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You can read the daily log for the last few days below, or with the Atom feed. Browse the archives for more.

2024-09-11

Off to Mumbai

Travel means a LOT of podcasts 🙃 #podcasts:

2024-09-10

Podcasts #podcasts:

Childless - by Satya Doyle Byock - Self & Society

The truth is that I’ve bit my tongue about Lisa Marchiano’s work for years, just as I have about Jordan Peterson’s, two people who use their platforms to equate “archetypal” and stereotypical perspectives of gender with psychology. I’ve bit my tongue because I’m not seeking a public fight. But there’s no doubt that much of their work is causing harm. Their anti-trans rhetoric and regressive ideas about women and men, and the masculine and feminine, are genuinely dangerous, drawing on people’s worst hunches and instincts, not the forward movement of psychic life. It’s hard to watch Jung’s work being used in such damaging ways; not for the sake of liberating people to live their individual lives as intended, but to reinforce the prisons of sex and gender as defined by others, equating genitalia with one’s psychological life just as eugenicists have, for centuries, equated skin color with intelligence.

…

Childless women have always existed. Just as trans people have always existed. The increased awareness of these populations today is not a result of social epidemics or wrong-headedness. Nor are the books and support groups around to attract people to a new “lifestyle choice.” No, the visibility is increasing because those who have historically lived with shame and grief outside of the standard white, colonial, hetero-normative, Christian images of “man” and “woman” are advocating for themselves, creating communities, and living less and less in the shadows.

In an era when gender apartheid is on the rise worldwide and gender-nonconforming people of all stripes are fighting for their lives, anyone with a platform would do well to resist fueling right-wing rhetoric with biological essentialist arguments and outdated notions of sex and individuation. Simplistic ideas about how men and women “should be” carry real-world power, cause disorientation and self-doubt, and ultimately threaten lives. This is true for cis men as much as cis women, as it is for non-binary and trans people. Biology is not archetypal. Motherhood is not for everyone. Sex is not destiny.

The journey of individuation is not universally defined.

5 Ways to Increase Your Learning Throughput - Scott H Young

  1. Schedule large chunks of uninterrupted time.
  2. Be aggressive about using fragmented time.
  3. Make each iteration more efficient.
  4. Make learning more enjoyable.
  5. Decide what you’ll do less of, in order to learn more.

Language Log » Berber, emic vs. etic

When my Uber driver told me last Sunday in Philadelphia that he was a Berber, I told him that he must be proud of his heritage, he responded, "Actually, we don't like that name.  It was imposed on us by Arabs, and it means the same thing as 'barbarian'.  We prefer to call ourselves 'Amazigh'."

Isaiah Berlin on Pluralism

That is why pluralism is not relativism -- the multiple values are objective, part of the essence of humanity rather than arbitrary creations of men's subjective fancies. Nevertheless, of course, if I pursue one set of values I may detest another, and may think it is damaging to the only form of life that I am able to live or tolerate, for myself and others; in which case I may attack it, I may even -- in extreme cases -- have to go to war against it. But I still recognize it as a human pursuit. I find Nazi values detestable, but I can understand how, given enough misinformation, enough false belief about reality, one could come to believe that they are the only salvation. Of course they have to be fought, by war if need be, but I do not regard the Nazis, as some people do, as literally pathological or insane, only as wickedly wrong, totally misguided about the facts, for example in believing that some beings are subhuman, or that race is central, or that Nordic races alone are truly creative, and so forth. I see how, with enough false education, enough widespread illusion and error, men can, while remaining men, believe this and commit the most unspeakable crimes.

Why do we do things that are bad for us? The ancient philosophers had an answer | Well actually | The Guardian

To achieve your goals, it can be more effective to put into place a defined plan that doesn’t let you reconsider. The psychologist Peter Gollwitzer called this an implementation intention: come up with a specific if/then statement that helps you achieve your goal. If it’s Tuesday, then I will go to yoga class; if I buy spinach, then I will make this smoothie for breakfast the next morning.

