[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] If you have to know the answer right away, it’s no; or at least, my goal with this video is to convince you that the world is not running out of sand. But if it were that simple, I wouldn’t be here (right?) and you probably wouldn’t be either. In fact, I was really surprised by some of the things I didn’t know as I dug deeper...
My Gift to You for my 37th Birthday
It can be frustrating to fill out a web form, only to accidentally refresh the page (or click "back") and lose all the hard work. In this blog post, I present a method to retain form data when the page is reloaded, which improves the user experience. Browser behavior Most browsers provide an autofill feature. In the example form below, enter anything into the input field. Then, try out the...
I watch the olive trees in my backyard dance in the wind. When they were small, they’d almost fall over. But the post kept them up. Now they’re big enough to stand on their own. A breeze comes along and their branches move with it but
It’s been around 2 years that I’ve had to stop with my long-term addiction to stable jobs. Quite a few people who read this blog are wondering what the hell exactly I’ve been doing since then so I’m going to update all of you on the various projects I’ve been working on. Meme credit: Fabian Stadler Mikochi Last year, I created Mikochi, a minimalist remote file browser written in Go and...
Meet Eddie AI—your new editing partner ready to bring cinematic flair to every cut!
I got a call from an ex-student asking me “how do you know when you found product market fit?” There’s been lots of words written about it, but no actual recordings of the moment. I remembered I had saved this 90 second, 26 year-old audio file because this is when I knew we had found […]
Kubernetes: everyone wants to do it, regardless of their scale and business objectives.1 Common justifications include better scalability, cost savings, standardization and being super modern and stuff. It’s the future! In my personal experience, Kubernetes is far from the magical uptime machine that a lot of people think it is, and migrating it to it comes with a lot of hidden costs and potential...
I have spent the last week reading "Shoe Dog", Phil Knight's memoir of how a runner on the Oregon University track team built one of the great shoe companies in the world, in Nike. In addition to its entertainment value, and it is a fun book to read, I read it for two storylines. The first is the time, effort and grit that it took to build a business, in a world where risk capital was more...
AI. You may have heard of it. Sure, ChatGPT is pretty cool, but when it comes to AI chatbots that try to replace a human in a product support context…
LLMs are good search helpers. Here’s three search tools I use every day. All of these use an AI to synthesize answers but also provide an essential feature: specific web search results for you to verify and further research. I use these for conversational inquiries in addition to more traditional keyword searches. Phind is an excellent free LLM + search engine. The AI writes an answer to...
Laetitia@Work #74
A new benchmark to measure the impact of AI on improving science
Solving hard problems in new ways
In a counter-intuitive observation: by making small, non-functional improvements, you gain more confidence in a new codebase, and can start to move faster.
“Connectionist” vs. Knowledge-Based AI
The big story on Wednesday, September 18, was that the Federal Reserve’s open market committee finally got around to “cutting rates”, and doing so by more than expected. This action, much debated and discussed during all of 2024, was greeted as "big" news, and market prognosticators argued that it was a harbinger of market moves, both in interest rates and stock prices. The market seemed to...
new essay in Asterisk
Sample language model responses to different varieties of English and native speaker reactions. ChatGPT does amazingly well at communicating with people in English. But whose English? Only 15% of ChatGPT users are from the US, where Standard American English is the default. But the model is also commonly used in countries and communities where people speak other varieties of English. Over 1...
My partner and I were both born in the early 1980s which is quite fortunate for our relationship because we can talk about some shared experiences we have had while growing up....
Highlights I learned a few techniques that make it easier for me to record videos for my course. I’ve decided I don’t need to use a Merchant of Record service. I’ve integrated htmx into my standard toolkit for making web applications. Goal Grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Record publishable versions of four lessons from...
