← Home

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

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

2024-10-17

Talked to a lot of people on Twitter DMs, which does not happen often.

AI Tinkerers Meetup

I gave a talk about podscript at the AI Tinkerers Meetup. It was some good public speaking practise after a long hiatus. Initially, I thought about going in and doing a spontaneous talk. But as I waited for the event to start at the nearby coffee shop, I decided to do a quick dry run and realised I would go over the 5min limit quite easily. So I cut down some material and tightened up a few things. Practising the talk definitely helped and I could feel it in the audience reaction during and after the talk. It felt very validating. Some folks came up to speak to me after, and after that I summoned up the courage to speak to some others as well. Told them all to follow me on X for the best vibes 😊.

2024-10-16

Podcasts #podcasts:

Finished Season 1 of Colin from Accounts. Loved it: Colin from Accounts (TV Series 2022– ) - IMDbtw

2024-10-15

Podcasts #podcasts :

Debrid

A random conversation at 3W cafe introduced me to the magical world of Stremio and Debrid servers to watch popular media online.

To set some context, my current media consumption workflow is quite effective, but a bit bespoke and clunky. It essentially involves:

Enter debrid servers into the picture. Here is a nice definition from GitHub - debridmediamanager/awesome-debrid: 🆓 Download and stream in an instant

Before: Debrid services are web apps that provide premium access to multiple file hosts (or one-click hosters, OCH). This enables users to download or stream content from various sources through a single account, often at higher speeds and with fewer restrictions. They are also referred to as multi one-click hosters (MOCH).

Now: Apart from being able to download from OCH, Debrid services are becoming more and more popular lately because of being able to instantly finish downloading a torrent and providing an HTTPS (!) link to download or stream a video inside it. The concept is similar to a shared torrent seedbox although not all Debrid services support seeding. The difference of this and Usenet is with a Debrid service, you don't need a different software to download content and it supports streaming a la Netflix. Other Debrid services like Real-Debrid also supports video transcoding without any additional fees.

Mind blown 🤯!! Why did I not know about this before 🤦🏽‍♂️.

In the conversation mentioned above, a friend demoed a combination of Stremio, Torrentio - Stremio Addon and Real-Debrid: All-in-one solution that just worked seamlessly. There is a guide on reddit that provides dead simple instructions to set it up: Stremio + Torrentio + Debrid: A How-To Guide

Here's an explanation of how my new simplified media consumption flow works:

  1. Search media to watch in Stremio.
  2. Stremio queries its addons for available sources.
  3. The Torrentio addon searches for torrents of the requested media.
  4. Torrentio sends the magnet link to the Real Debrid service.
  5. The Real Debrid service downloads the torrent to its cloud servers. A lot of the time the media is already cached because of previous users.
  6. Real Debrid creates a streamable link from the downloaded content.
  7. This streamable link is sent back to Stremio.
  8. Stream the media directly through Stremio.

2024-10-14

A great way to start the day, reading Ava's birthday post: 28 things I’ve learned - by Ava - bookbear express #self-improvement

My top 5:

I lied and put 6 down because I could not choose 🤷🏽😊

Love this book cover: Book: Alice’s Adventures in a differentiable wonderland - Simone Scardapane - The book PDF is free to download and looks really interesting. I find the idea of approaching neural networks as compositions of differentiable primitives, and building them as a type of differentiable programming quite intriguing. #neural-networks #ai #ml #books

/images/alice_neural.png

A comprehensive intro to Typst, a new typesetting system written in Rust: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX - jreyesr's blog - something I have been meaning to play with. I have been a longtime typesetting nerd, and one of the highlights of my life is getting Lua bindings for a font shaping library into LuaTeX, a popular typesetting system in the scientific community (details here) #typesetting

TIL - niche construction, courtesy of video: We could make every human on Earth rich and happy—if we decided to | Agustín Fuentes - YouTube

