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Daily log archive for Aug 2024. Go to the current daily log, or browse the archive index.

2024-08-31

Podcasts: #podcasts

Finished watching the Coding with Cursor Session 4 Video. Totally worth the 3-ish hours (although I watched it at speeds from 1.5x-2x) #coding #ai

Banger quote from Sahil somewhere in the middle of the video above ☝🏽:

What I would love to see is more generalists, you know, people who don't think about, "Oh, I need to get really deep, like get a PhD in TypeScript or web app development," because those things are not that hard now. And, you know, there's so many levels of distraction—you can outsource stuff, there's open source, there's Vercel, whatever—but actually just getting more and more horizontal, and that, I think, unlocks the really powerful ideas anyway, right? Like, the way you have ideas like Cursor is you have some design sensibility that came from somewhere, and then some engineering sensibility that came from somewhere, and some product sense from watching, you know, some reading, some Paul Graham essays over here, and listening to this over here, and doing whatever it is—whatever your life experience is, I think is adding more to it, right? Just like stuffing your prompt, like stuffing as much context into the prompt, and then just saying, "Do something cool." I mean, I think that's partly a good exercise for humans to do every once in a while, right?

The world is getting older, and some of the chaos that characterized the 60s is rarer now: The one advantage of an ageing world

Well, there’s this: the median American in 1968 was 26. Now? 38. And this isn’t an extreme age arc by world standards. At the time of the Cultural Revolution, when students hounded their elders for insufficient fealty to Maoist doctrine, the median person in China was a scarcely believable 18. That number is now almost 40. 

In France during its own 1968, when the republic tottered, the median age was a decade less than it is now. The median German is older than in the Baader-Meinhof heyday, as is the median Italian compared with the Years of Lead, when the far left and the far right murdered people.

Opinion | The Key to Longevity Is Boring - The New York Times

While obsessions with health and longevity have long dogged humanity, this latest version is intensified by an ecosystem in which influencers and podcasters profit from our attention and quest for health by getting sponsorships from supplement companies, sleep trackers and other pseudoscientific wellness products.

Good set of resources by Phil Eaton to get started with database stuff: Getting started with database development : r/databasedevelopment #databases

Is black coffee boring? Gen Z seems to think so - Coffee Intelligence #coffee

Some deep thoughts on art and AI: good artists copy, ai artists ____ - by Celine Nguyen #art #ai

How to stop living on auto-pilot | Psyche Guides #psychology #self-improvement

The importance of this behavioural focus cannot be overstated. In the moments when you feel hopeless, or just tired, a concrete image of the life you want can be motivating. And it’s most motivating when you believe you can reach that life because you’ve already started working towards it and can recall concrete evidence of positive movement toward your goals.

The reality is, behaviour change is hard, and many people have not been taught effective goal-setting. For example, someone might know that they’re unhappy and have intentions to change, but they focus on something too broad (‘I want to be happy’) or on what they don’t want (‘I don’t want to be depressed’). An ill-defined focus can lead to trying many things without following through on any one thing. Also, humans often fall prey to the planning fallacy, a tendency to underestimate the amount of time and effort a task will take. Many people set unrealistic goals and then give up or blame themselves for ‘failing’ when they struggle to reach them. It’s easy to unknowingly stymie your progress by not getting specific, realistic or behavioural enough with your life goals.

Oedipus Wrecks Havoc With Moral Judgment - by Rob Kurzban #evo-psych #morality

Quotes from ChatGPT Summary:

How I Read - Rob Henderson's Newsletter #reading #self-improvement

Here are the key concepts described in the article above ☝🏽:

While reading this article, stumbled upon another article about reading from Byrne Hobart: Read.. You will not learn anything of lasting… | by Byrne Hobart | Medium

You will not learn anything of lasting importance from TV, movies, podcasts, or that execrable Existential Comics thing. Even at 3x speed, they’re junk food. The way serious people learn is by reading. … Successful people converge on three ways to learn: lots of reading time, some exercises and projects, and some conversations with people who are slightly ahead of them. I simply can’t name a single person who became an expert on a topic by watching lots of videos!

Ouch!

