Craft By Zen by Jeremy Wong

Notes

Some news articles from this past week

• US Norovirus cases: One chart shows why everyone is barfing right now | Vox
• 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2025 | MIT Technology Review
• “School of Rock ”sweethearts Caitlin Hale and Angelo Massagli are married — and the cast reunited to celebrate
• Meta rolls back DEI programs in latest bow to Trump
• DeSantis appointee to university board says women should become mothers, not pursue higher ed | WUSF
• PDF: Jack Smith to the people of the US - Final Report on the Special Counsel’s Investigations and Prosecutions Volume One
• ‘Stomach bug’ cases surging in the Bay Area in biggest spike in years
• FBI raids home of San Leandro councilman | KTVU FOX 2

As it feels like the world turns inward, I’m going to try to take the opposite approach and meet people again.

• The Anti-Social Century - The Atlantic

Common misconceptions about the complexity in robotics vs AI | Harimus blog

• sometimes what we as humans think is hard is not actual to robots. The inverse is similar

I’ve been messing around with Cursor AI a bit this week, thanks to some Egghead videos.

• Search All of GitHub’s Code and Pass the Results to AI Agents in Cursor | egghead.io
• The composer tool is really powerful
• Generate Custom .cursorrules for Your Project Based on Community Examples | egghead.io

Browse for me. Can you export the playwright code after running so you can?

• Agent Settings - Browser Use
• browser-use/browser-use: Make websites accessible for AI agents

What the author is noting is there are no climate refugees because we are all at some climate risk, which is made worse with climate change. He lived through the 1978 fires where his father would hose down the house in case the nearby fires spread. It’s also an ode to the Palisades. Also, there’s an action plan at the end on how to be more fire resistant.

• 47 Years Later, The Palisades Disappeared Overnight » Mike Industries

Two articles about living with chronic pain. I wanted to see what these five things are and how we can shift public attitudes

• Chronic Pain: Five Things We Know About Causes, Treatments and Diagnoses - The New York Times
• Chronic Pain Afflicts Billions of People. It’s Time for a Revolution. - The New York Times

I read through this and am convinced Matt Mullenweg is on some trip no one else wants to be on. To rip apart the ideals of open source and make things more closed to the community tell me his own ideals have shifted.

• WordPress is in trouble | anderegg.ca

I’m curious about this video. Novati no longer works at Meta. He is credited for the most number of commits, which should always be taken with a grain of salt. I’m sure they will talk about develop productivity.

• “The Coding Machine” at Meta with Michael Novati

An excerpt of the new Tim Ferriss book is out

• The No Book

Huh the tea rooms directory eh?

• California Afternoon Tea Directory - Where to find afternoon tea in California

Recommended

A sleeper podcast that should be looked at. Birbiia interviews Ira Glass 3 times

• Working It Out — MIKE BIRBIGLIA

New podcast from PJ from Reply All (even if that ended poorly). Ira Glass episode is worth listening to

• Search Engine | Search Engine Podcast

This short film: The Second

Podcast recommendation from Alex Steffen for the Snap Forward

• Welcome to WHEN WE ARE - by Alex Steffen - The Snap Forward

This new OK Go music Video

Obits

Perry the Donkey, Model for ‘Shrek,’ Dies at 30 - The New York Times

This one hits a cord. It’s time to re-watch Mulholland Dr David Lynch - It is with deep regret that we, his family, announce… | Facebook

Summary

Mostly a return to work this week. We ended the week going to a vinyl night at our local coffeehouse. And doing yard work during the weekend, leading up to the housewarming.

Notes

I’ve discovered a way in Obsidian to make it possible to create these notes much easier using a feature called transclusion. That’s where you can link the contents of one note to another.

I found a redditor who did this for their monthly review reviewing the summaries. I’m hoping this weekly review process helps me out.

Birding! I loved Ed Yong’s XOXO talk that I wanted to read through this article and get started with birding.

• Opinion | When I Became a Birder, Almost Everything Else Fell Into Place - The New York Times
• Yong talks about how to be a public persona both online and off-line. How do you behave and act around people who are trying to reach out to you? How do you mute them all because it can always feel like a floodgate?

Khan Academy now has a financial literacy course that I want to take!

• Financial Literacy | Life skills | Khan Academy

This comedian reflects on how much focus time is spent on social media work like reels, shorts, and TikTok. That’s a full time job instead of working on the art (comedy in this case)

• Social Media is Depriving Artists. - by Isabel Hagen

Two from Sam Altman on reflecting about the year, and a Bloomberg focus on interviewing him. The reflection is about 2 years of ChatGPT.

• Reflections - Sam Altman
• Sam Altman Interview: OpenAI CEO’s Plans for ChatGPT, Fusion and Trump

I took a slow dive into RISC-V, which use an architecture that Framework is spearheading. If true, this could be huge in making modifications in the future where we only need to upgrade a little bit at a time. And can still be performant for a work machine. More to come.

