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2024-11-20

A bizarre love triangle playlist

Latest NYT Amplifier playlist just dropped: The Amplifier: A Bizarre Love Triangle Playlist #music #playlist

Jolene from Beyonce is one of my all-time fav, and I had already heard the song before. Apart from that my fav on that list was Taste by Sabrina Carpenter, followed by Wildflower by Billie Eilish.

Frames

frames - by Ava - bookbear express

The “frame” of particular friendship might be something like: we text each other fairly regularly, we get dinner at restaurants or we go on walks, we split the bill, we talk about feelings, we do not have physical contact with each outside of hugs. And obviously with a category as ill-defined as friendship frames can vary hugely between people, but I think that’s a pretty standard one that holds true for a lot of male-female friendships. Basically, we have a contract for how we behave with each other, and we both honor it unless/until it needs to be renegotiated. The failure case, of course, is that you simply can’t be friends with someone who isn’t interested in maintaining the frame. One particular behavior that really annoys me (a “red flag,” as they call it) is when someone verbally says one thing and then acts in a very different way. Like, they say, Let’s be friends, I understand you’re not looking to date anyone, and then they take you to a very romantic restaurant and pay for dinner. And then suggest sitting on a park bench and try to place a hand on your thigh. It’s like—hey, I can’t maintain this frame all by myself.

I generally see “relationship types” as frames. Friendship is a frame, boyfriend/girlfriend is a frame, marriage is a frame: a set of agreements between two people on how they act towards each other. Of course there are people who are anti-frame (I believe this is called relationship anarchy). I think it’s generally really difficult to forgo social frames because most people expect and need consistency. For instance, it would probably really upset most people if a close friend talked to you really intensely every day for two months and then suddenly switched to talking to you once a month without warning. Frames are functionally how you’ve agreed (either with yourself or with another person) to operate in society.

2024-11-19

What are children for

Links in Progress: What are children for? - by Boom

In this one, Boom’s Phoebe Arslanagić-Little reviews the most important things happening in the world of pronatalism and family policy in the last month.

Conservative News Influencers

The majority of news influencers are conservative men, study finds

This morning, The Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan research organization, published a deep 122 page report that found that the news influencer landscape skews male and leans disproportionately conservative, creating a concerning imbalance in our online news landscape that could ultimately have profound political consequences.

…

In a media environment where about 4 in 10 adults under 30 regularly get news from news content creators, this imbalance isn’t just inequitable—it’s a systemic distortion of public discourse that ultimately undermines democratic values, entrenches conservative messaging, and accelerates polarization. I've written before about how desperately the left needs to build an infrastructure to amass online influence, these stats highlight just how urgent that mission is.

and a surprising tidbit about how TikTok is actually an exception in some ways

Politically, TikTok also bucks the trend: it’s the only platform where right-leaning news influencers (25%) do not outnumber left-leaning ones (28%). TikTok also has a higher concentration of news content creators who identify as LGBTQ+ or advocate for LGBTQ+ rights (13%), which is more than double the proportion on other platforms.

As I've written previously, TikTok remains a hub for progressive activism online. But unfortunately, this has made the app the target of right wing ire and directly fed efforts to shut it down.

Postgres Tips

What I Wish Someone Told Me About Postgres | ChallahScript #databases #tools

Great list of easy to understand tips for when I get around seriously using the Postgres database, hopefully in the not so distant future.

Don't Deceive Yourself

don't deceive yourself - by Celine Nguyen - personal canon

Started following Celine Nguyen on Substack only recently. Her essays contain detailed analysis and lovely references.

What disturbs me, what keeps me up at night, is how I lie to myself. “Self-deception,” Joan Didion wrote in 1961, “remains the most difficult deception”:

The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. With the desperate agility of a crooked faro dealer…one shuffles flashily but in vain through one’s marked cards—the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which had involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough.

But how do you resist this kind of danger, when—by definition—the deceived self can’t even identify the lie? I’m trying to teach myself how to see what I don’t know about myself; to find the failures that my ego tries to ignore.

…

I used to be jealous of the people who seemed to just write more, do more, make more work than me! But lately I’ve realized that, while some are lucky to have an easier life (the prototypical trust fund kids, for example)…many of those people, in Didion’s words, knew the price of things. They wanted to make certain projects happen, and embraced the consequences.

The Stone Soup Theory of Billionaires

The Stone Soup Theory of Billionaires - by Brett Scott #money #anthropology

This is a powerful counter-narrative to the prevailing gospel which worships billionaires and their achievements. I will quote the intro in full, but the whole article is worth reading.

In recent years there’s been a strong outbreak of the Great Man Theory of History. This is the idea that single powerful or inspired men - literally men - create history and should be adored, or, on the flip side, reviled. Trump is obviously one of these people, but so too is Musk, Bezos, Putin, and so on. Regardless of whether they’re imagined as superheroes or supervillains, it’s assumed that the future somehow springs fully-formed out of them.

When you imagine that the course of history uniquely resides in single individuals like this, you also imagine that slight shifts in their decisions affect everything for the rest of time. They’re like the star characters in a great global soap opera, but one in which nobody else has any role but to watch them, and either praise or condemn their actions.

This same style of thinking is often applied to their wealth. The Great Man Theory of Wealth assumes that extreme riches are the result of inspired work that the person undertakes. If Bezos had not got up one morning in 1994 and had an idea for Amazon.com, we’d never have a global e-commerce platform. I mean, there are only 8.2 billion of us on the planet. Surely, the chances of a second person working out that you could match buyers and sellers on the Internet is incredibly small!

It’s always imagined that the Great Man builds something. He built a nation. He built a company. This isn’t the full reality. Here’s what actually happens: other people mostly build the thing, and the role of the Great Man is simply to be the focal point around which it’s built. To understand this, let’s turn to the parable of the Stone Soup.

He further goes on to break down and rebut several arguments that support the idea that somehow these billionaires deserve the wealth that they have acquired.

Professional Managerial Class

A two-part exploration of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) on Bill Mitchell's blog triggered memories of my own path down exploring this phenomenon a couple of years ago.

The work of author – Barbara Ehrenreich and her then husband – John Ehrenreich – in the 1970s, first introduced the term – Professional–managerial class.

The PMC according the Ehrenreichs were a “social class within capitalism that by controlling production processes through occupying a superior management position, is neither proletarian nor bourgoeisie”.

The PMC was occupied by “scientists, lawyers, academics, artists, and journalists”.