2024-08-30

Podcasts #podcasts

I feel like I could really use this 👇🏽 🙃:

Content-aware uploads for the site: Make uploads content-aware · deepakjois/debugjois.dev@05b3c86 · GitHub #coding

Pachinko S02E02. #tv

2 episodes of Terminator Zero on Netflix. #tv

Watched All the Bright Places (2020) - IMDb #movies

Add a --no-git flag to the sync-notes subcommand for this site: add --no-git option to sync-notes subcommand · deepakjois/debugjois.dev@bed6057 · GitHub #coding

A few minutes of Session 4 of Coding with Cursor before bedtime: Coding with Cursor: Session 4 ft. ‪@shaoruu‬ - YouTube #coding #cursor

2024-08-29

Podcasts: #podcasts

LLMs have a strong bias against use of African American English | Ars Technica #ai

The researchers conclude that "language models exhibit archaic stereotypes about speakers of AAE that most closely agree with the most-negative human stereotypes about African Americans ever experimentally recorded, dating from before the civil rights movement."

Why are so many straight men such bad conversationalists? | Dazed #culture

Sound familiar? I’m not surprised. The ‘conversation gap’ between men and women within the context of heterosexual relationships is a well-documented phenomenon: sociolinguistics professor Deborah Tannen popularised the idea that men and women approach conversations differently in her 1990 book You Just Don’t Understand, where she argued that men seek to negotiate and cement their status in the social hierarchy, often “exhibiting knowledge and skill by holding centre stage through verbal performance”. By contrast, women aim to develop connections, exploiting questions to “discover similarities and matching experiences”.

Many factors can contribute to this ingrained sense of male entitlement in conversation, including upbringing and family dynamics, cultural differences, and individual communication styles. But dominant, pervasive gender norms remain the main culprit.

Arguably the ‘conversation gap’ has only widened in the post-pandemic milieu. Prolonged isolation stunted the social skills required to form meaningful connections, further contributing to the ongoing epidemic of male loneliness. “Guys don’t always have a tight-knit group to call their own and even when they do, they’re not having deep conversations in the same way women do. But it’s still something they crave, as human beings. This is why, when women give them a platform during dates, they tend to treat them like a captive audience, an opportunity to offload any emotions they don’t always have the chance to process,” Lalli said.

Added support for YouTube and Twitter embeds: Add support for embeds · deepakjois/debugjois.dev@f7a81bc · GitHub

Testing X embed:

Testing YouTube embed:

TIL: Subko has a coffee sourced from Nepal - The Subko Story | The Hard Copy

If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You're Not Paying Attention

Had to look up options for fzf#run for an nvim I was trying to build: fzf/README-VIM.md at master · junegunn/fzf · GitHub

The actual plugin is here: GitHub - deepakjois/nvim-postit: capture post-it like notes with nvim. I mainly wrote it to scratch a tiny itch I had and also to try out the Composer feature to see how functional it was in helping me build entire projects. Overall, the experience was a bit mid because I got stuck at this stupid bug. I should have just googled it or something, instead of continuing to persist with the AI like I did. But still it was a great learning experience. The AI also put out a pretty good scaffolding that I would have struggled to come up with so quickly. #vim #neovim

A good guide to building a simple neovim plugin in Lua: How to write a neovim plugin in lua #neovim #vim

Saw the first shl Cursor video. The plan is to at least watch session 2 and session 4.

I soo wish I had time to watch these CMUDB Intro to Database Systems lectures (CMU Intro to Database Systems (15-445/645 - Fall 2024) - YouTube): #databases

Good overview of Claude Artifacts #claude #ai

2024-08-28

Podcasts: #podcasts

Cursor AI is mindblowing 🤯! I wrote this entire code in-situ with just a single sentence prompt: Port sync-notes.sh to Go · deepakjois/debugjois.dev@5a005d4 · GitHub

Matt Levine always has the best and simplest explanations of stuff happening in the world of finance, for e.g. this read on the Paramount acquisition which breaks down all possible scenarios in any acquisition: Accounting Isn’t Cool Anymore - Bloomberg