• RISC-V Laptops Really Arrive in 2025 - IEEE Spectrum

Add this to the Zuckerberg Czar comment, and we’re right on track. I’ve heard it before and I’ll echo it again. Facebook doesn’t care about our privacy or trying to do good. That’s a fact. They are in the profits business.

• Meta to End Fact-Checking Program on Facebook Ahead of Trump Term: Live Updates - The New York Times

The emerging wedges are: content generation, voice, verticalized search, and unstructured data parsing

• Emerging Wedges in Vertical AI Startups - by Tanay Jaipuria

This was a NYTimes article that goes through Jessica Harper’s acting career and the twists and turns it took

• The Unpredictable Jessica Harper Is Back in ‘Nightbitch’ - The New York Times

Casual Viewing | Issue 49 | n+1 | Will Tavlin - an article about Netflix

• Netflix has disrupted the traditional film industry by prioritizing scale and subscriber growth over quality filmmaking.
• Netflix has abandoned traditional film marketing, instead relying on its algorithm to recommend films to viewers.

Egghead released a new video about using Cursor. It’s been a roll with these

• AI YOLO - Sit Back and Watch Cursor Automatically Run Terminal Commands | egghead.io
• Generate Charts from Current Events with Gemini’s Structured Output and Code Execution | egghead.io

CES kicked off this week!

• Live Updates CES 2025: Nvidia, Samsung, Sony, Toyota reveals, plus more | TechCrunch

ValTown has a retro about competitor analysis and what they want to include in their own code editor

• What we learned copying all the best code assistants

“How I program with LLMs” - which helps me with understanding how I could be using LLMs as well. Really, there’s three ways this developer does it: autocomplete, search, and chat-driven programming. I already do all of these, and it’s nice to see someone else break them down. Authored by David Crawshaw, co-founder of Tailscale

• crawshaw - 2025-01-06

This is to remain no need features in 2025. I love the attitude. htmx doesn’t work for all use cases, but it sure has made it easier for prototype development

• htmx ~ The future of htmx

This is an easy test for PRs. “How do you like the new behavior?” This can help snuff out anything that I need to fix before releasing to production

• How Do You Like What You’ve Built? — Morris Brodersen

The Palisades fires rage on, and have spread to Altadena

• Palisades Fire Live Updates: 30,000 Ordered to Evacuate in Southern California - The New York Times

Martin Fowler talks at length about codemods

• Refactoring with Codemods to Automate API Changes

Slack talks about using puppeteer for accessibility testing

• Automated Accessibility Testing at Slack - Engineering at Slack

Dillon Shook, a developer, talks about getting laid off twice in one year. There’s some job resources here too.

• Laid Off for the First Time In My Career, and Twice In One Year - Dillon Shook

The DJI store has this camera, the Osmo Pocket 3, which focuses on you. Costs around $868, might be good to save up for in the future. Looks really cool

• DJI Store - Official Store for DJI Drones, Gimbals and Accessories (United States)

I’m not sure how this pairs with my current read of the biography of Judith Jones, but this is worrisome if true.

• Opinion | The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone - The New York Times

I submitted mine last year. Diving in, it looks like vitest is worth taking a look at.

• State of JavaScript 2024

Justice isn’t served.

• Trump Is Sentenced in N.Y. Hush-Money Case and Will Avoid Jail: Live Updates - The New York Times

James Altucher writes about writing down 10 ideas a day. I think I used this for Idea Generation in the past. I don’t think generating ideas has been my shortfall. It’s the necessary follow-up required.

• The Ultimate Guide for Becoming an Idea Machine - James Altucher

Flexoki is this color palette generator of sorts that fits with the Tailwind scheme of 50 step increments. The output is specific to prose and code, so the colors are simply put for those aspects.

• Flexoki — Steph Ango

Nick Milo’s failed year of sustainability

• 2024: Year of the Decalcified Heart - by Nick Milo

Work in terms of complexity versus complicated.

• ==Complexity refers to something that is hard to control and predict, while complicated refers to something that is difficult to understand==.
• Complicated might require a lot of parts, but it is knowable. Complex is not knowable.

Recommendations

Book recommendation: Learn More Faster: How to find your bullseye customer and their perfect product

Recommended blog: Human, being | Erin Nystrom | Substack

Human, Being is all about exploring and celebrating what it means to be human. I (hi 🙋🏻‍♀️, I’m Erin) share musings and reflections, grounded by over a decade in the health and wellness space and guided by my insatiable curiosity about the human experience, on how we might be able to make the most out of our time here on Earth.

Movie: Flow (2024) - no dialogue animation that follows a cat that has to survive a flood. Along the way, the cat meets some other unexpected animals to face the flood. Warning: some sadness with animals (mostly no deaths, if you are worried about cats or dogs dying)

Podcast: The Random Show — 2025 Predictions (AI, Aliens, BTC, and More), New Year’s Resolutions and Strategies, Smart Fitness, The Spinal Engine, New Apps, and Much More (#785) - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss

Podcast: Road Journal #3: Midnight in Provo - by Lea Thau

Newsletter: Escape to the Bookshop | Sarah Bringhurst Familia | Substack

I’m documenting my quest to start a tiny bookshop on a cobblestone street in a quaint hill-town in Umbria. Narni is a place of long, light-filled days, birds crying overhead, cats napping on warm stone. It’s a magical city where dreams feel like they might just come true.

