[{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been using Claude Code for months, and it\u0026rsquo;s convinced me that profound change is coming to my industry. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure it will all be good. What I do know is that tools like Claude Code (CC) make coding more productive and more fun. I got into this business because I loved making things, especially things my friends want to use. These tools make that easier than ever, and I\u0026rsquo;m having more fun with code than I\u0026rsquo;ve had in years.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not unique. Claude takes advantage of my strengths, which I think will apply to many other experienced software engineers. I think of these as the three hats I wear as a developer when developing projects:\nArchitect: Understanding what makes a good development plan and solution for the problem at hand Editor: A willingness to iterate to a great final draft The Opinionated: Understanding what matters to make a great product or solution (and what doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter) Architects # Every experienced CC user will tell you, giving Claude a great plan makes a huge difference. With a good plan and good guidance, CC can get you amazing results. I expect you\u0026rsquo;ll see a lot of stories like this one in 2026:\nPost from Dare Obasanjo on Threads This matches my experience as well. For a project like LLStudyGuide.com, I spent time creating good PRDs and design documents. Claude and I cranked out the initial version of that app in ~8 hours. CC got the initial parsers and data ingest done in an hour or less.\nThe key skill here is being able to clearly articulate a product problem, the technical constraints that matter, and to provide all the details that matter to the solution. Even with my experience, I struggle with pointless (to me) technology choices when starting from scratch (vite? turbopack? webpack? who cares!) because I want to \u0026ldquo;get it right\u0026rdquo; at the start. Claude takes all that friction away, letting me focus on the architectural or product choices that actually matter.\nEditors # These tools still make a lot of mistakes. You may also find out halfway through a feature that an earlier choice wasn\u0026rsquo;t the right one, and you\u0026rsquo;ll need to refactor. A willingness to embrace this iteration - knowing that CC will make fixes \u0026amp; refactors painless enough - is also a mindset shift. The process your English teacher probably tried to instill - outline, draft, read, edit/revise, repeat - is a key part of an agentic workflow.\nExperience helps here - I spend more of my time reviewing code than writing it now, aided by AI, of course.1 Reading code efficiently is the key skill, along with mastering supporting tools that can help you keep up. I also care a lot more about the thoroughness of my test suite than I ever have.\nThe remaining question for me is how we train juniors - I learned by making mistakes writing lower-level code. We\u0026rsquo;re going to need to rethink how juniors gain the experience to become capable seniors in this new world.\nThe Opinionated # You\u0026rsquo;re going to be able to crank out code faster than ever. What code matters, and what problems you need to work on will be the next differentiator. On most of my projects now, I\u0026rsquo;m spending more time sweating the product details vs worrying about low-value decisions. It helps that I have strong opinions on what makes a great product, or how I want a tool I\u0026rsquo;m building to work.\nDifferentiating products in a world where anyone can code will come down to how things work for a user, not the technical implementation itself. People that sweat the details (and sweat the right ones) will be able to move faster and ship better products. It\u0026rsquo;s that simple.\nWith LLStudyGuide, I spent the vast majority of that 8 hours tweaking the content pipeline and content generation prompts so I got the content I really wanted to listen to. Before these tools, I would\u0026rsquo;ve spent that initial weekend just cranking out the initial API code to stitch together the MVP content pipeline.\nBeyond the individual engineer # If you step back for a second, these attributes - problem domain expertise, a willingness to iterate and refine, and sweating the (right) details - have always separated great operators from everyone else.\nI\u0026rsquo;m currently reading Vibe Coding by Gene Kim \u0026amp; Steve Yegge. As we\u0026rsquo;re working to roll out these tools to 100% of our engineering team at the day job, this passage has stuck with me:\nOur leading hypothesis, which we\u0026rsquo;re hoping to validate in 2025 in a joint research project with DORA, is that AI amplifies whatever process hygiene you already have. If you don\u0026rsquo;t have fast feedback loops, expect more trouble.\nMissing tests? Now you\u0026rsquo;re missing those tests at 1,000+ lines of code per day per developer. A ten-developer team might crank out 60,000 lines a week. Have bad architectures that don\u0026rsquo;t enable independence of action? Either you\u0026rsquo;re still stuck, or each change is blowing up services faster than ever.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s the underlying theme for 2026 - whether it\u0026rsquo;s at the individual level, or the enterprise, AI coding tools will emphasize the skills you already have. The good thing about skills is that you can learn/teach them. When you nail those three skill buckets, these things are a huge unlock.\nNow, let\u0026rsquo;s get to the links.\nReads # Introducing Beads: A coding agent memory system: Planning is so important that folks are building their own systems to manage plans. I\u0026rsquo;ve been using the Linear MCP as my way of creating a planning buffer for CC, but this tool has some nice features. Will try it on the next project. The sold-out Nex Playground made my kids laugh and cry: I read a few reviews of this on Christmas Eve, and was able to snag one from Target that day (seemingly the last place in my entire area that had one). The Wall Street Journal had a great story about the startup behind the Nex (or read on Apple News+). carnage4life on Threads: This is the link to the Threads post I shared above. The replies are interesting, if you want to get a sense of the sentiment around this post. Keep in mind that the most gung-ho AI audience is on Twitter. Make of that what you will\u0026hellip; Someone made a ton of money betting on Maduro\u0026rsquo;s capture: Setting aside my other thoughts on today\u0026rsquo;s news, this is going to be a huge problem for these prediction market sites. Working in regulated gaming, I know how much of a burden those regulations can be, but I also see what transparency it forces on the industry. Feels like some of that may need to be brought to the prediction market companies. Code \u0026amp; Tools # Experiment.Red: My first one-shot project, a simple script to add DJ sets on YouTube to my Apple Music library. It\u0026rsquo;s a simple wrapper around yt-dlp that grabs the audio from a YouTube video, chops it up, and adds metadata, artwork, and sets it up for continuous (no gap) playback. LL Study Guide: Another one of my CC-driven projects, this is a podcast that reviews the questions from a daily trivia group I\u0026rsquo;m in. I wrote up more about this project here: Experimenting with an AI powered content generation workflow. ESPHome LilyGo T5 4.7\u0026quot; Components: I have a small e-ink dashboard I built about 2 years ago. Over the last few months, the screen was starting to get garbled or the text would appear faded or partially missing. I genuinely was worried the screen was failing. I decided to take an evening and upgrade ESPHome on the device to see if it would help fix it. Turns out the component that drives the screen was no longer maintained or compatible with the newest ESPHome. So, pulled out Claude Code, told it to help me refactor the components for the latest ESPHome. Two hours later, I had a fixed component AND Claude refactored my app code to improve the drawing performance. The screen looks as good as new. N8N.io: I\u0026rsquo;ve started moving away from IFTTT and running those little triggers and workflows on a self-hosted instance of N8N. So far, it\u0026rsquo;s been working well. I\u0026rsquo;m still getting up to speed, but it seems promising for even more use cases than IFTTT. The only thing that really sucks is that they REALLY want you to upgrade to a commercial plan, so the UI is littered with upsell CTAs. The self-hosted option is prohibitively priced - it\u0026rsquo;s either it\u0026rsquo;s free or expensive - Business is $800/mo. So, the community/free edition it is for me. Watch # Making 20 Upgrades for my Desk Setup - Dream Setups #2: This video inspired me to get back into 3D printing this break. I upgraded to a BambuLab P2S, inspired by this video. The printer is amazing. My desk still doesn\u0026rsquo;t look this clean, though. 🙂 My Claude Code Workflow for 2026: From Ray Amjad, whose channel I find very useful, this is an overview of his workflow. Listens # Sharp Tech: Google Starts Dancing, The Winners and Losers of Gemini Week, OpenAI Has an Advertising Problem: This is a little old, but a really good overview of Google\u0026rsquo;s advantages in the AI battle. (subscriber only podcast, but the link has a preview) I prefer using Copilot to review Claude\u0026rsquo;s code, but I\u0026rsquo;ve had good success with the Claude Bot, too.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","date":"3 January 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2026-01/05/","section":"Posts","summary":"Looking ahead to 2026 and sharing some personal projects and updates.","title":"Architects, Editors, \u0026 the Opinionated - Monday Links for January 5, 2026","type":"posts"},{"content":"Two things can be true at once about AI. It is overhyped and full of negative externalities. It is also unquestionably the future, especially for software engineers. For us, the pace of creation is faster - a developer can quickly get from idea to working MVP in hours or days - while still getting a full night\u0026rsquo;s sleep each day. On the other end of the spectrum, small tools and utilities can now be knocked out in an hour. There are some risks, of course - building secure, verifiable code can be tricky. Testing, code reviews, and good architecture still matter.\nI wanted to explore these risks as well as knock out some projects I\u0026rsquo;ve been bouncing around in my head for months. I\u0026rsquo;ve been building projects that are taking me up the ladder from \u0026rsquo;low risk/low complexity\u0026rsquo; to a full consumer SAAS application. I\u0026rsquo;d like to share the most recent project, as it covers some interesting ground, and then talk about the other projects that are part of this series.\nLL Study Guide: A learning companion for LearnedLeague players # I am part of an online trivia league called LearnedLeague.1 I\u0026rsquo;m not a great trivia player yet, but want to keep getting better. Most nights after I submit my answers, I end up looking up an answer or two I got wrong, learning what I can. I also tend to remember things a little better if I can associate them with a book, movie, or other narrative story, so I sometimes look up that angle.\nWell, with today\u0026rsquo;s AI tools, wouldn\u0026rsquo;t it be nice if I could just automate the whole thing? Even better, I\u0026rsquo;d love an audio summary of the whole thing I can listen to if I\u0026rsquo;m pressed for time. That\u0026rsquo;s why I decided to build LL Study Guide.\nSince I was already comfortable with Claude Code (CC), I wanted to level my process up with a full-on professional-ish development process. This means, PRDs, tech specs, issue tracking/epics, and code reviews. I wanted to use the tools that led to the best output, and wanted to get the boilerplate done over a weekend (where I still had family commitments and so on).\nHere are the AI tools I ended up using:\nChatGPT (5.1 thinking) \u0026ndash; Product requirements and content ideation Claude \u0026ndash; Second-pass requirements, structure, and refinement Midjourney \u0026ndash; Initial logo and visual concept generation Adobe Photoshop (Generative AI) \u0026ndash; Logo cleanup, polish, and final assets Claude Code \u0026ndash; Writing the Go app to write code for the content pipeline GitHub Copilot \u0026ndash; PR code reviews GPT-5.1 (with web search and high reasoning enabled) \u0026ndash; Generating study guide content and podcast scripts ElevenLabs (Turbo v2.5 model2) \u0026ndash; Converting scripts into high-quality narrative audio Linear (via MCP) \u0026ndash; Issue Tracking \u0026amp; Project Planning The final product is built as a static site using the Hugo static site framework, hosted on AWS for the production site. This minimizes operational complexity. The site and podcast are just HTML \u0026amp; MP3 files on an S3 bucket - no servers to manage in production.3\nMy development process was straightforward:\nGenerate a PRD with ChatGPT Ask ChatGPT to break that PRD down into chunks of works that could map to issues in Linear Hand that generated plan to Claude Code, configured with the Linear MCP, to create Linear issues with sub-issues as needed My CLAUDE.md file instructs Claude to always work in branches, follow the Linear branch naming convention, and to submit PRs for review Use Copilot to review all PRs I started in earnest on a Saturday afternoon and by Sunday evening I had the initial version working. My focus then shifted to improving the actual content experience - refining the content and UI of the final site. Probably 8-10 hours total over the weekend, and that\u0026rsquo;s with me refreshing my Go and Hugo knowledge. I spent a long evening iterating on various improvements - improved prompts for tighter content, addressing hallucination issues, and color/design tweaks to align with the new logo. Probably another 8 hours there, at most.\nI\u0026rsquo;m still tweaking it every day or two in small ways. I still think the content experience can be improved, have some ideas I\u0026rsquo;m chasing down there. I\u0026rsquo;m also hearing a few audio distortions/mispronounced syllables in the podcast, so am working through that. Otherwise, I\u0026rsquo;m super happy with this. My family4 listens with me - it\u0026rsquo;s actually been pretty fun.\nIn terms of the pipeline design, it\u0026rsquo;s pretty simple: grab the latest match day questions (only after the nightly submission deadline), generate a well-researched study guide, then use that as the basis to create the podcast script. The pipeline then takes that script and uses ElevenLabs to generate the final audio.\nIn terms of cost, each study guide takes about 7-8 minutes for GPT 5.1 to create. The ElevenLabs audio takes another minute or so. That\u0026rsquo;s about $0.50 in tokens each day for GPT 5.1 and 7000 characters in ElevenLabs usage (about $0.65 on the Creator plan5). I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure I can optimize that some more as I tighten up the study guide prompt.\nOther projects and next steps # This project is probably the fifth or so that I\u0026rsquo;ve taken on using Claude and the third from scratch. I\u0026rsquo;m convinced at this point that this is the way to build software these days. There\u0026rsquo;s still some work to do in order to tighten up my CLAUDE.md and other settings and instructions for Claude Code.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll be working on those items on my next project, which will keep exploring this content pipeline idea. I\u0026rsquo;ve been obsessed with personalizing content experiences in my career6, have some related ideas that I think will be very easy with modern tools. That\u0026rsquo;s next up.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m sharing fun Claude Code projects, I took an hour and used Claude to build a little script around yt-dlp that lets me grab DJ mixes from YouTube so I can listen to them without a video player involved.7 The goal is to create audio files that work well with Apple Music (iTunes), with album art, gapless playback, and some other niceties. The great thing about this project is that it\u0026rsquo;s simple - can be described in a paragraph. It\u0026rsquo;s also low risk - it runs on my local computer, is only running during the import, so it has minimal security concerns.\nYou can find the result of that project on Github. It\u0026rsquo;s written in JavaScript, runs inside bun. It\u0026rsquo;s super simple. I was done with the initial MVP in well under an hour. It was fast, it worked well, and was satisfying.\nLearnedLeague is awesome, and if you like trivia, you should 100% join. It\u0026rsquo;s invite only, so please let me know if you\u0026rsquo;d like an invite. There are four seasons each year, and your first (rookie) season is free. It\u0026rsquo;s fun and it\u0026rsquo;s a nice community.