But humans, for better and for worse, we reshape the world in a pace and pattern that nothing else does. So, when we talk about niche construction in humans, we're not just talking about making buildings or dams or using fire to heat things. We're also talking about ideas, faiths; beliefs about death and afterlife; about morals and ethics; about economics and justice. All of those things shape how we act. So, what we have to recognize then is the human capacity to create, to imagine, to live in incredibly complex societies, to build amazing technologies, is a double-edged sword, right? On one hand, it slices through all our challenges and makes us capable of doing a lot of stuff. On the other hand, it slices through bodies and lives and hopes and dreams. And so the same capacity that makes humans, in my opinion, amazing, makes us awful. We have the capacity to be the most amazing, compassionate, incredible organisms on this planet. At the same time, we have the capacity to be the worst, cruelest, most violent organisms- and it's that dynamic process that makes us human. What we can do is think technologically, biologically, ecologically, and ask questions about sustainability. And maybe to do this, we might want to listen to peoples around the planet, who are not the major contributors to the problems. It's just that we've been trying one system, a particular mode of economics and technology, and yeah, it's sort of gotten us into a bad place. So maybe, just maybe, we need to think culturally, a little bit more expansively, to do a better job of biologically and ecologically engaging with the world. Now, many people will just say, "Well, it's just nature." Right? The fact that some people are rich and some people are poor, it's just nature. The fact that in some cases men are violent to women, it's just nature. There's never just nature: It's always history and politics and culture and experience and biology and bodies and brains and hormones and diets- all mixed together. So, anyone that says things are the way they are because of human nature, doesn't know what human nature is.

☝🏽 Found here from the On Humans Substack: How We (Literally) Construct Our Worlds - by Ilari Mäkelä

This was probably the most profound sounding thing I said today 👇🏽

2024-10-13

Podcasts #podcasts:

Met folks for a 2hr no-yap reading session at 3W CMH: #books

Got introduced to the Stremio ecosystem thanks to Cyril. It seems like there might be way to streamline my media watching workflow a lot more with this, than my currently duct-taped version that involved Seedgator, rTorrent and scripts that download files using wget.

2024-10-12

Sex bomb: The collateral damage of OnlyFans’ explosive success #sex

Reuters reported some of the most direct harms in investigations that exposed child sexual abuse material and nonconsensual or “revenge porn” posted on the site. Those findings were drawn from police complaints obtained from more than 250 of the largest U.S. law enforcement agencies.

But the files also reveal collateral harms: families torn apart, reputations threatened, finances ruined.

Aside from Melinda Lam, who said her husband’s porn-buying spree destroyed her marriage, the police files describe a creator who unwittingly made sex videos for a close relative; women and girls shocked to find their likenesses stolen to sell porn; and passersby who found naked men making porn in public for their “fans.” Another creator filmed himself in lewd acts with a dog.

against brute forcing - by Ava - bookbear express #self-improvement #life #purpose

Take the ayahuasca discourse. Urban legend has it that people take ayahuasca and afterwards do things like give up on their startups, which is bad because productivity, ambition, greatness, etc. Now, my argument is that if you do psychedelics and quit something afterwards, it’s probably because you didn’t like or care about it very much. Again, we live in a culture that teaches smart young people that they have to direct their attention and energy towards something, even if it’s arbitrary and they don’t get any sense of meaning out of it. Because of that you get a lot of people trying very hard to brute force something that’s essentially meaningless to them. To me, that’s a bad outcome.

When I see people who are really good at brute forcing things I fear that they’ll just throw themselves at the nearest attractive obstacle without any sense of like… what is actually spiritually significant to them. And I actually think most people can find something to do that is deeply meaningful. I do not think that we teach our youth this!

But a life that looks good is not the same thing as a life that feels good. Maybe no one can tell the difference except for you, but you’ll struggle to fool yourself. More and more I notice that most people are primarily motivated by the avoidance of certain feelings. For instance, if you have spent a lot of time investing in something you don’t actually like very much, admitting that to yourself creates a lot of pain and discomfort and regret and uncertainty. And you might think to yourself, I can just avoid feeling all of those things if I don’t look at the problem too hard. I mean, my life is good, right?

Managed to score Navaratri ka prasad

2024-10-11

Another brain fog day 😒, but things improved in the afternoon!! Decided to go pandal hopping in HSR Layout.

