Craft By Zen by Jeremy Wong

My mom used to use a rolodex to keep track of her customers. She owns a hair salon, and she kept a single index card per customer with their name, phone number, and how often they visited. The analog solution made it simple to keep track of these customers, but the biggest pain was retrieving that information.

While I don’t run my own hair salon, I wanted to have my own version of the rolodex. Some people call this a personal CRM, but I never liked the marketing and sales analogy as that’s not the relationship I have with people. In Obsidian, I have a folder called “Rolodex” where each note has a person’s details, like a dossier. Through other notes, I’ll record interactions I’ve had with that person. Not every interaction of course, as that would make the system far too tedious.

I imported my contacts over from Google Contacts. I created a script to take a Google sheet export of those contacts and tidy up the information. Of course, I still have to go through and delete contacts who are actually not contacts. And I don’t mind having “weak” contacts as it helps color my notes a lot more when I had a one-time collaboration with them. Also, since Obsidian is bi-directional, I can connect people to each other.

I generally keep a map of contacts in a “map of content” or index of specific groups, like co-workers, activity groups, and close friends. This allows different connections to form for each segment type. Like periodic check-ins. For closer friends, I’ll reach out at least once a year if I have their birthday. Or remember I have to ask when their birthday is.

Future Improvements

• How do I sync updates in my contacts?
  • From my Contacts app?
  • From updates in social media?
• What is worth recording?

As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.
— Rumi

Every February, it comes as quickly as it goes. This month was no exception.

• React Labs: What We’ve Been Working On – February 2024 - React Compiler - Actions

  You can add action to elements like <form/>, access the status with useFormStatus, handle the result with useFormState, and optimistically update the UI with useOptimistic.

• Newsletter: Not A Designer

• I Ran A Background Check On A Startup

• Introducing Phind-70B – closing the code quality gap with GPT-4 Turbo while running 4x faster

• Introducing Supermaven, the first code completion tool with a 300,000-token context window

• They kissed on a school bus. Now, 77 years later, they’re reconnected.

• The New York Times - A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men

  • When I think I’m done being sick of the world

• Infinite Mac is a collection of classic Macintosh system releases and software, all easily accessible from the comfort of a (modern) web browser.

• Rivian lays off 10% of workforce as EV pricing pressure mounts | TechCrunch

• Happy New Year: GPT in 500 lines of SQL

• JavaScript Bloat in 2024 @ tonsky.me

• How I build and run behavioral interviews | benkuhn.net

• It’s OK to abandon your side-project - Robb Owen

• Scaling Yourself - by Ryan Peterman - The Developing Dev

• Functional UI Kit

• Engineering is more about people than tech

• The Era of 1-bit LLMs: All Large Language Models are in 1.58 Bits

  • 1-bit Large Language Models (LLMs) focuses on the innovative approach of quantizing model parameters to ternary values to achieve efficient performance comparable to traditional 32-bit models.
  • We explored the rationale behind moving towards smaller, more efficient LLMs, driven by environmental, economic, and deployment considerations, and the potential for these models to operate on consumer hardware.
  • Through analogies, we illuminated how quantization and stochastic quantization work to maintain model performance despite reduced precision, akin to summarizing a vast collection of books into single sentences that capture their essence. These discussions underscore the balance between efficiency and performance in the evolution of LLMs.

• Yuzu - Switch emulator (and hot on a lawsuit w/ Nintendo, although. the case could be weak because you have to bring your own encryption key)

  • Update yesterday: Yuzu is now down

• San Francisco Macy’s to close in devastating blow to downtown

• Obsidian Co-Pilot

• Mountaineer is a batteries-included web framework for Python and React.

• Configuring Google Cloud Functions to talk to Vertex AI

  • Deploy initial Hello World to Cloud Function using Python
  • Add requirements (LangChain and google-cloud-aiplatform)
  • Add CORS
  • Cloud Function runs with context + question
    • Caveat: Grounding source does not work. IAM not working with this.