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI\u0026rsquo;m using Turbo 2.5 because of cost/speed tradeoffs.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI am working on a CronJob running on a kubernetes cluster in my house to process each match day. So technically there will be a service to manage, but I\u0026rsquo;m doing that to keep learning K8S. It\u0026rsquo;s not necessary. I\u0026rsquo;m manually running the pipeline each day for now. In theory, I could also use an AWS managed service to run the cron job in EventBridge Scheduler or something similar.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nMy wife plays in the league with me. My son is going to start next season.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThe creator plan has just enough credits to cover about 28 days of podcast audio creation. That\u0026rsquo;s enough because LL doesn\u0026rsquo;t run on the weekends. If I\u0026rsquo;m doing active development on the audio side, though, I end up in overage territory, which raises the cost to about $1.05 per episode for just ElevenLabs. Ouch!\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nIf you know, you know.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nWhen I\u0026rsquo;m coding, I listen to dance/electronic music. The steady rhythm helps me focus.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","date":"7 December 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/projects/ai-powered-content-workflow-for-trivia/","section":"Posts","summary":"Using Claude Code to build a AI-powered content pipeline for a trivia league review and study podcast.","title":"Experimenting with an AI powered content generation workflow","type":"posts"},{"content":"Airplanes in the United States, with some exceptions, broadcast their position, call sign, and some limited telemetry using a technology called Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast, otherwise known as ADS-B. It\u0026rsquo;s an open, unencrypted standard, so can be easily read by anyone with an interest in tracking airplanes.\nNow, I\u0026rsquo;m a nerd, and I get interested in random things like this for the heck of it. I was already working on a radio-based project, so was already solving the outdoor mounting and antenna problems. I also love air travel. If you\u0026rsquo;ve ever looked at a map of all the airplanes currently in the air, it\u0026rsquo;s awe-inspiring. Beyond that, running a station and sharing the data with FlightAware gets you a free enterprise FlightAware account - more info on individual airplanes/tail numbers, stats, and more real-time data.\nThere are two ways you can go to build this out. First, FlightAware sells a packaged solution called FlightFeeder, you just provide an antenna and mount everything up. The second option is to grab a Raspberry Pi and install PiAware on it. From the title, you can guess which one I went with.\nWhile FlightAware has a packaged Raspberry Pi image for PiAware, I opted to use a plain old installation based on Raspberry Pi OS. My node is based on a Raspberry Pi 5, has an SSD mounted - it\u0026rsquo;s overkill for this use case. I expect I will make this node do other things over time. I wanted an image I felt comfortable fully customizing.\nThis was a lot of fun to put together. It\u0026rsquo;s a very simple project with loads of possibilities to go beyond the basics. The parts list is small, and the software very easy to install.\nParts # Here\u0026rsquo;s the part list for the node itself, and the antenna that goes with this project. To get this outdoors, I\u0026rsquo;ll refer you to my writeup about my Meshtastic node. This project is in the same enclosure as that project.\nProject Specific Parts: # Here\u0026rsquo;s what you need for the basic PiAware setup.\nRaspberry Pi 5 - I use an 8GB Pi, it\u0026rsquo;s overkill. 2-16GB boards are now available - (amazon, digikey). It was nice having a full-sized Pi with multiple USB ports. Nooelec RTL-SDR v5 SDR (amazon) - These allow the Pi to receive radio signals. Through software, the radio can be tuned to different frequencies. These are nice, have an aluminum heat sink, and fit nicely side-by-side. We need two in order to receive both types of transponders out there. 1090MHz 978MHz Dual Band ADS-B Antenna (amazon): Antennas have specific features to improve reception at certain frequencies and use cases, so make sure you grab on that supports ADS-B bands. sure you get one that is meant for airplane transponders (will say ADS-B and UAT). This includes an N-Type to SMA cable. If your choice doesn\u0026rsquo;t, please make sure you get a cable. Something like this on Amazon should work. SMA Female to Dual SMA Male Splitter (amazon) - the lead from your antenna will need to be split to connect to both radios. If your cable ends in an SMA connector, this splitter should work. Match your connectors so there aren\u0026rsquo;t any surprises. If you look at the photo below, though, you\u0026rsquo;ll notice that I added some other parts. Let\u0026rsquo;s take them by category.\nStorage: # I prefer using SSDs over Micro-SD cards. As I noted above, this is completely unecessary. A good Micro-SD card will work perfectly fine! This project does NOT write much to the local disk.\nPCI-e to NVME Hat for Raspberry Pi 5 - I used this Geekworm HAT for this build which mounts on top of the Pi like a normal HAT. I do prefer the NVME bases from Pimoroni these days, though. You can get them on Amazon. Samsung EVO 990 1TB SSD (amazon) - Again, overkill - I use a Samsung EVO 990 for most of my Raspberry Pi builds. Seems to work well with most of the PCIE SSD boards out there. If you decide to go with a MicroSD card, any Class 10 card aimed at security cameras should do fine. These are usually meant to handle heavy disk activity, will be less likely to fail. My favorites have been Samsung Pro Endurance MicroSD cards.\nPower: # To power the project, a lot depends on your mounting location and plans. If you follow how I\u0026rsquo;ve mounted these outdoor projects, I\u0026rsquo;ve leaned on POE to allow flexibility in mounting locations and the ability to use long runs without sending AC voltage down those wires.\nIf you decide to just power it with USB, you can grab any USB-C power supply. It\u0026rsquo;s also handy to have one around for initial setup. If you don\u0026rsquo;t have one, I trust the Canakit power supplies (amazon). Odds are you probably have a random USB-C power brick lying around. Just make sure it can do USB-C PD with at least 27W at 5volts. Not all of them do, and sometimes it\u0026rsquo;s not always broken out on the fine print on the charger.\nFor POE, just keep in mind that the radios take a lot of power. I had to replace my initial POE splitter with one that had a higher power supply, since this Pi couldn\u0026rsquo;t use a POE Hat (my SSD was mounted on a traditional HAT). With a random POE splitter, the Pi would occassionally stop responding. Diagnosing the issue, I found under-voltage messages in the dmesg logs, so I moved to a POE splitter with a higher power output. I ended up with an \u0026ldquo;industrial\u0026rdquo; one (amazon) that had 5A output at 5V. Seems to have stabilized Pi.\nSoftware Setup # I use ansible to setup the Pi and configure everything. Here is the role for setting up PiAware. This basically captures the instructions on the PiAware site.\n- block: - name: Check if piaware is installed already command: dpkg-query -l piaware register: deb_check ignore_errors: true - name: Configure and install piaware become: true ansible.builtin.shell: | wget \u0026lt;https://www.flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/files/packages/pool/piaware/f/flightaware-apt-repository/flightaware-apt-repository_1.2_all.deb\u0026gt; sudo dpkg -i flightaware-apt-repository_1.2_all.deb sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install -y piaware sudo piaware-config allow-auto-updates yes sudo piaware-config allow-manual-updates yes args: chdir: \u0026#34;/tmp\u0026#34; when: deb_check.rc != 0 register: piaware_install - name: install dump1090-fa ansible.builtin.apt: name: dump1090-fa state: present register: dump1090_fa - name: install dump978-fa ansible.builtin.apt: name: dump978-fa state: present register: dump978_fa - name: install piaware-web ansible.builtin.apt: name: piaware-web state: present register: piaware_web - name: install rtl-sdr ansible.builtin.apt: name: rtl-sdr state: present - name: Reboot if required become: true reboot: when: piaware_install.changed == true or dump1090_fa.changed == true or dump978_fa.changed == true or piaware_web.changed == true become: true That\u0026rsquo;s basically it. Find a safe way to get the antenna outside, routed to the Pi. As you can see below, I mounted the whole thing outdoors. Details on the outdoor mount can be found on my Meshtastic project post.\n","date":"5 October 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/projects/tracking-planes-w-adsb-raspberrypi-piaware/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Building an ADS-B Ground Station with a Raspberry Pi and PiAware","type":"posts"},{"content":"A lot is going on in the US, and perhaps I\u0026rsquo;ll write about some things over at the other place (though I haven\u0026rsquo;t yet). I\u0026rsquo;ll be honest and say I\u0026rsquo;m looking for moments to turn to happier things when the news is overwhelming.\nSo, this week I\u0026rsquo;m linking to things inspired by two ideas. First, I want to celebrate the art, creativity, and expression that brings me some joy. Second, I wanted to look at ways to express yourself online and how that\u0026rsquo;s changing now. One common reaction I\u0026rsquo;ve heard this week: all the social networks that most people use are owned by attendees at Trump\u0026rsquo;s inauguration.\nMost folks know about Bluesky and Mastodon - you should check them out - but I gather some other articles that look a little deeper. I also share some tools I use to diversify my news and media intake.\n(and please stop using Twitter/X!)\nReads # Dr. Adrienne Edwards Is Bringing Visionary Choreography to the Whitney Museum: I had the luck of catching this exhibit at the Whitney Museum a few weekends ago. It is amazing. It\u0026rsquo;s a wonderful testimony to a career that influenced and elevated so many. Dance is not an art form that always speaks to me, but seeing an Ailey School performance in high school is a core memory. This exhibit connects the dots of his career from his influences to his peers to his legacy. Just reading some of his letters was inspiring to me. This article is an interview with the curator of the exhibit.\nRapper\u0026rsquo;s First Time Hamilton Reaction: There is an indescribable joy in seeing someone discover a love for art that you love. I watched way too much of this series of videos from YouTuber \u0026amp; rapper Amari Leone. Give it time to get going. He starts out as an absolute skeptic, with no knowledge of the musical or its origins. By the end of the first act, he laughs, he cries, and he has his jaw just drop. As he\u0026rsquo;s recording each part over weeks, in between he\u0026rsquo;s getting educated by the comment threads and his own research on the musical. It\u0026rsquo;s a fun journey. I haven\u0026rsquo;t finished the entire series in the playlist - it\u0026rsquo;s quite long - but when I need a little joy, I watch the next part. He has an additional series going deeper into analyzing the musicality and lyrics of specific songs, check out his page for those.\nThe animation guide for the film Flow: See this post from a friend sharing how the team behind the 2024 animated movie Flow organized their work.\nThe Technological Poison Pill: How ATProtocol Encourages Competition, Resists Evil Billionaires, Lock-In \u0026amp; Enshittification: This post looks at why Bluesky\u0026rsquo;s foundations will keep it from following the same arc as the other VC-backed networks. It\u0026rsquo;s a little optimistic, IMHO, but I have hope that it will survive.\nFree Our Feeds: A group has started a crowdfunding initiative to stand up another separate service that leverages Bluesky\u0026rsquo;s underlying protocol. It\u0026rsquo;s started by some Mozilla folks and other names you may recognize. I haven\u0026rsquo;t donated yet, but I\u0026rsquo;m keeping an eye on it. More at the Verge. Maybe it\u0026rsquo;s not optimistic to believe that the AT Protocol will allow Bluesky to be resilient to capture.\nThe people should own the town square: Mastodon is moving to a foundation-owned model, removing one of the concerns around that ecosystem. I find my Mastodon feed has more technical posts, so it\u0026rsquo;s worth digging into that community if you\u0026rsquo;re into that.\nMigrating from Substack to self-hosted Ghost: the details: In case you want to move your newsletter off of Substack (some background on why you might want to), Ghost is the way to go. If you\u0026rsquo;re not technical at all, they offer a hosted solution just like Substack. If you\u0026rsquo;re more like Molly White, you can host it yourself, as well - Ghost is open source and non-profit. You should check it out.\nShould I leave Substack?: As I was researching Substack alternatives, I came across this article that does a deeper rundown on the alternatives, including Beehiiv, which I would put as the third option aside from Substack and Ghost (I\u0026rsquo;m partial to Ghost if that wasn\u0026rsquo;t clear).\nWatch \u0026amp; Listen # Wrap Drinks Ep. #033 - Cinematographer David Mullen: This is an almost 3-hour podcast (on YouTube), but it\u0026rsquo;s fascinating background listening if you get any joy from the way movies are made. Lots of segments in there that are amazing. If you can\u0026rsquo;t handle the 3 hours, there are some shorts from the episode that are fascinating. Code \u0026amp; Tools # Croissant: I use Croissant to cross-post to mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads when I want to post something broadly.\nNewsblur: I know it\u0026rsquo;s not as popular these days, but RSS still exists and is still supported by many publishers out there. If you\u0026rsquo;re looking for a different way to get news without having to go to multiple news sites, don\u0026rsquo;t discount using an RSS reader. Newsblur is the one I use. It\u0026rsquo;s a paid app, but I find it worth it to support an independent software creator who isn\u0026rsquo;t going to be tempted to build an ad network or make the product worse in order to \u0026ldquo;scale.\u0026rdquo; If this isn\u0026rsquo;t for you, there\u0026rsquo;s a decent thread at HN with other options.\nThe creators of Twitterrific are making an app to read (almost) anything on the web: This is a year old, but I did support this Kickstarter and have access to the betas. It\u0026rsquo;s an interesting take on this problem. I haven\u0026rsquo;t switched over to it fully, but I\u0026rsquo;m enjoying it alongside the main feeds of the apps I do use.\n","date":"22 January 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2025-01/22/","section":"Posts","summary":"A little celebration of expression, arts, filmmaking, and creativity to avoid the obviously big and heavy topics of the week.","title":"Anything but politics - (Wednesday) Links for January 22, 2025","type":"posts"},{"content":"I skipped last week\u0026rsquo;s update to spend some extra time with my family - my son had an extra day off on his break and last week was going to mark the final week of my recharge break after leaving Ohai.\nIt was the final week because today was my first day at Penn Entertainment where I\u0026rsquo;ll be leading mobile engineering for theScore and ESPN Bet and the rest of Penn\u0026rsquo;s digital portfolio. This is a special group of people with a strong engineering culture. I\u0026rsquo;m also rejoining a few former colleagues from my ESPN \u0026amp; Disney days. We did some special things over a decade plus working together, so I am looking forward with excitement and with high expectations on what we can achieve at Penn.\nLA Fires # I have family that was affected by the fires (thankfully just evacuations - the houses are still there). Numerous friends and former colleagues are also in the area. It\u0026rsquo;s been stressful for us worrying about them from afar, so I cannot imagine what it must be like for everyone affected by the fires. Thank you to all of the first responders working so hard to protect everyone.\nWe have a standing monthly donation to the American Red Cross because, honestly, natural disasters strike more often than we like to think about. Groups like the American Red Cross provide critical on-the-ground resources in the aftermath of these disasters, across the country. Please consider donating whatever you can.\nWildfire Donations: Your Generosity is Inspiring: The LAFD has some notes and links on other ways you can donate supplies or money.