Way behind on my reading and didn't code much the last two days.

Xiaohongshu helps Southeast Asia with tourism recovery post Covid-19 - Rest of World - Can't think of a non-Chinese app that works like this, using user generated content to drive recommendations.

User recommendations can sometimes be misleading or underwhelming. A single tree located on an empty plot of land by the roadside has gained popularity on the app as a photogenic spot, dubbed “Lonely Tree.”

The rise of the ‘manifinsta’: how social media became a manifestation tool | Dazed #culture #technology

Simply put, manifestation is intention-setting through focusing your thoughts on the desired outcome until it happens. It’s part of psychological thought that became popularised by books like The Secret, before taking over popular culture in 2020. Since then, there’s been a growing fascination around how algorithms, the internet, and even AI can be tools for manifestation.

Ellis says using social media as a tool for manifestation is similar to writing affirmations in a journal. “Popular culture today is wellness culture,” she says. “We’re going to be on our phones anyway, so it may as well be the best experience it could be.”

The latest Amplifier playlist: The Amplifier: All Apologies (8 Songs for the High Holy Days) #music

2024-10-10

Brain fog day 😒!!

Podcasts #podcasts:

2024-10-09

Podcasts #podcasts:

Fascinating article on how Ozempic is changing the layout of a typical modern gym: Ozempic is transforming your gym #fitness #gym

Key Points from Depression as a Functional Signal - Evolving Psychiatry Podcast

Podcast on Youtube: Depression as a Functional Signal | Hans Schroder | Evolving Psychiatry Podcast #31 - YouTube

Tips for improving concentration

A friend pointed me to a PDF on the University of Manitoba Site titled Tips for Improving Concentration. Most of it is the usual stuff. But a couple of things were useful, so I am noting them down here:

5 Tips for Staying Focused (When You’re Stressed) - Scott H Young

2024-10-08

Writing a circuit breaker in Go | Redowan's Reflections #go #patterns

Why main character syndrome is philosophically dangerous | Aeon Essays

/images/Pasted image 20241008123446.png

Not a clinical diagnosis but more a way of locating oneself in relation to others, and popularised by a number of social media platforms, MCS is a tendency to view one’s life as a story in which one stars in the central role, with everyone else a side character at best. Only the star’s perspectives, desires, loves, hatreds and opinions matter, while those of others in supporting roles are relegated to the periphery of awareness. Main characters act while everyone else reacts. Main characters demand attention and the rest of us had better obey.

 MCS is not a puzzle to be solved via a ‘do and don’t’ listicle. It is not a social problem against which laws can be passed. Instead, it calls on us to engage in what Joseph Campbell, among others, called a ‘dark night of the soul’. This might mean sitting with our anonymity, solitude, boredom and lostness; pushing back on the equivocation between performance and authentic connections; making ourselves vulnerable to others, and thus to failure. It might mean seeing ourselves as always incomplete – and recognising that fulfilment might not be in the cards, that life is not a triumphant monomyth, and others are not here to be cast in supporting roles. Myself, I tend to turn to Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame (1957), where a character reminds us: ‘You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!’ Sounds about right – let’s begin there.

AI Snake Oil Book: FAQ about the book and our writing process #books

The AI discourse is polarized because of differing opinions about which AI risks matter, how serious and urgent they are, and what to do about them. In broad strokes:

☝🏽🥺

nvim setup (contd.)

Watched this: Full Neovim Setup from Scratch in 2024 - YouTube

Installed plugins and tweaked configs. Made sure I was reading the docs for every line of code that I was adding to the config file.

/images/nvim_scratch.png

Had to add these two lines in my ~/.tmux.conf to get neovim fonts to look right, with italics and everything. No idea why exactly it works (esp the second line). #tmux #tools #config

set -g default-terminal "tmux-256color"
set-option -a terminal-features 'xterm-256color:RGB'

2024-10-07

Benefits of psychedelics: Can they teach us about the search for meaning in life? | Vox

Lot of stuff in the article ☝🏽. I will need to read it again to process it fully. Some disjointed quotes below

In 2017, Katrin Preller, a neuropsychologist at the University of Zurich, published the first experiment to test the specific contribution of these serotonin receptors in the subjective effects of LSD in humans. Participants listened to three kinds of music: music that they found meaningless (often free jazz — no disrespect, Sun Ra fans), music they had preselected as highly meaningful to them, and “neutral” music that was similar to their preselected songs but that they had never heard before.