• The Swyx Mixtape - Serena Colyer - Intentionality

  • Summary: The podcast transcript explores the concept of intentionality in depth, as discussed between the host and their guest, Serena Collier. Intentionality is presented as living life with purpose, direction, and a conscious choice to pursue what one truly desires. It involves having taste, standards, and a vision for what one wants their life to be, alongside the determination to achieve it despite potential setbacks or failures. Practicing intentionality means creating a personal set of standards and desires, and actively making choices that align with those standards and desires to shape one’s life according to one’s personal vision. It’s about making deliberate decisions rather than going through life passively, and it requires resilience, tenacity, and a willingness to confront challenges and discomfort for the sake of personal growth and fulfillment.

• 🧠 001 - Burak Dönmez - Brain Unveiled - For those fascinated by others’ PKMs

• Sure, It Won an Oscar. But Is It Criterion? - The New York Times

• World History Timeline - Vivid Maps

• Learning how to learn again

• Happy Leap Day! - The Pragmatic Engineer

• Announcing Observable v2.0

• #1 – PVH: An Intro to Local-First - localfirst.fm

• An ambitious NIH study has brought new attention to chronic fatigue syndrome : NPR

• Tyler Cowen’s three laws - Marginal REVOLUTION

• Women may realize health benefits of regular exercise more than men

• A new Chapter for A Book Apart - Sad, but also glad they aren’t ceasing operations

• The Revolution That Died on Its Way to Dinner

• One Pace - Cut the fluff One Piece Anime

• The Art of Using Workday Gaps - What to do during these gaps

  1. Take a break
  2. Prepare for the next work session

None of us know what will happen. Don’t spend time worrying about it. Make the most beautiful thing you can. Try to do that every day. That’s it.

— Laurie Anderson

I hope everyone’s winter has been going well. This is typically the time we throw on additional blankets. The family enjoyed a Christmas tree this past January, and it’s been our signal for a warmer, cozier time. We may throw on a feel-good movie for good measure.

To be honest, I was scared to start again. I left in silence, leaving the last part of a 7-part series go unpublished. It has been silently published on my website, in case you care to go back to the archives. And I’m afraid I let everyone down by going silent for 5 years (seriously 😳). But another part of me wants to reach out, say hello, and tell the world what I’ve been up to. I miss the intimate space and the replies I would get from you, dear readers. Maybe in the future, I’ll make a Discord server or a forum. But alas, there’s only so much time in the day for starting new projects.

🧹 Housekeeping

I’ve made some major updates to my website. Last year, I did a major rewrite to make publishing as seamless as possible. I’ve had a lot of configuration issues in the past with my Jekyll project, and rather than futzing around with yet another Ruby manager, I’ve moved myself over to Astro.

The other reason for making updates to my website is it feels like my attempt at reclaiming space I willingly handed over the past decade with social media. I like the tiny web circles, like my friend’s Discord server and other blogs. By that same token, I love carving out my own Internet space.

As such, I’ve been hammering on additions that make my personal space feel more at home and less of a microblog you shout into the air with countless other quasi-anonymous people.

Curations: In my mind, a curation is a collection that has been personally selected for a topic or theme. I think of it beyond listicles, where I can dive into other thoughts as I’m describing my favorite book, movie, or favorite creator. There’s much to explore.

Now: I have added it to the now-list page. A Now page is what you’re up to now. Here’s mine. However, if you want an update, I’ll email it in this newsletter.

Projects: I’ve been busy updating my projects so they are all consistent.

Writing: I’ve been experimenting with different formats. Today I Learned (TIL), Weekly Notes, Website updates, and things that I’m learning. I’ve noticed I like a mix of short-form and long-form, and I’ll continue to publish regularly now my website administration is a lot easier to handle.

Logs: In case you didn’t know, I’ve been putting all of my media consumed in one place. At least the things I keep track of.

I won’t be as extensive in future newsletters about my housekeeping updates.

📣 Personal Note

I left some of you wondering about my father and his health issues. He’s back home and still recovering. We’re visiting him once a week, and things are slowly progressing. I will give you more updates when I have them.

As always, feel free to reply. Share something you’ve been up to this winter. Send pictures of your favorite captured moment of 2024. That’s all for now. 👋🏽

There isn’t much to update. This has been a slower week for me.

I’m thinking more about making small spaces online, and I’m thinking more holistically about what that philosophy means to me. As well as gathering examples. If you run a small website, reach out to me about how you’re treating your small communities and how others can benefit.

Here’s the article in question: Where have all the websites gone?. I love this idea of a linktree alternative.

