI to see how your baby looks?" Well you're not alone! OurBabyAI is an app that shows how your future baby may look.
In a quaint bar on the outskirts of Catania (Italy), as whiskey glasses clinked and muted conversations blended into a […] The post Aging Code appeared first on Vadim Kravcenko.
In the world of finance, there are a myriad of strategies employed by corporations to optimize their tax liabilities. One such method, known as transfer pricing, has become increasingly prevalent in recent years, raising concerns about fairness and equity in the global tax system.
As I suspected my energy for writing in August was diverted to more important things. Plenty of energy to read, though. With a respite in September, I should soon be able to write a bit on the Greek philosophers I have been reading. The Cynics, Epicureans, and Stoics work well as a cluster. Then later a bit on Plutarch and the little philosophy project is a wrap. PHILOSOPHY Meditations (c....
A quasi-monthly feature. Recent blog posts and news stories are generally omitted; you can find them in my links digests. I’ve been busy helping to choose the first cohort of our blogging fellowship, so my reading has been relatively light. All emphasis in bold in the quotes below was added by me. Books Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (1990). I’ve...
New experiments show that the brain distinguishes between perceived and imagined mental images by checking whether they cross a “reality threshold.” The post Is It Real or Imagined? How Your Brain Tells the Difference. first appeared on Quanta Magazine
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.
Everything about the Black Magic's acquisition + May 2023 updates
and other updates from me in Mar 2023
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 […]
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 […]
See you again soon
Lessons from building and growing Copylime to 6 figures all in public
People talk about you the way you talk about yourself.
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...
A FAQ of sorts
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...
Architecture and interior design studio Archisphere collaborated with Carbone & Kacerovsky to design a ‘Cyclist’, a modern cafe at the Hotel Andaz am Belvedere Vienna. Archisphere drew inspiration from the movement, freedom, and enjoyment associated with cycling. In addition to this, the spirit of the art collector Prince Eugen, whose influence can be found throughout […]
A 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...
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...
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 personal guide to Singapore for foreign friends visiting.
Designed by Dixon Baxi, London.
No you can't "have it all." You can have two things, but not three.
This was almost a post on why millennial motherhood is so challenging, but turned into tactical food hacks.
Surreal and otherworldly.
Today is exactly 2 years since I quit my job and become a full-time indie hacker.
Covering the state of play as of Summer, 2023
AI is strange. We need to learn to use it.
A little bit of magic, but mostly just practice
will he go into destroy mode if I say no
Hey Siri, set a reminder for 365 days.
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.
Mike Cardona is a solo founder who has managed to build a $200k online business by specialising in automation content and consulting
Chinese policy and geopolitical risk are doing a lot of the work here.
And some prompts that might be useful when it does.
If you believe that the most serious risks from AI are real, should you write about anything else?
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.
EVs are just going to win.
small updates from me in July 2023
I put my M1 Pro against Apple's new M3, M3 Pro, M3 Max, a NVIDIA GPU and Google Colab.
Lessons from building AudioPen to 600+ paid users to clinching #1 on Product Hunt
There's a somewhat weird alien who wants to work for free for you. You should probably get started.
For sale: a few KIM-1 User Manuals I printed up.
"IBM's first computer"
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...
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) […]
We can start to see, dimly, what the near future of AI looks like.
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
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.
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...
A pragmatic approach to thinking about AI
Bor Hung Chong from Nefin Group discusses green energy solutions beyond solar panels.
all images courtesy Gaku Yamazaki Gaku Yamazaki, a 21-year old college senior, spends his spare time traversing Japan in search of what he has dubbed ikei-yajirushi, or ‘unusual arrows.’ There are thousands of these abnormal road signs dotted across Japan and while drivers might find them confusing or even annoying, Yamazaki has developed a certain […] No related posts.
A 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.
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...
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...
In 2005, Joel Spolsky’s software company, Fog Creek, filmed a documentary about their summer internship program. The film is called Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks with Geeks, and it follows four college interns as they design, implement, and launch a completely new software product. That’s not the interesting part. Looking back on this documentary 18 years later, it’s striking how many interviews it...
Lessons from building RadReads and helping over 40,000 professionals in public
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...
The emotional rollercoaster I experience in art supply stores can be summarised in one word: greed. I want every single pen, every brush, every quill, and a sheet of every paper, ranging from crude cardboard to magnificent handcrafted Japanese washi. And yes, I need papyrus. And no, I don’t know what for. I want it all! Which one should I pick? Here is how to find your perfect partner in crime....
It 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 […]
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 &...
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...
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...
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.
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."
“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.
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 […]
An optimistic take on technology and inequality.
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...
Super quick updates
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...
The Case for LLMs as Hallucination Engines
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:
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.
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
No GPU cluster required.
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...
We have more agency over the future of AI than we think.
Without Americans on the app, advertising dollars are at risk.
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...
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
Bad architecture must come from some underlying ethos.
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 […]
“We give them the same phone, in the same brand-new condition,” says one seller.
Want to find the best no-code newsletters for learning about what you can build without coding? You came to the right place!
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:
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...
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 […]
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 →
Neurodivergent physicists face barriers in STEM, but there are also benefits to being who they are.
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...
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:
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...
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.
by Enda Harte For me, there are six important first steps that I prioritized for practicing Stoicism (referenced in the diagram above), and I wanted to use this opportunity to go over each of these in a little more detail. Hopefully you’ll get an understanding of what they mean, and why it’s important to practice Read More >>
A PCB for breadboards to make working with op-amps easier.
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 […]
(Just not mine.)
Grids are very, very useful. I just published an essay on how anchoring the most important information on a web page to the Y-axis will help viewer’s focus on it and pay closer attention. It’s a pretty basic idea, really, but somehow I found myself writing over 1,000 words to describe it. I won’t do that here. Instead, I want to provide some very brief direction on using grids. Grids are a...
The 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...
Remembering Albert Borgmann (1937-2023)
<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...
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...
Is AI a Leveler, King Maker, or Escalator?
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...
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 […]
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.
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…
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...
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 →
They're not going to disrupt everything (yet), but they're a ton of fun.
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.
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...
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...
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…
Two Customer Encounters
The neuroscience, physics, and philosophy of freedom in a universe of fixed laws.
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...
A simple answer, and then a less simple one.
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...
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 >>
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...
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...
Five analytical tasks in under a minute
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...
And why it might revolutionize the search industry.
Foxconn and Luxshare slashed workers. But under pressure to expand away from China, they suddenly need them back.
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.
It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
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...
Let's Get Right To the Point
Lessons from building HeyGen from 0 to $1m ARR in 7 months
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.
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...
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,...
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 […]
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...
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
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, […]
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 […]
Yes, market-rate!
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 […]
After World War I, in Frankfurt, Germany, the city government was taking on a big project. A lot of residents were in dire straits, and in the second half of the 1920s, the city built over 10,000 public housing units. It was some of the earliest modern architecture — simple, clean, and uniform. The massive The post The Frankfurt Kitchen appeared first on 99% Invisible.
As 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...
A talk with architecture critic Justin Davidson about the thorny knot of issues involved at New York’s most conflicted transportation-entertainment site.
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
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...
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
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...
You think I’m crazy, but just wait and see....
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.
Early notes on how generative AI is affecting the internet
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
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...
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 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...
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.
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 […]
It’s time to expand our vision to include slower, more human-scaled speeds of transportation.
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
Part 1: How to spot misinformation, mistakes, and meaningless data
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.
It's about having small expectations.
'The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.' Teilhard de Chardin 💡Broken Hips This feels like one of these problems that most people have accepted as inevitable but that will be solved soon and we will look back and think how crazy we allowed this to happen for so long.
I’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...
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
Immigrating from Indonesia to the US and building Typedream in public
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 […]
What’s it like to be in the top 1%? According to the statistics, most of the readers of my blog are among the highest earning and/or richest people in the UK. I bet however that not many of you feel that way. Let’s start with income To be in the top 1% of earnings in… Continue reading The richest person you know →
The first in a series of posts about scripting Visual Pinball tables.