\nA thread on incarcerated firefighters: I didn\u0026rsquo;t know much about this program, so this was a fascinating thread on how these programs work. I\u0026rsquo;m grateful that these folks are out there supporting the full-time firefighters, and I hope they all find the program as fullfilling as this former inmate.\nReads # Things we learned about LLMs in 2024: I somehow missed this in my end-of-year roundup, which is inexcusable. It\u0026rsquo;s a great summary of everything that happened in LLMs last year. Some of it echoes my summary, but it goes into great detail in some specific areas, worth a read if you\u0026rsquo;re working on anything remotely around LLMs and AI. This is now the second year Willison has done this roundup.\nHow I program with LLMs: A good writeup from a very experienced developer on how they use LLMs to accelerate their work while making sure it\u0026rsquo;s accurate and up to their experienced, high standards. A few small tips, with a key insight that generic tools may not have the kind of efficient workflow versus tools built around a specific language. That\u0026rsquo;s why they\u0026rsquo;re building sketch.dev, \u0026ldquo;an LLM-enhanced Go playground\u0026rdquo; aimed at, you guessed it, Go developers.\nBits, Features, and Truth: In my career, I\u0026rsquo;ve appreciated working with strongly opinionated, direct program managers. Some of my biggest, most successful projects have had excellent program managers who were the keepers of the truth, and who had the skills to speak that truth no matter what. This piece is one of the best explanations of the function they provide that I\u0026rsquo;ve read in a while:\nYeah, I know you start-up folk believe you\u0026rsquo;re doing just great without a semblance of program or process management. You believe that these types of folks are going to slow you down with their agendas and to-do lists. Here\u0026rsquo;s the deal: just because no one has the title in your garage doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean the role doesn\u0026rsquo;t exist. In any group larger than one, someone has taken the role of keeper of the truth and their key skill is information wrangler. They constantly gather the information from the group, synthesize it, translate it, and, sometimes forcibly, present this information to the folks who are busily lying to themselves.\nAbsolute truth.\nOn Meta\u0026rsquo;s content moderation changes: I wrote this piece after Meta announced their content moderation changes. It\u0026rsquo;s over on the personal blog because it, I think by necessity, has an explicitly political angle and I would like to keep this space free of politics. If you\u0026rsquo;re ok with that, though, I summarized my thoughts and rounded up a number of reactions around the web that, quite frankly, are better than anything I could write.\nElon Musk and the right\u0026rsquo;s war on Wikipedia: Wikipedia is an important way for folks to learn and make serendipitous connections that spur curiosity and invention. Molly White corrects some of the misinformation from the latest bugaboo for some folks like Elon Musk. Wikipedia is a treasure, flaws and all.\n","date":"13 January 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2025-01/13/","section":"Posts","summary":"Opening with some personal news followed by the usual weekly list. A belated Happy New Year, everyone!","title":"New Year, New Chapters - Monday Links for January 13, 2025","type":"posts"},{"content":"As we end 2024, I wanted to do something a bit like my last update in 2022 and note down my thoughts on one or two big trends that we\u0026rsquo;ll see in 2025. I can boil all of this down to this basic idea:\nAI model innovation will slow down but its impact will accelerate.\nHere are three things I\u0026rsquo;m observing right now:\nLLM Models seem to have plateaued a bit: The top models are very close in general performance. The next-gen model from OpenAI is delayed (supposedly), hinting at some possible scaling issues that could affect other models. Improvements seem to be coming from functionality built into the API layers of the major platforms - for example, more round trips to the LLM, intermediate analysis layers, etc. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of work to do on compute cost and speed at inference time, which will take up a lot of attention at the bigger AI companies. Enterprises have lots of low-hanging fruit that are great fodder for experimentation, which will allow them to work through enterprise adoption friction (e.g. compliance, infosec, privacy, etc.). This will accelerate their second/third/next use case (and many enterprises are already at this step). Coding tools are good enough to push good developers to greatness and great developers to super developers. (This may also be true for the other product development roles, too) Together, they point to a good year for AI adoption, even if the models don\u0026rsquo;t improve dramatically in the short term. They also suggest that any team developing software MUST look at how they adopt these new tools into their work and processes. There\u0026rsquo;s no excuse at this point even for larger teams - the cost curve will move downward as you figure out your strategy and work through purchasing/compliance, and the current tools are good enough to make a difference.\nI\u0026rsquo;d like to highlight a real example from Claire Vo, who is the CPO at LaunchDarkly. A former colleague\u0026rsquo;s share about the concept of \u0026ldquo;Super ICs\u0026rdquo; pulled me down a rabbit hole that led to Vo\u0026rsquo;s approach to integrating AI into her big team at her day job as well as building a product as a solo founder. Lots of good little ideas woven into the stories linked below, which makes me excited about what the next year will look like for developers.\nThe Super IC: Good, short high level overview of the Super IC concept and how this CPO puts AI tools into practice in their personal toolbox and in how they interview product managers. This is a good place to start down the idea of Super ICs. Dan Mason on Raj\u0026rsquo;s post: Dan is the former colleague I mentioned. This LinkedIn post actually put Raj\u0026rsquo;s article on my radar. Dan adds some more ideas to Raj\u0026rsquo;s post, all worthwhile, but the money quote in there was \u0026ldquo;behind every successful person is an anxiety disorder channeled into productivity\u0026rdquo; which is an amazing statement. Config 2024: Hard truths about the future of product management: The Super-IC concept cited in the posts above was introduced by Claire Vo in this talk at Figma Config 2024. Pretty broad discussion, but you can hear how she\u0026rsquo;s weaving these ideas into her day-to-day as the CPO at LaunchDarkly while also experimenting with a side hustle called ChatPRD. She Built an AI Product Manager Bringing in Six Figures\u0026mdash;As A Side Hustle - Ep. 24 with Claire Vo: Speaking of ChatPRD, Claire Vo has talked about this a lot. This episode was a nice overview of the way she approached building it, including the insight that the AI was helping her catch features she missed. Put another way, these models are better at generating than analyzing. Exploring where that generative capability provides the key value will lead to more useful products in today\u0026rsquo;s models. I also appreciated the super-IC concept even more - her hypothesis that these solo creators will be able to maintain clarity of vision by eliminating the committee approach that most product dev turns into. There\u0026rsquo;s a more recent detailed update on Every if you happen to subscribe to it (I don\u0026rsquo;t, so if you have the full article, would love a copy 🙂). I also have linked to some of the tools that Claire Vo used to accelerate the build down below.\nI hope everyone has a great New Years and an amazing 2025! To my friends, if you\u0026rsquo;ve got ideas for a side hustle and want to bounce them off of someone, please reach out!\nReads # Server-Sent Events (SSE) Are Underrated: I need to go back and play with this again. I always found the bidirectional nature of websockets annoying more than anything else for most of my use cases.\nCognitive load is what matters: Really good way to think about software architecture, even in the early days of a product.\nHumanity vs Humans: Good quote about Elon Musk:\nMusk cares about humanity, but not much about his fellow human.\nCould probably change humanity/human to America/American to explain our current political moment, too.\nExploring LoRA \u0026mdash; Part 1: The Idea Behind Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning and LoRA: I\u0026rsquo;ve been going back to basics on some of my ML knowledge, re-reading books and going for articles like this that explain the basics of common techniques. This series has been helpful. Code \u0026amp; Tools # Cursor: I know you know about this tool, and I\u0026rsquo;ve talked about it before, but I\u0026rsquo;m giving the Pro version a go to speed up my side project. Given the topic above, thought it was worth highlighting. Will be comparing this to Github\u0026rsquo;s CoPilot as I go.\nClerks User Management Platform: I\u0026rsquo;ve used Cognito, home grown solutions, and Auth0 and I generally hate all of them. Found Clerk from the Claire Vo interview I posted above, will be trying it on my current side project.\nTiptap: Collaborative editor platform \u0026amp; components (think Notion-style editing) at a reasonable price. Also found via the Claire Vo deep dive earlier - she used this for ChatPRD.\nList of A16Z Apps Unwrapped : Good list of tools in a couple of different domains.\nWatch # Deskpi lite NVMe case for Raspberry Pi 5: Neat little case for the Pi 5. Nice review and assembly video. Listens # ATP Insider: Making the Show: The ATP Podcast team did an insider special (aka a subscriber only episode) on how they make the show. Lots of nice tidbits in here if you\u0026rsquo;ve considered podcasting. ","date":"28 December 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2024-12/30/","section":"Posts","summary":"Sharing this week\u0026rsquo;s list a little early due to travel, which is my end-of-year look at what might be on tap for 2025. Long story short, start budgeting for AI tools for your product development teams, especially your Super ICs.","title":"Getting ready for the new year - Monday Links for December 30, 2024","type":"posts"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m writing this on an airplane on my way to spend time with family, which I\u0026rsquo;ve been looking forward to since I started my break a few months ago. I don\u0026rsquo;t have any retrospectives for 2024\u0026hellip; I\u0026rsquo;m much more consumed by looking ahead to 2025. Development is changing with the introduction of all of these LLM-powered developer productivity tools. Digging into which ones are good and what problems are most important for my engineering teams - that\u0026rsquo;s one of the big puzzles for next year.\nFor now, here\u0026rsquo;s the normal list of interesting links for the last week. It\u0026rsquo;s a quick one. I hope you all have some time off to recharge and connect with family over this end-of-year holiday period. Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to those that celebrate!\nReads # The Developers Who Came in From the Cold: DaringFireball covered this, so I imagine anyone reading this has seen this already, but it was a great read about the challenges Rogue Ameoba had maintaining Audio Hijack, a critical audio app for many professionals, through various MacOS updates. Some nice lessons in there for working with platform owners in there.\nThe Ghosts in the Machine: I\u0026rsquo;ve never been a Spotify user. I prefer Apple Music. A tiny part of that has been the sense that Spotify doesn\u0026rsquo;t really care about music. I don\u0026rsquo;t think that\u0026rsquo;s entirely fair, but it never seemed like they really had solved the business model questions that still loom over the industry. This article reinforces that feeling. Spotify\u0026rsquo;s solution for trying to free music (and thus their profit margins) from the overhead of the labels is to just\u0026hellip; commission music to fill their top ambient playlists. Good report by Harpers.\n‘We Can Bury Anyone\u0026rsquo;: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine: Not really a tech story, but interesting in that it describes some aspects of how crisis PR firms astroturf to shape public opinion. The confidence of the PR firm in this story is telling, and I\u0026rsquo;m curious how much the platforms themselves are aware or care about this sort of behavior.\nScaling Test Time Computer with Open Models: Think we\u0026rsquo;ll see this technique more often:\nRather than relying on ever-larger pretraining budgets, test-time methods use dynamic inference strategies that allow models to \u0026ldquo;think longer\u0026rdquo; on harder problems. A prominent example is OpenAI\u0026rsquo;s o1 model, which shows consistent improvement on difficult math problems as one increases the amount of test-time compute.\nCode \u0026amp; Tools # Meta Video Seal: Meta AI released a new video watermarking model that aims to embed watermarks in video that are imperceptible to humans and can survive many common video modifications/ edits. They posted a nice little intro video to their threads account. Looks very interesting.\nTRMNL: Covered on this week\u0026rsquo;s Accidental Tech Podcast, and thus promptly selling out, TRMNL is an E-Ink dashboard with a plugin ecosystem and SDK. I love gadgets like this and have even built a similar device myself. They do support DIY boards, so I may be able to kill my custom ESPHome + HomeAssistant code and use their framework instead. The plugin ecosystem looks really good at first glance. I\u0026rsquo;ve ordered one and have grabbed the SDK while I wait for my device to come in next month.\nBridgy Fed: I\u0026rsquo;ve been playing with this over the last week. The project aims to connect the various federated social networks to help users take a little more control over the social graph. This spawned a new organization, A New Social. Seems like an interesting project. I\u0026rsquo;ve bridged this site into the fediverse and BlueSky. I\u0026rsquo;m actively setting this up, so we\u0026rsquo;ll see what happens when this post goes live today. Semi-related, I don\u0026rsquo;t want to run my own Mastodon server anymore, and have killed the instance I ran at tranquil.cloud.\n","date":"23 December 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2024-12/23/","section":"Posts","summary":"A short pre-holiday update published from 30,000 feet. Sharing a fun new hardware purchase, a new video watermarking framework from MetaAI, and some big tech-adjacent news from the week.","title":"Happy Holidays - Monday Links for December 23, 2024","type":"posts"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m happy to get this series going again after a couple of years away. Today\u0026rsquo;s list is largely drawn from the projects I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for the last few months. As you can imagine, lots of AI and AI adjacent things. There\u0026rsquo;s also been a lot of boilerplate-y research, because every project needs to start with a day (or more) of yak shaving angst about the \u0026ldquo;best\u0026rdquo; language \u0026amp; framework to use.\nI\u0026rsquo;m very curious what everyone reaches for first when setting up a new backend these days. Over the last three years, I\u0026rsquo;ve used NextJS for frontend and some API backends, NestJS for some pure backends at the startups, and explored Elixir/Phoenix, SvelteKit, and Rust/Rocket. At Disney, we had very smart people devise custom frameworks for our web \u0026amp; API products, which I miss from time-to-time (they were only available internally). Nothing has been as productive to me out of the box as Rails was back in the day, which is sad - I prefer Typescript these days, and am tempted by Elixir and Rust.\n(For what it\u0026rsquo;s worth, I picked Fastify \u0026amp; Apollo for my current project because they looked like they\u0026rsquo;d get out of the way quickly and I know the Apollo framework well enough. Ultimately, my efficiency is paramount as a solo/small team dev).\nReads # Everything my doctor told me was basically right (or lessons from using Stelo for 3 months): I\u0026rsquo;ve been focused on improving my overall fitness for the past few months. I summarized one set of changes I\u0026rsquo;ve put into place along with my use of a continuous glucose monitor to track and measure improvements. These devices are now available over the counter and can be a helpful tool for improving fitness and, for more serious athletes, workout and training efficiency. You can read more about my journey (both into this mess and how I\u0026rsquo;m starting to get out of it) in this post on my personal (non-tech) blog.