As I reveal my ignorance about TikTok trends, social media celebrities and Gen Z slang, my children are quick to point out my age, and I accept that reality, for the most part. I understand that I am too old to exercise without stretching first or eat a heaping plate of cheese fries and not suffer heartburn, but that does not stop me from trying occasionally. For the last decade or so, I have...
Woorkeri Raman, a former Indian cricketer and former coach of the India women’s national cricket team, has two non-negotiables. As an offspinner, you must never get cut, and you must never get driven through the covers. Even when Ravichandran Ashwin takes five wickets, Raman will still point out if he got cut or driven off…
The context is smarter than you.
Experimenting in stereo photography and I write an app to create old-fashioned stereoscopic cards.
One of the great joys of working here at Esri is the opportunity to collaborate with amazing people. Recently I had the opportunity to present at the User Conference about thematic mapping, with Sarah Bell and Kenneth Field. It was a lot of fun and we all surprised each other with what we made from the same source …
Last week, in the midst of the slow, painful collapse of the generative AI hype cycle, something incredible happened. On Monday, a Federal Judge delivered a crushing ruling in the multi-year-long antitrust case filed against Google by the Department of Justice. In 300-pages of dense legal text, Judge Amit Mehta
In a recent video, Hank Green nerd-sniped me by asking a question I couldn’t not answer. At one point in the video, he shows “a graph of the last 20 years of Olympic games showing the gold, silver, and bronze medals from continental Europe. And it “shows continental Europe having significantly more bronze medals than gold medals.” Hank wonders why and offers a few possible explanations, finally...
Imagine you got a job offer from a company but weren’t allowed to start work – or get paid – for almost a year. And if you can’t pass a security clearance your offer is rescinded. Or you get offered an internship but can’t work on the most interesting part of the project. Sounds like […]
A guest post and an in-person panel
Another correction
Have you ever wanted your very own vending machine? If so, you likely found that they’re expensive and too bulky to fit in most homes. But now you can experience vending bliss thanks to this miniature vending machine designed by m22pj, which you can craft yourself using an Arduino and other materials lying around the […] The post A desktop-sized DIY vending machine for your room appeared first on...
I recently read Julia Evans’ latest zine about git, and one of her tips was to configure your terminal shell prompt to show the git status. Julia’s terminal prompt looks like this: ~/work/homepage (main) $ main is Julia’s current git branch. When she’s in the middle of a git operation like bisect or merge, the terminal changes to this: ~/work/homepage (main|MERGING) $ It had never occurred to me...
Or is it?
Title insurance is grossly overpriced relative to actual risks involved. Why is that?
A brief overview of knowledge distillation and its capabilities
Earlier this month, MTV News abruptly pulled their site off the web without warning, eliminating a virtual archive of pop culture news stories that date back to 1997. This move coincided with a series of similar decisions from MTV’s parent company Paramount, including a similar move on CMT, and the swift removal of 25 years […] The post Cool URLs Mean Something appeared first on The History of the...
<p>blogstatic's <a href="https://www.producthunt.com/products/blogstatic#blogstatic" target="_blank">first PH launch</a> (documented <a href="https://valsopi.com/launching-on-product-hunt">here</a>) was in December of 2022, three months after the <a href="https://x.com/valsopi/status/1579798717867122694">rebranding and its public launch</a> and deciding to give blogstatic a <a...
Everything you need to know about the Amazon Weekly Business Review: how it works, why it works, and how it helps Amazon win.
June was busy. I travelled more than usual in June. Partly in the UK – visiting Glasgow, the west country, the south coast and the Isle of Wight; partly overseas – I visited Ibiza for a few days of R&R. Meanwhile, the election campaigns were in full swing. Nigel Farage did his Nth U-turn, and… Continue reading June ’24: Election fever →
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...
I got a Steam Deck. Only took me a year or so of contemplating getting one, and trying out HoloISO, the unofficial SteamOS installer finally convinced me to get one.1 It took another year to actually get down to writing down my thoughts on it. This post is written from the perspective of a software developer who used to play video games a lot as a teenager, less so as an adult, and as someone who...
