2024 Week 07 - Weekly Notes

I’ve been pretty active with the website updates. I thought it might do me a little good to start adding a short changelog to the website. This sounds like it will be different than my now page.

Around the Website

• Re-arranged the tags so it is better formatted in-line with the published date
• I finished reading The Psychology of Money, so I’ve moved it accordingly
• The lindy library metadata has been expanded, and posts have been added to the main page. It has also been renamed to the timeless treasure trove
• I started a content creator curation that I’m going to start expanding
• I added another TIL blog post that might become a more regular thing. I’m thinking of making its own section if I continue for a few more weeks
• Images were migrated to Astro assets, which help with the website performance. This should reduce the cumulative layout shift (CLS)
• I started to dabble with the technology tree and Plot.js
• I added my thoughts on American Fiction

I’m also coming up with more ideas of what to do next. I’m thinking about doing a microblog inspired by Linus’ stream. I’m getting inspired from “From Jason” Where Have All the Websites Gone and how he thinks we should trade in our linktree links with things that we like on the Internet. Hell, if I think about my own patterns, they used to be on curated link aggregators.

Notes

• Mental Models for Better Thinking - By Feynmanism Twitter / X Account
• A Skill Called Luck - by Jakob Greenfeld
• [[The Ed’s Up - How to Start a Book]] is extremely good resource for The Messy Middle for Writing
• The Apple Vision Pro – Stratechery by Ben Thompson - The productivity disappointment
• jQuery 4.0.0 BETA! | Official jQuery Blog - This was unexpected
• NYTimes: Ecuador Embraces President Noboa’s War on Gang Violence Amid Terror
• NYTimes: Maui Economy, 6 Months After Wildfire, Is Still Reeling
• NYTimes: At 116, She Has Outlived Generations of Loved Ones. But Her Entire Town Has Become Family. - it’s something I’ve thought about if I make it past 100. What if I outlive my children from old age? Heck, even my grandchildren?
• Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are ‘inept’ and ‘boring’
• Lessons Learned From Payments Startups
• Generative Value Newsletter by Eric Flaningam - Data Industry Primer
• Core Needs: BICEPS from Paloma Medina.
  • These are six core needs researchers find are important for humans (both at work and in our personal lives).
• Seven C’s of consulting change - i.e. the challenges and strategies for enacting change in consulting engagements
  1. Client: Understanding the client’s unique history, challenges, and opportunities.
  2. Clarify: Gaining a clear understanding of the context and the need for change.
  3. Create: Developing and proposing solutions for the desired change.
  4. Change: Implementing the proposed solutions and managing the change process.
  5. Confirm: Ensuring that the implemented changes align with the client’s needs and expectations.
  6. Continue: Supporting the client in sustaining the changes and integrating them into their operations.
  7. Close: Concluding the consulting engagement in a way that leaves the client better off
• Matthew Bischoff on Merlin Mann’s Thought Technology
• What it was like working for GitLab
• The Inko programming language - A language for building concurrent software with confidence
• Tara Seshan - How to hire low experience, high potential people
• Ryan Peterman - The Developing Dev - How To Onboard
• A Distributed Systems Reading List
• NYTimes: Bolsonaro and Allies Planned a Coup, Brazil Police Say
• NYTimes: Opinion | The Year of the Dragon Plant
  • I should take this as a sign to get a new bamboo plant. I let the last one die after I moved and placed it in a sunnier spot. That was a mistake
• Chad Fowler on Tim Ferriss Blog: You Don’t Need More How-To Advice — You Need a Beautiful and Painful Reckoning
• Episode #171 of Have You Heard podcast: The Damage Done - There’s a large discussion happening about public education right now, and teaching to the Common Core. It’s not pretty, and makes me think hard about sending my kids to public schools
• Internet Pipes: Sift Through the Treasure Trove of Online Data - I think I have this irrational spending habit of wanting things like this.
• I tried talking to ChatGPT today and using voice as an input. While learning Mandarin might not be there yet (the AI voice doesn’t recognize tonal languages as well), I can see it being good for my Spanish.
• Github: ChatGPT Failures
• The AI Augmented SDLC
• Engineering Practices for LLM Application Development
• Currently Away: How Two Disenchanted People Traveled the Great Loop for Nine Months and Returned to the Start, Energized and Optimistic by Bruce Tate
• Y Combinator - Requests for Startups
• OpenAI: Memory and new controls for ChatGPT
• OpenAI: Video generation models as world simulators
  • Sora - OpenAI’s text-to-video model
• Alexei Navalny was murdered by Vladimir Putin
• Coming face to face with inmates in El Salvador’s mega-jail
• Bob Moore, Who Founded Bob’s Red Mill, Is Dead at 94 - The New York Times
• Meghan Markle Signs Podcast Deal With Lemonada After Spotify Pact Ends
• Don’t Overlook China’s Open Source LLMs