\nPutting the New M4 Macs to the Test: The new M4 MacBook Pros are wowing a lot of folks and their benchmarks. For AI apps, this blog entry by Roboflow provides benchmarks for a few different models running locally. What did they find? Spoiler alert:\nImpressed by these benchmarks, we\u0026rsquo;ve decided to upgrade our developers still using M1-based laptops to the new M4 Max MacBook Pros.\nFWIW, I made the same decision, too (see the MKBHD entry below).\nWhy Hollywood Executives Are So Giddy About Trump 2.0: I still care deeply about entertainment and sports, perhaps unsurprisingly given how long I\u0026rsquo;ve worked in the industry. The money quote in this reporting comes from Warner Bros. Discovery C.E.O. Zaslav during an earnings call: \u0026ldquo;We have an upcoming new administration. It\u0026rsquo;s too early to tell, but it may offer a pace of change and an opportunity for consolidation that may be quite different, that would provide a real positive and accelerated impact on this industry that\u0026rsquo;s needed.\u0026rdquo; Whether that is better for quality entertainment vs quality earnings\u0026hellip; I\u0026rsquo;ll leave that up to you.\nCode \u0026amp; Tools # First impressions of the new Amazon Nova LLMs: Amazon recently released a whole new set of models at re:Invent a few weeks ago. Simon Willison has a great rundown of the models, pricing and capabilities. He also updated his LLM tool to support the new models. That tool is really nice, btw - simple and has some nice features.\nSkip: Skip allows Swift and SwiftUI developers to deliver apps for iOS and Android from a single codebase. Developers can add custom native Swift \u0026amp; Kotlin code if you need something unsupported by Skip. This will be great for the core UI of many apps, allowing Kotlin developers to focus on differentiated features. I\u0026rsquo;ve been keeping an eye on this since being introduced to the founders a year or so ago. Both founders are experienced devs on high profile apps with great reputations. The approach seems to make technical sense, as well. I just grabbed the latest SDK to start testing it out with an app idea I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on, am hopeful I can get an Android app running at the same time.\nBackblaze Open Sources Boardwalk Workflow Engine for Ansible: I\u0026rsquo;ve started automating the setup of all of my servers in my homelab, learning Ansible along the way. This tool by Backblaze looks really interesting for horizontally scaled environments. The ESPN Fantasy Games services ran in a similar setup once-upon-a-time in small, sharded pods or clusters, which is why this tool jumped out at me. I could relate to the workflow they were trying to automate.\nScour: Neat little news aggregator built on vector search, RSS, and some cleverness. I came across it from the developer\u0026rsquo;s blog about efficient binary quantized vector embeddings, which look very cool indeed:\nVector embeddings by themselves are pretty neat. Binary quantized vector embeddings are extra impressive. In short, they can retain 95+% retrieval accuracy with 32x compression and ~25x retrieval speedup. Let\u0026rsquo;s get into how this works and why it\u0026rsquo;s so crazy.\nMany years ago, a friend and I built a news aggregator that helped connect stories together as they evolved over weeks and months. The biggest side effect of all of this LLM excitement is a huge explosion in NLP tools. It\u0026rsquo;s easier than it ever has been to understand the meaning of text, even without using an LLM per se.\nTool Pre-Selection Using Embeddings: This POC and paper looked really interesting. There are vague similarities to the framework we built at Ohai, so if you\u0026rsquo;re curious how to think about architectures for more complex, sort-of open-ended assistants, this might be a good place to start.\nWatch # M4 Max MacBook Pro: I\u0026rsquo;m Convinced!: MKBHD\u0026rsquo;s review of the new M4 Max MacBooks basically convinced me to upgrade my daily driver laptop from an M1 Max to an M4, especially before any idiotic tariffs may be put in place. I\u0026rsquo;m writing this post on my new laptop with maxed out RAM, which was my only regret with the M1 Max it replaced. It\u0026rsquo;s wonderful.\nCommand: a new tool for building multi-agent architectures in LangGraph: While not exactly a new framework, this video was just released a week ago. It\u0026rsquo;s a good overview of LangChain\u0026rsquo;s take on multi-agent orchestration. There are a few of these multi-agent frameworks, including an exploration from OpenAI called Swarm.\nSecrets of the NBA-TNT Divorce: Bill Simmons and Matthew Belloni talk about the NBA deal. Episode is 3 weeks old, so a bit \u0026ldquo;old news\u0026rdquo; but it\u0026rsquo;s a good episode covering the state of sports rights generally, and an interesting conversation regardless.\n","date":"16 December 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2024-12/16/","section":"Posts","summary":"Getting back to writing every week - today\u0026rsquo;s list is inspired by the projects I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for the last few months.","title":"LLMs rule the world around me - Monday Links - 2024-12-16","type":"posts"},{"content":"My mini-bio is above, so check that out if you\u0026rsquo;re just curious about the high level. If you\u0026rsquo;re interested in the details, keep on reading!\nI\u0026rsquo;m a software engineer and product builder at heart, which has shaped the unusual way my career has progressed. I don\u0026rsquo;t say unusual lightly. I spent almost 15 years at ESPN + Disney, but in 3 different stints. In between, I went to startups (either my own or joining others\u0026rsquo;). Prior to that, I worked in an R\u0026amp;D team at a mid-sized software company, and several other startups. I\u0026rsquo;m not your typical process and spreadsheet executive, though I can do those things, too.\nThe consistent theme throughout my career is a relentless focus on building great products, usually in new technology or emerging paradigms. This isn\u0026rsquo;t just about the startups - each time I joined ESPN/Disney I came on to be part of or lead a new initiative. I helped build the first League Manager platform at ESPN, introduced realtime updates to ESPN.com before websockets were a thing, created ESPN\u0026rsquo;s mobile engineering team, relocated to India for 2 years and globalized the ESPN content platform, and finally helped drive the creation of new personalization systems for live television.\nThroughout those jobs, we dealt with the unique traffic and scaling needs of ESPN\u0026rsquo;s products. A breaking news push notification basically works like a self-triggered DDOS attack, for example. The whole audience comes back to update their fantasy roster between 12:30 and 1PM ET every Sunday during Fantasy Football season. March Madness is truly madness from a traffic standpoint.\nESPN also runs one of the most sophisticated newsrooms in the country, covering live sports around the world in near realtime, for mostly live television. It was exhilarating. Eventually, my remit expanded to all platforms powering the digital products for the media networks at Disney, including ABC, ABC News, National Geographic, the Disney channels, and more.\nThe startups in between helped me get out of the corporate bubble. At Fanzter, we launched Coolspotters, which had millions of monthly active users, along with a few other products. Most recently at Ohai.ai, I led the creation of the market leading AI personal assistant for families, tackling some tricky problems in LLM accuracy and oversight.\nMy LinkedIn has a complete rundown of my career along with highlights, but here are some that aren\u0026rsquo;t there:\nLaunched ESPN\u0026rsquo;s first mobile app, ScoreCenter (now the ESPN app), in 6 months from joining to launch. I was on stage for an Apple event - we were the first demo for push notifications. Having the ESPN tones ring out during that event is still a core memory. We also worked with Apple to build for iPad launch, with early access to the hardware. Drove the POC and internal evangelization of a personalized SportsCenter POC, maintaining high quality personalization while maintaining the production values of SportsCenter. Disney is now productizing this. This work also resulted in 2 patents. You can find more of my writing and my socials by following the links at sujal.com.\n","date":"12 November 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/about/","section":"","summary":"","title":"About","type":"page"},{"content":"Decoder is on my very short list of must-listen podcasts every week. Their episodes are usually interviews with CEOs and leaders about how they structure their teams, how they make decisions, and how they navigate tricky issues facing their business.\nLast week\u0026rsquo;s guest was Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb. In their conversation, Chesky goes deep into what \u0026ldquo;founder mode\u0026rdquo; means to him. If you haven\u0026rsquo;t heard that term before, it was popularized by Paul Graham\u0026rsquo;s essay reflecting on a talk Chesky gave at a YCombinator event:\nThe theme of Brian\u0026rsquo;s talk was that the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could be optimistically summarized as \u0026ldquo;hire good people and give them room to do their jobs.\u0026rdquo; He followed this advice and the results were disastrous. So he had to figure out a better way on his own, which he did partly by studying how Steve Jobs ran Apple. So far it seems to be working. Airbnb\u0026rsquo;s free cash flow margin is now among the best in Silicon Valley.\n\u0026hellip;\nIn effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who\u0026rsquo;ve tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s been a wide range of interpretation of what Founder Mode means - as swagger, as micromanagement/tyrannical bosses or as the veneration of long hours/no delegation. So it was great to hear how he\u0026rsquo;s actually thinking about it at a company the size of Airbnb. So much of what he said resonated with me. His overview begins with this:\nChesky: If I could summarize founder mode in like a couple sentences, it\u0026rsquo;s being in the details. It\u0026rsquo;s that great leadership is presence, not absence. It\u0026rsquo;s about a leader being in the details. And if you as a leader aren\u0026rsquo;t in the details, guess what? Your leaders aren\u0026rsquo;t in the details and their leaders aren\u0026rsquo;t in the details. And one day you\u0026rsquo;re gonna wake up and you have 50 year olds managing 40 year olds, managing 30 year olds, managing people two years out of college doing all the work with no oversight. And you have these four unnecessary layers and you have no experts in the company. So the antidote to this is to try to be as functional as possible. We are a functional organization. Functional just means expertise based, not general management based. And so I\u0026rsquo;m the only non-functional person in the company. All functions roll up to me. I generally think the CEO should be the chief product officer of the company. And here\u0026rsquo;s the heuristic. Like the most important thing a company does is make a product. If the CEO is not the expert in the product, then why are they the CEO? Said differently, I should not be the CEO of SpaceX because I couldn\u0026rsquo;t be the chief product officer because I do not understand rocketry. So maybe I\u0026rsquo;m a good CEO, but I can\u0026rsquo;t be the chief product officer. There may be some exceptions, but I generally think that\u0026rsquo;s the case. And then your leaders shouldn\u0026rsquo;t just be quote managers. And I put managers in quotes. They should be in the details. If we were a military, like a battalion, the cavalry general should know how to ride a horse. Like it\u0026rsquo;s crazy that they don\u0026rsquo;t. And leaders shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be fungible. So it\u0026rsquo;s really about being in the details.\n(transcribed using Whisper)\nIgnoring the ageism, most of this resonates with me. My best experiences have been with leaders who are in the details, who are users and experts on the products we\u0026rsquo;re building, and bring hands on expertise at a detailed level. This includes my time at places like ESPN, not just the startups.\nAt scale, things definitely get tricky. Disney started consolidating all of the media networks and content distribution into one technology organization back around 2017. It was a period of significant, regular restructuring as the company systematically executed this transition. It wasn\u0026rsquo;t fun, honestly. Chesky\u0026rsquo;s overview gave me a new appreciation of why the model can work better and likely does work better now for Disney, after the consolidations are complete.\nThey cover a lot of ground - his inspirations for structuring the company this way, his thoughts on product management vs program management, and a few other tidbits. Really fascinating episode, strongly recommended.\n","date":"31 October 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/updates/2024/10/what-founder-mode-means-to-brian-chesky/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"What 'founder mode' means to Brian Chesky","type":"posts"},{"content":"For almost 20 years, I\u0026rsquo;ve run a site called Fatmixx. It used to be a group blog written by a few of my friends and me. It\u0026rsquo;s been dormant for a few years (and a lot of content intentionally purged a few years back), but a recent conversation on LinkedIn reminded me that I used to write a LOT more often. I want to bring it back to life.\nFatmixx has been hosted at Pair.com, where I had a very traditional shell account with a Wordpress installation I managed manually. They are awesome, and if you need a VPS or shell account or other hosting, they are amazing. I could write code, setup databases, and experiment with new apps without any extra cost. It singlehandedly was responsible for a lot of my early creativity building web apps. After 2 decades, though, it has been superseded by new tools - AWS, Vercel, and my local home lab, in particular.\n​I have been using Hugo for new blog/writing heavy sites for a few years now and really like it. It\u0026rsquo;s simple, can be hosted easily just about anywhere, and is fairly flexible. Since it outputs static pages, moving hosts or solutions is easy. It\u0026rsquo;s also quite cheap.\nThe downside​ is, of course, losing the nice workflow on Wordpress or any other hosted blog. My workflow for UsefulClever, for example, is to write Markdown files directly, push them to Git, then have that deploy to S3 + Cloudfront. Not easy to do away from the laptop, for example. Since I tend to only write long-form posts there, this hasn\u0026rsquo;t been an issue. I\u0026rsquo;d love to get back to the kind of spontaneous writing I did before, and have that synced to the social networks. That way, I have a copy of everything, and can go with richer posts when needed. So, need a simpler workflow.\nEnter micro.blog - a hosted Hugo service. You\u0026rsquo;ll see changes around here after the move - new, simpler appearance, no comments, etc. If it goes well, I will also likely move Shahnicki Palace over here.\nBoth will cross post to socials, so you won\u0026rsquo;t need to directly follow these sites if you don\u0026rsquo;t want to. Fatmixx will be reborn for personal randomness except tech, UsefulClever will be tech and work focused, and ShahnickiPalace will continue to host our old podcast and may get used more for family updates.\nBTW - this had nothing to do with the recent Wordpress controversy, \u0026rsquo;ve wanted to do this just for efficiency \u0026amp; security \u0026amp; cost for months. The controversy did bring it top of mind\u0026hellip; so, maybe it actually had a tiny bit to do with it. 🙂\n","date":"29 October 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/updates/2024/10/moving-fatmixx-to-hugo/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Moving Fatmixx from Wordpress to Hugo","type":"posts"},{"content":"The goal of my sabbatical mini-projects is to stretch my brain into new areas. Practically, for September, this became a newfound obsession with radio projects - an ADS-B receiving station (i.e. aircraft tracking - writeup coming soon), and then learning about Meshtastic and LoRa. I also wanted to mount both outside, which would involve learning how to prepare an antenna AND any hardware safely for the elements. None of this is rocket science, but it was new to me.\nFor my node, I opted for a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W instead of using a microcontroller (e.g. ESP32 or Raspberry Pi Pico), which is the more common choice. This way, it\u0026rsquo;s just another linux box at my house, and it\u0026rsquo;s fits into my third mini-project, which is learning ansible.