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...
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 \(\pi\)...
We have this big issue right now because gaming is shifting from us to mobile platforms.
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 […]
“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...
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...
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, […]
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...
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...
From images of solar cooking to snake radio telemetry, we received 548 entries from around the world.
[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...
Seven principles for journalism in the age of AI
(A Lengthy Vacation Post-Mortem)
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 […]
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 […]
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,...
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 →
A new Twitter clone is surging in popularity. Could it have legs?
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
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 →
TSMC Arizona back on track, drawing arrows on graphs, the downsides of inclusionary zoning, why people hate inflation, and interesting ideas about market power
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
To get status, you have to give up status.
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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 →
Sacred Flames and Divine Philosophers
After decades of slumber, the country that brought us bullet trains and Nintendo has mustered some momentum.
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...
Designed by Mubien Brands, Santander.
"Ownership" means ten different things to ten different people. Let's talk about what we actually want.
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:
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...
(But why not?)
I interview Claire about her new book "Scaling People". Thanks to Stripe for hosting.
Lets build a simple virtual pinball controller to bring more immersion to your game.
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...
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 →
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.
The opposite of a good idea - Finding the real reason behind brushing our teeth - Let's not jump to conclusions
And what happens when we don’t?
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 […]
May 17, 2024.
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.
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.
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 >>
We trace Michael Dell's skill at the art of capital in business, and use it to examine how skill at capital allows you to make moves that aren't available to a novice business operator.
The 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...
There are good reasons to be skeptical about its ultimate utility.
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 …
The Convivial Society: Vol. 4, No. 9
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.
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 →
Felix Kan on building a bug-hunting platform to enhance cybersecurity for small companies.
And then there were two.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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...
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 […]
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...
On waiting for AI's Godot.
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,...
Also in October: Speak at JOM Launch Asia 2022, and the thing about Elon Musk.
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....
Weight Loss, Civilization, and Good Reading
It's my first product launch of the year!
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A simplified high-level overview of primary machine learning algorithms for anyone to understand
One of my favorite Lovelace interface cards for Home Assistant is the mini-graph-card by kalkih. It’s the card running most of the graphs in our smart home‘s dashboard. Surprisingly, mini-graph card is actually not included in Home Assistant by default – honestly, it should be, it’s so good – but you can easily install it […] The post Adding night shading to a Home Assistant mini-graph-card chart...
The differences between games development and more “standard” software engineering, roles, and how games are typically built.
Four questions to ask your organization.
Designed by Common Curiosity, Birmingham, London.
[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....
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
Going viral, my thoughts, and updates from me in October 2023.
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...
Longform journalism is coming back (and deserves our support)
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 […]
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.
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...
The second in a series of posts about scripting Visual Pinball tables.
"The people we love are built into us."
A talk with the author of The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight.
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 […]
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...
The investing legend, the goat of common sense and wisdom, and the Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway
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...
This post wraps up the sound work on Teacher's Pet.
On projects, side-projects, AI, and existential dread.
Spirit Halloween has over 1,450 pop-up shops and makes all its money in only 2 months (September, October)
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...
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...
Traveled to Bali and Sydney, some updates on Typing Mind, and a new product.
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...
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.
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!
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
How Twitter is breaking — and its CEO is accelerating its fall
Fueled by the pandemic, medical professionals have cashed in on Douyin, dispensing advice and endorsements.
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...
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.
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. […]
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...
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.
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...
By charging more $$$, you are lifting up the quality of the outcome and satisfaction.
A few big changes are making the online world a more boring place to hang out.
Lessons from building and growing Potion to its acquisition all in public
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.
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 →
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...
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...
"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."
Caught in a series of lies about his willingness to fight Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire's disturbing spiral accelerates
Some quick updates from me in June 2023
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.
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...
Lessons from building Tally.so from 0 to $40k MRR all in public
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 […]
When privilege becomes a pre-requisite.
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...
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...
I sold Xnapper, here is a quick update about the acquisition details
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...
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...
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
Rest of World’s four Labor x Tech fellows reflect on their year reporting about the global tech industry’s impact on its workers.
And other updates in April 2023
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...
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’
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 →
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.
"Is This Anything?"
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 […]
Reached $10K MRR, launched Xnapper (#1 of the week), went on Indie Hackers podcast (😱), and other updates in Aug 2022...
I also curated 300+ Black Friday deals for you
Imagine selling a website you made for $10,000. Pretty great, huh? Well that's exactly what Dmytro did
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...
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...
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...
The Justice Department worries about the stability of Ethereum, DCG tries to bilk their subsidiary's creditors, and Biden threatens a crypto veto.
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...
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...
Writing about military spending is difficult.
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.
All of us, except the AI startups and VCs—unless a real war breaks out
Good news on paper, but the devil is in the details
Jurisdictional gamesmanship is a common strategy for crypto businesses. Here is how it worked out for Binance and its CEO. Spoiler: poorly.
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...
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...
Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2m ARR in public
I turn 30, built a new app, and other updates in December 2023
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 […]
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...
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.
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 →
It was a such a short month!
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.
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:
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: ...
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.
Why everyone should learn about machine learning
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...
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...
"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."
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...
You probably know more about machine learning math than you think
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...
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?
A New Name for an Old Problem
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...
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.
A conversation with Andrew Lee, CEO of Shortwave and cofounder of Firebase.
The world has a new largest country, and it's on the move.
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 […]
GPT-4o, Google I/O, Fugaku LLM, Prep for Machine Learning Interviews, and more
What are the imperatives of the upside?
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...
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.
<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...
The temperature in the Middle East got even hotter in April, with Israel and Iran trading attacks on each other’s sovereign buildings/territory. Somehow World War III has never really seemed in danger of breaking out but it is a reminder that only change is constant. Over in New York Donald Trump was falling asleep in… Continue reading April ’24: Juggling cash as new UK tax year begins →
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...
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...
Not the usual monthly update, just a small update about Xnapper - my latest product
The Convivial Society: Vol. 4, No. 8
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…
Searching for "that principle which keys us deeply into the pattern of all life."
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...
What generative AI capabilities does Google offer to developers?
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 is the first in a series of newsletters covering this blog
<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...
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...
April 12, 2024.
Ozempic, Fertilizer, Lobotomies, and the dangers of hubris
Trying some unconventional techniques to create a pop-art print of a Cherry Mash candy bar.
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...
If you don't acknowledge the point of tariffs, how can you hope to criticize them?
Hey you, did you do the thing you said you would do?
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....
How to skip the brain, bypass reason and head straight for the heart to sell
April 26, 2024.
Basketball podcasts, new media, and no more ELI5
How to bear the gravity of being.
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,…
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...
Drones have become an essential tool to map, measure and observe the extremely dangerous environments surrounding volcanic eruptions.
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...
A new set of cases for two concept sequences, and the end of the Data Driven Series.
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 […]
Some stats, updates, and whatnot
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...
"Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself."
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...
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...
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...
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…
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...
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...
Discovering virtual pinball, a hobbyist community devoted to it, and building a full-size virtual pinball cabinet.
<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...
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...
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...
And more things I talked about over coffee & dinner this week.
Enhance your IoT projects with our special offer! Get 20% off a yearly subscription to the Arduino Cloud Maker Plan using code CLOUD20MAY. Valid until the end of May, this deal saves you $14.38, reducing the price from $71.88 to $57.50. Benefits of the Maker Plan: What is Arduino Cloud? Arduino Cloud is the next […] The post Save 20% on Arduino Cloud Maker Plan this May! appeared first on Arduino...
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.
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 →
The case for customizable AI systems as an alternative to one-size-fits-all AI systems
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 >>
I was thrilled to see recently Alex Isora make $800k by selling Unicorn Platform, a website builder, as I previously interviewed him about learning to code without a CS degree. Alex has stayed on at Mars, the company which has acquired him and unlike a lot of founders, will stay
Lessons from building Tailscan in public to $500 MRR
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…
We’re aging too fast (AKA my entire AI/robotics investment thesis)
How the Chatbot Arena leaderboard for LLMs works and why it’s important to understand
my role? first-to-die. the job? weird as hell.
