Newsletter - June Bugs

📍 Location: San Carlos, CA

If May was a happy time in our lives, then June erupted with a rude awakening. My wife and I caught COVID for the first time, which is surprising we didn’t catch it sooner. The first week hit me hard, the second week I lost my sense of taste. It was the weirdest thing as I was cooking some stew, I felt lost without my sense of smell. I know there were some viral moments during the pandemic of people showing how they could eat the weirdest combinations, and it was bizarre, but that seemed like a blip in history. When I lost my sense, it dawned on me how much we rely on our olfactory to navigate the world. I burned a candle and couldn’t smell it, convincing me if I was in a burning building, I’d have to rely on my sense of touch over smell.

I was mostly recovered by the third week. I dread anyone suffering through long COVID. Let me know how your COVID experience went if you’ve caught it. And if you haven’t, my goodness, keep it up.

Crafting Around

• After a short hiatus, we are back to posting my weekly notes.
• Sometimes, you’ll see me posting on my personal stream. I’m thinking of adding Webmentions to the website so I can tie these into federated social networks. If you have experience around this, please let me know 😀
• On my “build list” is a small AI app to allow students to ask questions about their class given their syllabus. I shared my notes about RAG understand the topic.

Interwebs Highlights

• As China’s Internet Disappears, ‘We Lose Parts of Our Collective Memory’ - China’s Internet lacks the number of websites and has set up a few walled gardens. The loss of digital identity and the ways in which these few apps lose in accessibility make it different to navigate around their world.
• Boz breaks down his system, 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.” Personally, I try to stick to clean my digital house weekly via a weekly review.
• “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.” Some of the ethos in this blog is to have a beginner’s mindset, and this piece of writing embodies that by Peter Gray on his newsletter post, In Praise of Amateurism.
• Nadia Asparouhova explores jhanas. “Jhanas are like swirling the paintbrush of your consciousness across a palette of altered sensations. These states vary in intensity; some are comparable to psychedelics, MDMA, or dissociatives.” I’m extremely interested and will be diving deeper.
• Kent Beck writes “Make the Change Easy Then Make the Easy Change” in his post Hinge.

See you around 👋🏽

For the newsletter archive, check out Newsletter Series. For this specific series, check out the Newsletter: Season Four .

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