Its the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025! I’ve changed up how I do daily notes, and in part this will change my weekly notes format. The unstructured version of daily notes means I should make it easier on myself to publish this.

Science says lasting relationships come down to—you guessed it—kindness and generosity.

• The Secret to Love Is Just Kindness - The Atlantic

News

Some random news stories this week

• CNN launches a digital paywall, charging some users to read articles for the first time | CNN Business
• Russian air-defense system downed Azerbaijan plane, sources say | Reuters
• Winning ticket for $1.22 billion lottery jackpot sold in California, Mega Millions says | AP News
• Norovirus cases are surging. A doctor explains what to look for | CNN

Notes from the week

A night dinner of pastas. It would be great to run this.

• Pasta Girlfriend
• Ali LaBelle | À LA CARTE — THE HOLIDAY PRINT ISSUE since the very beginning of my newsletter, i’ve dreamt of finding ways to bring it to life beyond the… | Instagram

Latent Space talked about paper club during NeurIPS. This conference is for PhDs to talk about their research, especially in the ML and AI space.

• How to Run a Paper Club (also: LIVE at NeurIPS 2024!)

This post is rehashing an earlier one about learning AI. It’s updating with what to learn now with the past 6 months of AI updates.

• The 2025 AI Engineering Reading List - Latent Space

I read a bunch of items from Derek Sivers again. Mainly because I re-read Directives and wandered around recent writing. This was one and there was another contemplating end of life matters.

• I love the contradiction of religions | Derek Sivers

I’m not sure why I was thinking of Strong Towns again. I certainly want to write down the main thesis. Also recap the book

A redditor made a few Obsidian Themes. It looks pretty good on MacOS.

• aaaaalexis/obsidian-cupertino: An Obsidian theme that brings native experiences to your vault.

I’m working on using Anki, and this came up while I was figuring out how to craft flashcards.

• The 3 Core Elements of Your Study System - LEANANKI

Ashley Stimpson’s “Awestruck,” featured in Johns Hopkins Magazine,

• Why You Should Seek More Awe in the New Year - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss

As 2025 starts, there are many listicles that start appearing. Here’s one that seems quite interesting for [[CSS]]

• A CSS Wishlist For 2025 | CSS-Tricks

I used Fish years ago. Interesting it is now 4.0

• Fish 4.0: The Fish Of Theseus

There are some old homes in the UK for a small price but look spectacular.

• English Old Housed - Old House Dreams

In electromagnetic signals from our brain, the rate of input might be slow, but there’s also a benefit.

• Thinking Slowly: The Paradoxical Slowness of Human Behavior - www.caltech.edu

There’s a mental model or principle lying somewhere inside of this. We need to check.

• Software Design is Knowledge Building | olano.dev

Good to keep up with trends and predictions. Although, we know predictions aren’t always right. Understand the basic assumptions

• By default, capital will matter more than ever after AGI — LessWrong

I think it would be great to create a default app list, not the ones you want it to be.

• My default apps of 2024
• One of the apps mentioned was Puzzmo. I’m not as big of a fan of this one.
  • Today’s Puzzmo
• My Subscription Stack (June 2024) - Monica Lim
• What Productivity Apps Are You Using in 2025? : r/ProductivityApps

Worth re-looking at unemployment trends as I may need to look for another job in 2 years.

• Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment? | Hacker News

The people list of some importance. Worth checking through, although it would be great to see profiles of each person

• People who are going to change the world - Alexey Guzey
• People · Patrick Collison

I love this as sometimes it’s not the big things we find joy in, but the little joys like re-learning Python. This is worth looking at.

• Rubenerd: Ten things in tech I found joy in during 2024

I think it might be worth subscribing to Bluesky or Mastodon and trying out some of these blogging events, take “Blogvent” as an example

• Wrapping up Blogvent 2024

Spotify’s plot against musicians

• The Ghosts in the Machine, by Liz Pelly

David Brooks writes about what the religious experience looks like.

• Opinion | The Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be - The New York Times

Criterion Collection has a wonderful collection in their publication, “Current”, from this past year

• A Year’s Worth of Essential Reading | Current | The Criterion Collection

Using a Raspberry Pi 5 to showcase a mini-computer build called Pilet

David Cain experimented with the year of depth back in 2017. I want to read more about how this affected him. I’m going through one of these types of years to really slow down and understand things deeper, not as much as I can. I suffer too much of that and the [[2025 Year of Capacity]] is acknowledging I can’t do, read, consume everything

• Go Deeper, Not Wider
• Why the Depth Year Was My Best Year

Celine Nguyen wrote about calendars and this specific design was interesting. It made me think about that full calendar and how to really visualize it

• Tézzo Suzuki is Working ☠️ OH no Type Company
• Amazon: 2025 Yearly At a Glance Wall Calendar 12 Month, Large Full Year Wall Calendar 2025 One Page

Simon Willison summarized his year with LLMs and is kinda a great voice in consolidating and synthesizing what it might mean

• Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

There are home hackers that are creating their own magic mirror. This would be an amazing side project.