They listened to each set on three different occasions: once while sober; once on LSD, which, they reported, made all three pieces of music more meaningful; and once on a combination of LSD and ketanserin, a drug that blocks the serotonin receptor so psychedelic molecules can’t dock there. The idea was to see if LSD still produces elevated levels of meaningfulness even when it can’t interact with the serotonin receptor.

The result? Blocking that receptor completely canceled the subjective effects of LSD; participants might as well have been sober. Preller’s findings helped establish that these receptors are critical to the noetic quality. No receptor activation, no extra meaningfulness.

But explaining psychedelic meaningfulness via the activation of serotonin receptors is like saying that turning the keys in the ignition explains what makes a car go. Once the receptors are activated, there’s a whole lot of under-the-hood activity that’s important to understand the mechanisms of meaning.

No matter how strong a psychedelic trip can be, connection remains a critical aspect of meaning-making. Psychedelics may help us forge new connections more easily — but the rest, like designing a society that does the same, is up to us.

Istanbul Food Recs 👇🏽 #turkey #istanbul #food

Today I used the gh cli for the first time to create a github repo from a pre-existing folder:

gh repo create --private --source=.

So much more convenient than using the web interface.

nvim exploration

I am a pretty competent vim user. But I hadn't explored nvim deeply so far. My vim config was in VimScript till recently and I hadn't made use of LSP and TreeSitter related features much. I finally decided to setup my nvim from scratch, and started by watching some YouTube videos #nvim #tools

I watched these videos and used the NVIM_APPNAME environment variable to start a fresh nvim config without disturbing my current setup.

Podcasts #podcasts :

2024-10-06

A couple of chapters of Wild Women: Seekers, Protagonists and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry: Subramaniam, Arundhathi: 9780143464907: Amazon.com: Books

AI and globalisation are shaking up software developers’ world #ai #coding #tech

These shifts matter because software talent is greatly treasured. Salaries are high (see chart 2). The median wage of a developer in America sits in the top 5% of all occupations, meaning that coders can earn more than nuclear engineers. Technology giants need them to make their platforms more attractive; non-tech company bosses want ever more coders to aid the digitisation efforts that, they hope, will improve productivity and increase the appeal of their products to consumers. The future looks to be one with more, and more productive, coders—and cheaper software.

Workouts for the face are a growing business #face #skincare

The FaceGym studio in central London looks more like a hair salon than a fitness studio. Customers recline on chairs while staff pummel their faces with squishy balls. They use their knuckles to “warm up” skin and muscles; give it a “cardio” session to improve circulation; and then a deep-tissue massage. Customers, who spend at least £100 ($133), say they leave with less puffy cheeks and more defined jaw lines.

The booming market for facial workouts offers the hope of looking younger and more chiselled. A third of Britons who had a non-invasive facial treatment in 2023 had or were interested in having a face workout, says Mintel, a research firm. Their growing popularity may be a result of customers frowning at conventional facials, which involve lathering with lotions and invasive cosmetic procedures. Inge Theron, Facegym’s founder, got into facial workouts after a having “thread lift”, which uses temporary sutures, that went wrong.

The house-price supercycle is just getting going #housing #finance

Three factors will ensure that, for decades to come, the housing supercycle endures.: demography, allure of cities, inability to build infrastructure to bridge long distances

Over the coming years housing markets could face all sorts of slings and arrows, from swings in economic growth and interest rates to banking busts. But with the long-term effects of demography, urban economics and infrastructure aligning, consider a prediction made in 2017 by Messrs Miles and Sefton. It finds that “in many countries it is plausible that house prices could now persistently rise faster than incomes”. The world’s biggest asset class is likely to get ever bigger.