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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
Back to basics for AI startups and others
To get the authorities’ attention, victims get help from influencers specialized in niches like corruption and pet justice.
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…
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
An answer to a puzzle: why is that some businesses go down the Deming path, become data driven, achieve operational excellence, and die, and others acquire Process Power and win?
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.…
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!
“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...
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
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 […]
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 …
Teacher's Pet gets new sounds in this post in a series about scripting Visual Pinball tables.
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...
Also in September: $12K MRR, built a small new app, SEO, and other updates...
A Political Chatbot that Gives 3 Politically Diverse Answers to Every Prompt
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...
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 …
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.
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...
Interest rates, Passive investing, Ben Graham as a young man, Daniel Kahneman, Ken Langone, Lawrence Cunningham, Reed Hastings, Steve Eisman
Here's a crash course on the rising trend of building in public
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...
Digital rights activists have questioned the ethics of using “soft fakes” to resurrect the past and manage the future.
What does it mean for AI to be better than a human? And how can we tell?
The Convivial Society: Vol. 5, No. 7
I was watching the Steven Spielberg 1977 classic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with the family last night and nerded out when I saw a character that claimed to be a cartographer. I always do. It was the cartographer who recognized that the signals the aliens sent were coordinates. This is how they knew …
Time for some humor
Test-Fly A $20 Million Jet On An Apple? Yes. With MicroSPEED
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?
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:...
Some light Visual Pinball debugging and the world of DOF. New to DOF? Read on.
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 […]
From Changamire's expulsion of the Portuguese to the ruined cities of Zimbabwe.
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...
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...
Output similarity is a distraction
Also in this issue: one-off purchase vs. subscription, selling Xnapper, and other updates from me in Feb 2024
Full story on my latest role at Paddle, the new AI program, and what it means for you
the Light Phone diaries
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...
A travel writer’s education The post The Importance of Being Different appeared first on The American Scholar.
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...
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
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.
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...
A life well lived
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...
The world of work is changing.
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...
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...
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...
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 […]
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 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...
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...
because some words are good and others are bad
<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...
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...
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...
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.
Google DeepMind releases AlphaFold 3, KANs, LLM Benchmarks are being looked at more critically, Apple is bringing their AI chips to data centers, StackOverflow partners with OpenAI, and more
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 →
A quiet evening reading from Tanquerey’s The Spiritual Life, first published in 1923
And why direct forms of communication will always be super valuable
Democratizing educational technology... and more
Why treating AI like a person is the future
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...
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%.
After showering, many people "hand-squeegee" some of the water off themselves before using a towel.
Also, we have a prompt library!
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,
More dreams, less goals, and some commitments for the year
Hotmart is quietly turning even micro-influencers into millionaires.
TypingMind.com is launching tomorrow on Product Hunt!
Humans are really the ones to be scared of
that's really how my brain spelled passion!!
April 19, 2024.
#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...
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.
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 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 …
Douglas Kendyson, a former engineer at Flutterwave and Paystack, has built a profitable bootstrapped African startup.
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 →
Why you’re getting this: I’m Jason Nguyen. I run Bloomstory.co.uk and The Mailroom. This is my newsletter. I used to write this every week, but now I send this out when I can — life got in the way. Updates on what’s been going on in my life are at the bottom of this newsletter.
The philosophy and lessons behind "a moneymaking machine like no other" (with a cumulative trading profit of $100B +).
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,...
As soon as the sun comes out on a bank holiday, it feels like half of London heads down to the south coast, and Brighton in particular. And though that town certainly has a lot going for it, not least a thriving restaurant and pub/wine scene that can show you a great time at all budgets, I'm afraid the thought of fighting my way through those narrow Lanes alleyways on the hottest days of the year...
Whats With All The Humanoid Robots? Part 2
Laetitia@Work #70
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
Early access to some software we've built to make XmR charts more accessible.
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,...
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...
What do I like about Byzantine coinage? Most people probably admire the Byzantine solidus, a gold coin that maintained its weight and purity for over 600 years, which is quite remarkable for a coin. The solidus was exported all over the world, including to Europe, which lacked gold coinage at the time, making it the U.S. dollar of its day. That's neat, but it's not the solidus that impresses me....
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...
We used to consider writing an indication of time and effort spent on a task. That isn't true anymore.
Your assets are the government's collateral.
How can we train Resilience?
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...
Mapping actors and solutions
OpenAI Q*, Primer on Reinforcement Learning, and Implications
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. […]
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.
fuzzy processors are entering mass production
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’
[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...
A previous employer found it important that the whole team had business cards. I had to wait a few months...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
This is not the monthly update, just a quick announcement 😄
Also prompts! And things to watch out for!
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.
Annotated slides from a recent talk
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...
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...
I’m a blogger, and I often commission custom illustrations for my blog posts like this one: An example of an illustration I commissioned for the blog, part of my year-in-review series The blog’s previous illustrator was the awesome Loraine Yow, who worked with me for six years. She recently changed careers, so I’m looking for someone who can take over as the blog’s official illustrator. Benefits...
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,...
[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...
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...
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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 →
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...
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 …
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...
If you’re employed, it’s because somebody believes that spending money on your salary will lead to more profit for its...
Don't get stuck in neutral
Laetitia@Work #67
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...
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...
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
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...
A lively talk with the author about his new book, Winging It.
“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 […]
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.
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...
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...
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...
Today's interview is with Iron Brands (he's Dutch, that is his actual name), who joined a privacy analytics startups as a co-founder after it had already launched. We talked about how he met the original founder of Simple Analytics, how they negotiated the new ownership structure,
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…
Amazon grew it's revenue per employee from $50K to $1M over its first fifteen years.
Remembering Charlie Munger
To: Satya Nadella; Bill Gates
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...
Here are some notes on migrating a signed zone from BIND’s old auto-dnssec to its new dnssec-policy. I have been procrastinating this migration for years, and I avoided learning anything much about dnssec-policy until this month. I’m writing this from the perspective of a DNS operator rather than a BIND hacker. migrating from auto-dnssec risks to avoid things to know prior preparations which...
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...
It seemed like just yesterday that Twelve Mile Circle chronicled the kid who designed an imaginary town and counted various forms of transportation. Now my elementary aged student is all grown up, a newly-minted university graduate. Those interceding years passed much more quickly than I could have possibly imagined. Michigan State University is huge (~50,000 […] The post Graduated appeared first...
Canada's recent federal budget has sent ripples through the investment and real estate communities. A key change: a looming increase in capital gains tax on sizeable transactions. This has many wondering – should I sell assets before June 25th, 2024, to avoid the taxman's bite? Let's dive into the situation and explore the best course of action for different scenarios.
Notes from the first AI Engineer Summit.
And a consideration for choosing a language
It occurs to me that I have been Blendering for a long time. In fact, it’s been almost exactly a decade since I gave my first public presentation on the technique of generating shaded relief using Blender. And in that time, the method has been adopted far more widely than I could have ever anticipated … Continue reading My Decade with Blender →
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
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.
Check cashing, as a business, is a poorly understood "alternative" financial service.
The Amiga, The Decline, The Fall
Windows becomes competitive
The hand wringing about failures of model alignment is misguided
Highlights The TinyPilot website redesign is finally done. I’ve learned to make Debian packages, and it’s surprisingly simple. I’ve given up on Vue and frontend frameworks in general. Goal Grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Publish a blog post and video about building a homelab NAS server with TinyPilot Result: Published...
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.
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...
The low-hanging fruit of pizza happiness, possibly
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
I gained 1,500 new users, but how many will convert? And other updates in July 2022...