While the Ehrenreichs focused on the mechanisms whereby this class, through their education and networks, advanced the interests of capital, Catherine Liu focused more on the disdain that the PMC have for the lower-paid occupations – the sense of superiority and virtue.

Time to dust off the paper copy of the book lying in my shelf and attempt to re-read it.

We Have Never Been Woke

Found references to this book in some of the PMC stuff I was reading because it articulates some similar ideas: We Have Never Been Woke | Princeton University Press

From a review in The Guardian:

“Woke” is not a particularly useful term, more often used in disparagement than in analysis. Al-Gharbi recognises this, disavowing it as a slur, refusing even to define it. What matters to him is how the concept is deployed in practice both by supporters and detractors.

The key to understanding wokeness, Al-Gharbi insists, is the struggles of “symbolic capitalists” – “professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction”. In other words, writers and academics, artists and lawyers, museum curators and tech professionals. It is a social stratum that attempts to entrench itself within the elite, elbowing out others already there, by using the language of social justice to gain status and accrue “cultural capital”. Theirs is a struggle within the elite presented as a struggle against the elite on behalf of the poor and the dispossessed.

This is not simply cynicism or hypocrisy, Al-Gharbi argues. Symbolic capitalists have constructed myths about their social roles that allow them genuinely to believe in fairness and equity while entrenching inequality and injustice, myths that have been accepted by many social institutions and power-brokers. The consequence is that the language of social justice has helped “legitimize and obscure inequalities”, allowing sections of the elite to “reinforce their elite status… often at the expense of those who are genuinely vulnerable, marginalized and disadvantaged”.

A Materialist Analysis of US Election Results

Why Are Poor Americans Voting for the Party of the Rich? | Ones and Tooze Podcast #materialism

Adam Tooze gave, from all that I have read, a really fresh analysis of the US election results from a materialist theory perspective. It's a long quote I picked out from the full transcript, but it's really worth reading. I really like the middle school analogy at the end between Kamala as a "spelling-bee girl" and Trump as a "high-living frat boy", both throwing a party and where the "academically unambitious high-school girls" (an analogy for white non-college educated women) would go.

The Professional Managerial Class (PMC) as an analytical category that I covered in the sections above also make an appearance.

Yeah, this is a great question. And I mean, I think at the most general level, the issue with materialism and the critics of materialism—materialism being the big, grand, metaphysical, almost philosophical idea that it's what we eat that determines who we are more than what we think. It's realities, it's the means through which and the way in which we reproduce our lives that shapes identities and assumptions about the world, right? That basic premise.

The thing about it is that it's so often applied as a means of rather coarse—not to say crude—simplification. You know, this for workers, that for capitalists. And then, surprise, surprise, the world doesn't make that much sense if you're trying to apply that. And in this particular case, as you're saying, what are we to make of the fact that better-off people seem to be voting for redistribution? It's turkeys voting for Thanksgiving, you might say. Conversely, you have working-class voters voting for a business party that's promising to produce huge tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy.

To my mind, the thing here is that materialism is misunderstood. And if you take it seriously, it's the precise opposite of simplification. It requires an almost infinitely painstaking attention to detail. It's, you know, almost like a novelist's attention to detail. And in this particular case, I think we need to just start by recognizing that the very minimum class schema we need to understand American politics right now is a three-class rather than a two-class model.

I mean, like, one element is an idea of the working class. Let's define that in terms of dependent employment—being working for somebody else, relatively low incomes (so, by all means, earning less than the average, so $50,000 or less), and a lack of control at work that goes hand in hand with relatively less credentials, less education.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are what you might call the rich people, the upper class, who have not just higher incomes but wealth and power and the security that goes with that. In the Marxist sense, they may actually literally control the means of production—a big hotel, a factory, a business, or whatever.

But you can't understand the politics of the US right now unless you've acknowledged that there's a third social class. Let's call it the professional-managerial class, who are credentialed by the education system, occupy positions of authority within the economy and society at large, and they exercise control directly, often over working-class Americans. And that starts literally at the beginning in kindergarten or elementary school, where you have a college-educated person taking charge of your kid and their kid's education, or taking charge of you yourself and subjecting you to education.

And it goes all the way through to the hospitals where your kids are born and your parents die, and the folks that regulate what you can build in your front yard and everything else, right? The entire apparatus of managerialism. And you can see where I'm going with this. Once you've got that three-part schema in place, which is thoroughly materialistic, you can, I think, easily understand the dynamics which are in play here.

The stereotypical working-class Trump voter admires the man himself, right? He admires—or she admires—the billionaire businessperson and his cronies. They've done well, and they exercise the privileges of having done well because they're allowed to speak their mind and do their own thing. And above all, what they're allowed to do is flaunt and show disrespect and scorn for the values of the professional middle class, which the rich folks can afford to just spit on, and working-class people have to suffer, right?

Trump and co. can say out loud what many ordinary Americans think, which is that they simply can't get with the highfalutin ideas of everyone from the schoolteacher to the librarian, all the way up to the fancy Ivy League professor and the folks on television who want to talk about complex norms of transgender identities or structural racism or climate change—these big abstractions, difficult concepts. And yet, what the working-class observer will point out is that it's not actually those people, in the final analysis, who call the shots. The people who do are the people like Trump. And those are the people that you kind of admire. And if somebody like that is willing to just shoot their mouth and speak their mind and say whatever they like, and it turns out to be a relatively conservative message, then this plays extremely well with that working-class constituency.

And this is not anti-materialist or a refusal of materialism. It's a very specific set of resentments, deeply embedded in the existence of many working-class Americans every day of the week. And as you start from there, what is difficult to understand about the fact that working-class men are not keen to vote for fancy, high-powered lawyer ladies as candidates of the Democratic Party? There's just nothing to my mind that strikes me as surprising about this at all, right?

And the appeal—or rather the distaste—is compounded by the fact that that fancy lawyer lady is treating Trump as though he's a buffoon. And one of her most successful punchlines in the campaign to the New York Times-reading class is, "I'm speaking now," right? Which is this sort of maternal assertion of power towards whoever it is who's supposed to shut up at that point. In this case, it was a heckler, but it expresses something that working-class Americans will find easy to relate to in a negative way.

I mean, is it really surprising that white women without college degrees preferred Trump over Hillary and then Harris by a margin of 25 to 28%? I struggle to understand why anyone finds this surprising. Like, you know, imagine a middle school class, and imagine there's two people throwing a party, and one of them is like the state champion spelling bee girl, and the other one is a high-living frat boy who appears to know how to have a good time. Where would you expect the less academically ambitious girls in the class— which side, which party do you expect them to go to, right?