Kalis added that changing your environment might be a better way to resist akrasia than trying to improve your willpower. These changes are called commitment devices: they don’t allow you to change your mind. As an extreme example, when Victor Hugo wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame, he told his assistant to lock away all of his clothes so that he was forced to stay inside and write.

Words on Founder Mode – Rands in Repose

Graham hints at some of the attributes of Founder Mode but mostly says it’s not a well-defined. It is. Founder Mode is the culture of a company and a culture is defined by the character of the founders. Here are the values I’ve discovered over and over again working with these humans:

And finally, hire leaders, not managers.

Need to go buy this book now. Looks amazing: An American Affordable Housing Crisis, Built By Local Democracy - Bloomberg #books

On The Housing Crisis: Land, Development, Democracy is a collection of reported essays by Demsas that explores the role that democratic structures play in perpetuating a housing shortage. Writing with plain yet authoritative language, she tackles the difference between such thorny economic concepts as shortage denialism and supply skepticism, showing how they manifest in real communities. Yet she also writes from the ground level to explore the toll of hyperlocal overdemocracy, connecting rational decisions by neighborhoods to reject development to an irrational picture of a country that can no longer build.

“Americans are aware by now that the housing affordability crisis is acute, but many don’t understand what’s causing it,” Demsas writes in the introduction to her new book. “All too often, explanations center around identifying a villain: greedy developers, or private equity companies, or racist neighbors, or gentrifiers, or corrupt politicians. These stories are not always false, nor are these villains imaginary, but they don’t speak to root causes.”

Perfect Couple S01E01

2024-09-09

Podcasts #podcasts :

Nice thread to mine some tips on using LLMs

Yet another interesting way that Russia is busting sanctions, this time featuring India: Russia built covert trade channel with India, leaks reveal

Random video that covers facts about flying - cabin pressure, cellphone usage, food/drink

Woke up to a bunch of newspapers talking about how the Tulu script was included in the Unicode standard. As a Unicode nerd, I couldn't get much out of the actual articles, so had to look up the actual proposals: ScriptSource - Entry - Unicode Status (Tulu-Tigalari)A

Industry S03E05

Deep dive into the how lazy.nvim is configured with options: GitHub - folke/lazy.nvim: 💤 A modern plugin manager for Neovim

2024-09-08

Was feeling restless and anxious today morning, so decided to binge a bunch of podcasts:

There’s a Non-Speculative Crypto Use Case That’s Actually Taking off - Bloomberg

☝🏽 is a podcast transcript of an episode from Odd Lots about stablecoins. Some insightful quotes below.

It's so funny. How much the narratives shift and are often very much at odds with each other. But the reason that can happen is because some people might argue that Bitcoin is kind of this weird postmodern thing. That it's just a token. Like it's just a symbol and people aren't really using it for anything other than betting.

…

Because the big contrast by putting them on a blockchain is if I have a bank account at say JP Morgan and I wanna send money to somebody at Bank of America — simplifying away a lot of the details here — JP Morgan has to essentially take money out of their accounts, whatever they were invested in, send it over to BofA, who's gonna reinvest it. In token world with a stablecoin it just sort of sits at rest being invested the whole time.

And the token represents an ownership interest in that, moves around on a blockchain, which is also a very open access platform. It really is in many ways a bifurcation of rights that were not possible in the traditional system and changes how you can move money around and at what velocity.

…

Where now there appears to be a decent body of people who are using stablecoins for I will generically wrap it in the basket of ‘something else.’ And that ‘something else’ mostly seems to come in two forms. One is a lot of peer-to-peer transfers of stablecoins. So that's people probably using it for things like business payments, individual payments like settlement of, call it, “real world activity,” where one leg is in crypto.