AI offers an intriguing new way to diagnose mental-health conditions #ai #therapy #mentalhealth

Traditional methods of diagnosing mental-health conditions require patients to speak directly to a psychiatrist. Sensible in theory, such assessments can, in practice, take months to schedule and ultimately lead to subjective diagnoses.

That is why scientists are experimenting with ways to automate this process. Artificial-intelligence (AI) tools trained to listen to patients have proved capable of detecting a range of mental-health conditions, from anxiety to depression, with accuracy rates exceeding conventional diagnostic methods.

By analysing the acoustic properties of speech, these AI models can identify markers of depression or anxiety that a patient might not even be aware of, let alone able to articulate. Though individual features like pitch, tone and rhythm each play a role, the true power of these models lies in their ability to discern patterns imperceptible to a psychiatrist’s ears.

Good analysis of the Malcolm Gladwell formula and it's appeal: The Malcolm Gladwell rule: how to succeed while annoying critics #books #pop-culture

Mr Gladwell is not a social scientist, nor does he claim to be. He is a journalist who popularises ideas from social science using what he has called “intellectual adventure stories…Their conclusions,” he concedes, “can seem simplified or idiosyncratic.” But stories are also, to use a Gladwellian phrase, sticky. The 10,000-hour rule is memorable; “work hard” is the forgettable line that every coach, teacher and parent has said a million times over.

His work may be formulaic, but so are spy novels, romantic comedies and pop songs. The secret to his success lies less in what he says than in how he says it. Mr Gladwell is a great storyteller and writes with a contagious sense of curiosity, with each revelation seeming as exciting to him as it is to readers. He may be an entertainer, but there are worse ways of being entertained than being prodded to think differently about the world.

The caveat here is that folks who read Malcolm Gladwell, once exposed to a different way of thinking about the world must expand their sources and do their own further research to know more about the topics he covers in his books. Unfortunately, few people do that and end up just spouting pithy quotes from his book without engaging deeper.

TIL - “K-healing”: Turn down the K-pop and pay attention to K-healing #books #mentalhealth #therapy

The country that gave the world popular bands such as BTS and hits such as “Parasite” and “Squid Game” is now exporting something slower-paced. The publication of “Marigold Mind Laundry” in America and Britain this month brings attention to the latest South Korean trend: the healing novel.

These books about burnout can be judged by their covers, which ooze wholesome peacefulness. Most depict an attractive building in a soothing colour, with nature artfully arranged outside. In the stories characters leave behind stress in search of something more meaningful. A high-flier sets up a bookshop; a TV writer quits her job and starts pottery classes. A connection to a new place brings connections to new people on their own quests for well-being. From cats to kimchi, ice-cream to coffee, “cosy healing elements” abound, says Clare Richards, translator of “The Healing Season of Pottery”, a popular novel in Korea that is set for international release this autumn.

First pull request for podscript from another contributor lfg!!! - feat(assemblyai): add assemblyai command by swayanshupanda · Pull Request #17 · deepakjois/podscript · GitHub

Played with OpenAI Canvas. Really liked the ergonomics of iterating on code, esp the inline edits. Looking forward to working more with it!

TIL VSCode Snippet Syntax: Snippets in Visual Studio Code #tools #vscode #snippets

2024-10-05

Life Admin Day

Bingewatched Nobody Wants This Nobody Wants This (TV Series 2024– ) - IMDb

2024-10-04

Podcasts #podcasts :

A couple of chapters of Wild Women: Seekers, Protagonists and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry: Subramaniam, Arundhathi: 9780143464907: Amazon.com: Books

The 'Biggest Man-Made Disaster' Ever? - by kyla scanlon

For the first time since 1977, the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) went on strike. ~45,000 dockworkers have started picketing at 36 US East and Gulf ports - from Houston to Miami to New Jersey. This comes at a very intense time with escalating geopolitical tensions, a presidential election in about a month, and a hurricane that devastated the lives of millions of people.

This strike represents about half of all US trade volumes. It puts $2 billion at risk per day in trade, and the economic loss could be as high as $5 billion a day. A strike that lasts only a week could take a month to clear. Some might say that’s mere pennies compared to the size of the US economy ($29T), but this is about more than just dollar signs.