The first day of cicada chasing exceeded expectations and we hoped for similar results on the second. However the weather began to change overnight with downpours possible during daylight hours. Local meteorologists predicted a line of thunderstorms rolling through the Midwest, approaching from the west. It would hit Peoria, Illinois mid-morning and St. Louis, Missouri […] The post Cicada Chase,...
Social proof is a powerful concept in marketing. It's the idea that as consumers, we are influenced by what others do, especially people we admire. If you have ever seen a website mention its number of users, a review from a customer, or company logos, you've
I don't have answers
It's a one-party state. They hold elections, but the Party always wins.
Talking to Jordan Schneider from ChinaTalk about China's technological ascent
The new Historical Topo Map Explorer is out of beta and ready for you to dive into a collection of over 180,000 beautiful vintage USGS topo maps! Use this updated Living Atlas app to geographically browse, download, export, and even animate, these cartographic objects of joy. Here’s how… 0:00 Adventurous introduction0:23 Navigating the map and finding topos0:40 …
"We think you're gonna LOVE it"
For anyone interested (you there in the phone box), here's a PDF of the 39 Books series. 39 Books: PDF As the introduction explained, the books were chosen from those on my books-read lists that I hadn't written about before. I thought it might be instructive to contrast the books I did write about for each year. Before 2007, I wrote elsewhere and almost all reviews are now behind paywalls or...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Let's Get Right To the Point
Traveled to Bali and Sydney, some updates on Typing Mind, and a new product.
(A Lengthy Vacation Post-Mortem)
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 […]
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...
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...
The first in a series of posts about scripting Visual Pinball tables.
Sometimes, when I am feeling down, I read about failed satellite TV (STV) services. Don't we all? As a result, I've periodically come across a company called AlphaStar Television Network. PrimeStar may have had a rough life, but AlphaStar barely had one at all: it launched in 1996 and went bankrupt in 1997. All told, AlphaStar's STV service only operated for 13 months and 6 days. AlphaStar is...
The second in a series of posts about scripting Visual Pinball tables.
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...
This post wraps up the sound work on Teacher's Pet.
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 →
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...
Super quick updates
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...
I sold Xnapper, here is a quick update about the acquisition details
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.
Yes, market-rate!
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...
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 →
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 →
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...
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...
What Larry David's legendary sitcom can teach about creativity and work.
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...
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...
And then there were two.
"Ownership" means ten different things to ten different people. Let's talk about what we actually want.
Four questions to ask your organization.
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...
Also in this issue: one-off purchase vs. subscription, selling Xnapper, and other updates from me in Feb 2024
On waiting for AI's Godot.
Competition tends to eliminate high profits resulting from business models that have worked spectacularly well. Will Berkshire's playbook continue to perform well in the future?
And why it might revolutionize the search industry.
Five analytical tasks in under a minute
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.
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 […]
I have a question: has anyone ever tried to standardize an RSS feed in HTML? I can’t find any discussion around it — but I’d love to read more about the idea because it intrigues me. The OG RSS was an XML feed. Later we got JSON feeds. So why not an HTML feed standard? (I know, I know, obligatory xkcd link.) At this point, I think it’s fair to say HTML has won. As Yehuda says: HTML…is humanity's...
A simplified high-level overview of primary machine learning algorithms for anyone to understand
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...
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.
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 …
Why everyone should learn about machine learning
Hey Siri, set a reminder for 365 days.
I put my M1 Pro against Apple's new M3, M3 Pro, M3 Max, a NVIDIA GPU and Google Colab.
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…
A simple answer, and then a less simple one.
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...
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.
It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
I turn 30, built a new app, and other updates in December 2023
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...
“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...
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.
<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...
A PCB for breadboards to make working with op-amps easier.
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 →
Going viral, my thoughts, and updates from me in October 2023.