• All things Magic Mirror

Here’s an AI article that I didn’t read.

• The code whisperer: How Anthropic’s Claude is changing the game for software developers | VentureBeat

Tim Urban’s idea of a controlled dopamine hit makes a lot of sense to me. Maybe this is how we slow down.

• Tim Urban on X: “24 thoughts that gave me a dopamine hit this year” - X thread

rounded-sm up resources regarding Ollama

• Ollama - Get up and running with large language models.
• What does people actually use Ollama and local LLM’s for? : r/ollama

Sometimes the boring stack is better. Rogério talks about different project make-ups and how it’s difficult to find the right balance while the product makes money.

• Scaling from a Billion to a Million to One · Rogério Chaves

A software developer is more than their code ability. Addy Osmani talks about the other type of skills that AI isn’t going to necessarily replace in you

• Future-proofing your Software Engineering career

Switching from casual to real usage, I want to understand actual workflows. Authored by Fernando Borretti.

• How I Use Claude

I read this blog post, and it irked me. I dug a little deeper, and making bold statements without understanding the repercussions make me resent I was reading this at all. Sure, there’s “doing Elon’s bidding” with the new DOGE, but it goes way deeper than that. The need to continue hustling (i.e. hustle mode) vs. taming the ego really showed here. This person was putting out their thoughts, so I understand this isn’t supposed to be relatable. But their public persona is what really bothered me.

• I am rich and have no idea what to do with my life
• I am rich and have no idea what to do | Hacker News

This is specific to analytics on AWS pages. We should see what they are

• The most visited Front-end Web and Mobile blog posts in 2024 | Front-End Web & Mobile

I probably should look at this soon and try it out. Not a someday build, but in the learning category. [[Someday Topics]] may need a different note

• Day 1 - Advent of Code 2024

Something to look at for longer term prospects for work

• Ask HN: Where to Work After 40? | Hacker News

Simon Willison goes through why it’s probably not companies rushing to turn on your video or microphone

• I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone

Data Visualization awards. I forgot about this, and maybe I should collect them in my vault?

• Best Data Visualization Projects of 2024 – FlowingData

Where in the world to go to. Not as comprehensive as the 1000 places to see before you die, but yet a good thing to review.

• 20 Years Later, a Look at The New York Times’ 52 Places to Go - The New York Times

I think if I did my 100 days of note-taking I’d feel better instead of skipping out once we had house stuff to deal with

• 100 Days of journaling

The new 2025 list has been released

• TSPDT - 1,000 Greatest Films (Table)

Recommendations

• Book: Algorithms to Live By
• Book: Escaping the Housing Trap
• Person: Dr Becky Kennedy is a parenting expert that might be worth checking into
  • Good Inside: A Practical Guide to Resilient Parenting Prioritizing Connection Over Correction
  • Dr. Becky (@drbeckyatgoodinside) • Instagram photos and videos
• Podcast: Episode 05.21: 2024 Review – Quiet Little Horrors
• Podcast: Latent.Space 2024 Year in Review - by swyx & Alessio
• Gabby Bernstein’s New Book: Self Help
• Podcast: Grief & Pizza | Building Experiences with Joel Hooks
• Home Cooking podcast is back with another episode! Episode 18: Frankly, We Have a Lot to Ketchup On (with Latif Nasser) — Home Cooking
• Book - The DOSE Effect Book - Tj Power - DOSE stands for the following
  • Dopamine - How to build a healthy relationship with your phone and improve your attention
  • Oxytocin - How to build your inner confidence and strengthen your meaningful relationships
  • Serotonin - How to elevate your energy levels and improve your mood every single day
  • Endorphins - How to destress your brain and improve your physical health and longevity

Obits

Former President Jimmy Carter dies today

• Former President Jimmy Carter dies at 100

By suicide. Really sad. Way too young.

• Jeff Baena, filmmaker and husband of Aubrey Plaza, dead at 47 - CBS News

Last week note of the year. Which I’m making public on the last day of the year.

Writing takes a lot of work. Building up the notes are also a lot of work. I’ve been expanding my usage on how to create better notes that can help with the overall writing time.