Because strike is about more than just money- it’s about the democracy of automation.

Kyla Scanlon, as always with yet another great analysis - this time on the longshoremen strike.

Related, a piece in the Economist about the strikes: A ports strike shows the stranglehold one union has on trade

There are whispers that the two sides may not be too far apart on wages. The bigger issue is the union’s biggest fear: automation. The container liners do not want to concede too much on this.

Are mental health awareness efforts contributing to the rise in reported mental health problems? A call to test the prevalence inflation hypothesis - ScienceDirect #mentalhealth

In the past decade, there have been extensive efforts in the Western world to raise public awareness about mental health problems, with the goal of reducing or preventing these symptoms across the population. Despite these efforts, reported rates of mental health problems have increased in these countries over the same period. In this paper, we present the hypothesis that, paradoxically, awareness efforts are contributing to this reported increase in mental health problems. We term this the prevalence inflation hypothesis. First, we argue that mental health awareness efforts are leading to more accurate reporting of previously under-recognised symptoms, a beneficial outcome. Second, and more problematically, we propose that awareness efforts are leading some individuals to interpret and report milder forms of distress as mental health problems. We propose that this then leads some individuals to experience a genuine increase in symptoms, because labelling distress as a mental health problem can affect an individual's self-concept and behaviour in a way that is ultimately self-fulfilling. For example, interpreting low levels of anxiety as symptomatic of an anxiety disorder might lead to behavioural avoidance, which can further exacerbate anxiety symptoms. We propose that the increase in reported symptoms then drives further awareness efforts: the two processes influence each other in a cyclical, intensifying manner. We end by suggesting ways to test this hypothesis and argue that future awareness efforts need to mitigate the issues we present.

More about terminal colors than I ever wanted to know: Terminal colours are tricky #terminal #colors

The Perfect Girlfriend #ai #girlfriend

It’s easy to dismiss Miku and WaifuChat as a niche product for lonely, introverted men who are already somewhat on the fringes of society, disconnected from real-life relationships as it is. But that’s not looking at where the puck’s going: It’s not just Dungeons & Dragons–playing “incels” who are susceptible to the allure of AI-powered connections, at least not for long. Like a lot of other virtual-world trends, what starts out as a niche can quickly become mainstream. And by the way, those introverted “nerds” who spend loads of time alone on their devices? They’re a growing percentage of the population.

TIL source_env: Direnv's `source_env`, and how to manage project configuration — brandur.org #tools #direnv

# Common configuration for al developers, committed to Git.
source_env .envrc.local

# Custom env values go here.

Good overview of Python formatted output: A Guide to Modern Python String Formatting Tools – Real Python #python #strings #formatting

2024-10-03

Podcasts #podcasts:

This tweet made me watch Annayum Rasoolum today. The movie has its weak points (long rambly plot, for one!) but the excellent cinematography and a deeply humanistic portrayal of Kochi working class folk makes up for it. Loved Andrea Jeremiah's performance.

The latest Capital Gains newsletter has great career advice: Central Nodes #tech #career

That offsetting growth comes from two sources that sound like they're opposites but that actually have some deep similarities. One is that as people age, they accumulate more loose social ties, and those ties are relevant to what they do. Someone who's worked in investing for a long time will have a roster of friends whose opinions they respect on specific topics, like the mechanics of ETF construction, the best way for an American to tax-optimize investments in Europe, or how to handicap the odds when one of your portfolio companies faces a big lawsuit. In other fields, the specifics of expertise vary, but the general phenomenon holds—jobs have turnover, many jobs involve working with outside organizations, so over time the number of people who you vaguely know will keep on increasing.

But people also accumulate facts, and get better at pattern-matching. This is especially useful when an industry goes through a long cycle: in 2022, there were professional investors with a decade of tech investing experience who had literally never experienced a bear market that didn't resolve itself in a quarter or two. And, in fact, they'd experienced what looked like a literally apocalyptic bear market in 2020, and saw that the time gap between "the world is ending" and "stocks are now at a record high" was about five months. Someone a bit more experienced, who remembered either the long painful grind-down from 2000-2002, or that the low point for US equities during the financial crisis was months after the spectacular headlines—the market started moving up in 2009 when the flow of bad news slowed, not so much because there was good news.