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a list of the parts I bought just to create the base node indoors:\nRaspberry Pi Zero 2W - (amazon, digikey) SD Card (amazon) - prioritize endurance over speed. I\u0026rsquo;ve been using the Samsung cards. USB Micro B power supply - (amazon) - pick one, I trust the stuff from Canakit on Amazon, but these should be relatively safe - i\u0026rsquo;ve used random ones before. SEE UPDATE BELOW WaveShare LoRa HAT with GPS - (pishop, waveshare) - this is a kit - includes indoor antennas. 915Mhz is the right frequency for the US, and I got the one with GNSS. UPDATE Do not use the HAT above - it has a limitation handling long messages because it lacks a temperature-controlled oscillator (or TCXO). More information in this video on YouTube. I don\u0026rsquo;t have a great recommendation for a replacement yet. I\u0026rsquo;m using the Meshadv v1.1 but it\u0026rsquo;s from a community member who sells via Etsy. There just aren\u0026rsquo;t that many available at any time. To get this contraption outside, I had to solve for a few issues: powering the Pi without an outlet nearby and making the whole thing weatherproof. This had some knock-on changes - e.g. getting different antennas that could handle the elements.\nWeatherproof Outdoor Enclosure (amazon) - there are many options, this is the one I chose and it\u0026rsquo;s held up bone dry through a couple of rainstorms so far. My buddy who got me hooked on this found a different one with a better mounting plate (holes were pre-drilled). Might be worth looking at other options, though I really like this one so far. POE HAT for the Zero (amazon) - I decided POE would be the safest way to run power out to the mounting location. Low voltage keeps a lot of the electrical code considerations simple, and it\u0026rsquo;s easy enough to fix. Outdoor ethernet cables (amazon) - get just the length you need, or make your own. You\u0026rsquo;ll also need short patch cables for inside the enclosure. I recommend these super thin Monoprice cables, as always. Netgear POE Switch (amazon) - You\u0026rsquo;ll need something to power the POE, so a switch or POE injector will be required. I have had good luck so far with Netgear. We\u0026rsquo;ll see how it holds up in the dusty garage. Outdoor rated LoRa antenna (amazon) - I was in a rush, in hindsight I may have gone with something from Rokland to ensure quality. It\u0026rsquo;s been good so far. I will be trying a Rokland-sourced antenna in the second node I\u0026rsquo;m building, will update this once I have some data. Outdoor rated antenna cable (amazon) - the antenna comes with one, but I wanted something closer to the exact length of my run. Adding this to the list here because it\u0026rsquo;s worth considering the length of the wiring - there\u0026rsquo;s some relationship between signal loss and cable length, though I\u0026rsquo;m not an expert. (optional) Antenna Mount (amazon) - the antenna comes with some wall mounting options, but if you have eaves or any roof overhang for your mounting location, they won\u0026rsquo;t work. This little arm was enough. Double check the mounts are square out of the box. I had to return one because it was welded out of square, and one I mounted was also out of square. I didn\u0026rsquo;t notice until it was up\u0026hellip; Waterproof panel mounts/cable connectors (amazon) - need to get the POE into the weatherproof box while keeping out bugs and the elements. This is specifically for the ethernet ingress. Waterproof panel mounts/glands (amazon) - this is to allow the antenna cables into the box. Use the smallest that will seal well against the cable. Breather valves (amazon) - the box will get hot, and air has moisture. I have another Pi in the box running two RTL-SDR radios for ADS-B tracking, and they get quite hot - too-hot-to-touch hot. The bleeder valves allow some way for the warm air to escape while maintaining the weather seal. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure this is enough - I may need to get a weatherproof fan or vent added to the box to cool it in the height of the summer, but I\u0026rsquo;m hoping this is enough. Rokland RokTape (rokland store) - Recommended by the same friend that got me started on the project, I used this to seal the connections to the antenna. Apparently, moisture can seep into the cable, destroying it. As you can see, the outdoor part of this was by far the most expensive aspect of the project. Once you fall down the rabbit hole, though\u0026hellip;\nAnd this doesn\u0026rsquo;t include any other tooling you may need. I needed hole saws to bore holes into the weatherproof enclosure for the glands, for example, caulk, etc to seal any ingress into the shed where all of this is mounted. I already had ladders, etc. to do most of the work.\nIt felt really good getting it all mounted, though. Hardware has been stable for the 2 weeks it\u0026rsquo;s been running. So far, so good!\nSoftware setup: # I started with a base Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit Lite install on the SD card. I then basically followed the instructions here: Install Meshtastic on Linux-Native Devices. I have an ansible role I am happy to share at the end of the post if you want to see exactly what I installed to get it running.\nGotchas: # As always, noting down some things that got me in trouble.\nRP-SMA vs SMA connectors. This is mildly infuriating, because not only is it confusing, the vendors on places like amazon are also confused and will sometimes mislabel their connectors. Which means, sometimes you will have a \u0026ldquo;male\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;female\u0026rdquo; pair of connectors on a wire and a board that look like they should go together, but both have holes for a pin to go into. Here\u0026rsquo;s more detail on the difference. Bottom line, look closely at product photos to double check you\u0026rsquo;re getting what you actually need. GPS - I still don\u0026rsquo;t have the GPS functionality working. For whatever reason, I never get a lock, I\u0026rsquo;ve tried it outside and just gave up. Appreciate any hints on this one. Photos # Some additional photos.\nAnsible role for the Pi # Just included the text here. It\u0026rsquo;s not perfect, which is why I\u0026rsquo;m not sharing the repository directly yet (I\u0026rsquo;m literally brand new to ansible):\nmeshtastic/tasks/main.yml\n- name: run apt-get update become: true ansible.builtin.apt: update_cache: yes - name: install base meshtastic dependencies become: true ansible.builtin.apt: name: \u0026#34;{{ item }}\u0026#34; state: present loop: - libgpiod-dev - libyaml-cpp-dev - libbluetooth-dev register: base_meshtastic_dependencies - name: install meshtasticd web server dependencies become: true ansible.builtin.apt: name: \u0026#34;{{ item }}\u0026#34; state: present loop: - openssl - libssl-dev - libulfius-dev - liborcania-dev register: web_meshtastic_dependencies - name: Enable SPI on Raspberry Pi include_tasks: configtxt.yml vars: raspberry_pi_boot_config_options: - line: \u0026#34;dtoverlay=disable-bt\u0026#34; regexp: \u0026#34;^dtoverlay=disable-bt$\u0026#34; insertafter: \u0026#34;#dtparam=spi=on\u0026#34; - line: \u0026#34;dtparam=spi=on\u0026#34; regexp: \u0026#34;^dtparam=spi=on$\u0026#34; insertafter: \u0026#34;#dtparam=spi=on\u0026#34; - line: \u0026#34;dtoverlay=spi0-0cs\u0026#34; regexp: \u0026#34;^dtoverlay=spi0-0cs$\u0026#34; insertafter: \u0026#34;#dtparam=spi=on\u0026#34; - line: \u0026#34;enable_uart=1\u0026#34; regexp: \u0026#34;^enable_uart=1$\u0026#34; insertafter: \u0026#34;#dtparam=spi=on\u0026#34; - name: Check if reboot required stat: path: /var/run/reboot-required register: reboot_required_file - name: Reboot if required become: true reboot: when: reboot_required_file.stat.exists == true - name: download latest deb file locally become: true ansible.builtin.get_url: url: \u0026#34;\u0026lt;https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware/releases/download/v2.4.2.5b45303/meshtasticd_2.4.2.5b45303_arm64.deb\u0026#34;\u0026gt; dest: \u0026#34;/tmp/meshtasticd_2.4.2.5b45303_arm64.deb\u0026#34; - name: install meshtasticd become: true ansible.builtin.apt: deb: \u0026#34;/tmp/meshtasticd_2.4.2.5b45303_arm64.deb\u0026#34; register: meshtasticd_install - name: backup config file become: true ansible.builtin.file: src: /etc/meshtasticd/config.yaml dest: /etc/meshtasticd/config.yaml.bak.{{ ansible_date_time.date }} when: meshtasticd_install.changed == true - name: Copy config file to /etc/meshtasticd become: true ansible.builtin.copy: src: \u0026#34;meshtasticd_config.yaml\u0026#34; dest: /etc/meshtasticd/config.yaml - name: Reload service meshtasticd, in all cases become: true ansible.builtin.systemd_service: name: meshtasticd state: restarted enabled: true - name: Install python3 become: true ansible.builtin.apt: name: python3 state: present update_cache: true - name: Install python3-pip become: true ansible.builtin.apt: name: python3-pip state: present update_cache: true - name: Install meshtastic python library become: true ansible.builtin.pip: name: meshtastic state: present break_system_packages: true - name: Configure meshtastic ansible.builtin.shell: | meshtastic --host localhost --set-owner \u0026#39;\u0026lt;your host name here\u0026gt;\u0026#39; --set-owner-short \u0026#39;\u0026lt;your host short name here\u0026gt;\u0026#39; --set lora.region US --set position.gps_mode ENABLED meshtastic --host localhost --set mqtt.enabled true --set mqtt.address \u0026#39;mqtt.meshtastic.liamcottle.net\u0026#39; --set mqtt.username \u0026#39;uplink\u0026#39; --set mqtt.password \u0026#39;uplink\u0026#39; --set mqtt.encryption_enabled true meshtastic/tasks/configtxt.yml\n--- # Inspired by Jeff Geerling\u0026#39;s playbook: # \u0026lt;https://github.com/geerlingguy/ansible-role-raspberry-pi/blob/master/tasks/main.yml\u0026gt; - name: Configure options in /boot/firmware/config.txt. become: true lineinfile: dest: /boot/firmware/config.txt regexp: \u0026#34;{{ item.regexp }}\u0026#34; line: \u0026#34;{{ item.line }}\u0026#34; insertafter: \u0026#34;{{ item.insertafter }}\u0026#34; state: present loop: \u0026#34;{{ raspberry_pi_boot_config_options }}\u0026#34; meshtastic/files/meshtasticd_config.yaml\nLora: Module: sx1262 # Waveshare SX126X XXXM DIO2_AS_RF_SWITCH: true CS: 21 IRQ: 16 Busy: 20 Reset: 18 GPIO: # User: 6 ### Define GPS GPS: SerialPath: /dev/ttyAMA0 ### Specify I2C device, or leave blank for none I2C: # I2CDevice: /dev/i2c-1 ### Set up SPI displays here. Note that I2C displays are generally auto-detected. Display: Webserver: Port: 443 # Port for Webserver \u0026amp; Webservices RootPath: /usr/share/doc/meshtasticd/web # Root Dir of WebServer Logging: LogLevel: info # debug, info, warn, error # TraceFile: /var/log/meshtasticd.json General: MaxNodes: 200 MaxMessageQueue: 100 ","date":"4 October 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/projects/meshtastic-node-with-a-pi-zero-2/","section":"Posts","summary":"This is the second project I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on lately, learning how to build and deploy a meshtastic node outdoors.","title":"Running a Meshtastic Node on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W","type":"posts"},{"content":"In case you\u0026rsquo;ve missed my posts on social media (I\u0026rsquo;m on threads/instagram as @sujal, mastodon as @sujal@mastodon.social, @sujal at bluesky), I\u0026rsquo;m in the process of stepping back from Ohai.ai, the startup I\u0026rsquo;ve been with for the last 2 years. My plan is to take as much time off as the universe will allow before starting the next thing.\nThe upside for you, my friendly readers, is that I\u0026rsquo;m turning my attention back to the fun hobbies and updates that I used to write about here back before things got super-intense at Ohai.\nMy first order of business has been to finish the Raspberry Pi cluster I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for the past 6-8 months. The goal is to end up with 2 clusters of 4 Pis, plus some spares. One cluster running microk8s so I can begin to explore the Kubernetes ecosystem, while self-hosting some small projects: the tranquil.cloud mastodon server will move here, as well as a new project that I\u0026rsquo;m using to learn Elixir + Phoenix. The second cluster will have AI co-processors on 3 of the Pis, where I\u0026rsquo;m planning on exploring AI-at-the-edge projects (especially if I can somehow find an M.2 Hailo 10H\u0026hellip; can someone help me with that?). The three boards will be running Hailo 8L coprocessors initially.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m not ready to share any of the applications yet, I do have a Raspberry Pi configuration that I really like, and wanted to share in case you\u0026rsquo;re looking at picking up a Raspberry Pi 5 or two or twelve (yes, I may have a problem). They\u0026rsquo;re low power, they have PCIe support built in, and have all the flexibility that Pis have been known for. They can also easily be powered via Power-over-Ethernet (POE), minimizing the wire clutter. (I mean, look at the bottom case in the photo - it\u0026rsquo;s so clean.)\nMy base setup for each Pi looks like this:\nRaspberry Pi 5 8GB (digikey) - get all the RAM you can afford, it will never hurt. I tend to avoid Amazon when buying Pis - they\u0026rsquo;re usually marked up and some distributors will offer discounts if you\u0026rsquo;re buying more. If you prefer Amazon, here\u0026rsquo;s an affiliate link to a search for 8GB Pi 5\u0026rsquo;s. Pimoroni NVMe Base Duo (amazon, pimoroni) - allows use of 2 NVMe cards with the Pi. Note that this is a base, not a HAT, so may limit your case/mounting options. Samsung 990EVO 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD (amazon) - again, get all the storage you can afford, it (mostly) can\u0026rsquo;t hurt. Waveshare POE HAT (amazon, waveshare) - I\u0026rsquo;m using the F variant, made for the Raspberry Pi 5. It\u0026rsquo;s been rock solid, if a tiny bit tricky to install. (optional) Raspberry Pi AI Kit (pimoroni, waveshare, digikey, amazon) - I did buy these, but it\u0026rsquo;s a PCIe HAT with a single slot and the Hailo 8L. If you can source the Hailo 8L M.2 separately, it\u0026rsquo;s likely cheaper and less wasteful if you also want to use an SSD with the Pi. Again, not something I\u0026rsquo;d buy from Amazon, since there are other US distributors. (optional) Pinboards AI Bundle (pineboards) - An alternative, which I\u0026rsquo;m running on one Pi, is this kit which includes an 8L mounted to the HAT and another PCIe slot for an SSD. Definitely a way to go, if a bit pricey. For each cluster, this is what you see in the picture above (all links to Amazon):\nC4Labs Cloudlet Case - I love this case - it can rack mount up to 8 Pis, comes with (noisy) fans if I need more cooling, and has room for a small POE switch. Netgear POE Switch - I have the 5 and 8 port managed variants of this switch. Both fit nicely in the case, but the 8 port does make it easier to use short, 6\u0026quot; patch cables for boards at the edges of the rack. Monoprice SlimRun Cat6A cables - they\u0026rsquo;re thin, they work well, and they make the case look so neat with the short, 0.5ft cables. Now, you\u0026rsquo;re likely doing the math on all of that and wondering about the costs. This is not the cheapest way to get your home lab setup. Pis are not cheap, and there are knockoffs that would be less expensive. Buying a standard Intel N100 mini-pc might also be competitive when you add up the power components and other items above.\nSo, this is definitely preference and passion on my part, plus wanting to lean on the ecosystem and community around the Pis. It\u0026rsquo;s full of people doing crazy things like mounting 6 AI coprocessors on a single Pi. Practical? Hell no. Fun? Yes! It\u0026rsquo;s also inspiring, because in the process of doing the wacky stuff, folks like Jeff Geerling link to other more complex and realistic examples in their write-ups.\nI did run into some gotchas which I wanted to document, at least for myself for the next build:\nPimoroni uses proprietary FFC cables: the little \u0026ldquo;flat flex cable\u0026rdquo; or FFC that connects the HAT to the PCIe slot on the Pi is finicky and fragile. BUY EXTRAS IF YOU CAN! The biggest drawback of the NVME Base vs the AI Bundle is that the Pimoroni boards use a wider connector on the HAT side. This is simply to prevent users from inserting the cable the wrong way (the FFC is directional). Downside is that, if there\u0026rsquo;s a cable issue, I can\u0026rsquo;t just grab an FFC from another PCIe HAT, I have to grab it from a Pimoroni Duo. (My tale of woe with a failed Duo setup will have to wait for another day).\nKeep spare standoffs and screws around: I have a bunch of kits like this (different ones with different sizes/materials) in my house from other projects, and I ended up using up all of the 15mm standoffs in one kit, had to order another. Also, the POE hat needs 16mm standoffs, of which I had\u0026hellip; zero. So I used 15mm and made sure not to fully tighten or flex the HAT.