ROFL: San Francisco software engineer getting ready to use JIRA

A great example of a TUI example in go using libraries from Charm: GitHub - Broderick-Westrope/tetrigo: A tetris TUI written in Go

Skin Dysmorphia, sigh 😔: Skin dysmorphia: Why your skin is probably better than you think | Dazed #health #wellness

brat is out, demure is in, and what better than an FT article to explain it: ‘Demurity’ and the memeification of modern life #pop-culture

Millennials Are Doing the Midlife Crisis Differently: Making Less, Doing More - Bloomberg #pop-culture

The world needs codes quantum computers can’t break #cryptography

Notes on monospace, fonts, ascii, unicode #monospace #design

I added image support to the daily log 🕺🏽. Wrote an entire parser extension for goldmark using Cursor, and it barely broke a sweat. I need a moment to process this.

/images/image_support.webp

Tweaked the upload script as well: Tweak upload script · deepakjois/debugjois.dev@d7dc155 · GitHub

Hoffman owns Huberman: Is Andrew Huberman Ruining Your Morning Coffee? - YouTube

Did some digging into content-aware S3 uploads so that I can copy over files only if they have changed. But turns out that even though S3 APIs can provide an ETag for the remote content, there are no off the shelf tools that actually check the ETag with the MD5 of the local file before uploading. Found one resource online: Fast S3 Updates with Golang and Goroutines — CodeSolid.com 0.1 documentation

2024-08-27

Podcasts #podcasts

Next article in The Economist's AI schools brief: AI needs regulation, but what kind, and how much?

So much life admin stuff 😕

2024-08-26

Podcasts while doing morning chores and rucking: #podcasts

Rather than fearing getting old, here’s how to embrace it | Psyche Ideas

Using mindfulness to grow older rather than get older

Industry S03E03 was another banger, as usual!: x.com

Small script from Karpathy to get LLM to write your commit messages (the comments have more suggestions and forks): Git Commit Message AI · GitHub

llm-scraper looks interesting (uses Playwright framework): GitHub - mishushakov/llm-scraper: Turn any webpage into structured data using LLMs #ai

In praise of mangoes

India is the world’s biggest mango producer, with volumes greater than the next nine growers combined, according to Tridge, a data firm. Yet its share of the global export market by value is a meagre 7%.

Absolutely wild story of Israelis and Lebanese finding each other on dating apps, due to GPS scrambling at the border. Somebody should make a movie about it. Making love not war in the Middle East

Somebody beside me in the coffee shop introduced me to a couple of open source coding assistants: #ai #coding

2024-08-25

The Great Washing Machine Scam | Craftsmanship Magazine

Good recap of the DNC: How would Kamala Harris govern? #podcasts

Pachinko S02E01

2024-08-24

Podcasts: #podcasts

Pachinko is back for S2, so gotta put that in the rotation: Pachinko (TV Series 2022– ) - IMDb

“Underconsumption Core” ftw: For Years, TikTok Told Us What to Buy. Now ‘Underconsumption Core’ Is About Consuming Less. - The New York Times

After years of being told what to buy, TikTok users are trying something new: buying and using only what they need.

Ask HN: Tired of software career. What now? | Hacker News

Also, from the comments section:

The traditional career progressions for software developers are management, entrepreneurship, and carpentry.

The achievement society is burning us out, we need more play | Psyche Ideas

For the Korean German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, contemporary capitalist society has become an ‘achievement society’ and we, as its subjects, have become ‘achievement-subjects’. In the achievement society, we suffer from an internalised pressure to achieve – to do more, to be more, to have more. Whether we are aware of it or not, we have internalised the capitalist work ethic to the degree that our successes and failures weigh heavily on our individual shoulders. The primary result of the achievement society is burnout – the emotional, cognitive and physical exhaustion that comes from the pressure to constantly achieve.