So the very fact that American liberals find this so hard to digest to the point at which they begin to question their own metaphysical assumptions, you know, to my mind, is an expression of the extraordinary material—profoundly material—divides there are in US society that literally render the behavior of one group almost incomprehensible to the people who supposedly understand everything, right? The liberal educated group.

And one of the reasons why we can't see this incredibly obvious, incredibly powerful three-way split is that it's very badly captured by the statistics that we have to rely on. It's really appalling how inadequate the sociological data are on American elections. Basically, what do we have to do? We have to rely on two categories to do almost all the work. One is college versus non-college, and the other one is $50k, $50k to $100k, $100k plus.

As though these were adequate categories for describing the complex reality of American society. I mean, it's telling that even if you just combine those two elements, you end up with something quite informative, which is that amongst men without college degrees, there is a huge propensity to vote Trump amongst those with over $100k in income. Because, you know, just imagine the novelistic character here: this is the small business owner who didn't go to college and nevertheless has made good, and therefore knows very well that folks like Harris or Clinton are just a huge pain-in-the-ass lawyer lady that they want to have absolutely nothing to do with, right?

And so there's this scornful rejection of those values, firmly rooted in materialism, translated into a cultural politics of mutual scorn and contempt, you know, which have very, very deep roots in American society in this current moment. So I think materialism is all the way. It gives us all the juice that we need, but we need a more refined, complex, richer understanding of these social, economic, and cultural hierarchies.

2024-11-18

NYT Amplifier Playlist

The new NYT Amplifier playlist just landed and I have been listening to it: The Amplifier: 7 New Songs You Should Hear Now #music #playlist

Graucha Max by Darkside is one of my favs.

Walking in Japan

Walking Japan (again): From Fukuoka to Nagasaki #travel #japan

Yet another lovely read from Chris Arnade. Yet another antidote to the Japan slop hitting my timeline from folks visiting there from India, and just marking off places they found in a tourist guide.

Work as the central point of your life can sound empty and meaningless and not something you think I would admire given that I write about needing something spiritual that isn’t confined to this world, but also tries to make sense of what comes after death. Yet when you are a stakeholder in your job, that is when you are your own boss, which is one of the defining differences between craftsmanship and simple labor, then there can be a spiritual component, which while not as deep and complex as faith, can give someone a clear sense of purpose that extends beyond this life.

In Japan, partly due to permissive zoning laws, but also because of historical precedent, there are independently owned and run restaurants almost everywhere, although they tend to cluster next to train stations, which are also almost everywhere. These small businesses are the economic and meaning-making engine for almost everyone who works in them, which is often both parents, and a few of their children. That sense of ownership, coupled with a culture of thoughtfulness, means the food in them is almost always amazing, no matter the location.

Sex Strikes

Are sex strikes really the best response to the behaviours of men? | Dazed

Pretesting

The ‘secret strategy’ that could boost your ability to learn | Psyche Ideas #learning #hacks

Imagine you are planning to learn about the solar system but, before you start, your teacher gives you a multiple-choice quiz on the topic. You haven’t learned a single fact about the solar system yet, so the questions, such as ‘Which of our dwarf planets is not a plutoid?’ or ‘Which planet is the least dense in the solar system?’, leave you staring blankly. Naturally, you are bound to make mistakes. You might understandably feel that this guessing in the dark is a complete waste of time. In fact, it’s not – a growing body of research shows this early test can significantly enhance your later learning.

Researchers believe pretesting is beneficial because it improves the way that we process the to-be-learned material…

…

Increased attention to the to-be-learned material could be another factor. Pan and his colleagues have observed reduced mind-wandering after pretesting, and other researchers have shown that participants’ eyes focus more on sentences related to the questions they received in advance. Other potential mechanisms include an improved motivation to learn and that pretesting acts as a metacognitive ‘reality check’, highlighting what you do and do not know and encouraging you to fill in knowledge gaps.

Whatever the mechanism is, when you later need that information, you’re more likely to recall it after a pretest than if you had simply read it.

Mental Health Diagnosis

What a psychiatric diagnosis means – and what it doesn’t mean | Psyche Ideas #mentalhealth

A diagnosis is a prototype

In the official diagnostic manuals, categories such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or generalised anxiety disorder come with stringent criteria for applying the diagnosis. The view taken by clinicians is usually not so rigid. Instead, these categories are often understood as prototypical: they are based on the typical or illustrative example of a mental health problem from which real-world presentations will often deviate. From this perspective, a diagnosis is a ‘best fit’ match between someone’s experiences and a prototype, which represents the most specific or notable features of a condition.

Self Care and the Beauty Industry

Jessica DeFino is back again to eviscerate the beauty industry and their shenanigans: Post-Election, Beware 'Self-Care'

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence,” Audre Lorde wrote in her 1988 essay collection, A Burst of Light. “It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

If the activist were alive today, she would hardly recognize the concept of self-care, and we would hardly recognize her.

Consider: Her forehead would be wrinkle-free — a placid, paralytic approximation of youth — courtesy of Botox. Her frown lines would be filled with a smidge of injectable Juvéderm, and her eyes would appear wide and awake; perhaps from a blepharoplasty, perhaps from a syringe of filler to the tear troughs.

This time specifically, she is writing about the origins of the phenomena when "skin-care" got substituted by "self-care".

I can’t say what Lorde would make of the surface-level “self-care” the beauty and wellness industries promote today, since it only rose to popularity in 2016. Following the (first) election of U.S. President Donald Trump, activists circulated the above quote from Lorde to emphasize the importance of tending to one’s needs in times of political upheaval. Cosmetic companies slyly swapped the word “self” for “skin”. Customers ate it up — of course Lorde meant collagen levels when she preached about preservation! — because people were tired, and applying eye cream is easier than engaging in political action.

Over the next year, skincare became the fastest growing market in beauty, amassing $5.6 billion in sales and totaling 45% of the industry’s growth. And over the next eight years, every failure of care by the government created another opportunity for Big Beauty to expand the reach of its narrowing standards, all under the banner of wellness.

Bihar's Daughters are Coding

Alice Evans looks at “the Honour-Income Trade-Off” in Bihar where girls are enrolling into programming schools and then going on to get coding jobs: Bollywood, Are You Watching? Bihar's Daughters Are Coding

2024-11-17

Podcast Recap

2024-11-16

Spent the whole day outside and did fun things!

Dot Mandala

Made this dot mandala at StoryZone and had loads of fun. We were given a 3 min intro with the tools and off we went for two hours just randomly trying out things. I chose to focus on bright colors and simple patterns. Check out the result below.

