2024 Week 25 - Weekly Notes

Be a cycle maker, not a cycle breaker
— Jatee Kearsley, owner of Je T’aime Patisserie Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Video

This idea of forgoing cycle breaking to making new cycles, like being the first grad to your family, or running your own business. Jatee talks about being the first business owner in her family, and I loved her enthusiasm and spirit.

Reflection - I’m using these weekly notes to remind myself what I’ve been reading and consuming over the past week and reminding myself why these things are important to me. I’ve felt myself being pulled in too many directions, and the heading in this note help me understand what overall topics are interesting me as of late. Hopefully I want to string these together into more cohesive themes that I can thread from week to week.

Social Interest

• Women Are America’s Safety Net - The Atlantic

Pertains to Dev

• Alex Martin - Good code is rarely read
• Robb Knight - Perplexity AI Is Lying about Their User Agent
• Anthony M Simon - The Architecture Behind A One-Person Tech Startup
• luminousmen - Senior Engineer Fatigue
• Mihail Eric - How Alexa Dropped the Ball on Being the Top Conversational System on the Planet
  • Beaurucratic management stalled releasing new features, LLMs before
• Henrique Yuji on The Miners - How React 19 (Almost) Made the Internet Slower
• ADP Research Institute - The rise—and fall—of the software developer

  Because of [Google Maps] global scale, even a small shift in maps routing from a seemingly-innocuous (and frankly very useful!) feature could create a reinforcing feedback loop with spatial inequality. Inadvertently diverting foot traffic from low-income streets to high-income streets takes revenue and potentially tax dollars from already struggling communities and funnels it instead to richer communities. Thread by @kaseyklimes

• Will Larson on Irrational Exuberance - How to create software quality.
• Ask HN: Why do message queue-based architectures seem less popular now?
• Benjamin Sandofsky - Fast Crimes at Lambda School
  • A long piece I found worth reading as a DevBootcamp grad. Ben breaks down the issues with ISAs and the background with BPPE, as well as management at Lambda School / Bloom Institute of Technology and their untrustworthy CEO.
• I created my first Snippet in VSCode
  • More information: Snippets in Visual Studio Code
• State of JavaScript 2023

Tools of Thought

• Tooling from Every - Spiral - Automate 80% of repeat writing, thinking, and creative tasks. Your voice and style included.
• Tiago Forte on Forte Labs - Digital Attention Spans: AI as a Source of Infinite Patience
• r/ChatGPTPro - Compilation of creative ways people are using ChatGPT
• Andrew Chen - The case against morning yoga, daily routines, and endless meetings
• Mushtaq Bilal, PhD shares his AI Apps for Academic Writing
• Celine Nguyen - research as leisure activity
• Jamie Tanna - Blogumentation - Writing Blog Posts as a Method of Documentation

Obits

• Willie Mays, Baseball’s Electrifying Player of Power and Grace, Is Dead at 93
• Donald Sutherland Dead: ‘Klute’, ‘Ordinary People’, ‘Hunger Games’ Star Was 88

Podcast Notes

• Retired, not tired. with Kelsey Hightower (Changelog Interviews #595)
  • Takeways:
    • Fractional CTO, outbound CTO
    • Be methodical, not faster
    • Who am I - test your beliefs

Culinary

• NYTimes - How to Cut an Onion - J. Kenji López-Alt
• Lavender Latte Recipe | Starbucks® at Home

Recommended

• Book - Hyperfocus by Chris Bailey
• Book: The Laws of Connection by David Robson
  • An excerpt and explanation found in his article for WIRED - The Science of Having a Great Conversation
• Cookbook: Big Night: Dinners, Parties & Dinner Parties by Katherine Lewin

Papers We Love

• [2406.12430v1] PlanRAG: A Plan-then-Retrieval Augmented Generation for Generative Large Language Models as Decision Makers

Share the love with these videos

Map Men - There are NOT 195 countries

Log’s Carving Club - How to Use Every Dremel Bit

Jenny Nicholson - The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hote

Someone mentioned in the comments how much research she’s done in this experience and how that service has already flopped. The amount of research into this topic is nuts.