\n","date":"17 September 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/projects/raspberry-pi-clusters-with-ai/","section":"Posts","summary":"My sabbatical project begins with building out a little cluster for my homelab with AI coprocessors, POE, and SSD boot drives.","title":"Building a cluster of Rasperry Pis with AI coprocessors, POE, and SSDs","type":"posts"},{"content":"I am a sucker for a good Instagram ad, unfortunately, which means I\u0026rsquo;ve tried a lot of random things out. I also don\u0026rsquo;t have any desire to write review posts or build a review blog, but I like being able to point people to something when they ask for recommendations. The list below are things I use and would recommend.\nFor most things, I do actually do research ahead of time, including using sites like Wirecutter, to get started. I know, I know, but I find them a really good way to at least get a chance to understand what\u0026rsquo;s available, the state of the market for a particular category of device, and some initial sense of durability. Then, I adjust to my tastes. I don\u0026rsquo;t always go with their top pick.\nMany of these will be affiliate links, just FYI. I\u0026rsquo;ll update this list as time goes on with new categories and items.\nA quick key: ✅ = I own it now, ❤️ = can\u0026rsquo;t live without, 👀 = keeping an eye on it\nSoftware Tools \u0026amp; Apps # ✅❤️ Newsblur: I still lean on RSS readers to keep up with news, including newsletters, blogs, and major news sites. While we\u0026rsquo;ve moved beyond the heyday of RSS, it\u0026rsquo;s still alive and kicking. A good news aggregator keeps me off the social media hamster wheel. Newsblur is my RSS reader of choice, and worth a premium subscription to support a small, independent software company that continues to innovate. Home Office # ✅❤️ Caframo Chinook Cage Free Desk Fan: I set up a desk in a window-filled room in my house, where it gets SUPER warm in the summer (no AC in this part of the house, too). I needed a small desk fan to stay cool that wouldn\u0026rsquo;t get picked up on video calls. This fan is nearly silent, moves a decent amount of air on the low speed - it was exactly what I needed. Health \u0026amp; Fitness Gear # ✅❤️ Oura Ring: Easily my favorite health sensor device. I love the way it works, the sleep score, and the form factor of the device. If you\u0026rsquo;re like me and struggle with going to bed - I\u0026rsquo;m a night owl, get more coding done in the late evening than any other time - a sleep tracking device gives me the data I need to recognize choices made and their consequences on how I feel the next day. The biggest insight for me? A late dinner (or snack) has a bigger impact on my sleep quality than I would\u0026rsquo;ve imagined. Lots of similar devices - Apple Watch, Fitbits, etc all do similar sleep tracking. I find this the best in terms of size/weight/battery life. Generally looks nice, too. 3D Printing \u0026amp; DIY Electronics # ✅ Creality Ender 3 Pro: This is the printer that got me started with 3D printing. I\u0026rsquo;ve upgraded the absolute crap out of it at this point, and I\u0026rsquo;m starting to outgrow it. It\u0026rsquo;s not that I\u0026rsquo;m printing things it can\u0026rsquo;t print, but I\u0026rsquo;m getting less joy out of tinkering with it and just want to use it. These inexpensive Ender printers are very capable, but they are cheap because they require parts, maintenance, and upgrades. In fact, here\u0026rsquo;s a list of the key upgrades - these are the exact items I used, but they may have newer/better versions, especially the controller boards:\nBIGTREETECH SKR Mini E3 v2.0: more efficient, a touch screen, and silent stepper upgrade all in one. Well supported in Marlin firmware, which is what I\u0026rsquo;m still using. Creality 3D Print Tent: Maintaining a consistent temperature environment while printing is essential for consistent printing. I found this relatively inexpensive enclosure was worth it. Lots of DIY options out there, if you want to go that route, too. Creality MK-8 Metal Extruder: This part takes a lot of stress, so upgrading from the included plastic part to this metal one is worth it. Lots of buying options on Amazon and elsewhere. I did have to buy a second because the collar on my first one failed. Capricorn Bowden Tube: Simple upgrade, worth doing. It\u0026rsquo;s also worth noting that there are Ender 3 kits that include all of those printer upgrades, except maybe the tent/enclosure. Do the math.\n👀 Bambu Lab P2S: This looks like a perfect upgrade at a decent price point. Recommended by Scott Yu-Jan, it looks perfect for my needs.\n👀 Voron 3D Kit: I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about upgrading, once the startup settles a tiny bit more. These kits look tempting. There are several different sites offering kits, so consider this just one mainstream source for it. The other option is getting a Prusa, which have great reputations as no-fuss/light-maintenance machines.\n✅❤️ TRMNL: The best little e-ink display. I\u0026rsquo;ve built my own and I\u0026rsquo;ve bought others. This is the nicest little package I\u0026rsquo;ve used. The screen is clear, the software easy to use. The ethos of this little company seems solid - not a lot of data capture, developer-friendly, and DIY options available. Love it. I have a TRMNL and I\u0026rsquo;ve pre-ordered the TRMNL X. Well designed devices.\nClothing # ✅❤️ Mack Weldon: I live in Mack Weldon. They started with base layers (underwear \u0026amp; undershirts) and then expanded into shirts, pants, hoodies, jackets, and more. All of my base layers are from them along with a big chunk of my remaining casual wardrobe. I find the base layers generous in terms of sizing, but for their other clothing, they tend to run slim. I have had to size up more than I expect as I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten heavier. I love their sweats and Radius pant, especially for travel.\n✅❤️ Collars \u0026amp; Co.: I\u0026rsquo;ve started wearing these shirts and their half-zips in 2024. I love the style, especially their semi-spread and cutaway collars. They layer well with my usual hoodies, as well. I wish I could replace all my other polos with these.\n✅❤️ The Perfect Jean: A relatively new purchase (as of Jan \u0026lsquo;23), I\u0026rsquo;m loving these jeans, especially as I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten overweight. I\u0026rsquo;m a 40/30 right now (ugh), and I find the skinny fit works really well for my body. I have a big midsection, but my legs are pretty fit, still, so I hate the baggy cut of most jeans cut for larger waist sizes. This fit has been great. Super super stretchy. The ads are silly, but the jeans are great so far.\nTravel \u0026amp; Work Gear # ✅❤️ Tom Bihn bags: A small-ish, US-based maker of \u0026ldquo;premium, durable bags \u0026amp; accessories,\u0026rdquo; Tom Bihn has been my goto for bags and travel gear. The bags are made in the USA in Seattle. For short business trips, I use their TriStar bag. My daily use backpack goes between their Smart Alec and the Stubble \u0026amp; Co bag below. Sadly, you can\u0026rsquo;t buy the Smart Alec anymore, but the new designs look great. To give you an idea of how well these bags hold up, I\u0026rsquo;m a chronic, extreme overpacker and I\u0026rsquo;ve had both since at least 2014. You\u0026rsquo;d be hard-pressed to tell.\n✅❤️ Waterfield Designs bags: These guys are well known in the tech community, especially amongst Mac folks. I\u0026rsquo;ve been a customer for multiple decades. I\u0026rsquo;ve had several bags from them, but I still use a Muzetto messenger bag when I just need to carry my laptop, iPad, a notebook, and a few cords. It\u0026rsquo;s the bag I grab when working at a coffee shop or my parents\u0026rsquo; place, or when I want to work while the kids are at practice. I have the waxed canvas version, and I\u0026rsquo;ve owned it since 2017. I\u0026rsquo;ve just recently had to replace the shoulder strap pad\u0026hellip; that\u0026rsquo;s it. They\u0026rsquo;re beautiful bags, and very handy. Also made in the USA, in San Francisco.\n✅ Stubble \u0026amp; Co Roll Top Backpack: A Christmas gift from the family, I absolutely love this backpack. Waterproof, big enough to handle my chronic over-packing (I\u0026rsquo;m slightly embarrassed by how many spare batteries I carry), looks great, and is very comfortable to carry. I asked for something waterproof \u0026amp; nice now that I\u0026rsquo;m taking the train back into the city regularly. Four months in, it\u0026rsquo;s handled the occasional rainstorm well and still looks cool. (Update 11/2024: I did have a zipper fail this summer, they replaced the bag with no questions. I suspect I pushed the bag too far\u0026hellip; it was a YKK nylon zipper that failed, which tends to be a quality part).\n","date":"16 January 2023","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/product-recommendations/","section":"","summary":"","title":"The Things I Like - Product Recommendations","type":"page"},{"content":"Wars, inflation, a tech billionaire deciding to blow his fortune to do\u0026hellip; something? So much has happened this year, and some of it had directly to do with the topics these posts try to cover. I have a catch-up post for this week - a roundup of two of the big themes I noticed from 2022.\nStreaming: is it the future or isn\u0026rsquo;t it? # I left Disney in January after realizing that I wasn\u0026rsquo;t interested in adding a new tile type to a grid of tiles. Through some canonical industry rule, all streaming apps - whether for live sports or for VOD content - needed to look the same.\nThe industry overall has this flocking behavior. Everyone, including Disney, wanted to be more like Netflix. More content, more scale, more \u0026ldquo;personalization.\u0026rdquo; Same interface. Then, suddenly, the shine came off of Netflix, and people started worrying about math again. Ironically, the consummate \u0026ldquo;math\u0026rdquo; CEO at Disney, Bob Chapek, was pushed out because people realized media success is not all just about the math. Turns out the creatives matter.\nIf nothing else, 2022 was the reminder that you can\u0026rsquo;t just turn knobs on a big spreadsheet and win without creating products people truly, truly love. And yet, almost all the features being discussed are about solving initial customer acquisition and retention. In other words, streaming company problems, not user ones. The ideas out in the public conversation are the spreadsheet knobs: new content, personalization (aka better data / \u0026ldquo;one customer\u0026rdquo;), and exclusivity - including a renewed focus on live events.\nFrom a user\u0026rsquo;s perspective, a fundamental question remains: what problems are solved by streaming? Cost is increasingly not the answer. It\u0026rsquo;s an inferior live experience today: Can\u0026rsquo;t flip during sports and the latency means push notifications spoil the stream. Meanwhile cable has service aggregation, an efficient live delivery platform, and VOD catalogs (often including the streaming services bundled in). Something has to give.\nLinks # 5 Unpredictable Predictions for Streaming in \u0026lsquo;23: If you are interested in the business of streaming, you should read Julia Alexander, who has a great grasp on the analytics of all this streaming content. Her companion to this piece, The 4 Streaming Commandments of 2022 is also worth a read. I\u0026rsquo;ve also found my subscription to Puck well worth the investment. Was This $100 Billion Deal the Worst Merger Ever?: What happens to HBO over the next few years? It\u0026rsquo;s something I\u0026rsquo;m watching closely as a fan, but also because HBO grew through it\u0026rsquo;s reputation as a home for creators. Take something like \u0026ldquo;I May Destroy You\u0026rdquo; - brilliant show, if you haven\u0026rsquo;t seen it. The creator and star of that show, Michaela Coel, turned down a $1m offer from Netflix in order to have creative control, which the BBC and HBO both guaranteed. Worth noting - the person who led HBO to powerhouse status, Richard Plepler, is producing shows for Apple TV+. This article covers the history of how HBO got into it\u0026rsquo;s current state. What happens to Twitter? # My last updated covered my thoughts on Twitter, so I won\u0026rsquo;t dive through all of that again. The key thing is to see how social media changes over the coming months. Meta seems to be confused about their business. TikTok could get banned in the US. And the former richest man in the world may just blow up his business empire by running his $44b purchase as he did his bulletproof glass demo.\nAlso, join a Mastodon server. Stop using Twitter. Not sure where to start? Read the third link below.\nLinks # Welcome to Hell, Elon: I linked to this a month ago, and it still holds up. Read it. Internalize it. I wrote the other day that I\u0026rsquo;m coming around to Patel\u0026rsquo;s idea that content moderation is the true product of a social network. It\u0026rsquo;s reductive, but there\u0026rsquo;s a fundamental truth there. Think about how nuanced and central content moderation is to great social experiences. I keep thinking about what a Gmail for ActivityPub (the open protocol powering Mastodon) might look like, which makes me think about why we all ran to Gmail in the first place: storage and impressively good spam filtering. Content moderation doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to be as automatable as spam filtering, yet, so perhaps there\u0026rsquo;s a business there plugging in services and guidelines to a scaled moderation provider. Many companies are doing this already for Meta and others - most of them don\u0026rsquo;t run the moderators in house anyway. How to buy a social network, with Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg: Nilay Patel also interviewed Matt Mullenweg recently, where they covered a lot of these ideas, some of the unique challenges Mullenweg faced after they acquired Tumblr, and how he thinks about moderation and the App Stores. Great interview, well worth the listen. (also, Tumblr is planning to support ActivityPub, so if you hate Mastodon/Tweet style networks, go reactivate your Tumblr. I just did.) A guide to getting started with Twitter alternative Mastodon: The Washington Post published a solid guide to getting started on Mastodon. Go create an account if you haven\u0026rsquo;t already. Stop using Twitter until things settle down over there. What does Web3 really mean? # First, a little work plug: If you\u0026rsquo;re interested in learning Solidity or Solana programming, please checkout Metacrafters to start your learning journey. We\u0026rsquo;re cranking away at helping folks find meaningful employment in Web3, so if you know anyone that\u0026rsquo;s interested, send them my way. Even with the meltdown on the speculative side of crypto, we\u0026rsquo;re still seeing robust hiring in companies truly working on real user-facing problems leveraging these types of technologies.\nFor me, Web3 remains interesting because everything that goes on chain has to be considered in terms of a protocol. By its nature, data on chain is open, readable, and reusable by anyone. Zooming out a bit, then, the idea of decentralization and federation are really what interest me. We\u0026rsquo;ll see whether blockchains are always necessary or not - but as the Mastodon world shows us, there\u0026rsquo;s definitely a growing interest in getting back to protocol driven systems vs the centralized control of the big platforms today.\nPeople don\u0026rsquo;t want to run servers, though, and so it\u0026rsquo;s going to come down to composable layers. ActivityPub + a new gmail-like client that work in a way similar to SMTP and email clients, for example? 2023 will start shaking out these use cases. I\u0026rsquo;m actually pretty excited to see where this all goes.\n","date":"26 December 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-12/26/","section":"Posts","summary":"A little roundup of two big areas of interest.","title":"Adding a new tile type to a grid of tiles - Monday Links - 2022-12-26","type":"posts"},{"content":"This weekend, I joined a number of other folks in saying, \u0026ldquo;ok, it\u0026rsquo;s time to move to Mastodon.\u0026rdquo; I really don\u0026rsquo;t know if Mastodon will be \u0026ldquo;the\u0026rdquo; thing that replaces Twitter, but right now it fits my needs really well.\nTurns out I have a few Mastodon accounts already, from the last, smaller freak out about Twitter back in the 2017/2018 timeframe. I don\u0026rsquo;t honestly remember the trigger - I\u0026rsquo;m sure it was something with Trump and his horrible followers that triggered the deeper exploration. It didn\u0026rsquo;t stick for me, though. I found it easier to just dial back my use of Twitter.