HSR Food

Tried two places in HSR Layout:

2024-11-15

Been rewatching Andor S1 since I tweeted about it a couple of days ago.

Tokyo

Lots of Indians are going to Tokyo, and I keep seeing pics on X. But they also seem to be doing the same stereotypical things, that I did back when I was there several years ago.

This NYT article about visiting Tokyo has a slightly offbeat 3-day itinerary: 36 Hours in Tokyo: Things to Do and See - The New York Times #tokyo #japan #travel #offbeat

Jung Quote

"People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic texts from the literature of the whole world – all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls."

Carl Jung Psychology and Alchemy

The Bro Vote

I read about this in the Vox Culture newsletter from Rebecca Jennings. The newsletter doesn't seem to be accessible online, but there is a members exclusive article which covers the same thing: From Joe Rogan to Theo Von, Gen Z podcasts and livestreams helped Trump win | Vox #trump

Could it be that growing up in a fundamentally different media environment than generations before them, one populated by individual influencers who often preach the values of entrepreneurship, self-improvement, and, ultimately, self-interest over everything else, galvanized the youngest voters to vote for a man who shared that same spirit? Or could it be that young men have helped make this content popular because they like what it says?

What’s clear is that Donald Trump catered to the bro vote and won.

…

Ten years later, men are even lonelier, more likely to be single, more skeptical, and more afraid than ever. They find solace and community online, in places that older folks still don’t understand, where they see idealized versions of masculinity winning. They cheer on UFC fights and boxing matches, use “edgy” slurs, trade in risky crypto investments, bootlick Silicon Valley billionaires, listen to toxic dating advice, and denigrate women.

They vote for a man who has done everything you’re not supposed to do — steal, lie, rape, idolize Hitler — because his election fulfills their fantasy that men really can get away with whatever they want.

For now, it seems they’re right.

Male Loneliness

The article above about The Bro Vote triggered a journey down the rabbit hole of male loneliness.

My starting points were two articles I had come across in Sept from Alice Evans (and linked in the daily log as well), which I re-read:

Found this report titled State of American Men 2023 from one of Alice Evans' other articles (which is only tangential related). PDF here (the executive summary is great): STATE-OF-AMERICAN-MEN-2023.pdf

Read a few more articles but came away a bit unsatisfied. Decided to ask ChatGPT to give me a succinct breakdown, and I thought it did a pretty good job.

Male loneliness has increased in recent times due to shifting societal norms, changing labor markets, and evolving relationship dynamics. Traditional forms of male bonding, such as workplace camaraderie and community-based activities, have diminished with the rise of remote work and urbanization. These changes have led to fewer opportunities for men to form and maintain deep friendships. Research by Niobe Way, author of Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, highlights how boys are often socialized out of forming close emotional bonds as they age, leading to a lack of intimate friendships in adulthood. This socialization, combined with modern lifestyles that prioritize individualism over community, exacerbates male loneliness.

Additionally, the decline in marriage rates and delays in forming long-term relationships play a significant role. Sociologist Eric Klinenberg's work in Going Solo reveals how the increasing prevalence of single-person households—particularly among men—contributes to feelings of isolation. Digital dating culture, while ostensibly expanding opportunities to connect, often fails to provide the deep, meaningful relationships men seek. This is compounded by the fact that men are less likely than women to maintain social networks outside of romantic relationships, leaving them more vulnerable to loneliness when those connections are absent or fail.

Finally, mental health stigmas continue to inhibit men from seeking help or sharing their struggles. The societal expectation for men to embody self-reliance and emotional stoicism discourages them from building supportive networks. Studies such as those by Brené Brown on vulnerability show that the inability to express emotions openly hampers relational depth. These combined factors underscore how recent societal shifts have uniquely affected men, leading to increased loneliness and a pressing need for cultural and structural solutions.

Kyla Scanlon on How Trump Won

How Trump Won, What Happens Next, and How Disconnects Drove Democracy

Kyla is already great at taking disparate narratives and summarizing them. So I am not going to attempt to quote from her piece. Just go read the whole thing, it's great!

The majority of the article is focused on economic and policy analysis, but even she refers to the idea of Trump winning over young male voters, by linking out to this Bloomberg article: Trump’s Appeal to Young Men in Three Charts: Election 2024 - Bloomberg

More Trump and Election Analysis

Just gonna collect the random links under one heading:

Selection Effects

Selection Effects by Byrne Hobart in the Capital Gains newsletter

The last para is killer, and I can really relate to it as a person with wayyy too many interests

One irony of all of this is that these filters are self-reinforcing: if you select into a particular peer group that's really excited about political activism, recreational math, vegan cooking, cryptography, or whatever, you get constant evidence from your daily life that these are universally interesting topics. And if you've selected into these groups, you'd probably rather live in a world where that perception is true! So being aware of selection effects has tradeoffs: you'll know more about the rest of the world if you periodically check yourself in that way, but a lot of what you learn makes the world a slightly less friendly place.

Living Fossils - Just Tell Me What To Do

"Just Tell Me What To Do" - by Josh Zlatkus #psychology #therapy

Yet another banger of an article from the awesome folks at Living Fossils. It's so beautifully written and yet hard to summarize. It covers the usual topics that show up in other Living Fossils posts around technology upending culture and religion and the limits of therapy.

Humans rely on many sense-making methods to patch together an understanding of the world around them. One of these methods is, of course, our senses. If I touch a bush and get pricked, that’s enough information for me to avoid that bush in the future. However, if I want to know how the bush came to be prickly, then I must rely on more than my senses. I must instead rely on something like religion, culture, or science. I think of these as sense-making institutions; they try to explain what our built-in senses cannot.

…

So here’s the big picture. Science has stolen like a fox into the henhouse and killed many of our ancient ways of making sense of the world around us. For some questions, science has provided more accurate answers which tend to be less comforting than those made, at least in part, for comfort. For other questions, science has discredited existing answers without replacing them. It’s up to those in the modern world to fill in the blanks. To some extent, all of us are playing Mad Libs.

Obviously, the increased accuracy, transparency, and choice that science offers can be good. At the same time, the shifting, open landscape that it creates can be deeply confusing and disorienting. It often leads people to seek shelter, to cast around for something—or someone—to tell them what to do.

Andor

The Power & Beauty of Revolution in ‘Andor’ | by Nick | Medium

The quality of Andor’s writing is clear here. The directness of its politics is demonstrated. And the series underpins one thing: only through sacrifice, collective action, and the long slog of inches gained, will true revolution come.