This is my 3rd post summarizing the key takeaways I got from reading the book Modeling Life. I recommend reading my earlier posts first to get a good grounding on the foundations covered in the book. A system can exhibit three different types of behavior: equilibrium, oscillation, and chaos. The E. coli bacteria we encountered…
Restore Order (to your printer)
I love the “carry-on only” traveling style, it’s cheaper and you don’t have to worry about airlines losing your stuff. Outside of requiring a bit more planning, what’s not to love? Turns out this is a beloved product category with a passionate community behind it, and as a result a lot of manufacturers are making really awesome bags. As a result you see different bags with different strategies,...
Different Kinds of Difference At Work
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...
For everyone to have access to AGI, everyone must also have access to the compute to use it
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:
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
These moments in time seem to have a higher density than usual.
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...
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...
A long overdue VC apocalypse and the birth of the first real AI companies
Landevenneg is a small village in Finistère, Brittany. It is famous for its Benedictine abbey and its religious history. Landevenneg...
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 →
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 […]
Political pollsters have a problem. Certain groups in the population are much happier to talk to pollsters than others, so if you call up 1000 people to ask who they're planning to vote for, the results you get won't really represent the voting intentions of the
When Google Glass launched in 2013, the public opinion seemed to be “interesting technology, but the world isn’t ready yet.” Now that more than a decade has passed, the world may finally be ready — especially with the omission of controversial features like video recording. If that appeals to you, then Akashv44 has a great […] The post Create your own affordable Arduino-powered smart glasses...
When Steve Jobs spoke about the intersection of liberal arts and technology, he did not envision crushing symbols of art and culture.
A new model opens up new possibilities
Mathematicians have disproved a major conjecture about the relationship between curvature and shape. The post Strangely Curved Shapes Break 50-Year-Old Geometry Conjecture first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Hard to believe that those dumb hobbits risked their lives walking all the way to Mordor when they could have just taken the Orange Line. Oh wait, the tunnel under the mountain is closed so they would have had to switch to the Red Line at Bree and then made another transfer to get to Mount Doom. Still that seems like a minor inconvenience when compared to risking imprisonment by nasty...
Held in Hawaii this year, the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) hosted its annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) that focuses on the latest developments in human-computer interaction. Students from universities all across the world attended the event and showcased how their devices and control systems could revolutionize how we interact with […] The post Check out...
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...
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...
The striking synchronicity with which Great Awokening terminology increased in news media worldwide
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:
Some hints about what the next year of AI looks like
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 ultimate destination was Dayton, Ohio and it took about seven and a half hours to get there. However we didn’t just sit in Dayton for an entire week. If I had to drive all that way you better believe I would do some County Counting along the way too. At this point I’ve already […] The post Dayton, Ohio Part 4 (Venturing North) appeared first on Twelve Mile Circle - An Appreciation of Unusual...
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.
It seems that the internet’s greatest potential is to create intimacy across distance. Which means we still have a long way to go.
The Birth of Computer Operating Systems
In the 1450s, German inventor Johannes Gutenburg designed the movable-type printing press, the first practical method of mass-duplicating text. After various other projects, he applied his press to the production of the Bible, yielding over one hundred copies of a text that previously had to be laboriously hand-copied. His Bible was a tremendous cultural success, triggering revolutions not only...
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
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...
How to not waste it
Does quantity lead to quality?
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
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 …
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.
Simple and common acts of nature often inspire brilliant design. Such is the case with “Puddle,” a series of flower vessels that mimic a puddle of water. Using properties of transparency and surface tension, these whimsical vessels create the illusion of a single plant growing from a puddle. Created by Japanese design duo YOY (Naoki […] Related posts: This Piece of Wall Art Doubles as a...
Just when PowerSeeker thought they had nowhere to go...
Mixing REAL Time With REAL UNIX Is Not Magic...It Is Technology.
In pursuit of a better book deal (and record deal and podcast deal...)
fine fine I'll write about AI
You are awake. You think and you feel. But what is it that is doing all this thinking and feeling? We call it “consciousness” and over 100 years ago the philosopher Edmund Husserl made a bold attempt to uncover its secrets. Subjective experience is private The thing is: Consciousness is not “out there”, it is “in here“. It is personal and subjective. When I say that I like squirrels or that my...
Crypto-related litigation is in full swing, as the Terra civil fraud trial has kicked off and two other cases against crypto companies have survived motions to dismiss.
Are you keeping up with the Commodore?
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
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...
Taking AI timelines seriously
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
An oldie but goldie
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).
Launching a small business is a thrilling entrepreneurial adventure, but selecting the appropriate legal framework can feel like traversing a complex maze. This guide sheds light on the merits and drawbacks of the three primary options: sole proprietorship, partnership, and incorporation,
A positive vision for the transformation to come
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 →
Russia is sometimes described as the world's most sanctioned nation. And while that's true, the long list of sanctions that the G7 coalition has placed on Russia in response to its attack on Ukraine are surprisingly light compared to the fewer but far more-draconian sanctions placed on Iran over the last decade or so. This ordering of sanctions precedence is a mistake. With its all-out invasion of...
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,...
Operating Systems Come in Many Flavors But QNX Can Take the Heat
The Underrated Virtues of Plain Vanilla
We should have known the famed urbanist loved the bike.
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
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…
“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.
Question: Answer: The post Stand Out and Dare to Disagree appeared first on Vadim Kravcenko.
We all know avocados are healthy, and coke is bad. Yet we can’t help but gulp down a coke with a plate full of french fries. It takes an enormous amount of energy to break bad habits. I’ve broken bad habits under two conditions: (a) it’s a do-or-die situation, or (b) you have a device…
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...
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...
I was planning to finish my last two data updates for 2024, but decided to take a break and look at the seven stocks (Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla) which carried the market in 2023. While I will use the "Magnificent Seven" moniker attached by these companies by investors and the media, my preference would have been to call them the Seven Samurai. After all, like their...
Employment Insurance (EI) is a social insurance program in Canada that provides temporary financial support to eligible individuals who lose their jobs through no fault of their own. While this is the most commonly understood purpose of EI, the program offers various benefits beyond situations of job loss, extending its reach and impact on individuals and society as a whole.
Happy Friday everyone, Below is the story of: how I found an artist to collaborate and mint my 1st ever NFT project on the theme of “build in public” how it all came together on Twitter DMs how we plan to auction/sell it to a thoughtful buyer how we intend to donate all the proceeds to the
Al Capone went to prison for tax evasion, and didn't go to prison for tax evasion.
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 →
The Starbucks rewards app is an incredible business. However, mobile orders are getting out of control and hurting the brand's "premium" vibe.
Hello everyone! It’s me again – Tony 👋 Time flies! February 2022 marks the 6 months milestone of me going indie hacking full time! 🥳 In this issue, I’ll share my regular updates from February and some thoughts on the first 6 months of my journey. Let’s go!
Technological change brings organizational change.
I’ve enjoyed March. I managed to enjoy a few days’ skiing, despite less snow than any of us would like, in the Austrian alps. Back at home, the sun has been getting stronger, and the evenings have been getting lighter – and now with Summer Time we will enjoy lovely late evenings for six months.… Continue reading Mar ’24: A towering influence →
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $80-100k/month in revenue and employs six other people. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and my professional life overall. Goal Grades At the start of each...
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...
A cool Japanese clamtop
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Applications to our new residential seminar close this coming Friday, 31st May
Earlier this year, I created an open-source app called PicoShare. It’s a simple Golang web app for sharing files. I use it to send files that are too large to be email attachments, but I don’t want the recipient to deal with Dropbox or Google Drive. A few months ago, I started seeing my PicoShare server die every few days. When I checked the logs, I saw an out of memory error:
Last time, we left off at the fact that modern films are distributed with their audio in multiple formats. Most of the time, there is a stereo version of the audio, and a multi-channel version of the audio that is perhaps 5.1 or 7.1 and compressed using one of several codecs that were designed within the film industry for this purpose. But that was all about film, in physical form. In the modern...