And the other part that they seem to be using it for significantly is just dollar access because something we take for granted in the United States because our banking system, you know, for all our criticisms is pretty good and largely works, it's easy for us to get dollars and more importantly it's easy for us to get dollars in a way that we feel good about being safe and secure.

But if you live in, like, Argentina, if you live in Venezuela, if you live in Southeast Asia, it can be much harder to get your hands on dollars. And this is definitely a tool where people are using that.

2024-09-07

Podcasts: #podcasts

Pachinko S02E03

English Teacher S01E01 and S01E02 - It's one of those shows that is really really funny, but also quite sophisticated in its humor. Loved it!

Playing around with different configuration options with dashboard-nvim: GitHub - nvimdev/dashboard-nvim: vim dashboard

GitHub - ibhagwan/fzf-lua: Improved fzf.vim written in lua #neovim #fzf

What I really liked was that I provided a way to run the plugin in a sandboxed environment:

sh -c "$(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ibhagwan/fzf-lua/main/scripts/mini.sh)"

Skimmed the video of this podcast. Would love to get my hands on the speedrunning ideation prompt that was displayed partially (at the 4m mark). #claude #ai #prompting

2024-09-06

Podcasts #podcasts

Checked out Kind Roastery in Indiranagar. The ambience is nice, the coffee is mid: maps.app.goo.gl/TLyvPhTC88t1A1aM7

Walked around Defence Colony in Indiranagar, on the way from Kind to Third Wave, and it was a vibe!

Nice graphic of the upcoming Yellow Line metro stations. Unfortunately, it appeared alongside an article talking about how things are delayed and it's not gonna open anytime soon.

/images/metro_yellow_line.png

Large language models will upend human rituals

Still, things might get awkward if everyone suspects that everyone else is inauthentically using an LLM. As Erving Goffman, a sociologist, argued, belief in the sincerity of others—and the ritualistic performance of that belief—is one of the bedrocks of social life. What happens when people lose their faith? A bad performance evaluation is one thing if you think the manager has sweated over it, but quite another if you suspect he farmed it out to an algorithm. Some managers might feel ashamed, but will that really stop them for long?

Richard Dawkins has a new book out: The Genetic Book of the Dead. Came across a review which seemed to rate it well.

2024-09-05

Podcasts #podcasts

Full Scale IQ Test - Looks interesting #iq

Postgres as a search engine #rag #postgres

In this post, we’ll explore how to use Postgres to create a robust search engine. We’ll combine three techniques:

  1. Full-text search with tsvector
  2. Semantic search with pgvector
  3. Fuzzy matching with pg_trgm
  4. Bonus: BM25

Some very interesting illustration of Postgres plugins and SQL, a lot of which I glazed over for now.

Tried this watch alternative and I am gonna switch to it: GitHub - sachaos/viddy: 👀 A modern watch command. Time machine and pager etc. #tools

YC Backed AI Code Assistant: Melty — open source AI code editor #tools

Luxury Beliefs:

2024-09-04

Podcasts: #podcasts :

Slow Horses S01E04 #tv

Neat app that can log how we feel throughout the day: How We Feel #wellness

GitHub - sachaos/viddy: 👀 A modern watch command. Time machine and pager etc. #tools #watch

Episode 48: Alcohol - by Stuart Ritchie and Tom Chivers - did not bother to listen to the podcast, but the show notes have some useful links to dig into. #alcohol

Came across a couple of links to build TUIs w/ BubbleTea: #tui #tools

Why I'm unreachable and maybe you should be too #productivity

What I am interested in

Spending time with people I love.

Spending time with people that spark my curiosity.

Spending time on my health like cooking nice food, doing fitness, sports, etc.

Traveling to new places and exploring them alone or with my girlfriend or friends.

Hacking on creative projects, reading about stuff I'm curious about, or working on new businesses I'm passionate about.

Inspiring people to create stuff by sharing what I make and writing about it on here and Twitter.

Sharing stuff with my followers that sparks my curiosity.