\nThis time feels different. Don\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong - the core UX on Mastodon still has some challenges. That said, the implementations are more robust: the core principles are the same, but the software has kept marching forward.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s no better way to see this than by re-reading some articles from 2018 on Mastodon. So we\u0026rsquo;ll start there and then talk about some of the best things in the ecosystem I\u0026rsquo;ve found so far.\nTired of Twitter? Join Me on Mastodon (Aug 2018): An optimistic article from Wired in 2018. The New Social Network Dodging Government Surveillance\u0026mdash;and Nazis (Aug 2018): An interview with the founder of Mastodon talking about some of the challenges around moderation and the advantages and disadvantages of federation. Twitter rival Mastodon isn\u0026rsquo;t safe from online mobs either (Aug 2018): A more pessimistic article from the Verge. I had forgotten about the Wil Wheaton drama. My current plans # I\u0026rsquo;ve joined Mastodon.social as my primary. I\u0026rsquo;m @Sujal on there, too. I also have a few other accounts as backups/placeholders as I better understand moderation policies. I\u0026rsquo;ll be dialing my Twitter usage down a lot, though not quite zero. I didn\u0026rsquo;t have time to undo the various bots and automation I have integrated into Twitter, including posts from this site, for example.\nI\u0026rsquo;m leaving because I\u0026rsquo;m just tried of the Elon show. He likes stirring up controversy, and I just don\u0026rsquo;t care. My timeline on Twitter is half about him all the time, and it\u0026rsquo;s tiring. He\u0026rsquo;s making bad decisions about Twitter - the issues he\u0026rsquo;s acting surprised about have been there at least since 2018, as you can read above. I don\u0026rsquo;t want Twitter to die\u0026hellip; but I just don\u0026rsquo;t want to be part of it anymore. It kinda sucks as an experience. His antics have also turned me off to Starlink and Tesla (hope his shareholders are good with that - again, I\u0026rsquo;m sure I\u0026rsquo;m not alone).\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also setup a test Mastodon instance at tranquil.cloud so I can play with the software and get a feel for the software. If you\u0026rsquo;re looking for a server to play with, let me know what you\u0026rsquo;ve got in mind and let\u0026rsquo;s work together.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s better today? # The apps, for one thing. Looks like Tapbots is working on a Mastodon client. They make the best iOS client, Tweetbot, and everything I\u0026rsquo;ve heard is really good.\nThat said, I\u0026rsquo;m using Toot! on iOS. It\u0026rsquo;s really solid, and has some very fun UI flourishes that actually make the experience a little more fun without being too annoying.\nI really would prefer a great Mac desktop app, but haven\u0026rsquo;t found one yet. Browser it is!\nActivityPub # I\u0026rsquo;ve also started digging back into the underlying protocol behind the fediverse, ActivityPub. Ratified by the W3C in 2018, it\u0026rsquo;s what makes Mastodon federation work. Time to brush up. Some really interesting possibilities here if we could make it easier to run nodes. Could this be a backbone protocol for the little-m metaverse?\nActivityPub on Mastodon: Mastodon\u0026rsquo;s docs on their ActivityPub implementation. ActivityPub at W3C: The W3C published spec. Tumblr adding support for ActivityPub: There\u0026rsquo;s an ActivityPub plugin for Wordpress, which is also owned by the company that owns Tumblr, Automattic. Flickr considering adding support for ActivityPub: Another fun platform from the heydey of Web2 considering the protocol. Listens # ‘Grand Scale Foot-Shooting\u0026rsquo;, With Anil Dash: Anil Dash has been one of the most consistent voices on this whole Elon/Twitter thing. Worth listening to. Code \u0026amp; Tools # DigitalOcean Mastodon Droplet: This is the foundation of my little standalone instance. ","date":"5 December 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-12/05/","section":"Posts","summary":"A Mastodon roundup - a lot has changed since the last time I looked into it.","title":"It's time to check out Mastodon (and ActivityPub) - Monday Links - 2022-12-05","type":"posts"},{"content":"Apologies for the lack of updates the last month. As some of you know, I took some time off in Jan/Feb to help my parents settle in here in CT. We moved them up because my father has some health things that would require more support over the long term, so having them close would make that easier. Fate had different ideas, though, and he had something more acute come up 2 months ago. So, between startup life and that, I\u0026rsquo;ve had very little free time to write. Things are settling down, so hopefully that gets back to normal. Appreciate all the kind words and support from the folks that have known what\u0026rsquo;s going on. I hope to get this new routine established over the holiday.\nMy update this week will be brief - the startup I\u0026rsquo;m at, Proof of Learn, officially launched our first product at the beginning of the month at Solana Breakpoint. If you\u0026rsquo;re a developer, and you\u0026rsquo;ve been curious about what you can do with blockchain technology, we\u0026rsquo;ve built a learning platform that can help you learn the underlying tech and on chain development, including Rust. Our business model is to help folks land work through an open credentialing process that itself leverages on-chain capabilities. Our courses will get you the skills in a way that employers can ultimately verify. We have users from all over the world at this point learning about Solana. Oh, and you can earn $100 for completing each Intermediate or Advanced course.\nI\u0026rsquo;d appreciate it if you could check it out and send any feedback my way. The Advanced course projects are fun, and I\u0026rsquo;m working my way through those myself. Links below.\nMetacrafters: The app where you can learn, earn, and land a job. Whitepaper: Our whitepaper - if you\u0026rsquo;re wondering about the economics behind our earn model and how we can pay folks for completing the courses, look no further. Metacrafters SOL Proof Launch Video: We showed this on stage at Solana Breakpoint. If you want a quick summary of the whole platform, including new capabilities coming next quarter and beyond, this is a good option. ","date":"21 November 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-11/21/","section":"Posts","summary":"A little plug for the startup I\u0026rsquo;m working at, and a personal update.","title":"Come learn Solana with us! - Monday Links - 2022-11-21","type":"posts"},{"content":"Lots of pixels spent this week on Musk closing on his acquisition of Twitter, and I have nothing interesting to offer on what happens next that isn\u0026rsquo;t already pretty obvious. I\u0026rsquo;ll just add - I do want the service to survive, so I\u0026rsquo;m hoping for the best but getting ready to drop off yet another platform if it seems like time.\nHere are some aspects of the whole deal that I\u0026rsquo;m most curious about:\nWelcome to Hell, Elon: I imagine most of you have seen this brilliant column from Nilay Patel - full of lots of supporting links and data. Kakao is Korea\u0026rsquo;s app for almost everything. Its outage forced a reckoning.: Thinking about Musk\u0026rsquo;s, \u0026ldquo;X the everything app\u0026rdquo; tweet, I really wonder if the US audience wants this app. Super-apps tend to work well in countries with tightly centralized services, often because of government forces encouraging monopolies/duopolies in key services, e.g. payment. We\u0026rsquo;re kind of the opposite of that as a market. On top of that, Kakao\u0026rsquo;s outage shows some of the risks of having a single app be so critical to everyday life. Reads # The Fantasy Football Kingpin: There was this debate inside Disney/ESPN about how to approach gambling. As this article shows, they/we were already in the business, just not dealing with the money. (these leagues sound intense\u0026hellip;) Same Type Of Rotax Engines Used In Iranian Drones Targeted In Bizarre Theft Wave (Updated): A fascinating look at how Iran might be getting engines for their drones. I can\u0026rsquo;t imagine this scales to the demands of an active shooting war, but the fact that this is even plausible is amazing. How I decided that swiping right would be Tinder\u0026rsquo;s signature move: A simple explanation for a UX that transcended Tinder to become part of our vocabulary. ‘I Don\u0026rsquo;t Think Anyone Should Buy Land in Any Metaverse Right Now\u0026rsquo;: The headline is a little dramatic, but I loved the answer about what the metaverse land grab was about - advertising. Without additional utility for users, though, what normal user wants to hang out there? The projects focused on that are the ones that will win on the other side of this \u0026ldquo;winter.\u0026rdquo; A Data \u0026amp; Society report interviewed doorbell camera users and delivery drivers to understand how surveillance is affecting both, for the worse.: I have cameras on my door. Not Rings, but one that stores to a local server (so I can play with AI detection, etc.) and a Nest cam that\u0026rsquo;s using their cloud services. This creepy use case has crossed my mind a few times, pushing me toward local-only cameras\u0026hellip; https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2022/tiktok-popularity/: Speaking of weird algorithmic surveillance, this is a really good overview of TikTok\u0026rsquo;s product, including interviews with creators. @sequoia Gen AI Market Map: Good overview of the notable players in the Generative AI space. Code \u0026amp; Tools # bleeding edge ai: A single list, time sorted, of the latest news in AI. A great one-stop site if you want to keep up with the pace of AI development. Playing with Minecraft and command-line SD (running live, using img2img): Fun little experiment turning Minecraft drawings into more realistic drawings. tRPC: A Typescript-based typesafe API framework. Looks interesting. Haven\u0026rsquo;t used it yet. Next.js 13: Some fun things on the new feature list, including layouts. Highlighting this release, though, because of Turbopack. One more major step in the dev/build pipeline now written in Rust and much faster for it. Rust is the language I\u0026rsquo;d pick to learn if you\u0026rsquo;re looking for something different. It just feels good. Tailscale in the browser: Love Tailscale, and love WebAssembly. WebAssembly is underrated. Adobe pulling Pantone Colors from Creative Cloud tools: Crappy situation for designers who need Pantone to align colors in physical production (e.g. print, signage, etc). This feels like something that ought to be standardized at this point with the core open sourced. No idea how hard that is, but the Pantone has been around long enough that the core patents have to be expired by now. excalidraw-animate: Animate your Excalidraw drawings. Pretty sweet. Got me to try Excalidraw, which I haven\u0026rsquo;t used before. ","date":"31 October 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-10/31/","section":"Posts","summary":"A lot happened in two weeks - some interesting angles on the Twitter deal, some tools to keep up with the happenings in AI and Generative AI specifically, and a correction in metaverse marketplaces.","title":"Do you want an \"everything app\"? - Monday Links - 2022-10-31","type":"posts"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve enjoyed Chris Arnade\u0026rsquo;s photography and his writing from his various travels around the world. He takes a somewhat unique approach of just walking - a lot - in whatever town or city he\u0026rsquo;s visiting. I\u0026rsquo;m always struck by the seeming serendipty of the encounters - chance meetings with locals with interesting stories he would definitely not have met traveling a more touristy way.\nHe recently wrote a piece about how he travels. Some good tips there, and an important reminder that even serendipity (or luck, if you will) requires right conditions to happen. He encourages those conditions with good planning - a lesson for all of us trying to create serendipity in other ways - innovation, invention, discovery. You can \u0026ldquo;plan\u0026rdquo; the conditions, even if you can\u0026rsquo;t plan the discovery itself.\nHow to Travel: The piece I mentioned above. Chris Arnade: In case you want to know more about Mr. Arnade, whose backstory is also interesting. Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America: His book featuring his photography and the stories he\u0026rsquo;s collected along the way as he walked across various parts of the US. (affiliate link) Reads # Warren Craddock on Twitter - a thread: A Twitter thread on how culture can doom a startup from someone who worked on Lytro, Google Glass, and more. Meta\u0026rsquo;s flagship metaverse app is too buggy and employees are barely using it, says exec in charge: Speaking of organizations where culture may be getting in the way of some hard conversations\u0026hellip; Code \u0026amp; Tools # Amazon EC2 Trn1 Instances for High-Performance Model Training are Now Available: Amazon rolling out a new instance type focused on ML training. I just like the name - Trainium. :) 800Gbps networking is a mind blowing number\u0026hellip; Prefixed API Keys: A neat idea on structuring API keys. Lots of feedback in the linked Hacker News Thread. Interior.ai: Take a photo of your current room, and get interior decorating ideas rendered into the photograph by a generative model. Phenaki: Generative AI for creating videos from text. Imagen from Google Research: Same thing, different team and implementation. Generative models are the new research hotness. ","date":"17 October 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-10/17/","section":"Posts","summary":"Even serendipity requires a little planning.","title":"Getting to know the world - Monday Links - 2022-10-17","type":"posts"},{"content":"When I started my first stint at Disney, I worked for the Walt Disney Internet Group. As the name implied, most everything digital and Internet were centralized in one organization at Disney. That sort of arrangement seems archaic today, of course. Software is in everything, every system supporting every line of business. Nearly all of it is web-based. Using web technologies doesn\u0026rsquo;t distinguish a team, rather it\u0026rsquo;s the problem they know how to solve. Web development is table stakes. Obviously.\nWith each new wave, the same pattern plays out. We saw it with machine learning and AI over the last decade - data \u0026amp; personalization features typically leading the charge on machine learning for consumer products. This always felt off to me. Big swings never come from product generalists who are technical specialists - it\u0026rsquo;s very rare.\nSo, it\u0026rsquo;s through that lens that I look at Stable Diffusion/Midjourney/etc and the hard work going on across the machine learning/AI ecosystems. Yes, there\u0026rsquo;s impressive output - generative images, text, and more - everyone sees that. A little more subtle is the genius work going on with the input side. These things are accessible to non-specialist developers, the product specialist types who know the use cases that might move the needle in a huge way.\nAutotrain: This was a dream for years - we had a platform that could\u0026rsquo;ve been the foundation for this sort of system and workflow, but other priorities always came first. This looks good - not quite as fancy graphically as Lobe.ai - but a nice web wizard with all the cool bits that could lead to more powerful, domain-specific models. Shared by a former Disney colleague who knows his stuff when it comes to this tech. Stable Diffusion for M1 Macs: Do Apple\u0026rsquo;s benchmarks hold up against NVidia in a real-world stress test? You can try it yourself and find out. (yes, things are still optimized heavily for NVidia\u0026rsquo;s architecture, but I\u0026rsquo;m still trying this out locally as I have time) Stable Diffusion Live: A really clever idea, using RSS feeds from major news sources as generative prompts. This is by another brilliant former colleague, by the way. Watch # ESPN Streak For The Cash Is Gone And It Will Be Missed: I always joke around that my career is kinda like the MCU - you can basically divide it into phases. This app is a core memory from Phase 4, which was the ESPN Mobile Engineering phase. I worked on the first mobile app for Streak back in the day. Two weeks ago, ESPN announced they were shutting it down after 14 years. I was never an avid player, but it was such a fun concept. As I wrote on Twitter, this game epitomized a scrappier time for the best team in sports - an end of an era, for sure. I found this small group of hardcore fans talking about it. Thought this was a nice summary of the core fan of this game. Reads # Google is shutting down Stadia: No traction, but this idea that perhaps GPU at the cloud\u0026rsquo;s edge could power deep experiences even on clients that could only play video (e.g. Fire Sticks or whatever)\u0026hellip; it\u0026rsquo;s pretty amazing. I hope that they don\u0026rsquo;t give up on this. The economics never made sense with the high end GPUs required to play AAA titles, but I wonder if there are lighter use cases that could work - personalizing video streams, as one example. Google itself is looking at AR and YouTube, so I\u0026rsquo;m guessing they\u0026rsquo;re thinking about the same things. NASA May Let Billionaire Astronaut and SpaceX Lift Hubble Telescope: I find the idea of a billionaire (not Elon, btw) and SpaceX leading the charge on this a bit odd. Code \u0026amp; Tools # Migrating Cognito User Pools: I spent a big chunk of my week making this all work for some specific migrations. It is both simpler and more complex than it seems. I appreciated this overview as a complement to the official docs. I also have learned to love and hate Cognito. Hobbies # Teenage Engineering PO-80: Record Factory: \u0026ldquo;make your own vinyl records!