Thanks for the AI

Turing Post might be one of those AI websites to follow

• The best books about AI&ML, 2024 edition
• The State of AI Startups in 2024, LS Live @ NeurIPS
  • i sensed anxiety and frustration at NeurIPS’24 – Kyunghyun Cho
• Every - How to Be More Agentic
• Anthropic - Building effective agents
• OpenAI - OpenAI DevDay 2024

The Apps

Might be good to use for default apps of 2024

• Maverick Mac | A curated list of awesome mac applications and utilities
• Tiago’s list - Rediscover Your Year: A Cheat Sheet for Reflecting with the Help of Tech
• The new terminal - Ghostty

Writing

Sarah Cucchiara’s substack, people’s princess, writing lessons learned

• everything i learned about writing - by sarah cucchiara

Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden - In praise of the hundred page idea

The Harsh Truths

• Opinion - The New York Times - Don’t Do Trump’s Work for Him on Mass Deportations

Uplifting Stories

• 86 Stories of Progress from 2024 from Fix the News. Not everything was bad this year.
• ‘The Interview’: Rick Steves Refuses to Get Cynical About the World. Yes, the travel writer Rick Steves.
• On the science side - ScienceAlert - The Risk of Cancer Fades as We Get Older, And We May Finally Know Why
• If you don’t follow Peng (Bay Area), he’s been doing great work for city trash pick-up. My guide to those who are interested in beautification volunteering : r/bayarea

Annual Reviews

• The Power of an Annual Review: Reflect on the Past to Reimagine your Future
• PDF - Farman Street - Annual Review Framework for 2024
• And I want to work on my principles during the next year. Podcast - Art of Accomplishment - Wrestle With Your Principles
• Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?
• What Productivity Apps Are You Using in 2025? : r/ProductivityApps

No Tears for Tech

• Where’s Your Ed’s At - Never Forgive Them
• So instead, have your own tears for making software. Bert Hubert’s writings On Long Term Software Development
• And tangential - Keeping a CHANGELOG at Work - code.dblock.org
• The opposite of tears are joy. What’s your “I can’t believe other people don’t do this” hack? : r/AskReddit

A New Flag

• Illinois Flag Commission

Bakeries To Try

The New York Times wrote two articles for bakeries to try out

• The Golden Age of American Bakeries Is Upon Us. Here’s Why.
• The Best Bakeries in America

Recommended

• Email Newsletter - Stress Less : NPR - A series on stressing less
• Book - [The Dictionary Story: A Love Letter to Language Tucked Into a Delightful Fable about the Difficult Question of How to Be Yourself]
• Book - Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman. I got halfway through the book before Libby ran out of time. I’m going to continue reading it via eBook. See the definition of finitude.
• Course: Backend Development Track | Boot.dev
• Podcast: ‘Not Gonna Lie,’ Is a Breakout Hit. Podcast Link
• Podcast: The Iconic 400 Part I - Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang - Rank 400 iconic people
• Course by Casey Muratori - Computer, Enhance!

Merry Christmas

• Christmas in Pictures: Lights and Color Mark the Season

In the margins of books

In the book on how to read a book (Mortimer and Alder), here’s some strategies they employ:

1. Underlining - For me, it’s highlighting the lines that resonate with me
2. Vertical lines at the margin - Honestly, this isn’t something I run into for underlining a multi-line passage because highlighting using a digital book is a lot easier
3. Star, asterisk, or other doodad at the margin - This is the step after highlighting to determine which pieces of highlights continue to resonate after the first insight.
4. Numbers in the margin - Originally to indicate the sequence in which an argument is developed, might be a good notation for anything subsequent enforcing an argument.
5. Numbers of other pages in the margin - This is making reference to another highlight. Some people use Cf to be a “compare from”. It’s a reference mark.
6. Circling of key words or phrases - This serves much the same function as underlining.
7. Writing in the margin, or at the top or bottom of the page - the words or notes around the books. This could be questions and answers (like Oxford notes), the major points, reflections, related to other pieces of writing.

Something something, AI

egghead.io’s Tutorial - Use Gemini 2.0 to Create Agent Instructions to Refactor an Entire Codebase

Turing Post - 🌁#80: What’s in 2025? From Elad Gil, François Chollet, Maxime Labonne, swyx and others

Local Shut-downs

Oakland cocktail bar Kon-Tiki lashes out on Instagram

All the UUIDs

eieio.games does it again! - Writing down (and searching through) every UUID

2024 Photo Recap

• The New York Times - The Year in Pictures 2024: Far From Ordinary

Map it out

Hello, Jesus

It Pays to Have Long Hair and a Beard in Utah—Jesus Models Are in Demand

Flash the cards

SuperMemo - Effective learning: Twenty rules of formulating knowledge

I finally bought Anki, and looking at different ways to make the flashcards better. I’m at the rote memorization phase of learning Mandarin, so I’ve been figuring out what content to put on there, especially to help with grammar, word position, and vocabulary. I’m starting to graduate from words to coming up with my own sentences.

Recommended

Book - The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer, John Burgoyne

KCRW - Guide - Cookbooks - The best cookbooks of 2024, according to Celia Sack (Good Food podcast)

Music

My friend and I create playlists for recapping the year. My specific rules for this playlist is to have it be at most 90 minutes, which is the length of this CD. And this has to have been released in 2024. There’s a few gotchas, such as re-issues, re-releases, remixes, etc. I try to make it generally the original release, but that doesn’t always workout. And sometimes I want to change the list after the end of the year.