Four long-awaited studies paint a muddy picture of social media’s impact on public opinion
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 […]
Tether, a stablecoin, has been in the news for offering sanctioned actors such as Hamas a means to participate in the global payments ecosystem. In this post I want to explore in more depth how Tether is being used to dodge sanctions. I'm going to avoid drawing on the Hamas example, which has been controversial, and will instead dissect the U.S. Department of Justice's recent indictment of group...
👋 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!
Designed by M — N Associates, Ho Chi Minh City.
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $60-80k/month in revenue and employs six other people. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and my professional life overall. Highlights TinyPilot is facing a supply...
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...
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...
'Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion' That Works
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
Can audio engineering ideas help us deal with life in the city?s
Okay, promises, promises. Here's the first of my bucket list projects I'm completing which I've intermittently worked on for literally two decades. Now that I've finally shaken out more bugs, tuned it up and cleaned it off, it's time to let people play with the source code. real serial port) and has expanded RAM with 16K of addressing space, all on an unexpanded stock Commodore 64. It's almost...
If you are a paid subscriber, voting is open for one week
In building Juno, a visionOS app for YouTube, a question that’s come up from users a few times is whether it supports 360° and 180° videos (for the unfamiliar, it’s an immersive video format that fully surrounds you). The short answer is no, it’s sort of a niche feature without much adoption, but for fun I wanted to take the weekend and see what I could come up with. Spoiler: it’s not really...
How do immature egg cells maintain genetic quality for decades before they mature? Scientists find unusual safeguards in this quiescent cell that may inform research into fertility. The post How ‘Idle’ Egg Cells Defend Their DNA From Damage first appeared on Quanta Magazine
One of the most difficult situations that a person can face is to have a loved-one in a critical medical condition and have to make life-or-death medical decisions for them. I have been in this situation many times as the consulting neurologist, and I have seen how weighty this burden can be on family members. […] The post Predicting Outcome in Severe Brain Injury first appeared on NeuroLogica...
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...
The new Kino app recording ProRes Log with a custom preview LUT. Yes we’re still talking about shooting video on iPhones. But I also want to talk about digital cinema shooting in general, in a world where top camera makers are battling to give filmmakers everything we want in a small, affordable package. How does the DV Rebel spirit — born of camcorders and skateboard dollies — live on in a time...
It's been an eventful year
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 […]
Most of us go about our lives comforted by the thought “I would never drop a nuclear weapon on the moon.” The truth is that given a lot of power, a nuclear weapon, and a lot of extremely specific circumstances, we too might find ourselves thinking “I should nuke the moon.”
One of several highlights for me in January was visiting Salisbury cathedral, which I did on an impulse while travelling back from the Coastal Folly. My main frame of reference to the cathedral being those notorious Russian nerve agent assassins citing it as their reason for visiting England, something which to a Londoner had as… Continue reading Jan ’24: A giant tax bill lands →
Physicists and cosmologists will have a new probe of primordial processes when Europe launches the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) next decade. The post Hopes of Big Bang Discoveries Ride on a Future Spacecraft first appeared on Quanta Magazine
And definitions for the most important terms you should know
Here are a few flavors of a technique, illumination cartography, that uses data to shed light on its underlying basemap. There’s something satisfying about presenting a phenomenon as revealing geography rather than obscuring it. Love, John
I'm working on a side project right now, one of several, which involves telematics devices (essentially GPS trackers with i/o) from a fairly reputable Chinese manufacturer. The device is endlessly configurable and so, like you see with a lot of radios, it has a UART for programming. The manufacturer provided a cable for this purpose, and when I plug it into my laptop running Windows, it appears in...
The hype is not supported by current evidence
Let's talk about overhead paging. The concept goes by various names: paging, public address, even intercom, although the accuracy of the latter term can be questionable. It's probably one of the aspects of business telephone systems that gets the most public attention, on account of the many stories (both true and mythical) of the exploits of people who have figured out the paging extension at a...
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 […]
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, …
James and his partner Danielle have an enviable working set-up - they live and work on a sailing boat!
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.…
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...
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...
After a rise in shootings, an all-woman group is advising the new Brazilian government on how to deal with radicalization online.
Hello everyone! It's Tony again with another monthly updates.
Despite Camberwell's increasing reputation for all kinds (and all budgets) of great food, it still seemed unlikely that this bare-bones pub, just opposite the Walworth bus depot and furnished, as far as I could tell, with tables and chairs nicked from the local secondary school, could house anywhere worth eating at, never mind somewhere worthy of a special journey. Sure, the beer selection was...
Homer's epic poem tells the story of how Odysseus struggled to return home after the Trojan War. It is one of the greatest stories in history.
We got it in 1983, I think, so it only took me about 41 years to get around to it. This Tomy Tutor isn't a replacement system I secondarily acquired, nor is it a Ship of Theseus Frankenstein rebuild. This is my actual first computer, in its original case, on its original components, with the Federated Group sticker still on the original box. And it still works. His High Holy Munificence Fred R....
The Tax Break You've Been Looking for !
Studio Kloek has shared images of a bedroom and bathroom suite they designed for their client who desired "a hotel-like bedroom and bathroom in their home, so they could feel as if they were on vacation every day."
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
Everyone’s inner world is the one they are truly living in. There are billions of these worlds, each one larger than you or I can imagine. Culture, then, is the connections between these worlds — a distributed embassy — an invisible armature of intersecting thought. Minds, after all, are too complex for a singular, shared reality. The best we can hope for as an expanding population of...
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!
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...
Let's talk about ChatGPT with Code Interpreter & Microsoft Copilot
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 →
Then they stealth edited the piece. They knew they'd committed libel.
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.
<p> Some super </p> <p class="top-button"> <a href="#top">🔝</a> </p>
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...
Don't overcomplicate things
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
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
The OpenAI CEO’s dismissal of an Indian competitor launched a debate over the country’s tech capabilities.
Owning your own message, with intermediaries
It's my name, and the name of my Substack too. That's one less thing for everyone to remember.
Indie updates, B2B vs B2C, Black Friday, surfing, skimboarding, hardware.
Will the Reality Pro be the metaverse’s iPhone moment?
In the past (in fact two years ago, proof I have been doing this for a while now!) I wrote about the "inconvenient truth" that structural aspects of the Internet make truly decentralized systems infeasible, due to the lack of a means to perform broadcast discovery. As a result, most distributed systems rely on a set of central, semi-static nodes to perform initial introductions. For example,...
As the Mayoral election approaches, all sorts of parties are announcing all sorts of policies on all sorts of things. manifesto to be released, that of Green Party candidate Zoë Garbett, a 134-page monster which was launched yesterday. And because transport is one of the areas Mayors have most control over, let's dig into some of her more intriguing transport policies. Set an ambition to flatten...
The Dayton trip came to an end but I still had a bunch of stuff to talk about that didn’t fit into any of the earlier articles. Naturally I’ve collected them all together within this final compilation to serve as a wrap-up. Then we can call this one done and move onto the next travel […] The post Dayton, Ohio Part 7 (Hodgepodge) appeared first on Twelve Mile Circle - An Appreciation of Unusual...
Live Hangs, Early Chapters, Cut Material, and more…
When I was a kid, I used to take allowance money and occasionally buy rubber-band-powered balsa wood airplanes at a local store. Maybe you've seen these. You wind up the rubber band, which stretches the elastomer and stores energy in the elastic strain of the polymer, as in Hooke's Law (though I suspect the rubber band goes well beyond the linear regime when it's really wound up, because of the...
[Hardware] Tiny volumetric display
I grew up primarily with the Commodore 64, where if you wanted to do anything really cool and useful, you had to do it in 6502 assembly language. Today I still write 6502 assembly, plus some Power ISA and even a little TMS9900. I like assembly languages and how in control of the CPU you feel writing in one. But you know what would make me not like an assembly language? One that was contrived and...
Jumia says it paid its logistics partners. Logistics partners say they paid all the workers. The workers say they haven’t been paid.
