2024 Week 27 - Weekly Notes

Morgan and I are doing Camp NaNoWriMo this month and we were reviewing strange Sci-Fi concepts. This one in particular peaked her interest.

• New prison concept could see inmates serve sentences in minutes

My own interests this time around is to write a story I know a ton about - film history and preservation.

To add to my watchlist is “The Beast”. I love the Sci-Fi concept of living past lives, and this sounds right up my alley. I think I really want to write a Sci-Fi thriller that goes through past lives. I know there have been similar veins in “Everything, Everywhere All At Once” and Matt Haig’s “The Midnight Library”. If you love these kinds of movies and books about alternate realities, let me know. This may be the premise of another short story I would love to write.

Around the blog

I’ve made some updates this week in terms of content and quality of life. This includes all curation posts in one page. Adding the full timestamp on the bottom. Adding the author to all blog posts. And fixed some cover images on some book posts.

Everyone’s favorite topic: AI

• The New York Times - Consulting Firms Are the Early Winners of the AI Boom
  • I read somewhere comparing AI to the Internet boom from the 90’s. Except there’s a major difference: Cost. To train AI models and the cost to compute takes a lot of GPUs, of which it’s hard to innovate. These consulting firms feel like they are selling slightly better workflows but certainly not 10x the output.
• Also a calling for a more human web - Manifesto for a Humane Web
• Max Woolf explains The Super Effectiveness of Pokémon Embeddings Using Only Raw JSON and Images
• window.ai - Everything about the new Chrome AI feature

Dev Things, Tooling, and Productivity

• Problem: couldn’t get the rich text to convert bullet points correctly from clipboard to Obsidian. Solution: Rich Text to Markdown Converter
  • Is there a way to copy and paste a list of bullet pointed content from a word doc into an obsidian note without having to reformat all the bullets in the note? : r/ObsidianMD
• Peter Schroeder on Substack maps out ‘How to do great work’
• Tony Alicea breaks down the React Compiler
• Marcus Buffet writes some Programming advice for his younger self
• Steph Ango - What can we remove?
• I’ll be taking note about what Reforge is doing when considering writing a PRD for a generative AI feature (by Ailian Gan)
• Jordan Cutler describes How he plans his week as a Senior Engineer in Big Tech
• Evan Hahn - My programming beliefs as of July 2024

Obits

• Bill Cobbs, ‘Bodyguard’ and ‘Night at the Museum’ Actor, Dies at 90 - The New York Times
• Martin Mull, Comic Actor Who Rose to Fame on ‘Mary Hartman,’ Dies at 80 - The New York Times

Recommendations

• Book - Laura Mae Martin - Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing
• Newsletter - Tim Leffel’s Nomadico - covering tips for working beyond the office, and living in motion. It’s his coverage of digital nomads, remote work, travel hacking, van life, FIRE, learning journeys and more.
• Book: Africa Brooke - The Third Perspective: Brave Expression in the Age of Intolerance

Society

• As shared on my newsletter, this X thread from Corry Wang talks about his observations about China and technology.
• The crazy bench is back at it again. The New York Times reporting Supreme Court Rules Trump Is Entitled to Some Immunity
• Robin Berjon writes The Public Interest Internet. I’m preparing a post talking about the Internet’s last mile problem, and a lot of that has to do with the infrastructure behind it.
• The Washington Post - Why refrigerators and other kitchen appliances break so easily now. Answer: high tech means high maintenance costs. Think hard about its LTS if we’re talking about companies who have to release one or more products a year.
• Nature - Does Ozempic boost fertility? What the science says
• SFGate - Costco’s bold new plan for the California housing crisis
• NPR - Caesar salad turns 100: It was born July 4, 1924 in Tijuana. Although the birthdate is quite contentious as the creator might have been traveling around this time. It didn’t debut officially in the restaurant’s menu until 1926. The location where it was originally served claims to serve the recipe, although modified to include anchovies. Certainly I’ll travel to Tijuana and try it out.

Educational

• Chris Woodford’s Explain that Stuff which covers 400 articles about how things work. Especially good for Home Schooling those STEM topics.
• The Atlantic - Your Dog Doesn’t Need You to Be an ‘Alpha’

Entertainment

Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos are back with a short film called The Second. From the duo who made the YouTube series, “Every Frame a Painting” and a segment of VOIR. Also, they made some excellent segments on FilmStruck (RIP) and some extras on The Criterion Collection.

Currently Logging

• Continuing “Dave the Diver”
• Continue campaigning with my wife “Baldur’s Gate 3”
• Updated 2024 media log
• Currently reading “Get Better At Anything” by Scott H Young