Two actionable pieces of advice are about increasing the space of relevant connections:

  1. Do case studies a bit outside of your exact job function—if you're a software engineer, learn something about product management; if you're in equities, learn a bit about how credit people think. You won't necessarily apply this directly, but it will inform the work that you actually do (sometimes an equity investor looking at a deep value situation can save a lot of time by noticing that the company's bonds trade at 50 cents on the dollar—there's a chance that the bonds are a better risk-adjusted deal and a potential indicator that the company's problems are deeper than they look.)

  2. Similarly, try to have a network that skews a little bit away from what you work on. The more senior you get in your career, the less problems are framed as tasks. "Do X (which fixes Y)," becomes "Fix Y," with the specifics left as an exercise for the reader.

The Doing Deficit: How Deliberate Action Outperforms Passive Learning #learning

In truth, most of us don’t suffer from a knowledge deficit—we suffer from a doing deficit. We take online courses and read books but rarely apply what we learn. The hard part isn’t learning what to do; it’s doing what we already know. So how can we shift from passive thinking to active doing?

It's difficult to move from thinking to doing because:

Some actionable tips:

possibilities - by Elaine - manners & mystery #friendships #relationships #self-help

How do I build deeper friendships? What does “deeper” even mean? This question has been on my mind lately, and yet, I don’t subscribe to a platonic ideal of friendship. I don’t think friendships have to follow a certain path of progression to achieve a “standard of excellence.” We need all sorts of friends in our lives. The ones we catch up with infrequently over dinner and the ones who witness us week to week or day by day. The friends we only see at the climbing gym or dance studio or pickleball court and those we go on physical and spiritual journeys with. We need them all.

…

Many adults feel vaguely unfulfilled in their friendships but can’t put their finger on why. My theory is that it has something to do with expecting a lot from our romantic partners and very little from our friends, so we’re barely scratching the surface of what’s possible. For example, if you wanted a friend to reach out to you more often, but it’s not a burning itch, you might let it pass. It bothers you from time to time, but for the most part, you ignore it. They’re probably busy, you tell yourself. On the other hand, if you wanted the person you’re dating to check in with you more, you’d probably agonize over why they’re not responding faster to your texts, unable to focus on anything else until you get an answer.

All relationships evolve from a series of back-and-forth requests ranging from low stakes (e.g. asking a friend to grab lunch) to extremely consequential (e.g. asking a friend to be the guardian of your child). Vulnerability is the beating heart of all relationships, and how comfortable you are being vulnerable with someone is a more accurate measure of closeness than time spent together.

Conviction and Knowledge

From: Tim Urban / waitbutwhy

/images/Pasted image 20241003232029.png

2024-10-02

Podcast #podcast:

Came across this substack post from somebody on X and found it super intriguing, esp the quote below: Good At Sex: Seduction Via Narrative Reinforcement (pt 7) #sex #masculinity

I view sex as a success for both of us, and thus seduction is a collaborative activity. We both want the same thing: to get around my annoying brain gatekeeper that got installed there by eons of evolution that doesn’t understand birth control and is trying to evaluate if you’re worthy of impregnating me. So please—use seduction techniques on me. Roleplay as an alpha male well enough to trick my vagina into believing that your cum will give me alpha sons.

Millennials Will Age Terribly - by Chris Jesu Lee #culture #millenial

My friend Trevor has a thing he often says, about how in today’s society, there are no elders, only olders. By that, he means there’s decreasing social worth placed on acquired skills and knowledge that comes with life experience—distinct from lived experience, which is something more of a status boost granted upon birth based on one’s identity. Therefore, as one ages, there is no upside, only downside. You just become a more out-of-touch, slower, paunchier, balder, and wrinklier version of a young person. There are no elders. Only old young people.