How pour-over coffee got good - Works in Progress - This is a really long article, and it's not just about the pourover. A lot of the article is a deep-dive into coffee culture, before it actually gets to the pourover.

One chapter of Gendered Species: A Natural History of Patriarchy 1, David-Barrett, Tamas - Amazon.com #books

The core idea behind this book is that the relationship between women and men is not random. Gender rules are not random. Patriarchal institutions are not random. Tough norms about sex are not random. Marriage is not random. And not only patriarchal practices are not random, but even the existence of the patriarchy is not random. Instead, there are six factors, four ecological and two social, that together determine the rules about women and men. The key to this book is the idea that there are reasons why we live in a matriarchy, a patriarchy, or a gender-equal society. Six reasons. … These examples above each stand for one of the six factors. In more scientific terms, they are the four ecological factors: (1) the distribution of the resources, (2) the stability of the resources, (3) the scarcity of the resources, and (4) the exploitability of the resources, together with the two societal factors: (5) the society’s technology set it uses the access the resources, and (6) the population’s fertility. Among these six factors, no single one drives gender rules and norms. It is the interaction of the six factors that matters. It is together that they determine the way societies regulate and guide the relationship between women and men.

The hunter-gatherers of the 21st century who live on the move | Aeon Essays Summary of key cultural and evolutionary contributions of non-sedentary humans throughout history:

It also links out to a really interesting paper in the journal of Human Evolution: Variability in the organization and size of hunter-gatherer groups: Foragers do not live in small-scale societies

Speedran this video interview of Daron Acemoglu by Alice Evans:

Was reminded today of this cute single binary fully featured editor, written in go: Micro - About #editor #go

2024-09-03

Podcasts: #podcasts

🫶🏽🥺: The Rumblr — “I Think I Am In Friend-Love With You” written by... #friendship #love

My friend Viveik's notes from Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals : Burkeman, Oliver: Amazon.in: Books

/images/oliver_burkman_8000.png

Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods – Something Similar #systems

An LLM TUI: Anatomy of a Textual User Interface - Textual #llm #tui

React microphone component: Making a simple React microphone component #react #javascript

Kubernetes, the harder way: GitHub - ghik/kubernetes-the-harder-way: A guide to setting up a production-like Kubernetes cluster on a local machine #systems

Sunscreens don't cause cancer, they protect AGAINST skin cancer #sunscreen #wellness

Kimchi no more? Climate change puts South Korea's beloved cabbage dish at risk #climate #food

Napa cabbage thrives in cooler climates, and is usually planted in mountainous regions where temperatures during the key growing summer season once rarely rose above 25 Celsius (77 Fahrenheit).

Studies show that warmer weather brought about by climate change is now threatening these crops, so much so that South Korea might not be able to grow napa cabbage one day due to the intensifying heat.

Give me Instapoetry — and something more substantial too #poetry

It's cute when the FT discovers the term "raw-dogging" and fumbles to really explain it 😂: Ask Shrimsley: Should I try ‘raw-dogging’?

Put simply, raw-dogging on planes is flying without making use of any of the usual distractions of in-flight movies, music, computer games or books. You simply sit upright staring at the seat in front of you or, if you are lucky, the flight map.

2024-09-02

Podcasts

Came across this thread, and lowkey plugged podscript to one of the thread replies 🙃.

Found a couple of useful tools for audio in the thread: #transcription #audio #stt

2024-09-01

Went to the AI demos at HSR Hacker House. Good vibes. May apply for the next round to work more on podscript.

Really nice note taking app by one of the guys who works on Cursor: Type Here | App. The cool thing is how it uses the browser's localstorage and IndexedDB to persist notes on the client. One of the things I wanna do is explore a seamless way to periodically backup from the browsers local storage to something more durable in the cloud.

First Onam Sadhya of the season. Hope to end up in at least 1-2 more ✌🏽.

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