I’m workshopping a new book. For the last few months, I’ve been feverishly writing a book about strategy. Strategy for individuals, small organizations and large ones as well. Strategy for someone seeking to make a difference, and strategy for people who do projects. Starting this week, I’ll be leading a series of discussions and talks […]
It's the Memorial Day holiday weekend and it's time for a little deferred maintenance, especially on those machines I intend to work on more in the near future. So we'll start with one that's widely considered to be a remarkable cul-de-sac in computing history: the Canon Cat. work processor" because of its built-in telecommunications, modem and word processor even though Jef Raskin, its...
The mystery of why we don't dream of building perfect societies anymore
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...
USB, the Universal Serial Bus, was first released in 1996. It did not achieve widespread adoption until some years later; for most of the '90s RS-232-ish serial and its awkward sibling the parallel port were the norm for external peripheral. It's sort of surprising that USB didn't take off faster, considering the significant advantages it had over conventional serial. Most significantly, USB was...
Took mum to her childhood home Sunday just gone to see Papa. We walked in and mum saw Nana and they both started to cry. Papa, Alan, Alby, my grandfather was quite sick. The room was quiet and somber but had an unshakable aura of warmth and love. Everyone was
How do we think about a fundamentally unknown and unknowable risk, when the experts agree only that they have no idea?
A selection of fifteen formerly paywalled articles
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...
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...
The Dawn of Microsoft's Golden Age
What makes machine learning infra so important and why I find it so interesting
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.)...
Laetitia@Work #62
In the 1900s, Albert Einstein unified the concepts of space and time, giving us a useful new way to picture the universe.
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...
Technological progress must be harnessed, not fought
And prompt engineering is a subset of software engineering.
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
[Hardware] The smallest and silliest MIDI synth yet
Disclosure: Waterfield sent this in exchange for a review. Yeah, that probably colors something on a deep-down, subconscious level, but I won’t say anything that I don’t truly believe. Unlike a phone or laptop, the Vision Pro is one of those products that is particularly tricky to take around without a case. I’ve got around this by wrapping it in a hoodie and throwing it in my backpack, but I was...
<![CDATA[I'm developing the new program Insphex (inspect hex), a hex dump tool that is created with and runs on the Medley Interlisp environment. Similarly to the Linux command hexdump, it shows the contents of files as hexadecimal values and the corresponding ASCII characters. An early version of the program prints the hex dump to the standard output like this. Output of the Insphex hex dump...
Google search is overwhelmed with spam these days. Back in January I switched to Kagi and have been happy with it. It’s not free but there’s a limited trial to check it out. I pay $10/mo for unlimited access. Turns out I do about 50 searches a day. I’m unclear on how Kagi works or why it’s better than Google. It seems to be returning more quality results and less SEO-churn old-but-look-new pages....
Six theories.
I feel like I used to spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with suspect hard drives. I mean, like, back in high school. These days I almost never do, or on the occasion that I have storage trouble, it's a drive that has completely stopped responding at all and there's little to do besides replacing it. One time I had two NVMe drives in two different machines do this to me the same week. Bad...
I had meant to write something today, but I'm just getting over a case of the COVID and had a hard time getting to it. Instead I did the yard work, edited and uploaded a YouTube video, and then spewed out a Cohost thread as long as a blog post. So in lieu of your regularly scheduled content, I'd like to link you to the Cohost thread on the Monticello AT&T microwave site (complete with pictures!)...
Lessons on Listening from Plutarch
Previously on Deep Space Nine, I wrote that "the mid-2000s were an unsettled time in mobile computing." Today, I want to share a little example. Over the last few weeks, for various personal reasons, I have been doing a lot of reading about embedded operating systems and ISAs for embedded computing. Things like the NXP TriMedia (Harvard architecture!) and pSOS+ (ran on TriMedia!). As tends to...
But is AI different than other technologies?
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
A new Amnesty International report raises difficult questions.
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 […]
Lessons from building Senja.io to $4,000 MRR in Public
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'm heading to Las Vegas for re:invent soon, perhaps the most boring type of industry extravaganza there could be. In that spirit, I thought I would write something quick and oddly professional: I'm going to complain about Docker. Packaging software is one of those fundamental problems in system administration. It's so important, so influential on the way a system is used, that package managers...
The Hardest Working Software in the World
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...
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...
Going all in on life
Back in 1935, they seized the gold. But now, digital gold is back.
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…
[Hardware] Army of Robot Slide Whistles
I want somewhere to put my Vision Pro when not in use. Many people use the original box, and there’s beautiful stands that exist out there, but I was looking for something more compact and vertical so it would take up less room on my desk. So I opened Fusion 360 (which I am still very much learning), grabbed my calipers, and set out to design a little stand. There was interest when I showed the...
This year I read Robert Antelme's The Human Race for the first time. I was nonplussed. The strange title, closer to popular sociology than memoir, should have been a warning. This was not quite the horror story one imagines of memoirs from those who survived Nazi concentration camps, which are no doubt read with a certain kind of pleasure – not quite Schadenfreude but the least amount of pleasure...
There is an interesting disconnect in our culture recently. About 90% of people claim that they verify information they encounter in the news and on social media, and 96% of Americans say that we need to limit the spread of misinformation online. And yet, the spread of misinformation is rampant. Most people, 74%, report that […] The post Spotting Misinformation first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.
ANACAPA Architecture has shared photos of a 1970’s-era residence and combination guesthouse/home office they updated in the hills of Montecito, California. Collaborating with the client, the designers reworked the home to bring it up to date. They did this by maintaining the home’s existing footprint and structure, yet completely reimagining the interior floor plan, focusing […]
Plus: bland buildings can't be blamed on labor costs, reasons to be sceptical about prediction markets, and gentrification policies that actually help.
If you’ve spent any amount of time driving through any major American city, you know what it’s like to be stuck in bumper to bumper traffic. But if you’re from Los Angeles – the land of freeways, traffic and smog – you know this struggle especially well. But Jake Berman, the author of The Lost The post The Lost Subways of North America appeared first on 99% Invisible.
Crypto enthusiasts protest the trial of Alexey Pertsev As the multiple Tornado Cash legal cases wend their way through courts in the Netherlands and the U.S., we continue to learn how society's money laundering laws will be applied to some of the more unique financial entities being created on the new technological medium of blockchains. Last month Alexey Pertsev, a co-creator and...
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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...
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.
Laetitia@Work #68
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 […]
My second day of county counting focused west of Dayton, once again targeting five new counties. This time I planned to capture Butler and Darke counties in Ohio; and Union, Fayette, and Randolph counties in Indiana. Hopefully this excursion would also take about three hours like the previous day. Unfortunately I knew that it wouldn’t […] The post Dayton, Ohio Part 5 (Venturing West) appeared...
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...
Governments seize huge quantities of bitcoin, and a few people seem to be yearning for the days of peak crypto mania.
And the centre's not looking too good, either.
Some free software to create, modify, experiment with and share XmR charts. Unlock the ability to become more data driven today.
Central bank settlement systems are the the tectonic plates of the payment system: they are vitally important to our lives, but we never see them in action. All of a nations' electronic payments are ultimately completed, or settled, on these systems. If they stop working, our financial lives go on pause, or at least regress to older forms of payment. In this post I want to introduce readers to a...
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...
Over the past year, AI startups have raised some impressive amounts of money. OpenAI raised $10 billion, Anthropic did $6 billion, Inflection AI raised $1.3 billion, and dozens of companies closed rounds in the hundreds of millions.
This may be our answer - we could put the number pad around our clickwheel.
Of course maps are just the most fascinating and information dense graphical information products around…in my unbiased opinion. I can, and do, go on and on about the deep and pervasive benefits of spatial representations. But…well…sometimes a map, strictly speaking, can have some issues. That’s ok though, because maps are here to fix the problem …
We’ve had ChatGPT for 18 months, but what’s it for? What are the use-cases? Why isn’t it useful for everyone, right now? Do Large Language Models become universal tools that can do ‘any’ task, or do we wrap them in single-purpose apps, and build thousands of new companies around that?