This passage above ☝🏽 reminded me of a concept explored in this post on Living Fossils that I posted on 2024-08-11, about how technology upends wisdom, and the faster technology changes, the less the elderly can keep up: Technology, Part III: A Fish Out of Water - by Josh Zlatkus.

But that also makes me wonder if that’s because we can’t or won’t move on. If the economic situation were as rosy as the 50s and 90s combined, how different would things be, really? There is a piece in the Cafe Hysteria Substack entitled “The Twenty-Something Teens” which looks at how 20-something women were eagerly identifying as teens (for instance, by overly identifying with the music of Olivia Rodrigo). My friends and I often talk about how the default identity that everyone tends to revert to online is that of the hysterical teen. Is that because online communication forces us to or because the freedom of the internet enables us to take our most preferred forms?

The latest Amplifier playlist: The Amplifier: 6 of 'The Greatest' Songs #music #playlist

I have long dreamed of compiling an Amplifier playlist of different songs with the same name. Watching Eilish perform “The Greatest,” probably the emotional apex of the whole show, I realized she was offering me the perfect opportunity. I started to think of the many other artists who have bestowed that imposing moniker on one of their tunes — Cat Power, Lana Del Rey and Kenny Rogers among them.

Added a github action workflow that can sync my repo from my Obsidian vault in Gdrive directly and commit the files. I can use this if I am away from my computer and updating my Obsidian vault on my mobile: debugjois.dev/.github/workflows/sync-build-deploy.yml at 9511119670d8b306bf7224a596579045542793f5 · deepakjois/debugjois.dev · GitHub

Downloaded a scientific calculator app for Android, thanks to the reco in this Reddit thread #apps #android: What is the best Android Calculator ?

Neat little app. I am using it to define formulas and plug the values in for my Math Academy quizzes: Numbat - scientific calculator #calculator #apps #math

100 XP on MathAcademy today #math #learning

Indian Physical Culture

I listened to this podcast on a walk today and it led me down a rabbithole that I wanted to write about: Podcast #1,026: 5,000 Years of Sweat — Lost Workout Wisdom From the History of Physical Culture | The Art of Manliness

The guest Conor Hefernan has written a book The History of Physical Culture: Heffernan, Conor: 9781957792224: Amazon.com: Books. In the podcast he is covering the history of physical culture broadly. The part that made me pay attention was when he started talking about Indian physical culture, especially Indian clubs that have been in use for a very long time historically. I searched online and found that the author has also written a more recent book specifically on Indian physical culture: Amazon.com: Indian Club Swinging and the Birth of Global Fitness: Mugdars, Masculinity and Marketing eBook : Heffernan, Conor: Kindle Store

The show notes contain a link to an article: Indian Club Exercises: Swing Your Way to Health | The Art of Manliness

And a video:

2024-10-01

Podcasts #podcasts :

This is such a cool project: Bop Spotter. Now all I need is an RSS feed or a playlist to capture all the songs. #music #playlist

I installed a box high up on a pole somewhere in the Mission of San Francisco. Inside is a crappy Android phone, set to Shazam constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's solar powered, and the mic is pointed down at the street below.

Heard of Shot Spotter? Microphones are installed across cities across the United States by police to detect gunshots, purported to not be very accurate. This is that, but for music.

This is culture surveillance. No one notices, no one consents. But it's not about catching criminals. It's about catching vibes. A constant feed of what’s popping off in real-time.

Started Math Academy. Took a while to get through the diagnostic test, but I guess it turned out okay. I have set myself an aggressive goal of finishing the Mathematics for Machine Learning module by December. #math

English Teacher S01E06 #tv

Using gdrive API in Go

To access a Google drive from the Go API SDK in unattended auth mode (i.e. without the OAuth dance), we need to do the following:

Added gdrive syncing support: Add sync-notes-drive subcommand · deepakjois/debugjois.dev@2ed1a1d · GitHub. Now I can update notes on my phone and sync them to gdrive.

Will soon add a github action that will use this subcommand to sync, update the website and commit the changes back to the repo. Planning to use this workflow for that: GitHub - stefanzweifel/git-auto-commit-action: Automatically commit and push changed files back to GitHub with this GitHub Action for the 80% use case.