• Billionaires’ Survivalist Bunkers Go Absolutely Bonkers With Fiery Moats and Water Cannons
• Scraping the Web for Fun and Profit - $127
• Marlon Brando Centenary Collection
• I tried Zed again. Really fast, and wish it had extensions
• Proton Pass - Open Source Password manager
• Expected Value: Millionaire’s Math
• Doomsday Clock - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists - We’re 90 seconds to doomsday
• Monarch vs. Mint: Why Monarch is the best Mint alternative | Monarch Money - am I serious about switching from Mint to Monarch (since Mint is going away?)
• Train To Code
• Ex-Caltrans employee’s lawsuit alleges racist & hostile work environment in SD
• GitButler | Git Branching, Refined
• zoxide - alternative to cd
• Kagi Small Web | Kagi Blog
• Invented Chinese Names Rejected in San Francisco Elections - The New York Times
• announcing freenginx.org
• The High-Risk Refactoring
• Frontiers | Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom
• reorproject/reor: AI note-taking app that runs models locally.
• AT&T says service has been restored after massive, nationwide outage. Authorities are investigating

For my GitHub repo, I wanted to rename the remote master branch to main.

These instructions helped the process.

Go to Settings, then Branches, then edit the master branch. Rename them to main.

You will have to do it locally as well. The command for local machine is as follows.

git branch -m master main

Afterward, you may need to reattach main to origin/main. Follow the instructions on the terminal as necessary.

Why change to main?

This ZDNet article covers GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references. It took them awhile, so many of my old repos haven’t been updated accordingly.

As part of curations, I have added a classifieds section.

As a kid, I love reading the classifieds in the SF Chronicle. It was an interesting time to see it in the advent of Craigslist. Of course, this is by no means an alternative to Craigslist. It is hardly a place for others to add classifieds. This is more like a personal space I can add a wall for you to tear a piece of paper like on those coffee shops for finding a gardener. Except it’s more specific to my own tastes.

In the coming months, I plan to add much more to this. It’s like a personal ad system that probably has better click through rates (jk). I loved Metafilter’s ads since they were more tailored to their audience. This is not a paid sponsorship or ad board. I don’t get paid for this, at least for now. If I do in the future, I’ll be sure to put my disclosures in the classifieds.

If you have any classifieds you want to share, feel free to email them to me. I’ll review them personally for now.

And maybe in the future I can add a “missed connections” section. I love easedropping on people’s first time dates, which have been plenty this past year. I plan on writing some short stories about them in the future.

Enjoy!

I’ve been pretty active with the website updates. I thought it might do me a little good to start adding a short changelog to the website. This sounds like it will be different than my now page.

Around the Website

• Re-arranged the tags so it is better formatted in-line with the published date
• I finished reading The Psychology of Money, so I’ve moved it accordingly
• The lindy library metadata has been expanded, and posts have been added to the main page. It has also been renamed to the timeless treasure trove
• I started a content creator curation that I’m going to start expanding
• I added another TIL blog post that might become a more regular thing. I’m thinking of making its own section if I continue for a few more weeks
• Images were migrated to Astro assets, which help with the website performance. This should reduce the cumulative layout shift (CLS)
• I started to dabble with the technology tree and Plot.js
• I added my thoughts on American Fiction

I’m also coming up with more ideas of what to do next. I’m thinking about doing a microblog inspired by Linus’ stream. I’m getting inspired from “From Jason” Where Have All the Websites Gone and how he thinks we should trade in our linktree links with things that we like on the Internet. Hell, if I think about my own patterns, they used to be on curated link aggregators.