GitHub - srcbookdev/srcbook: TypeScript notebook for rapid prototyping #typescript #jupyter

Awesome food at Sardarji Da Dhaba: x.com

2024-08-23

A few podcasts:

Go's time package does not have a way to fetch the number of days in a month. Here is a snippet I found that does that. Source: Go: Number of days in month — brandur.org #go #time

import "time"

func daysIn(m time.Month, year int) int {
    return time.Date(year, m+1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, time.UTC).Day()
}

From the post above:

The reason it works is that we generate a date one month on from the target one (m+1), but set the day of month to 0. Days are 1-indexed, so this has the effect of rolling back one day to the last day of the previous month (our target month of m). Calling Day() then procures the number we want.

Nice vim trick to edit a macro inside a buffer and then yanking it back. Vim macros are mapped to registers of the same name: This VIM trick BLEW MY MIND - YouTube #vim #tools

"Clinically proven" does not mean anything: Why you shouldn’t fall for ‘clinically proven’ beauty products | Dazed #beauty #skincare

Trailer for the upcoming LOTR anime is cool: The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim | Official Trailer - YouTube

Latest from the Imperfectionist Newsletter by Oliver Burkeman: The Imperfectionist: Turning words #zen

Watched Ladybird. SO GOOD!: Lady Bird (2017) - IMDb #movies

Found Wild Wild Women, an Indian women rappers group on Insta. Their songs are nice: YouTube Music

templ looks neat. I would have used it for this site if I had known about it before I decided to build it: Introduction | templ docs

2024-08-22

Started the day with some interesting podcasts: #podcasts

Skimmed the fswatch docs to better understand how events are generated: Top (fswatch 1.17.1) #tools

notes on effectively fucking around and finding out: e/fuck #quotes

side quests > main quests

the main quests are predictable and boring, always stay contrarian and make choices based on how fucking random they'll sound when you are explaining them to your product mommy/daddy tinder date. doing this also just helps you find out about niche scenes and subcultures that you otherwise won't

good vibes + good friends >>>> everything

now that you are doing random things , you'll meet lots of random people, and the main goal of e/fuck is to have good vibes and make as many actual friends as possible. you have to actually like spending time with them, and the optimal action is always to be nice and help your friends if you can, even if you don't necessarily get anything in return

stay himbo

you are probably going to meet people with weird or off vibes that you don't fuck with. usually the default reaction is to be confrontational, but do you actually care? just listen, understand, if its not your thing, let them do what they want and don't be friends with them.

keep fumbling

if you keep fumbling (partners, jobs, whatever), you are definitely fucking around and finding out - otherwise how would you even get the opportunity to fumble, you know?

Patrick Collison posted a goated list of books that capture the silicon valley tech zeitgeist: x.com #books

The latest in the Living Fossils series on technology and evolutionary mismatch has arrived! Technology, Part IV: Artificial Solutions to Artificial Problems

Homo sapiens’ main defense, of course, might be the same as that for every organism: living in an environment that is syntonic with its design.

Someone one twitter said they hated waking up to workout, which set me off on a tangent about how much I hate working out. Pulled up a quote I had read a long time ago, about exercise. It's from an essay Against Exercise by Mark Greif.

“Modern exercise makes you acknowledge the machine operating inside yourself. Nothing can make you believe we harbor nostalgia for factory work but a modern gym. The lever of the die press no longer commands us at work. But with the gym we import vestiges of the leftover equipment of industry to our leisure. We leave the office, and put the conveyor belt under our feet, and run as if chased by devils. We willingly submit our legs to the mangle, and put our stiffening arms to the press.”

Dug into the docs for Go templates and discovered define and template actions: template package - text/template - Go Packages

Changes to site: #code #website:

2024-08-21

Love to start the morning with a podcast about eating bugs: What's the Buzz on Eating Bugs? Can Insects Really Save the World? | Listen Notes #food

AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products. Good. #ai

Dasel is cool: GitHub - TomWright/dasel: Select, put and delete data from JSON, TOML, YAML, XML and CSV files with a single tool. Supports conversion between formats and can be used as a Go package. #tools

Cool idea to copy files into a tmp folder and inject a script to support hot reloads on a static file server: GitHub - baalimago/wd-41: Web-Development 41, a static web server with hot-reloads #tools

GopherCon UK 2024 Talks: GopherCon UK 2024 - YouTube #talks #go

GitHub - yuin/goldmark-highlighting: A Syntax highlighting extension for the goldmark markdown parser. which uses chroma under the covers. It seems a good strategy might be write out the classes, and then write out the CSS separately.