Spotify - 2024 Curiously Curated. And a YouTube alternative link

A few from friends

• D’s 2024 Curated
• Teagan’s 2024 Monthly Playlist

From the Media Log

• The film that I want to finish: Past Lives (2023)
• The weird film: Poor Things (2023)
• The cringiest TV series: The Curse, Season 1 (2023-2024)
• The book that resonates the most: The Psychology of Money (2020)
• The unexpected book find: Frostbite (2024)
• My RomCom of the year: Upgraded (2024)
• A great TV find: Ramy (Seasons 1 and 2). I still need to watch the 3rd season
• The cry-fest film: Suzume (2022)
• My good 90’s find: Go (1999)
• The most intense non-intense film: Challengers (2024)
• Unexpected horro series: The first four Ring movies from Japan. Absolutely better than the American ones.
• Best horror from this year: The Substance (2024)
• RIP Dame Maggie Smith: Gosford Park (2001)
• Hallmark Movie of the year: Sugarplummed (2024)

A few more favorite things

• Major Life Events! Wedding, Honeymoon, bought a house

• Software: Raycast with Superkey

The hyperkey has been a game changer. I was worried prior because I had used both MacOS’ native key re-mapping and Karabiner Elements prior.

• More to add…

• Hamilton

• Dicken’s Faire

Revived my newsletter!

Major website additions, like curations and projects (after years of neglect)

These are a few of the things that I learned

Tom Whitwell returns with 52 things he learned in 2024.

And adding this internal playbook (as a PDF) at Facebook called the Red Book

And maybe for the first few weeks of 2025? 7 Databases in 7 Weeks for 2025

For more recaps of 2024:

• The 2024 Web Almanac
• Obsidian Plugins Wrapped 2024

And of course, handhelds.

What’s up, Cal?

I’ve read a good chunk of Cal Newport’s books over the years. He breaks down his own interests in The Tao of Cal

Make Care Packages

I love the idea of creating care packages for friends and family. Christmas shouldn’t be the only time you create gifts for people, so maybe call them care packages instead.

Might I recommend First Bloom’s Care Packages as a starting point?

And on that note, I love themed gifts. Here’s the one my wife and I use

• Something she needs
• Something she wants
• Something to wear
• Something to read

Show me your home library

I came across a video breaking down the largest home library. I wasn’t aware of the Loeb Classical Library, or other collections of the sort. The hoarding mind of mine would love to have a complete set. But who am I kidding. It’s enough I have a good set of Criterion Collection films.

Speaking of books, I have been recommended Nick Milo’s “How to work a book”. Here’s a short write-up of what to expect from the one hour course. Books are for thinking, not reading

Goal Set and Start

Ness Labs - Rethinking Goals: the Science of Nonlinear Goal Setting

A Different Advent

12 Days of OpenAI | OpenAI

Alongside that, some are talking about Google’s new chip. Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip

Notre Dame Re-Erected

The New York Times - How Notre-Dame Was Reborn

When is the right time?

I really love the depth Simon Willison goes into details like this where I’ve heard the debate from different angles and how he’s able to consolidate them. Storing times for human events

A different interpretation of time is place. And Ev William’s new start-up wants to conquer lonliness. Mozi: A Place For Your People. See also, The Myth of the Loneliness Epidemic—Asterisk

Maps across time

TimeMap.org - World History Atlas - This has been an interest of mine to control the timeline and understand a map better. Or any other incident. Scrubbing, as they say.

Changelog Spin-offs

A new era for the Changelog Podcast Universe - three of their shows are getting spin-offs. Sounds like cut backs, but they are re-focusing, and I can totally understand that.

Recommended

Book - Buy Main Street Millionaire by Codie Sanchez

Podcast - The AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook - for folks wanting interviews with top and indie game makers

Podcasts Guide - The New Yorker’s The Best Podcasts of 2024

Novella - Money Matters: a novella by Naomi Kanakia

Newsletters - NPR’s Stress Less Series

US Department of Transportation

I was watching an interview with Pete Buddigeg about the different transit programs

Transit Costs Project – Construction Costs of Urban Rail Projects All Over the World

Corridor Identification and Development Program | FRA

Corridor Identification & Development Program - This is the OG of program development

Your own adventure

You Exist In The Long Context - Steven Johnson

• This is really interesting, creating an adventure game given the text of the book the author wrote about the fingerprinting system used in crimes back in the 1910s. I would love to simulate some other scenarios from history. Apparently, the author has done the same thing for the cuban missile crisis.

Costco says bye bye to books

To be clear, they are going to still have books during the holiday season. From what I can tell, the previous buyer for Costco retired, and this might be one of those consequences.

Food Deserts

The Atlantic - The Hidden Cause of Food Deserts

Estimations

Dave Stewart - The work is never just “the work”

The visuals are great (and I won’t reproduce here). It goes over what is beyond the implementation and how it’s visualized.