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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.
Laetitia@Work #69
Documentation is really just glorified dog sitting
Designed by Universal Favourite, Sydney.
Marvelling at the full circle life seems to have taken after retirement.
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...
Whether it's the joy of self-employment or the burden of payroll decisions, every business owner faces unique financial considerations. One critical choice arises early on: to pay yourself a salary or take dividends? Understanding the pros and cons of each path empowers you to optimize your income tax position, secure important benefits, and navigate the complex world of corporate and personal...
March 1, 2024.
Mathematicians have struggled to prove Falconer’s Conjecture, a simple, but far-reaching, hypothesis about the distances between points. They’re finally getting close. The post Number of Distances Separating Points Has a New Bound first appeared on Quanta Magazine
These are the two most-streamed children's shows. And Joe Brumm's personal touch for Bluey trumps Cocomelon's engagement-hacking approach.
One of the things I love most about working in a community studio is hearing about other ceramicists' experiences with new-to-me clay bodies. This has helped me feel confident in trying out many different clay bodies, and I now use a bunch of different clay bodies in my practice. Yet there are too few commercial clay body reviews out in the world, even if you deep dive various topical forums! I...
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.
Originally from Florence, Italy, I'm a printmaker and tutor now based in London for the past 10 years. I work mainly on abstract art, and I am especially interested in the possibilities that printmaking offers when experimenting with colour, shapes and textures. Describe your printmaking process. I typically begin my process with geometric shapes or a selected colour palette, which I enjoy...
IPL is one of the greatest entertainments for a cricket lover like me. Chennai Super Kings (CSK) is my favorite team. Ruturaj Gaikwad, the new CSK captain for the IPL 2024 season, lost 10 out of 13 tosses: LLLLWLLLLLLWL. The probability of seeing the sequence LLLLWLLLLLLWL is 0.513 or 0.00012. Unsurprisingly, the odds of seeing…
When I wrote about open-air dining in seoul I thought nobody would care, but surprisingly I got quite a bit of comments and DMs from fellow covid-cautious travellers. I would keep on...
For decades scientists were confused by Antarctic sea ice. Climate models predict that it should be decreasing, and yet it has been steadily and slowly increasing. It also made for a great talking point for climate change deniers – superficially it seems like counter evidence to the global warming narrative, and at least paints scientists […] The post Antarctic Sea Ice Hits Record Low first...
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.
I recently received the following question to the SGU e-mail: “I have had several conversations with friends/colleagues lately regarding indigenous beliefs/stories. They assert that not believing these based on oral histories alone is morally wrong and ignoring a different cultures method of knowledge sharing. I do not want to be insensitive, and I would never […] The post Indigenous Knowledge...
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...
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...
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 →
While on vacation I went on a small road-trip across Estonia. During the second half of the trip I ended up being in Võrumaa, and while driving I suddenly remembered a random fact that some people mentioned in a hackerspace Slack channel: there’s a new museum around here! The museum was officially opened on 10th of June 2023 (more news coverage from ERR) and when me and my wife got there, we were...
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $80-100k/month in revenue and employs six other people. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and my professional life overall. Highlights TinyPilot had its...
A lie.
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.
The faces are back, a new book, calm, beauty, civil war. The faces are back. Feels like something is happening here. This ^ is the start of a new book. “We need more calm companies.” — Justin Jackson What is beautiful? Another face. These papers are so bright and saturated that it’s tough to get the white balance right. Civil war.
Ever wondered about what happens when banks are closed or why some apps have operating hours? It's fascinating.
I’ve had quite a lot of culture to enjoy in February. Aside from some travel for the Six Nations rugby, I’ve been to two shows – one in London’s Royal Opera House and one on the south coast. Both events were either full or practically full. Covid feels fully behind us now. But the prices… Continue reading Feb ’24: Envyidia →
What do a Dutch chocolate chip cookie and a thousand-year-old teahouse in Kyoto have in common?
Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold3 and other deep learning algorithms can now predict the shapes of interacting complexes of protein, DNA, RNA and other molecules, better capturing cells’ biological landscapes. The post New AI Tools Predict How Life’s Building Blocks Assemble first appeared on Quanta Magazine
May 10, 2024.
I've raised $12M for my company + hired amazing people -- and until very recently, whenever anyone would ask me my 10-year plan I would flat out say "I have no idea".
An early draft of Probably Overthinking It included two chapters about probability. I still think they are interesting, but the other chapters are really about data, and the examples in these chapters are more like brain teasers — so I’ve saved them for another book. Here’s an excerpt from the chapter on Bayes theorem. In 1889 Joseph Bertrand posed and solved one of the oldest paradoxes in...
Continuing a recent theme, here comes along another example of excellent restaurant pedigree producing a fantastic place to eat. The Buxton is a smart and buzzy spot halfway down Brick Lane, within trotting distance of sister restaurant the Culpeper which is also a lovely (if often wildly oversubscribed) modern British bistro with rooftop kitchen garden. The same guys also run the Green in...
Inside Stability AI's roster of AI models.
Thoughts on planning and letting go of expectations
Is your bookshelf ready for Summer? If not, we have you covered. Continuing a recurring tradition, Archinect has reached out to notable figures across the architecture community who have been featured in our editorial over the past year, asking them what books they believe should be on your radar. The resulting list, in its own way, encapsulates the most important conversations taking place...
Dayton is decently sized place with about 130,000 residents in the city proper and about 800,000 in the larger metropolitan area. So that makes it large enough for some attractions and urban amenities, but nobody would mistake it for a city that never sleeps. I figured I might run out of things to do before […] The post Dayton, Ohio Part 2 (Take a Walk) appeared first on Twelve Mile Circle - An...
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...
Payments companies are regularly punished for engaging in money laundering. MoneyGram, for instance, has has to pay multiple fines. Western Union was famously busted in 2017. Meanwhile, Cash App is being probed as we speak for inadequate anti-money laundering controls. In the future, these companies may have in their grasp a very simple techno-legal trick that allows them to deal with dirty money...
Part of our 80/20 series sit on a cushion for 20 mins per day focus on your sensory experiences (touch, sight, smell, sound). Try to perceive them as accurately as possible [1] [2] [3] footnotes: is that really all? on one level, yes -- both in the sense that
I find it difficult to believe but, it was ten years ago today that I posted the first article on my then-new website, Drew Ex Machina. […]
Last week, someone leaked a spreadsheet of SoundThinking sensors to Wired. You are probably asking "What is SoundThinking," because the company rebranded last year. They used to be called ShotSpotter, and their outdoor acoustic gunfire detection system still goes by the ShotSpotter name. ShotSpotter has attracted a lot of press and plenty of criticism for the gunfire detection service they provide...
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...
The best critics (or reviewers) educate, entertain and help us spend our time better.
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...
March 29, 2024.
The Swedish music giant is pushing to make Africa’s biggest sound the world’s favorite sound.
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...
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...
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.
Dynamic pricing, Greenback emissions, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Working too hard, Ozempic's effect on the brain, Race and cardiovascular disease, Inflation's effect on insurance pricing
When people have asked, I’ve told them with a straight face that we didn’t go to Daytona for Spring Break, no, we went to Dayton. As in Ohio. As in probably the least likely Spring Break destination in the United States. We managed to avoid warm weather, sandy beaches, and southern hospitality for… a bunch […] The post Dayton, Ohio Part 1 (The Wright Stuff) appeared first on Twelve Mile Circle -...
In any creative endeavor, it’s possible to define success as the big win, the moment when your dreams match reality. Success is the end of imposter syndrome, stability and finally making it to the other side. By this definition, it’s clear that success isn’t going to happen. It’s incompatible with the reason you do this […]
Making friends is hard; introducing others is easy.
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...
Vegetable carts, flower shops, mom-and-pop stores: Small speakers that read out digital payment receipts are making fintech companies big money.
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.
(just a quick announcement...)
March 15, 2023.