2024-11-14

Lampy

Came across this really cool lamp: Lampy – shop.absurd.industries

/images/lampy.png

Linguistic Observer Effect

How the word 'slop' went mainstream.

the linguistic observer effect - The Etymology Nerd

By lending “slop” the legitimacy of the New York Times, we would instantly be elevating it against potential synonyms, giving it more of a platform to spread than its competitors. Alternatively, we could kill the word by making it seem unnatural, like Taylor Lorenz likely did with her 2021 article about the then-nascent word “cheugy.” I called this the Linguistic Observer Effect: by publicly observing a word, we inadvertently alter its trajectory.

Ben went on to publish his article, and I wrote a substack post wondering what would happen to the word.

Six months later, I think we have our answer. “Slop” has reached sustained usage in the media, and I’ve even heard my friends casually use the phrase (though I know they weren’t saying it earlier this year). This almost definitely happened because of the Times piece:

tty demystified

The TTY demystified #tty #tools

Tribalism in Human Beings

Tribalism and Modern Elections - by Alice Evans #evolution #culture

book recommendation from the article: Tribal by Michael Morris: 9780735218093 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

Two Fundamental Psychological Systems:

Tribalism in the Digital Age: Epistemic Tribalism In a fragmented media landscape, people form echo chambers, valuing in-group cohesion over objective truth.

How to do great work

From: x.com

/images/graham_great_work.png

2024-11-13

Math Roadmap

Good roundup of math topics.

thanks to @aagrabakijasmine on X

Dating Standards and Hot People

Too much exposure to hot people is warping our dating standards | Dazed #dating

These quotes are so relatable, but the whole article is well worth reading!

It’s been well established that the digital ubiquity of “unrealistic beauty standards” is whittling away at our self-esteem and mental health. What has been unpacked less exhaustively, however, is the impact it’s having on our dating lives. Online, men are calling Sydney Sweeney and Margot Robbie “mid”, rating the latter a seven out of ten on the universal scale of hotness, and a lot of my gorgeous friends lament never being hit on in real life. “Back in the olden days they [men] would see like 200 baddies in their whole life and now it’s like, they are desensitised to it,” posited influencer Tinx, to resounding agreement on TikTok and beyond. Over half of US adults say dating has gotten worse over the last ten years. Has overexposure to good-looking people skyrocketed our standards?

…

A 2014 study conducted by Carlota Batres, assistant professor of psychology at Franklin & Marshall College and the director of the Preferences Lab, found that participants with access to the internet favoured more masculine men and thinner, more feminine women. “The internet influences our perceptions of what it is that we find attractive,” she tells Dazed. It’s a theory bolstered by a later study by Batres, which found that our visual diet – or the faces we see most (on or offline) – shapes our perception of what’s beautiful. It’s no wonder that a dissonance is occurring when we step out of the lacquered digital realm into the real world of idiosyncrasies and textured skin, where we’re illuminated by fluorescent overhead lighting instead of ring lights, and you see every angle of someone’s face.

It’s a take echoed by psychologist and researcher Michelle Drouin: “I think you can put it down to basic habituation. We have now become habituated to the images that we’ve seen online and we think that that’s our reality… Physical attraction is what makes someone walk across the room for someone else. And if you don’t have that initial prime attraction, because you’re so habituated to all the beautiful, perfect images that you see online, then what’s the trigger that makes you walk across a room?”

Life is a Gift

Nov 11 was Dostoevsky's birthday, and X seems to be flooded with a bunch of quotes. This one caught my eye

2024-11-12

Podcast Recap

LLMs and Go

Some links to work with LLMs in Go #golang #llm

2024-11-11

Economist on ADHD

Researchers are questioning if ADHD should be seen as a disorder

As somebody who recently realised I had very clear ADHD-like symptoms for most of my adult life, I have spent way too much time researching and understanding the disease. I have posted about some of the stuff I have uncovered before.

It is like being inside a pinball machine with a hundred balls,” says Lucy. “Three inner monologues,” says Phillip. “Like several tracks playing at the same time,” says Sarah. This is how people with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) describe what is going on in their heads at any given moment. With so many thoughts jostling for attention, it is a struggle to concentrate. Appointments fly by. Relationships founder. Feelings of inadequacy—alongside anxiety and depression—start to creep in.

…

But for a growing number of experts, the evolving scientific understanding of ADHD is leading them to question whether it should be seen as a disorder at all.

Instead, they say, ADHD may simply represent another point on the spectrum of neurodiversity: the range of different ways of thinking and behaving that count as normal. They point to other, non-pharmaceutical interventions that have been shown to make a difference to people with symptoms, from building a supportive environment that harnesses their strengths to offering tools that help them cope with the challenges of daily life.

Day of the Jackal

Loved the first four episodes: The Day of the Jackal (TV Mini Series 2024– ) - IMDb #tv

2024-11-10

OS X CLI Utilities

Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities

Some nice ones:

Uruguay and Teslas

TIL, Uruguay is a great place to import Teslas: Where to buy Teslas in Uruguay: imported straight from China - Rest of World

Uruguay, a small country with a robust public charging network, tax cuts for EVs, and minimal bureaucratic hurdles for car imports, has become a natural landing pad for Teslas.

2024-11-09

Turns out it took me longer to actually feel fully recovered despite the fever receding earlier this week. Decided to take a break from daily logging. But now I am back!

Podcast Recap

2024-11-05

Declared podcast and feed bankruptcy and marked everything I missed during the fever as read. I should do that more often.

Starting watching Rivals: Rivals (TV Series 2024– ) - IMDb #tv

2024-11-04

Fever seems to be gone! 🕺🏽

Podcast Recap

2024-11-03

Substance

Watched Substance movie. Pretty good watch! The Substance (2024) - IMDb

Caught up with the latest episode of Special Ops: Lioness #tv

2024-11-02

Finished bingewatching The Diplomat S2. The ending was just so silly, but at least it sets up the third season really nicely.

2024-11-01

Gonna stop with the fever updates. Will log once my fever has completely gone.

Started watching The Diplomat S2, and realised I need to go back and do a full recap of S1 because I have forgotten everything: The Diplomat (TV Series 2023– ) - IMDb #tv

2024-10-31

Finally went to the doctor today, even though I was reluctant. As expected they prescribed an antibiotic and something to counteract the side-effects of the antibiotic. All this was before they received the blood test results. The blood test was another major ripoff. Apart from the standard CBC test, they included additional tests for Dengue and Typhoid which were super expensive and absolutely unnecessary. I wasn't paying attention, so I only realized later what I ended up paying for.