Crunchyroll grows in India with a low monthly subscription price - Rest of World

India’s anime market is expected to surpass $5 billion by 2032, according to Polaris Market Research.

Speedran this talk using ChatGPT: Keynote | Aparna Ramani - YouTube

All It Takes Is One Piece of Work to Change Everything in Your Life Forever #quote

Consistency happens when you show up, even when it makes no sense.

Amazon S3 supports conditional writes now: Conditional requests - Amazon Simple Storage Service #aws #s3

The Kong readme is pretty dense: GitHub - alecthomas/kong: Kong is a command-line parser for Go #go #cli

Changes to site: #code #website

2024-08-20

Went to the new vibey restaurant in the Bangalore scene: Kopitiam Lah. Pretty good! Both the Milo and Teh were on point 👌🏽

Went to Copper and Cloves.

Lots of life admin stuff!

2024-08-19

Wasted a lot of time shitposting on Twitter: x.com

One Chapter of Amazon.com: Gendered Species: A Natural History of Patriarchy: 9798327856271: David-Barrett, Tamas: Books

Industry S03E02, and the obligatory recap podcast:

Lots of podcasts, since I was doing a lot of chores today: #podcasts

2024-08-18

The Economist has been featuring a series on online dating in their Intelligence podcast series: #dating

A lot of links about mangoes: Mangonada - by Nic Miller - Tales From Topographic Kitchens

If you are missing Flickr and want to go beyond Instagram: 8 photo sites that let you showcase and discuss your work - The Verge #photography

It is wild and cool at the same time that people make elaborate travel plans around collect Pokémon: Pokémon Go as a Travel Guide? Meet the Fans Booking Trips to Catch 'Em All

Marina Hyde is hilarious: So Donald chatted with Elon, and here’s the future as they see it – losers win, incompetence rules | Marina Hyde | The Guardian

Anyway, from the future of the red mist planet to the future of political discourse: Monday night’s conversation between Musk and Donald Trump on X (audio only, only almost an hour late, and only for massively fewer live listeners than advance estimates suggested). It was so dysfunctional that even Trump’s dentures were trying to escape. Hours after it had taken place, Musk issued an intriguing APB: “Anyone have a <1 hour edit of the highlights of the @realDonaldTrump conversation?” To which the only reply is: sorry … what? That is like NBC putting out a request reading: “does anyone have any highlights of the Olympics?” YOU OWN THE PLATFORM. How can you not have organised some highlights?!

There is a list of dope coffee spots in Bengaluru that someone tweeted. Not holding my breath tho: x.com

Interesting example of an end-to-end scraper: GitHub - clemlesne/scrape-it-now: A website to scrape? There's a simple way.

2024-08-17

After setting up Aerospace and git, today I am setting up Wezterm: Okay, I really like WezTerm | Alex Plescan #tools

Decided to dig into some Bitcoin related stuff that landed in my inbox this week. Eventually decided it was a better use of my time to just read their summaries via ChatGPT #bitcoin

One Chapter of Amazon.com: Gendered Species: A Natural History of Patriarchy: 9798327856271: David-Barrett, Tamas: Books #books

Did a speedrunning of this podcast by Cal Newport using ChatGPT: How To Change Your Life By Journaling - Escape Mediocrity & Improve Clarity | Cal Newport - YouTube #podcasts

Question 1: How do I clarify what I want in life? (1:08 - 6:09)

Check out the full podcast, esp the three example "master narratives" and their descriptions: Pastoral Lifestyle, Urban Artist Lifestyle, Quaint Family-Centric Lifestyle.