Notes

• Mental Models for Better Thinking - By Feynmanism Twitter / X Account
• A Skill Called Luck - by Jakob Greenfeld
• [[The Ed’s Up - How to Start a Book]] is extremely good resource for The Messy Middle for Writing
• The Apple Vision Pro – Stratechery by Ben Thompson - The productivity disappointment
• jQuery 4.0.0 BETA! | Official jQuery Blog - This was unexpected
• NYTimes: Ecuador Embraces President Noboa’s War on Gang Violence Amid Terror
• NYTimes: Maui Economy, 6 Months After Wildfire, Is Still Reeling
• NYTimes: At 116, She Has Outlived Generations of Loved Ones. But Her Entire Town Has Become Family. - it’s something I’ve thought about if I make it past 100. What if I outlive my children from old age? Heck, even my grandchildren?
• Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are ‘inept’ and ‘boring’
• Lessons Learned From Payments Startups
• Generative Value Newsletter by Eric Flaningam - Data Industry Primer
• Core Needs: BICEPS from Paloma Medina.
  • These are six core needs researchers find are important for humans (both at work and in our personal lives).
• Seven C’s of consulting change - i.e. the challenges and strategies for enacting change in consulting engagements
  1. Client: Understanding the client’s unique history, challenges, and opportunities.
  2. Clarify: Gaining a clear understanding of the context and the need for change.
  3. Create: Developing and proposing solutions for the desired change.
  4. Change: Implementing the proposed solutions and managing the change process.
  5. Confirm: Ensuring that the implemented changes align with the client’s needs and expectations.
  6. Continue: Supporting the client in sustaining the changes and integrating them into their operations.
  7. Close: Concluding the consulting engagement in a way that leaves the client better off
• Matthew Bischoff on Merlin Mann’s Thought Technology
• What it was like working for GitLab
• The Inko programming language - A language for building concurrent software with confidence
• Tara Seshan - How to hire low experience, high potential people
• Ryan Peterman - The Developing Dev - How To Onboard
• A Distributed Systems Reading List
• NYTimes: Bolsonaro and Allies Planned a Coup, Brazil Police Say
• NYTimes: Opinion | The Year of the Dragon Plant
  • I should take this as a sign to get a new bamboo plant. I let the last one die after I moved and placed it in a sunnier spot. That was a mistake
• Chad Fowler on Tim Ferriss Blog: You Don’t Need More How-To Advice — You Need a Beautiful and Painful Reckoning
• Episode #171 of Have You Heard podcast: The Damage Done - There’s a large discussion happening about public education right now, and teaching to the Common Core. It’s not pretty, and makes me think hard about sending my kids to public schools
• Internet Pipes: Sift Through the Treasure Trove of Online Data - I think I have this irrational spending habit of wanting things like this.
• I tried talking to ChatGPT today and using voice as an input. While learning Mandarin might not be there yet (the AI voice doesn’t recognize tonal languages as well), I can see it being good for my Spanish.
• Github: ChatGPT Failures
• The AI Augmented SDLC
• Engineering Practices for LLM Application Development
• Currently Away: How Two Disenchanted People Traveled the Great Loop for Nine Months and Returned to the Start, Energized and Optimistic by Bruce Tate
• Y Combinator - Requests for Startups
• OpenAI: Memory and new controls for ChatGPT
• OpenAI: Video generation models as world simulators
  • Sora - OpenAI’s text-to-video model
• Alexei Navalny was murdered by Vladimir Putin
• Coming face to face with inmates in El Salvador’s mega-jail
• Bob Moore, Who Founded Bob’s Red Mill, Is Dead at 94 - The New York Times
• Meghan Markle Signs Podcast Deal With Lemonada After Spotify Pact Ends
• Don’t Overlook China’s Open Source LLMs

I needed a regular expression for checking if a number has 1 decimal point. Here’s the regular expression ChatGPT came up with: /^\d+(\.\d{1})?$/

Of course, it wasn’t actually the correct requirement. It needed to check if it’s an integer (no decimal points). And if it is a decimal point, it can be at most one.

I screwed up and tried to pair two quantifiers together. So if you have ? and you want to use {0,1}, you can’t do {0.1}?.

And I didn’ need the group, although in retrospect, using the quantifier on the group works, but removing the group makes the ? obsolete.

Here’s what I ultimately came up with.

function validateToOneOrNoDecimalPoint(number) {
    // Regular expression to match numbers with either 0 or 1 decimal point (optional)
    const regex = /^\d+\.?\d{0,1}$/;
    return regex.test(number);
}

// Example usage:
console.log(validateToOneOrNoDecimalPoint(3.5));   // true
console.log(validateToOneOrNoDecimalPoint(10));    // true
console.log(validateToOneOrNoDecimalPoint(2.34));  // false (more than one decimal point)
console.log(validateToOneOrNoDecimalPoint(5.));    // true (no decimal point)
console.log(validateToOneOrNoDecimalPoint(5));     // true (no decimal point)

And I added even more test cases, and used regex.match over regex.test. Subtle difference.