The blood test came back normal. So basically it's likely some viral infection which is taking its time to get out of my system. The antibiotics are useless against a viral infection, so there is no use taking them (but the doctor asked me to complete my three day dosage anyway).

I have decided to learn to interpret my own blood test results and do my own research on common diagnosis for viral and bacterial fevers and infections. Nearly every established brand that operates a clinic cares only about their bottomline. Sigh 😔!

What makes it worse is that today is Diwali 🪔!

2024-10-30

Another day of fever 🤒. Subjectively, I feel much better. But the temperature on the thermometer keeps swinging between 99 and 97. FML.

Jasmine Green Tea w/ Himalayan Pink Salt

Since I couldn't taste anything with the fever, I decided to try some jasmine green tea with himalayan salt. It's actually quite nice!

Special Ops: Lioness

I don't believe this show went mainstream, but it had good reviews in the first season. I loved the action, the drama, the defence/espionage mumbo jumbo and Zoe Saldana in a badass avatar. The second season just released and I watched the first couple of episodes. #tv

Lioness (TV Series 2023– ) - IMDb

Call Me Bae

I normally ignore TV shows coming from the Bollywood mafia because it's usually the same old cliched shit. This was why I was sleeping on Call Me Bae. But as I started watching, I actually got into it and binged the entire thing. It has its limitations and awkward moments, but overall it was executed quite well. Very bingeable. Ananya Pandey may not be a top actress, but she is a very underrated one for sure. #tv #india

Call Me Bae (TV Series 2024– ) - IMDb

Illuminate by Google

Illuminate | Learn Your Way

From this article: Pushing the frontiers of audio generation - Google DeepMind

2024-10-29

The fever continues to persist. I think I feel a bit better than yesterday. But it might be just the effect of the paracetamol. Once it starts wearing off the wooziness and discomfort returns.

Cursor

How I write code using Cursor: A review #ai #coding

This article makes some good relevant points. Also read the HN discussion.

Whether I'll be using Cursor in a few years or have moved on to another tool, I can't really tell. I am confident that at the time of writing this, Cursor is the best example of the potential of LLM coding assistants, and if you want to explore how this type of tool might be of value I suggest you give it a spin.

I found that I don't use the tab completion as much as the Cmd-K inline editing and Cmd-L chat features. However, on the rare occasion I did use it, it was pretty helpful to avoid a lot of manual typing. The other thing I believe folks are overlooking is prompt engineering. The precision and clarity of your prompts can make a difference in the output you are getting.

Matt Levine

Why So Few Matt Levines? · Gwern.net

Many people owe most of what they know about stock trading, bonds, arcane but controversial matters like naked shorts, meme stocks etc to Levine; and I would be embarrassed to admit how much of my economics knowledge comes through Levine rather than some more rigorous source like my old economics textbooks. This is because Levine provides 3 key ingredients which foster learning…

This is the reason I recommend Matt Levine's newsletter to everybody. Reading his newsletter for a decent period of time is the equivalent of getting a minor in finance and economics.

Shopify vs Salesforce

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-29/shopify-is-winning-salesforce-clients-stoking-e-commerce-rivalry

TIL Shopify and Salesforce are competitors in the ecommerce space.

For years, Salesforce and Shopify peacefully co-existed. Better known for its customer management software, Salesforce entered e-commerce in 2016 with the $2.8 billion acquisition of Demandware. Now called “Commerce Cloud,” Salesforce says its clients include most top retailers, such as Saks Fifth Avenue. Customers also typically use other Salesforce products, meaning they can integrate the e-commerce tools with marketing and other functions, Ball said.

…

Today, the company’s commerce and marketing business is its slowest growing segment, and Shopify revenue eclipsed the business back in 2021. “They’re certainly a noticeable competitor in the space,” Ball said. “I think one would be head-in-the-sand to not see it.” Salesforce says it has been attracting Shopify customers, including Black Rifle Coffee Co., ReserveBar and Hasbro Inc.

2024-10-28

High fever 🤒. Couldn't do much all day 🤷🏽.

However, I do need to deliver on a tight deadline. So I decided to tackle it in a feverish frenzy. Made good progress through it, better than I expected in my state.

2024-10-27

Colin From Accounts

Finished Season 2 finally. It's a highly underrated TV show. #tv #comedy

2024-10-26

Daily Log Digest Newsletter

Tweaked some code to fix newsletter generation code that I originally wrote during LearningDev hack hours: Tweaks to newsletter code after testing · deepakjois/debugjois.dev@d45cfee · GitHub

Put out a call for folks willing to test it. Will add a link to it in a few days after I have sent out a couple of newsletters to the early testers.

Podcast Recap

2024-10-25

The rockets are nifty, but it is satellites that make SpaceX valuable #satellites #internet

TIL about satellite internet:

Using satellites to provide internet access is not a new idea. Such firms as Hughes, SES and ViaSat already offer exactly this service, bouncing signals from subscribers back down to ground stations and on to the wider internet. But they rely on small numbers of satellites mostly in high orbit. That allows a single satellite to see a large portion of Earth’s surface and thus to serve many customers at once.

Unfortunately, flying so high also means that signals take a noticeable amount of time to get up to the satellite and back down to Earth. That makes remote working, video calls and online gaming a pain. And having lots of people share one satellite risks congestion. For that reason, says Mr Potter, satellite internet has been seen as a last-resort option, useful only when nothing better is available.

Starlink’s satellites fly in very low orbits, around 500km up. That slashes transmission delays, allowing Starlink to offer a connection similar to ground-based broadband. The trade-off is that each satellite can serve only a small area of Earth. To achieve worldwide coverage you therefore need an awful lot of satellites. According to Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, the 6,400 or so Starlink satellites launched since 2019 account for around three-quarters of all the active satellites in space (see chart 3). SpaceX has firm plans to deploy 12,000 satellites, and has applied to launch as many as 42,000.

Text fragments

I kept seeing this everywhere and just assumed it was some proprietary Chrome feature. Turns out it's a web standard: Smarter than 'Ctrl+F': Linking Directly to Web Page Content #css #standard #search #text

Historically, we could link to a certain part of the page only if that part had an ID. All we needed to do was to link to the URL and add the document fragment (ID). If we wanted to link to a certain part of the page, we needed to anchor that part to link to it. This was until we were blessed with the Text fragments!