Realised I was doing this so often, it would help to create a ChatGPT Cal Newport Summarizer #chatgpt #podcasts

One chapter of Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI , Ananthaswamy, Anil - Amazon.com #books #ai

Found a neat trick to enable persistent tmux popups: Dismissable Popup Shell in tmux #tmux #tools

lualine is good: GitHub - nvim-lualine/lualine.nvim: A blazing fast and easy to configure neovim statusline plugin written in pure lua. #nvim #tools

2024-08-16

A podcast on the saga pattern in distributed systems by Oxide: The Saga of Sagas / Oxide

The journey of Bengaluru’s waste - The Hindu

A wholesome post about an early Indonesian feminist icon (Kartini) whose story got made into a Netflix movie: Kartini: Java's Pioneering Feminist! - by Alice Evans

Re-read this great Matt Levine piece in his Money Stuff newsletter from a while ago. Good recap of the "The crypto financial crisis of 2022": Crypto Had a Credit Bubble - Bloomberg

John McWhorter on code switching: Harris gonna code switch #linguistics

Harris grew up among Black kids in Oakland, Calif., and went to Howard University, an HBCU, where she was a member of a sorority. I have never met Harris, but in my California days I spent a good deal of time in Oakland, and my sister went to an HBCU around the same time Harris was at Howard. I feel quite confident that Harris was richly immersed in code-switching between standard and Black English in her formative years. Today she is faking neither a “Southern” accent nor a Black one, but bringing to a national audience the sincere and effortless linguistic versatility that most Black Americans possess.

ngl Dazed has some of the best dating advice out there: How to date when... you’re prone to fantasy | Dazed #dating

useful git tip to remove untracked files from a folder: git clean -d -n public, followed by git clean -d -f #git

Overhauled my git config with the tips here: #git

GitHub - hluk/CopyQ: Clipboard manager with advanced features #tools

An often unlooked part of the GPU training pipeline: A practitioner's guide to testing and running large GPU clusters for training generative AI models #gpu #ai

Hit up some spots in HSR Layout today. Figured the crowd wouldn't be there due to the long weekend. Went to La Kene, Raghavendra Tiffins and Shubh Chaats.

Fascinating article about the booming Russian economy that upends mainstream economic wisdom. Although the article attempts to explain the reasons for Russia's economic boom in terms of mainstream economic concepts, I am willing to bet that a similar explanation and justification will not be forthcoming if this was happening in a rich liberal democracy: Vladimir Putin spends big—and sends Russia’s economy soaring

Another article in the Economist Schools brief on AI: LLMs will transform medicine, media and more…

2024-08-15

Started the day off with a couple of pop culture podcasts: #podcast

TIL - Python fractions: #python

>>> from fractions import Fraction as F
>>> F(1, 10) + F(1, 10) + F(1, 10) == F(3, 10)
True

Ziglist is cool: ziglist.org

A couple of links about distraction and attention in the current technological environment: #attention #productivity

A profile on the movie Premium Rush: A Tribute to ‘Premium Rush’: The Most August Movie of the Century #movies

Everyone in their 20s must read Quarterlife: Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood - Kindle edition by Byock, Satya Doyle. Health, Fitness & Dieting Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com. #books

research as leisure activity - by Celine Nguyen #research

Shoulda, woulda, coulda: why FOMO won’t let go of us #fomo

Finally switched to Aerospace: GitHub - nikitabobko/AeroSpace: AeroSpace is an i3-like tiling window manager for macOS #tools

One Chapter of Amazon.com: Gendered Species: A Natural History of Patriarchy: 9798327856271: David-Barrett, Tamas: Books #books

Nice extension to clean up the Twitter web UI a bit: Control Panel for Twitter - Chrome Web Store #twitter #tools

2024-08-14

How much ambition is too much? With Lucy Kellaway #podcast

I went along in that sort of classically quite driven way, being a columnist on the FT for decades and decades. And then somewhere in my 50s, it kind of stopped working for me a bit, I think. And I sort of thought, is this all there is? and so I quit the FT to become a school teacher, which is something that isn't really associated with ambition at all in that traditional way. But reflecting on it now, I think actually ambition is wanting something badly. Isn't that what it is? Wanting to achieve something. And maybe what I wanted had changed, but the ambition was sort of still there. It was just to do something a bit different.