Related: Twitter Thread - ~9.5% of software engineers do virtually nothing: Ghost Engineers (0.1x-ers)

And something about complexity - I Didn’t Need Kubernetes, and You Probably Don’t Either

While there is a reason we need to slow down. Ness Labs - The Art of Wintering: How to Find Strength in Slowing Down

The Next Day

The Verge - Dia is the The Browser Company’s AI-powered follow-up to Arc

Photos of the year

AP News - Associated Press 100 Photos of 2024: An epic catalog of humanity

Skill Trees

I love skill trees. Here’s a repo on a repository of Maker Skill Trees and templates to make your own.

And on mentorship - ShiftMag - I have 30 years of experience and still need a mentor. You do too.

Meanwhile, in South Korea

CNN - South Korea president declares emergency martial law

While here in the states, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson Is Fatally Shot in New York City

It’s all opposite in the family

The New York Times - He Was One of New York’s Busiest Shoplifters. His Mother Was a Cop.

Those damn lights

The Ringer - Inside the War Against Headlight Brightness. The wonderful and consequential issues with high beam LEDs

Finally, React has custom element support

Custom Elements Everywhere

Oh, major news outlets

Why I Just Resigned From The Los Angeles Times

Recommended

Book - Good Nature - Why Seeing, Smelling, Hearing, and Touching Plants is Good for Our Health By Kathy Willis

Book - Marcelo Gleiser: The Island of Knowledge

Podcast - The Nathan Barry Show - How to Turn Your YouTube Channel Into a $100,000+ Business (2024) - Jo Franco | 050

PDF - Seth Godin - The Thanksgiving Reader

And the NYTimes Guide to 100 Notable Books of 2024

Thanksgiving week, and for the past few weeks I haven’t been keeping up with my notes. But I still continue to do it.

We hosted a friendsgiving, so here’s some of the things I used to get through cooking.

• The Kitchn - How To Make Vegetarian Thanksgiving Lasagna

Attacked for Bitcoin?

GitHub - jlopp/physical-bitcoin-attacks - Physical Bitcoin Attacks: A list of known attacks against Bitcoin / crypto asset owning entities that occurred in meatspace.

The world is more dangerous than we know it. Thank you, crypto bros

Where’s Your Ed At?

Ed Zitron’s newsletter, “Where’s Your Ed At?” is absolutely worth the read. His latest newsletter, Lost In The Future, has an insightful reflection on the Trump win, and the sentiments we all feel.

See also: Stratechery by Ben Thompson - A Chance to Build

And this: Vitalik Buterin - From prediction markets to info finance

Codex Operandi

Nabeel S. Qureshi’s Principles

Open Sourced AI

The Open Source AI Definition — by The Open Source Initiative

Now let’s see how many closed models will follow along. See Why Compound AI + Open Source will beat Closed AI.

And I’ll leave this essay by Aidan McLaughlin here: The Problem with Reasoners

I just really like this title

Hazel Weakly - Home Baked Abstractions, Store Bought Implementations

And this: Henrik Karlsson - A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox

Bear With Us

When you stay at the Fat Bear Lodge

Many Ways to Skin a

1 dataset. 100 visualizations.

Reminds me a lot of Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec

See also: Lila Shroff - Datasets as Imagination

Empowering for future me

What does it mean to end a career?

Bitfield Consulting contemplates this in A career ending mistake.

Local Happenings

KTVU FOX 2 - Beloved Puerto Rican restaurant La Perla moving out of Oakland

KQED - Omar Torres Resigns From San José City Council, Is Arrested

Newsletter Recs

• for Big Culture Essays;
  • Sam Kriss
  • The Scholar’s Stage
  • rayne fisher-quann
• for art/literary criticism;
  • Garth Greenwell
  • Sam J
  • Brandon
• for U.S. election news;
• Nate Silver
• ettingermentum
• for nuanced tech takes;
  • AI Snake Oil
  • Reboot (self-plug)
• for fun;
  • Good Hang
  • Max Read
• for visual inspiration;
  • Lyndsey Kong
  • Stefania Culafic

How to make it perform

eieio.games - The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

Mary Oliver, When Death Comes

When a clown enters a palace, the clown doesn’t become a king, the palace becomes a circus.
— Turkish proverb modified by Elizabeth Bangs

I love collecting quotes. The first one came from another newsletter that I needed to read the original poem. The second is a reflection of the current state of things.

When you need to brighten up your day

Thank you Elmo for going on Chicken Shop Date (even if he eats veggie nuggets)

Doctors vs. AI

Okay, the title is clickbait-y. What we’ve noticed is if you put your symptoms with an LLM, there’s a likelihood it could get your illness diagnosed, but of course, don’t actually call it a diagnosis.

NYTimes - ChatGPT Defeated Doctors at Diagnosing Illness

Your News, brought to you by your influencer

NBC - 1 in 5 U.S. adults get their news from social media influencers, according to Pew report

Let’s go to the source form the Pew Research Center: Influencers Who Often Post About News, and Who Sees Their Content

Local Murder Drama

Bob Lee’s murder trial is often a soap opera. Here’s an inside look.