2024-10-24

Hyprland

TIL about: Hyprland - a tiling window manager for Linux #linux #tiling

Hyprland provides the latest Wayland features, dynamic tiling, all the eyecandy, powerful plugins and much more

GenZ lingo

After the NYT, it is the Economist's turn to write about GenZ slang: TikTok is changing how Gen Z speaks #genz #slang

2024-10-23

all the information I consume on the internet

I feel like one of my big failings, and simultaneously my big flex is the amount of information I track on the internet. On the one hand - after years of doing this I seem to have developed a remarkable ability to hold a conversation or spout random bits of knowledge on a wide variety of topics, which seems like a useful skill to have 🤷🏽. On the other, I think the time and effort that I dedicate to this has prevented me from engaging in some forms of deep work that I would very much like to do and might be potentially rewarding.

In any case, there is no question that I push myself to the verge of information overload, but tbh I actually really enjoy myself while doing it. Here is my rough system by which I manage to have some sort of discipline and efficiency in the process:

Podcast roundup

From now on, instead of keeping a daily cadence, I will just list interesting podcasts I came across whenever I get around to it during a week. #podcasts

2024-10-22

brain rot

Why teenagers are deliberately seeking brain rot on TikTok | Psyche Ideas #culture #media

…brain rot is what we might call a ‘genre of participation’, to borrow a term from the work of the cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito. On a digital social media application like TikTok, with its endless different types of content, one way of participating is to seek out brain rot and therefore turn off, so to speak, one’s brain. And it’s clear from my research that this type of mindless TikTok video serves an important purpose in the larger ecosystem of the internet.

You might say that brain rot is a necessary strategy for managing the particular anxieties of being a teenager at this precise moment in history, fraught as it is with conflict, catastrophe, and predictions of future doom.

As adults, we can have an unfortunate habit of forgetting our youth as soon as we’ve left it and policing the next generation according to our own expectations. But when it comes to teenagers on TikTok, I think the emergence of the term brain rot suggests that members of this generation possess a highly sophisticated approach for navigating the complexities of their media lives. Much in the same way that teenagers in the 1980s navigated changing economic landscapes through their video games and music video consumption, or earlier generations pushed back against restrictive social values using pirate radio and television, teens today are using TikTok and other digital media to negotiate and make sense of a complex world that is very often designed for adults. In a time of heightened global anxiety and fear, rather than restrict their digital access, we might stand to learn from teenagers about how and why they spend their time on TikTok.

2024-10-21

Facts: Software Engineer Titles Have (Almost) Lost All Their Meaning #titles #engineering #swe

Fullscreen Screenshots on Windows

I watch a lot of video content on my TV that is hooked up to a Windows PC. I wanted a smooth workflow to take fullscreen screenshots with a hotkey while I was watching, without any dialogs or popups.

The Logitech K400 wireless keyboard that I to use with the PC does not have a dedicated PrtScrn key. The standard shortcut key Win + Shift + S opened up the Snipping tool which was too disruptive and clunky.

Finally, I download and Installed ShareX and setup the Hotkey for fullscreen capture to be: Ctrl + Shift + Backspace. By default, the screenshots are automatically saved in a folder under Documents/ShareX. I use the hotkey to snap screenshots while watching shows and movies, and they get saved in the background without interruption. I can browse them later and create memes 😀! #screenshots #windows

CSS trick to balance text as well as icons

You can use text-wrap: balance; on icons – Terence Eden’s Blog #css

Streamlining Go Project Creation

Go-Blueprint Docs #go #boilerplate

Powerful CLI tool designed to streamline the process of creating Go projects with a robust and standardized structure. Not only does Go Blueprint facilitate project initialization, but it also offers seamless integration with popular Go frameworks, allowing you to focus on your application's code from the very beginning.

A Philosophy of Travel

Some great tips on travel, and how to travel well: A Philosophy of Travel - by Tracy Gustilo - Pose Ponder

I read up on history, geography, and culture. I love to browse street markets and bookstores. If I do touristy things, I prefer secondary or tertiary sites, or locations that domestic travelers themselves go. I travel to learn — and I want to learn to travel well. I have no real desire to collect “experiences” of places — just say No to bucket lists! My goal is to stretch to accommodate what’s around me, and to try hard to see beyond whatever’s become habitual and mundane at home.

Economist Special Report on the US Economy

The envy of the world | Oct 19th 2024 | The Economist #usa #economy

On Productivity:

This year the average American worker will generate about $171,000 in economic output, compared with (on purchasing-parity terms) $120,000 in the euro area, $118,000 in Britain and $96,000 in Japan. That represents a 70% increase in labour productivity in America since 1990, well ahead of the increases elsewhere: 29% in Europe, 46% in Britain and 25% in Japan.

On Shale Oil:

The Marcellus is just one of several such rock formations around America, from the oil-rich Bakken shale in Montana and North Dakota to the Permian basin, endowed with both oil and gas, in Texas and New Mexico. The revolution in tapping their hard-to-reach hydrocarbons got under way in the latter half of the 20th century as companies and government researchers worked to combine hydraulic fracturing, or fracking (the injection of specialised liquids to open cracks in rocks), and horizontal drilling. As they honed these techniques in the early 2000s, production surged. Now, America produces some 13m barrels per day of crude oil and 3bn cubic metres per day of natural gas, making it the world’s biggest producer of both.

On the yuan displacing the dollar:

On the IMF data, the dollar’s share of reserves has fallen back only roughly to where it was in 1995. And it has not been China absorbing its share, or even the euro, which Europe uses for most of its own trade and is the dominant currency in parts of Africa. Rather, it is, as one joke goes, other currencies called “dollar” or “krone”: those in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. “They are the currencies of small, open, well managed, in the main inflation-targeting economies,” says Mr Eichengreen.

They are also mostly America’s allies, making it hard to sustain an argument that the fall in reserve share says much about lost Western hegemony. And among remaining official holdings of dollars, three-quarters are owned by governments with a military tie to America, says Colin Weiss of the Federal Reserve. Strikingly, note Mr Arslanalp and his colleagues, the yuan’s share of international reserves has shrunk since 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, sparking American sanctions and much speculation that countries would jettison the dollar for fear of similar treatment.

On why the dollar is the preferred global reserve currency:

Looking in the round, researchers at the Federal Reserve concluded in 2023 that dollar dominance “has remained stable over the past 20 years”. Why is it so tough to displace?  One reason is network effects: the more people use dollars, the greater the incentives to use them. This is visible in currency-trading, where the dollar’s liquidity means that for some currency pairs it is cheaper to trade through the dollar—ie, to sell a holding for dollars, then buy the desired currency—than to trade two non-dollar currencies directly.