I mentioned earlier that while I prefer specializing in non-x86 laptops, that doesn't mean I don't collect interesting or unusual x86 laptops, like the Brother GeoBook NB-60 (I finally tracked down a mostly working NB-80C, the top of the line model, which will be the subject of a future restoration). However, this one is a unit I've had since about 1998 when they were getting rid of it at the...
One of the curses of a good memory is the inability to forget stupid, hurtful things we said in the past, and sometimes last week. Years ago I wrecked a friendship with a glib remark, a wisecrack that I didn’t even believe but had convinced myself was funny (it was, in fact, but also gratuitously nasty). Granted, some people deserve to be hurt, but that wasn’t the case here. I said such things to...
Everyone hates Scrum, or at least it seems so, except for management. I did as well, but a difference is that I started my career in 1981, long before the hordes of Scrums took root. 1981, you say, so you must have done Waterfall, so you are old and have
Last weekend to celebrate our 94th month anniversary we decided to attend a beginner’s risograph workshop at Knuckles & Notch. To be very honest I haven’t heard of the word “risograph” until...
What happened when English villagers encountered black Americans during World War II?
Investors have been debating the dividend question for decades. So far, shareholders have been well served by Warren Buffett's reluctance to send out dividend checks.
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.
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...
The structural reasons why banks sometimes behave bizarrely in interactions with customers, like forgetting things which customers tell them.
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The Convivial Society: Vol. 5, No. 4
Nothing connects.
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 […]
Things people nigh-universally like to eat: salt, fat, sugar, starch, sauces, meat, drugs...
Notes for myself, and maybe you too.
A lesson in ignoring economics
Sound code is added in this third in a series of posts about scripting Visual Pinball tables.
Ruby on Rails, or 'Rails' for short, is a framework for making websites with the programming language Ruby. The idea behind it is to simplify how programmers create websites and it caused a storm amongst developers when it was released in August 2004 by software engineer David Heinemeier
Highlights TinyPilot’s EU distributor is on track to begin sales by the end of August. I’ve freed up time by delegating responsibilities to my teammates. I miraculously became unstuck on two tasks that have been blocking work for months. Goal Grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Get my EU partner ready to begin sales by the...
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 …
How I find clear signals in a misinforming & disinforming noisy world; To see the future, look back in time
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.
A glimpse into the biggest challenge in the world of AI, why it matters to you, and why it's worth so much
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 →
A letter from a father flying solo with his toddler
Have you worked in digital design for a while? I bet you’ve been under pressure to apply deceptive design patterns...
In the halcyon days of analogue modems and POTS dialup Internet, when the only wireless connection in your house was between the cordless phone and the wall, anything having to do with the Web was best consumed in small bites (pun intended). If you wanted to take data with you, you downloaded it first. Which brings us to this. This watch was not a device I owned back in the day (or had even...
We were a Commodore 64/128 household growing up, and Apple IIe systems at school, but that doesn't mean I was unaware of Atari 8-bits. There was a family at church who had an 800XL and later a 130XE — and a stack of COMPUTE!'s I used to read through for hours — and it was interesting to compare the two worlds, especially the relatively luxurious Atari BASIC and DOS against Commodore's spartan...
Things I know
In four months, I’ll embark on the adventure of a lifetime—fatherhood. To prepare, I’ve been honing a quintessential father skill—storytelling. If my son inherits even a fraction of my tastes, he’ll soon develop a passion for film noir detective stories. … Continue reading →
If the COVID pandemic showed us anything, it is that our public spaces are overflowing with opportunity for germ transmission. In 2019, most people didn’t think twice about touching a gas pump handle or an ATM touchscreen, but it quickly became apparent that such contact presents a genuine risk. We have technology to detect interaction […] The post Synjets provide non-contact haptic feedback...
The rise of AI is creating both crisis and opportunity
No update this month I’m skipping my normal retrospective this month, as I sold TinyPilot and am taking some time to figure out my next project. Retrospectives will hopefully resume in a month or two!
Here’s another installment in Data Q&A: Answering the real questions with Python. Previous installments are available from the Data Q&A landing page. corr_trend What does “strength” mean?¶ Here’s a question from the Reddit statistics forum. I am currently doing a uni assignment and one of my tasks is analysing the correlation between two variables. When I use the correlation function in Excel, it...
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
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...
James McKinven is an entrepreneur who has succeeded in making money from podcasts - no easy feat. He earns money by editing podcasts for companies
How can it be that a) all products are designed, b) designers want to create something good for the world...
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...
My thoughts on the new edition with a focus on inconsistency avoidance, one of the twenty-five psychological tendencies that can cause human misjudgment.
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.
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Unfortunately, later it turns out souls are just absolutely delicious. Today's News:
The global reach and impact of our journalism in 2023
What life is like in a challenge trial
Unlike many indie founders, I’ve never shared revenue numbers for Preceden, my SaaS timeline maker tool. Even if they were remarkable – which they are not really – I just don’t think there are many good reasons to publicly share revenue numbers, and there are lots of downsides. However, below I’ll share a chart showing … Continue reading My Indie SaaS Revenue has Grown 37% per Year for 13 Years →
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
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, […]
Why does Juan Joya Borja (aka El Risitas aka “Spanish Laughing Guy”) always put a smile on our faces.
Yep, that’s it: I like painting with watercolors. As a hobby. As a student, I thought hobbies were lame. Because:...
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...
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
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...
Adding precision to the debate on openness in AI
December 1, 2023.
Occasionally, research into the history of telephony takes you into some strange places. There are conspiracy theories, of course, and there are people who insist on their version of events so incessantly that details of dates and places can become heated arguments. There is also the basic nature of the internet: the internet has a wealth of historical information but it is scattered across many...
A Federal judge ruled last week that the emergency banking measures taken to end the Ottawa convoy protest in 2022 contravened the protestor's rights. In this post I want to provide my reading of this particular ruling and what is at stake for Canadians and their bank accounts. To be clear, Justice Mosley's ruling touched on far more than the banking measures, and extended to the broader legality...
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!
The new year dawns, not just with fresh resolutions, but also the opportunity to reassess and optimize your tax strategy. While taxes may not be the most exhilarating topic, savvy planning can significantly reduce your liability and boost your financial well-being. So, grab your financial acumen and join us as we explore key strategies to dominate your 2024 tax return.
notes on building blocks
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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.
What Bluey can teach us about machine learning
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.
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
Or a glimpse into post-entertainment society (it's not pretty)
Hey folks, Recently, I gave a workshop on “BUILDING IN PUBLIC” at On Deck and shared insights, lessons, war stories and essentially opened up all my playbooks on the topic. The talk seemed to have resonated deeply with many fellows and I was grateful and delighted. Some of them even shared highlights and
In my last post, I looked at equities in 2023, and argued that while they did well during 2023, the bounce back were uneven, with a few big winning companies and sectors, and a significant number of companies not partaking in the recovery. In this post, I look at interest rates, both in the government and corporate markets, and note that while there was little change in levels, especially at the...
The United States Patent and Trademark Office has a system of 1,400 descriptive "design codes" allowing you to search for trademarks with “Rickshaws”, “Centaurs” or “Mechanical women”.
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Fortunately they were just drawings and not people. Today's News:
"We make our lives by what we love."
Whether you’re a product engineer, a product manager, or an engineering executive, you’ve probably been pushed to consider using Large Language Models (LLM) to extend your product or enhance your processes. 2023-2024 is an interesting era for LLM adoption, where these capabilities have transitioned into the mainstream, with many companies worrying that they’re falling behind despite the fact that...
There are few things more important in the success of a restaurant than pedigree. If you are able to launch one good restaurant, you're more than likely to be able to make a good go of a second. And then a third, and so on. Well, up to a point. You don't want to spread yourself too thinly (just look what happened to Byron, or Jamie's Italian) but if you - and the people around you - know...
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Sometimes I save a rant for 10 years and finally decide it's not a thinkpiece, it's a stupid joke. Today's News:
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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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