2024 Week 28 - Weekly Notes

Sometimes, I feel like the news is ramping up the demise meter by forcing down our media consumption one terrible news cycle after another. What started with an deluge of pieces to replace President Biden from the race and ending with an assassination attempt of Former President Trump. In the chaotic nature of news makes me feel nervous, like there is no stability in our world. Entropy wins, and we can’t expect more than chaos. But there’s optimism inside of me, knowing there is a better future, which we have to make changes in the present for them to be realized. Dare I say, manifest.

That said, maybe it’s the heat that’s getting to us. - Death Valley reached 129 Degrees. This heat dome was enough for me to stay inside or to go to the pool. Stay cool out there!

Tools for Thought

• Writer - The full-stack generative AI platform - I’ve been thinking of what AI tools could look like, and this one I think was really thought out well.

AI

• LLM101n: Let’s build a Storyteller by Andrej Karpathy. The course isn’t started yet, but the syllabus looks promising
• Ethan Mollick on his newsletter One Useful Thing - Gradually, then Suddenly: Upon the Threshold
  • Technological change often happens gradually, then suddenly as key thresholds are crossed.
  • AI models are rapidly improving and crossing key capability thresholds, making them more useful tools.
  • Tracking AI’s evolving capabilities through an “impossibility list” can help understand its rapid progress.
  • Also, if you haven’t used Claude’s artifacts, it’s helped me quite a bit with generating diagrams (mostly in mermaid since it’s compatible with Obsidian’s markdown flavor)
• Conrad Gray reviews Superintelligence—10 years later
• Lilian Weng - Extrinsic Hallucinations in LLMs
• Evaluate prompts in the developer console \ Anthropic
• GitHub Copilot Extensions are all you need

Web Dev and Tangents

• A great write-up about Enhancing The New York Times Web Performance with React 18 by Ilya Gurevich from the New York Times about using the new APIs from React 18 and how that migration went. As I’ve worked in this before, it was interesting how existing interactive elements had to be re-worked with a different script. It’s fascinating what the Times does to keep up to date with these frameworks.
  • When I talked to the Cooking team about how they keep recipes, it’s apparent to me how much Engineering effort they take to make sure it’s all running smoothly.
  • The results show for themselves
    • 
• Arno Gourdol - On the origins of DS_store. DS_Store = Desktop Service Store
• Julie Zhuo reflects on 40 things I wish I knew when she was 20. X Thread
• How I write HTTP services in Go after 13 years | Grafana Labs
  • How Mat writes HTTP services in Go (Go Time #322)
• DevRel’s Death as Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon
  • Changelog take: He goes on to back this conclusion up with five bullet points and a list of devtools that are succeeding with no/minimal DevRel staff. In conclusion, DevRel is not dead, but ZIRP DevRel is. Folks need to adjust accordingly.
• Jack Kelly - I’m Funding Ladybird Because I Can’t Fund Firefox
  • The Mozilla Foundation won’t let donations go to Firefox. Interesting
• Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships - Wisdom from Linus Torvalds, the creator of Git and Linux
• Ryan Peterman on The Developing Dev - Product Thinking - Why All Engineers Should Understand the Product
• Phil Eaton - A reawakening of systems programming meetups
• 18F - Why simplicity? Choosing a web architecture
  • Which is related to MIT Technology Review’s Inside the US government’s brilliantly boring websites

With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.
Hyrum’s Law

• Tom’s Hardware - 13th and 14th Gen Intel CPU instability also hits servers — W680 boards with Core i9 K-series chips are crashing - Intel is having their Boeing moment
• Luca Rossi - How to Help Underperformers 📉

Around the world and back

• New Atlas - Monster 310-mile automated cargo conveyor will replace 25,000 trucks - The future of conveyer belts might be beyond my dreams, finally
• After watching Challengers last month, this article from the Guardian intrigued me - ‘I’m good, I promise’: the loneliness of the low-ranking tennis player
• Robert F. Moss - The True Story of Hushpuppies, a Genuine Carolina Treat. Dispels the Confederate myth
• The Washington Post - Why clothes are so hard to recycle, and how scientists plan to cut fashion waste
  • Nature - ‘Chemical recycling’: 15-minute reaction turns old clothes into useful molecules
• Henrik Karlsson - How to think in writing
• The Washington Post (Opinion) - Ban left turns on busy streets and save time
• The New York Times - What to Know About the Wildfires in California
• Ryan Holiday - 37 (Or So) Lessons From A 37 Year Old
• MARIA FARRELL AND ROBIN BERJON on Noema Magazine - We Need To Rewild The Internet
• Tracing Wood Grains newsletter - Reliable Sources: How Wikipedia Admin David Gerard Launders His Grudges Into the Public Record
• TechCrunch - Whataburger app becomes unlikely power outage map after Houston hurricane
• MSN - The pimple patch becomes a breakout fashion statement

Recommendations

• Book - Nathaniel Eliason: Crypto Confidential: Winning and Losing Millions in the New Frontier of Finance
• Book - Maria Popova and Ofra Amit: The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry
• Podcast: Mixed Signals from Semafor Media
• Book - Nate Silver: On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
  • Will the follow-up be as good as his first book? I have my reservations about the signal and noise now that we’re almost a decade read later.
• Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect: Guidara, Will: 9780593418574: Amazon.com: Books
• Book - Jeff Guenther, Kate Happ: Big Dating Energy: How to Create Lasting Love by Tapping Into Your Authentic Self

Obits

• James M. Inhofe, Senator Who Denied Climate Change, Dies at 89 - The New York Times - holy hell, this is a brutal, scathing obituary I’ve ever read. Makes sense for this man. He had long covid, which related to the next item.

  Mr. Inhofe opposed abortion, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, health care legislation and campaign-finance reforms while supporting the death penalty, gun rights, counterterrorism powers, offshore oil drilling and constitutional amendments to require balanced budgets and ban flag desecration

Videos

The most ridiculous thing. BARK Air - Revolutionizing flying for dogs | NY, LA, London & more - The price tag: $6k

Physics Girl had live, 10 hour session showing what life is like with her Long Covid and some very interesting talks in between.