Network effects do not guarantee the status quo for ever, as shown by the fall of past reserve currencies such as the British pound and the Dutch guilder. The problem faced by rivals now is that they simply cannot offer as safe and liquid a store of value, and in such quantities. China’s authoritarian system and controlled capital account, which restricts how much money can be taken out of the country, make investors skittish. Europe lacks safe, jointly issued assets on the scale of the Treasury market. Nowhere offers America’s combination of the rule of law, deeply liquid markets and an open capital account, meaning that investors know they can get their money out easily.

On the dominance of US stock markets:

There are two ways for a stockmarket to outperform its rivals, setting aside ephemeral ups and downs (and America’s stockmarket is no more volatile than those of other major economies). One source of high returns is if the companies comprising the market make more profits. The other is for investors to value those profits more highly. America’s recent stellar record reflects primarily the latter effect. In a paper last year Cliff Asness, Antti Ilmanen and Dan Villalon of AQR Capital Management compared the American market with a currency-hedged index of large- and mid-cap stocks in other developed countries. They found that once the effect of rising valuation multiples was stripped out America’s outperformance fell by nearly three-quarters and became statistically insignificant. Today America’s valuations are unmatched: the US market trades at 24 times forward earnings, compared with 14 in Europe and 22 in Japan.

2024-10-20

Podcasts:

John Collison on Crypto

From the podcast linked above. I used the transcript made available on Listen Notes site, which seems to be really bad at transcribing an Irish accent 😀:

Well. The thing about crypto is there's been a lot of hype on what crypto is useful for. And so for example, if you go back and read the original Bitcoin paper, which is a great read. It's a very readable original paper, it actually used the word interchange in there and talks about kind of the use of bitcoin as a payment method. But bitcoin turned out to be certainly stock bitcoin, you know, before lightning and everything like that should have to be a horrible payment method, like slow expensive, let's not do that. And now the technology has matured through what has been kind of fourteen years of development. I think the crypto haters used this argument that like, well, you know, it is the Web in ninety three for you know, many many years, whereas the actual web coming along. But there's been fourteen years of lots of technical development happening such that we've ended up with much more advanced technologies. And so what you specifically have now with stable coins is you have, firstly, something that's value doesn't change and so there's none of the kind of speculation stuff that we're talking about. You have something that's actually very technically scalable, so with the current L two's there's no real scalability issues with them, and you have a pretty sensible construct where in a way, it's narrow banking. Right. We've been talking about narrow banking in this country for decades, and we have ended up with narrow banking through stable coins, where let's say a good stable coin, you know that like a PAXOS or a USDC. In the case of USDC, it is fully backed by short term treasuries. And that actually just seems like a pretty good construct to me. And so you know, we now make it where you can, you know, accept money and strive via crypto. You can do some payouts things like that. And the obvious thing that people say is true where in the US you will be slightly too biased against crypto because the US is the world's best currency. You know, the US has the world's reserve currency where you get to spend and might back exactly. And so of course people in the US think the USD is awesome because it is an awesome currency, whereas many people in many other countries have a much more adversarial relationship with their own currency. And I'm not even talking about Zimbabwe, though it is true. I'm talking about Turkey, which is a very large country and economy and population, but people there do not have full faith in the lira, and they think about what's a better place to keep money than lira.

I think all the serious grown up crypto players today, I mean they're subject to the fincent travel rule. They are ky seeing the actors, and so if you go through a crypto flow today, you will see the normal frictions of dealing with a regulator financial product where you are asked to provide your you know, last for your social or upload a driver's license or things like that. And so I think just in most of the crypto use cases that are being tough. Obviously there's the sketchy dark web stuff exists as well, but in most of the use cases we are talking about where serious businesses like stripe or serious merchants are using crypto, it is the custodial lissis part of the crystals.

Hack Hours: Build Your Side Projects

I spent time on Zoom today hanging out at Hack Hour : Build Your Side Projects · Zoom · Luma. This is a session organized by Bhavani Ravi (who also happens to be friend). It was a good experience and I came across people building some interesting stuff.

I spent the time building the backend for a weekly newsletter that would aggregate my daily logs as a digest.

First, I spent time exploring the features offered by Buttondown, a newsletter service. It is pretty easy to get started. I realised that its API feature and RSS-to-Email feature both required a paid subscription and I wasn't ready for that kind of commitment just yet.

However, Buttondown does support a Markdown compose feature. So I came up with the idea of generating a Markdown output of my daily log entries and copy-pasting it into the online Buttondown interface manually. I had some code in < 15m with the help of Cursor, which also included some minor transformations from Obsidian Markdown syntax to something that Buttondown supports for images and embeds: Add newsletter generation. Fix #14 · deepakjois/debugjois.dev@9ab01ad · GitHub

Need to do some more testing before making the newsletter public.

Bhavani also linked me to this article about running and hosting your own newsletter. I don't think I have the bandwidth for that right now, but it's an interesting read: Guide to running a newsletter in 2024

2024-10-19

Have been a bit behind on updating my podcasts, so am gonna just add all the ones I didn't add the past few days #podcasts:

Darren Acemoglu on the On Humans podcast

Summary of key themes generated by ChatGPT

tmux config for undercurls

Pull of the Undercurl #tmux

The article contains some .tmux.conf incantations to better support undercurls. It also talks about updating the terminfo on macs. I should try that to improve the rendering of fonts on my neovim/tmux setup on mac.

audio transcription using Gemini models

podscript currently doesn't support Gemini, so I am keen to add support. As part of the research, I read the README in this repo: GitHub - SouthBridgeAI/llm-transcription-study: Useful resources for LLM-based Diarization and Transcription. #audio #transcription #gemini #google

It seems like unlike ChatGPT, Google Gemini accepts audio files as input and can transcribe the audio and even generate diarization.

Found this repo in a much bigger thread on audio transcription which has a lot of wonderful insights:

4-stage guide to machine learning

I have posted a link to this Twitter thread before (twice, it seems!). But today I actually got around to reading it: https://x.com/justinskycak/status/1821614668516839777

The thread is well worth reading in full, but I wanted to extract the key resources mentioned for easier recall:

no-yap reading session

successfully completed another my second no yap reading session in 3W CMH. Rutvi joined like last time, and this time Swayanshu joined as well.

I read parts of the following books:

2024-10-18

TIL there is a BuyItForLife subreddit.

For practical, durable and quality made products that are made to last.

Found a great thread for the best review sites: What review sites do you trust? Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, etc? #reviews #purchases

Long thread on a 4-stage guide to learning ML: https://x.com/justinskycak/status/1821614668516839777 #ml #learning