TIL - Vikram Seth translated the Hanuman Chalisa: Vikram Seth’s translation of the ‘Hanuman Chalisa’ is a virtuoso feat only he could have pulled off - The Hindu #books

Loving this print: "The Heart Of The Rose" by Elihu Vedder (1891-1892) Art Print by Maria Popova | Society6 #art

Binge watched MILF of Norway (TV Series 2024– ) - IMDb . It's a decent (albeit slow-paced at times) relationship drama exploring themes like midlife crisis and teenage angst, but what I really liked was how it normalises the idea of being an adult content creator #tv

TIL - You can remove background from an image by using an inbuilt Quick Action from the Finder context menu 🤯 #osx #finder

Saag paneer recipe (nice pics): Authentic Saag With Paneer Recipe - A Spicy Perspective #recipe

Instant Pot Daal Recipe: The Instant Pot Dal Formula That Makes Dinner In Minutes #recipe

GitHub - simonmysun/ell: A command-line interface for LLMs written in Bash. #llm #bash

How to Build Anything Extremely Quickly - Learn How To Learn #productivity

CRITICAL requirements for outline speedrunning:

The Real Reason People Aren’t Having Kids - The Atlantic #kids #parenthood

ChatGPT Summary:

The article by Christine Emba argues that declining birth rates are not primarily driven by economic factors, as commonly believed, but by a deeper existential crisis. Despite government efforts to boost fertility through financial incentives and family-friendly policies, birth rates continue to fall across developed nations. The article suggests that many people are choosing not to have children due to a lack of a clear sense of purpose or meaning in life. This uncertainty about the value of life and human existence leads them to perceive the challenges of parenthood as outweighing any potential benefits provided by government support.

The article contrasts the attitudes of those who find deep meaning in having children with those who feel ambivalent or anxious about it. It suggests that, in the absence of strong religious or cultural frameworks that provide a sense of purpose, financial incentives alone are insufficient to encourage people to have children. The underlying issue, according to the article, is a broader societal loss of meaning, which cannot be easily addressed by government policies. Instead, it requires a more profound cultural or existential shift to inspire people to view parenthood as a fulfilling and meaningful endeavor.

2024-08-13

Why Can’t Apple Figure Out Movies? - The Ringer #podcast #apple

Even as an extreme bitcoin skeptic, this podcast has a lot of insights about the different : Great Power Network Competition and Bitcoin (and Aliens) - The Jacob Shapiro Podcast #bitcoin #crypto

Adam Tooze breaks down the latest crash in the stock markets:Adam Tooze: The Stock Market Seesaw #economics

Ben Johnson (creator of BoltDB in Go) has some good insights on databases in this Changelog podcat: Picking a database should be simple featuring Ben Johnson on "It Depends" (Changelog & Friends #56) #databases

2024-08-12

I am waiting to test ride a Royal Enfield electric motorcycle, because fuck Ola: Retro Indian motorcycle maker Royal Enfield plans electric foray #motorbikes

Industry S03E01, lfg!!! #tv

whisper optimised to run on Mac. The benchmark looks good (12min in 18s): x.com

Economist podcast about the Proud Boys: Portrait of the Proud Boys

Interesting problem in Go CI toolchain I ran into in a different context: Your Go version CI matrix might be wrong — brandur.org

research as leisure activity - by Celine Nguyen

2024-08-11

Part 3 of this excellent series on Technology on Living Fossils, a blog about evolutionary ideas: Technology, Part III: A Fish Out of Water - by Josh (Part 1 and 2 are highly recommended if you haven't read them) #evo-psych #technology

A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life: Heying, Heather, Weinstein, Bret: 9780593086889: Amazon.com: Books #evo-psych #book #technology

Good video about the Aerospace window manager: Aerospace Is The Best Tiling Window Manager I've Tried On macOS - YouTube

2024-08-10

Downfall's Hitler meme applied to the Trump-Harris contest. Hilarious: x.com

China is now the world leader in coffee shops

Artificial Intelligence Stuff #ai

Absolute banger podcast on using LLMs day-to-day: Pragmatic LLM usage with Nicholas Carlini / Oxide. The blog post accompanying this is a great read as well.

One more chapter of Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI , Ananthaswamy, Anil - Amazon.com. This chapter contained a great explanation of a perceptron and its representation in terms of vectors and matrices. I skipped the mathematical coda for now. Will tackle that some other day.

