2024 Week 23 - Weekly Notes

Coming out of vacation is hard to transition back into the normal routine gears. As such, it’s the end of the week and I haven’t reviewed my notes from the previous week.

I lost my sense of smell, known as parosmia?, and it completely threw me off guard. And by losing your sense, you notice the hidden ways you use your nose. Like detecting smoke, cooking, and tasting food. Or the smell of the outdoors like petrichor after it rains.

I’m trying something new with this week’s format. It took far longer to create, so I think I might scale it back next week. Let me know if you like this better.

News

Local Rumblings

• H5N1 bird flu detected in SF, first in California city wastewater
• Massive fire at Lake Chabot Public Market in Castro Valley
  • We used to go to Mama Cho’s BBQ. Sad it is no more, and it would take 2 years to rebuild

National (and International) Splashes

• NYTimes - Trump Guilty on All Counts in Hush-Money Case
• NYTimes - How Yu & Me, a Popular Chinatown Bookstore, Rebuilt After a Fire
• NYTimes - As China’s Internet Disappears, ‘We Lose Parts of Our Collective Memory’
• WSJ - The Opaque Investment Empire Making OpenAI’s Sam Altman Rich
• What? Texas creates their own stock exchange: TXSE

Health

• Sarah Larsen on X - “I’m 36. Stress controlled me for years so I turned to neuroscience. After 1200+ hours studying elite athletes, CEOs & psychologists, my toolkit is now full of powerful neuro-hacks. Here are the top 7 that will change your life”
• 7 Rules for Emotional Health - Nick Wignall

The Technium

The AI Stuff

• Stephen Wolfram - Can AI Solve Science?
• Introducing Perplexity Pages
• Linus Lee - 🎹 A synthesizer for thought
• O’Reilly - What We Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs (Part I)
• A Hugging Face Space - FineWeb: decanting the web for the finest text data at scale

Opinionated Mentions

• Boz (Andrew Bosworth) - Inbox ten

  For those who are curious, my system is Inbox Ten. That means I aim to end every day with fewer than ten emails in my inbox. I also have fewer than ten open chat threads across all interfaces. I’ve also read all relevant notifications in internal tools, read all relevant posts in internal groups I care about, and started rough drafts of any relevant proactive communications I intend to produce. — Boz

• DHH - Why I retired from the tech crusades

• Matt Bessey - Why, after 6 years, I’m over GraphQL

  • Rebuttal from Marc-André Giroux - Why, after 8 years, I still like GraphQL sometimes in the right context

• Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs - Seeing Like a Data Structure

Other Matters

• Sarvasv Kulpati - Simulating Tree Growth Through Digital Evolution
• Zach Leatherman - I Need Your Help to Make 11ty Fully Independent and Sustainable in 2024
• Andrew Quinn - Lessons learned from 6 months of operating a teensy-tiny news archive
• Jakob Greenfeld - The Smart Web does exist (but it needs your support)
• Dan Luu - How (some) good corporate engineering blogs are written
• The Pragmatic Bookshelf - Server-Driven Web Apps with htmx: Any Language, Less Code, Simpler Code by R. Mark Volkmann - a potential buy for me

Amateurs, in contrast, are not certified as knowing. They may or may not know, and their “knowledge” may or may not be trustworthy, but they are always seeking. They are striving to know, in their own ways of knowing, ways that are meaningful to them but may or may not be meaningful to others. Amateurs are always learning, never at a steady state of knowing. — Peter Gray on his newsletter, Play Makes Us Human, writing “In Praise of Amateurism”

Lengthy Digestions

• Pull Rank - Secrets from the Algorithm: Google Search’s Internal Engineering Documentation Has Leaked
• Julian - Multi-layered calendars
• Nader Dabit - Building High Impact Developer Communities
• The Picky Champy - Radial Menus In Video Games
• brr.fyi - Engineering for Slow Internet
• Andy Matuschak - How Might We Learn?

Tasks are infinite, calendars are finite — David Sparks

• Will Larson interviewed for One Review - Unexpected Anti-Patterns for Engineering Leaders

Playback

Elizabeth Filips presents “Deadly Beauty: Why Everyone Feels Ugly Now”. Citations for the video.

Touch down!!!