They're not going to disrupt everything (yet), but they're a ton of fun.
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...
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…
Imagine selling a website you made for $10,000. Pretty great, huh? Well that's exactly what Dmytro did
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...
A FAQ of sorts
Want to find the best no-code newsletters for learning about what you can build without coding? You came to the right place!
We can start to see, dimly, what the near future of AI looks like.
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...
Rethinking the Role of PPO in RLHF TL;DR: In RLHF, there’s tension between the reward learning phase, which uses human preference in the form of comparisons, and the RL fine-tuning phase, which optimizes a single, non-comparative reward. What if we performed RL in a comparative way? Figure 1: This diagram illustrates the difference between reinforcement learning from absolute feedback and...
“Most heists target gold, jewels or cash. This one targeted illegal seeds. As the British established their sprawling empire across the subcontinent and beyond, they encountered a formidable adversary — malaria. There was a cure — the bark of the Andean cinchona tree. The only problem? The Dutch and the French were also looking to The post The Fever Tree Hunt appeared first on 99% Invisible.
No GPU cluster required.
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.
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...
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.
Google Colossus Explained Simply
See you again soon
Today is exactly 2 years since I quit my job and become a full-time indie hacker.
small updates from me in July 2023
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
Caught in a series of lies about his willingness to fight Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire's disturbing spiral accelerates
The differences between games development and more “standard” software engineering, roles, and how games are typically built.
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $60-80k/month in revenue and employs seven other people. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and my professional life overall. Highlights I think through what it...
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:...
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
It seems that the internet’s greatest potential is to create intimacy across distance. Which means we still have a long way to go.
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!)...
People talk about you the way you talk about yourself.
Covering the state of play as of Summer, 2023
For sale: a few KIM-1 User Manuals I printed up.
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.
Some quick updates from me in June 2023
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.
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...
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...
Everything about the Black Magic's acquisition + May 2023 updates
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...
will he go into destroy mode if I say no
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...
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...
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....
“We give them the same phone, in the same brand-new condition,” says one seller.
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 […]
Lessons from building and growing Potion to its acquisition all in public
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...
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.
There are a growing number of AI coding tools that are alternatives to Copilot. A list of other popular, promising options.
Lessons from building and growing Copylime to 6 figures all in public
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 […]
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 […]
Designed by Dixon Baxi, London.
No you can't "have it all." You can have two things, but not three.
Surreal and otherworldly.
Lessons from building AudioPen to 600+ paid users to clinching #1 on Product Hunt
and other updates from me in Mar 2023
A little bit of magic, but mostly just practice
Lessons from building RadReads and helping over 40,000 professionals in public
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $60-80k/month in revenue and employs six other people. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and my professional life overall. Highlights I’ve started the process of...
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) […]
A lot of otherwise talented people are too pessimistic to actually do anything. They are paralyzed by risks that don’t exist and greatly exaggerate them where they do, preventing them from being one of the best. Consider this lightly edited excerpt from a conversation between Charlie Rose and Magnus Carlsen that argues it’s better to … The post The Winner’s Edge appeared first on Farnam Street.
In 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
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 […]
Without Americans on the app, advertising dollars are at risk.
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 […]
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...
Immigrating from Indonesia to the US and building Typedream in public
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:
It's my first product launch of the year!
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,...
Lessons from building Tally.so from 0 to $40k MRR all in public
Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2m ARR in public
It was a such a short month!
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.
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.
"IBM's first computer"
(Just not mine.)
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...
(But why not?)
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
Also in October: Speak at JOM Launch Asia 2022, and the thing about Elon Musk.
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...
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.
Reached $10K MRR, launched Xnapper (#1 of the week), went on Indie Hackers podcast (😱), and other updates in Aug 2022...
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!
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.
Not the usual monthly update, just a small update about Xnapper - my latest product
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...
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.
v. 229.328 compliant with
earth/mars-x8292 communication
protocol 29xjw899992
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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