Great history lesson to put the latest AI Boom in perspective: A history-lover’s guide to the market panic over AI

The Schools Brief on AI in the Economist keeps giving: How AI models are getting smarter

These are the two new books you need to read about AI

2024-08-09

FT Big Read about Microsoft's AI strategy: # How Microsoft spread its bets beyond OpenAI #ai

Long amazing Twitter post on how to get from high school math to cutting-edge ML/AI: x.com #ai #ml #math

Another Twitter thread on LLMs vs human intelligence: x.com #llm #ai

Tests designed for humans surely reflect an assumption of human constraints/limitations. We cannot read and memorise all the books in the world, or the whole internet. We cannot solve millions of practice problems and exhaust every possible variation.

…

Given such constraints, the hope of JEE-type test designers is that most of the time, the only way to solve their problems is for people to actually generalise their knowledge or understanding from the context in which they acquired it, rather than regurgitate from memory.

Batman and Superman in retro 4k: #tv

Converting a bytes.Buffer to an io.Writer in Go: #code #go

var b bytes.Buffer
_ = io.Writer(&b)

The reference time that we use in time.Parse in Go is specified as: (January 2, 15:04:05, 2006, in time zone seven hours west of GMT). This is the reason time.Parse("2006-01-02", …) unambiguously reads a date in yyyy-mm-dd format: time package - time - Go Packages #code #go

Neat: HTTP requests via /dev/tcp | Redowan's Reflections #tcp #bash

A few chapters of this book in the Orphan X series: Into the Fire: An Orphan X Novel - Kindle edition by Hurwitz, Gregg. Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

2024-08-08

TIL - Intel apparently has these GPU processors called Gaudi: Gaudi processors & Intel's AI portfolio

Fascinating podcast about Olympic performance: The hidden mathematics of Olympic success—an interview with Amandine Aftalion There is also her book: Be a Champion: 40 Facts You Didn't Know About Sports and Science

TIL - There is a favicon generator out there and it supports Unicode characters. I used to generate a Devanagari based favicon: Favicon Generator - Text to Favicon - favicon.io

If you are wondering when is a good time to stop programming: How To Know When It's Time To Go

2024-08-07

One chapter of Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI , Ananthaswamy, Anil - Amazon.com

Rebank podcast about Agora: Rebank: A New Approach to Stablecoins with Nick van Eck

FT Big Read article about India's dependence on China: Link

Waffle marks are interesting: Waffle mark | Observable Plot

Even a Little Alcohol Can Harm Your Health, Research Shows - The New York Times

A library that detects mimetype using the contents of a file/stream: GitHub - gabriel-vasile/mimetype: A fast Golang library for media type and file extension detection, based on magic numbers

GOTOOLCHAIN environment variable can be used to run a different go version - Go Toolchains - The Go Programming Language

goldmark hashtag parser: GitHub - abhinav/goldmark-hashtag: Adds support for #hashtags to the Goldmark Markdown parser.

caddy local file server no-config: caddy file-server --root <folder>

Read a chapter of Amazon.com: Gendered Species: A Natural History of Patriarchy: 9798327856271: David-Barrett, Tamas: Books

Found out about dashboard-nvim and the ability to customise nvim start screen: GitHub - nvimdev/dashboard-nvim: vim dashboard

S3 does not set Cache-Control header by default. This means that the amount of time Cloudfront keeps the objects in its cache before going back to the origin is controlled only by the Minimum, Default and Maximum TTL.

2024-08-06

Claude artefact showing example usage of LangChainGo: LangChainGo Code Snippet for Cleaning Audio Transcripts #ai #claude

Read Schools Brief of AI from The Economist #ai

viper can read from a custom environment variable using viper.BindEnv, e.g. viper.BindEnv("OPENAI_API_KEY) will bind openai_api_key config to the environment variable. From: viper package - github.com/spf13/viper - Go Packages #go #viper

Use latest from main branch in go.mod: go get github.com/tmc/langchaingo/llms@main

Langchain support in Podscript: Use langchaingo by deepakjois · Pull Request #13 · deepakjois/podscript · GitHub