From the feed

MSN - Newport Oregon will power thousands of homes with waves

Derek Sivers - Wealth = Have ÷ Want

The Shape of AI | UX Patterns for Artificial Intelligence Design

MSN - Lots of Republicans suddenly think the economy wasn’t that bad after all

Recommendations

Newsletter - Sharon McMahon’s Substack - The Preamble

• Also, her book is out: The Small and the Mighty

There’s been a bunch of back and forth with shuttling our things out of our old apartment. As such, I have not been taking as many week notes for this week.

PSA

The Atlantic - Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula - I mean, I definitely grew up with them and used them throughout college until moving over to silicon ones. When one melted, I “noped” out of it.

Fence Sitting

Valerie Bishop Pearson - Not A Vote Of Confidence

• And for those looking for more information, try this subreddit: FencesitterUS

Windows retools MS Paint with AI?

Windows Insider Blog - New AI experiences for Paint and Notepad begin rolling out to Windows Insiders

Obsidian Webclipper

Obsidian - Save the web

Bye bye, Kubernetes

Gitpod: We’re leaving Kubernetes

I’ve seen other flurry of articles rushing to find the faults

Paul Butler - The hater’s guide to Kubernetes

Jeremy Brown - Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation.

Election Controversy

NYTimes - How Crypto Enthusiasts Hijacked a Dog Mayor Competition

• Upset by poll-stuffers, Enzo’s owner dropped him off.
• See who won

When to hold vs. keep

🌲 Heuristics for Hanging on to Things - by Eleanor Konik

• Where is the balance between how much we capture and how much that we capture is useful?
• Some notes are returned to on a recurring basis, like cooking thanksgiving meals
• For all things digital, the heuristic is to store it in archive, as loss aversion leads to regrets if the file is lost forever. Examples: lost photos, notes, etc.

Our digital therapists

Jess McAllen - The Therapist in the Machine

On the feed

Nature Medicine - Seven-year performance of a clinical metagenomic next-generation sequencing test for diagnosis of central nervous system infections

IronCalc - Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine - Later should be filed with spreadsheet alternatives

Grant Slatton - Algorithms we develop software by

OSnews - Mozilla Foundation lays off 30% of its employees, ends advocacy for open web, privacy, and more - uh oh

The Atlantic - The Death of Search

• But not really about search more than it’s the change in our behaviors

Timothy Snyder - Decapitation Strike

The Guardian - Texas woman sets record for donating more than 2,000 liters of breastmilk | Guinness World Records - Of course, you might Google how much breast milk does the average woman produce…

Recommended

Newsletter - Depths of Repair - Untangling the barriers that make finding genuine connection and growth so difficult. Strategies and tools presented through raw personal stories of failure, resilience, and unearthing our best selves.

Book - Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors: Shattering Limiting Beliefs and Toxic Behaviors to Uncover Infinite Possibilities by Erica Rooney

Book - The Memory Palace by Nate DiMeo

Documentary - Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb

Podcast - Essential Craftsman Podcast. I’m looking forward to hearing the one bonus about what to look for in hiring a contractor

Catalog - 2025 The Whole Seed Catalog - I am going to order one of these for the seeds next year

This was election week. And frankly, one that was a hard pill to swallow. There are a range of responses, but I’m going to keep my head down as we move into our new place.

Federated Learning Coming

Lucy Bellwood and Scott McCloud created a comic about AI and privacy for Google.

Deceitful Manifest v3

EFF issued this: Chrome Users Beware: Manifest V3 is Deceitful and Threatening

Misc. Dev Related

Josh W. Comeau - A Friendly Introduction to Container Queries

Bluesky Starter Pack - Diversify Tech: Starter Pack

• And Joel Hooks’ Starter Pack

Behind the product: Google’s NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs)

The architecture of a conference application built with Expo

Rohan Ganapavarapu - MOATs Aren’t Useful

Engineering Codex - 7 simple habits of the best engineers I know

Right to fix those McDonald’s Ice Cream machines

Victory Is Sweet: We Can Now Fix McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines - iFixit

Your News, Reduced Bias

Find Your News - Match me with nonprofit newsrooms

While nowadays I don’t read much from news websites, it’s really nice to find the hyperlocal websites that I am interested in.

On the feed

Newsletter (Substack) - Embedded by Nick Catucci - My Internet: Jasmine Sun - Jasmine is the Substack core product leader and Reboot cofounder

18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian – The Marginalian

AI for Startups - Microsoft On the Issues - This is on re-evaluation given the election results

Vox - Denaturalization, explained: how Trump can strip immigrants of their citizenship

Obits

Quincy Jones dies: Music titan produced Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ among others | AP News

• Quincy Jones, In Conversation

Bernie Marcus, Home Depot Co-Founder, Is Dead at 95

Recommendations

Book - We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships by Kat Vellos

• And don’t forget the newsletter - The We Should Get Together Newsletter

Newsletter - Reboot

Newsletter - Dan Pfeiffer’s Substack - The Message Box