\u0026rdquo; is the headline. What a wonderfully cool, retro thing to release in 2022. It\u0026rsquo;s Teenage Engineering, so you know the build quality will be out of this world. I\u0026rsquo;m still itching for a TX-6 or OP-1, just to look at them. Using Healthchecks.io with Home Assistant: Monitoring Home Assistant is tricky - it\u0026rsquo;s in your home, behind your firewall, and your home likely has consumer-grade internet and power . Really liked this solution. The Healthchecks service looks interesting - simple, decent free tier. ","date":"10 October 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-10/10/","section":"Posts","summary":"A catch up list after 2 weeks of craziness.","title":"Close to Table Stakes - Monday Links - 2022-10-10","type":"posts"},{"content":"Getting back on track, just a few days late this week. I hope you\u0026rsquo;ve all had a great couple of weeks. Mine has turned out ok, after a rough weekend fighting an illness and a family emergency (all is good now!).\nReads # The future of the office is the clubhouse: Thought this was a nice view of what offices can be in a world with more remote work. Uber apparently hacked by teen, employees thought it was a joke: This is scary and funny at the same time. Solana Security Workshop: An overview of security for Solana smart contracts. Haven\u0026rsquo;t run through this myself, yet, but this looks good. Nielsen, Amazon Strike Three-Year Pact to Measure ‘Thursday Night Football\u0026rsquo;: This is a few weeks old, but has come up a few times in my reading when looking at how well Amazon is doing with Thursday Night Football. Ben Evans likes to say that \u0026ldquo;all of the questions in \\[streaming\\] are TV industry questions, not tech industry questions.\u0026rdquo; Every passing week seems to reinforce this idea. I wonder how this measurement is done - how much relies on surveys/sampling vs direct measurement. Likely doing what they did for TV Everywhere, but I admit I\u0026rsquo;m curious. The Follower: An engineer built a tool that uses open surveillance cameras to determine where an Instagram photo was taken. Very creepy, and a reminder of how good today\u0026rsquo;s computer vision and photo analysis systems are. Code \u0026amp; Tools # Dream Textures: A Blender plugin that lets you tap into Stable Diffusion to generate textures right from the shader editor. Maker \u0026amp; Home Automation # Adafruit\u0026rsquo;s 3D Parts Repo: A very cool resource from Adafruit with a library of 3D parts that are printable, customizable, and remixable for a huge variety of common electronic parts. Includes Fusion 360, STLs, and other formats. ","date":"28 September 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-09/26/","section":"Posts","summary":"A catch up list after 2 weeks of craziness.","title":"Better late than never edition - Monday Links - 2022-09-26","type":"posts"},{"content":" Reads # Stable Diffusion is amazing:\nStable Diffusion is a really big deal: From the article: \u0026ldquo;Stable Diffusion is a new \u0026ldquo;text-to-image diffusion model\u0026rdquo; that was released to the public by Stability.ai six days ago, on August 22nd. It\u0026rsquo;s similar to models like Open AI\u0026rsquo;s DALL-E, but with one crucial difference: they released the whole thing.\u0026rdquo; There is an amazing flood of tooling coming out around this family of models. Show r/StableDiffusion: Integrating SD in Photoshop for human/AI collaboration: For example, take a look at this plugin that\u0026rsquo;s integrates Stable Diffusion right into Photoshop. 4.2 Gigabytes, or: How to Draw Anything: You probably saw this article making the rounds this week. I know it hit daring fireball, for example. Think about what he\u0026rsquo;s doing - he\u0026rsquo;s painting. With words. And a 4.2GB stable diffusion model. Is it a tool like Photoshop or a projector for a mural? Is it cheating? An A.I.-Generated Picture Won an Art Prize. Artists Aren\u0026rsquo;t Happy.: Does your opinion change about the 4.2GB if the artist wins an art award? Should it? This one created using midjourney. Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake finally:\nEthereum\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;merge\u0026rdquo; rally explained: Having been heads down inside the Solana ecosystem for the past few months, I take for granted the low transaction fees and relative efficiency of the chain. Ethereum is on the cusp of achieving at least the efficiency part of this as it switches from a proof-of-work model to a proof-of-stake one. The key number is a 99.95% more energy efficient network. Transaction speeds and costs should also be more reasonable. How The Merge will slash Ethereum\u0026rsquo;s climate pollution: A nice summary of the energy usage of Ethereum. The Merge: If you haven\u0026rsquo;t been following along with what this \u0026ldquo;merge\u0026rdquo; consists of, and how they\u0026rsquo;re handling it, Ethereum\u0026rsquo;s own page on the transition is a good read. Heisenberg Hydrogen - clean \u0026amp; messy:\nI\u0026rsquo;m always fascinated when the physical scale of invisible things have visible engineering side-effects (e.g. microwaves being too big to fit through the mesh on the microwave door - how nuts is that?!). Turns out hydrogen being element #1 makes it tiny - so tiny that keeping it from escaping a pipeline or a fueling port is\u0026hellip; tricky:\nYears after shuttle, NASA rediscovers the perils of liquid hydrogen: One reason SpaceX and the other private space companies may move faster than NASA - they don\u0026rsquo;t need to worry about direct interference from politicians. That seems to be the lesson here of why NASA chose hydrogen as the fuel for the Artemis launch system. Clean hydrogen has a leak problem\u0026mdash;and the tech to monitor it is nascent: Leaking hydrogen could undo it\u0026rsquo;s otherwise clean uses. Good overview on the state of the industry. Everything else:\nCyber Guidance for Small Businesses: Very good set of recommendations here. FIDO MFA, people. It\u0026rsquo;s the way to go. Adam Grant on Brainstorming: I really like this approach. I need to remember this for the next brainstorming session. Optimize for ideas, not for the strongest personalities. Game Things # Skeleton Retargeting in Unreal Engine 5: Fascinating demo that shows them retargeting a lion onto the skeleton used in their multiplayer demo shooter called Lyra. It covers skeleton retargeting overall in Unreal 5, but the demo with the lion is both impressive and leaves the host nearly in tears from laughter. Skip through to about 30 minutes if you just want to see the lion portion. Code \u0026amp; Tools # Nix: Ran across this checking out an open source project by a former colleague. It\u0026rsquo;s a toolchain that attempts to provide reproducible build environments and deployments. Anyone play around with this? Reach out - would love to hear why you tried it and how it went. Eraser: I\u0026rsquo;m a sucker for good documentation/diagramming tools. This one looks interesting. Some of the simplicity of the text-based tools I listed a few weeks ago. In practice, I found editing older diagrams more confusing in the text-based tools, this looks promising as it\u0026rsquo;s WYSIWYG like most diagramming tools. Use the Keyboard: I\u0026rsquo;m a keyboard shortcut fan. This feels like it was made for me. It\u0026rsquo;s a reference of popular apps, including webapps, and their keyboard shortcuts. Cool Projects # Raspberry Pi Pico Solar System Project: Neat little project. Love how sharp these little screens are. ","date":"12 September 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-09/12/","section":"Posts","summary":"I used a discord bot to make this image about this week\u0026rsquo;s links. It\u0026rsquo;s too easy.","title":"99.95% Energy Reduction - Monday Links - 2022-09-12","type":"posts"},{"content":"This is a very real holiday weekend list for me, as I used the extra free time on this Labor Day weekend to dig back into some of them. You get some music making, some electronics making, and some a taste of my love of film. Hope my American and Canadian friends are having a great Labor Day weekend.\nReads # Tongariro Crossing: Travel is one hobby I never have enough time for. I did this hike in 2004 with my sister. It was AMAZING. I want to do it again once my kids are a little older. The taller volcano was used as Mount Doom in the Lord of the Rings movies (thus connecting this entry to the theme of these posts. 😉 Honestly, NZ just came up in convo yesterday, and I love this hike too much not to share it) MPE: MIDI Polyphonic Expression Explained: The MIDI protocol most music equipment uses hasn\u0026rsquo;t changed much in practical terms for decades. MPE is a pretty signfiicant change for the protocol, enabling more ways of controlling the sound of your instruments. If you\u0026rsquo;ve seen something like a ROLI Lightpad Block at, say, an Apple Store, MPE is one reason it can allow so many different gestures to affect the sound. The rise and rise of A24, a champion of storytelling on screen: Whether it\u0026rsquo;s unusual movies like Everything Everywhere All At Once or quirky films like Spring Breakers, or more serious fare like Room or Euphoria, I\u0026rsquo;m finding A24 in the opening credits of more and more film and tv I love. Twitter Whistleblowing Report Actually Seems To Confirm Twitter\u0026rsquo;s Legal Argument, While Pretending To Support Musk\u0026rsquo;s: I just really feel bad for all the folks I know at Twitter who have to deal with man-child temper tantrums and then this, on top of everything else. Game Things # Google for Games Reports 2022: Really interesting survey-based analysis of game trends. Contrasting the mobile and pc/console reports is worthwhile. Google\u0026rsquo;s 2022 PC \u0026amp; Console Insights Report: Diversity and inclusion are key for global success: People want games that speak to them, that allow them to form bonds, and are in their language. 25 years ago, Catan became an American hit by beating Monopoly at its own cruel game: Any discussion of in-game resource modeling probably includes a reference to this board game, which millions of people have enjoyed over the years. 32 million copies so far - have you played it? Code \u0026amp; Tools # What is Hydra?: Interesting idea to create a wallet-of-wallets for Solana. The common thread in the use cases seem to be around allowing communities to share in the royalties for various transactions. Status Hero: I actually helped build a product similar to this at a prior startup. I haven\u0026rsquo;t found a perfect tool for async team updates. Slack is too noisy, and encourages it. Something like this seems useful, though this one also feels a little pricey. Cool Projects # Pi Powered Musical Robot (with cowbell): Cool little project. Admire the love that went into getting this working. iPod-style ESPHome Remote: Apparently, click-dial controllers similar to the iPod wheels are easily available now\u0026hellip; Very cool little build. Might be a good Christmas-time project. Black Widow Batons + Backpack: I\u0026rsquo;m not a cosplayer at all, but this build looks really well done, and all printable on the relative simple and small bed of an Ender 3. ","date":"5 September 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-09/05/","section":"Posts","summary":"Today, you get to learn about all my hobbies that I don\u0026rsquo;t have time for.","title":"My hobby is collecting hobbies - Monday Links - 2022-09-05","type":"posts"},{"content":"The fun part of building a game is the walk down memory lane as we talk about the games that inspired us. This week\u0026rsquo;s bit of nostalgia is one you may not have played - it\u0026rsquo;s a classic, but perhaps not quite super popular.\nReads # Are you an Accidental Diminisher?: Loved this post by a former colleague. I\u0026rsquo;ve definitely been guilty of a few of these early in my career. What happened when we disabled Google AMP at Tribune Publishing? Shockingly little. So you should try it, too: AMP was a bad idea from the beginning. I hated it, hated having to implement it for my day job, and always disable it. I even have an app installed whose sole purpose is to rewrite AMP links so I never visit them on my phone. Unimaginable heat in China (twitter thread): Shanghai skyscrapers dimmed their lights overnight this past week to help conserve power. I fear that stories like this will become more common. Watches \u0026amp; Listens # The Rise \u0026amp; Fall of Syndicate (The Bullfrog Game, Not That YouTuber Guy): This game came up during a game design session this week. I LOVED this game so much. I remember vividly playing this for hours, not sure if it was on my Apple //c or on my first x86 box (can\u0026rsquo;t remember). This is a really great overview of the game. It was on sale on GOG for $1.75, so of course I downloaded it. If you just want to see the gameplay, that\u0026rsquo;s on YouTube as well. Code \u0026amp; Tools # BOBBY.app: A neat little backup tool. Starting with the Google suite is an interesting choice\u0026hellip; since I think Google Drive might have that covered (maybe?). Notion support, though, would be a godsend right now. Cool Projects # Viral Post Generator: Funny little app that MadLibs a perfect LinkedIn post. I LOL\u0026rsquo;ed. Face Tracking Terminator Skull: Loved the comment thread on this one - lots of Skynet jokes mixed with a few really good suggestions for improvements. ","date":"29 August 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-08/29/","section":"Posts","summary":"A look back at a favorite old game, and a way to win at LinkedIn. 😉","title":"\"Persuadertron Selected\" - Monday Links - 2022-08-29","type":"posts"},{"content":"The title of this week\u0026rsquo;s edition is from the first Read in the list today. Good reminder of what really matters, though I\u0026rsquo;d argue it matters in any era. Also a few maker links this week - guess what I\u0026rsquo;ve been planning for my ever-fleeting downtime?\nReads # De-Bossification: Something about this piece resonated with me. I\u0026rsquo;ve never been super-focused on title or intimidation as a way to lead. Mostly just my personality, but I also believe it\u0026rsquo;s helped that I\u0026rsquo;ve had so much time at startups in between big-corp stints. Startups are centering because you have to build, you have to push yourself and everyone around you to keep learning, keep incorporating external feedback (customers, advisors, investors), and dive into hard problems. A Tale of Two Sports: A question all Web3-based startups need to deal with: what\u0026rsquo;s on chain, what\u0026rsquo;s not, and how to make that make sense to users and the business model. Sorare is growing, doing really well, and has a very active marketplace. The metrics that seem to matter are traditional product \u0026amp; business metrics, not floor price or whatever. Imagine that. 🙃 Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation: I used to orienteer as a high school student. It was amazing to just get off trail and race with just a map and a compass (and a buddy, usually). I was also the navigator for my family\u0026rsquo;s road trips growing up. Yet, I traveled to LA for several years regularly, and I still don\u0026rsquo;t actually know the name of any major non-highway roads. It took doing an old school \u0026ldquo;explore the map\u0026rdquo; session or two (using Apple Maps, though, not paper), to mentally model it out. I tried to get my son to buy a paper map when we were up in Lake Placid, for the same reason. (he wasn\u0026rsquo;t interested) Comment thread on HN full of interesting little tidbits and stories. AWS DeepRacer: This is old, but came up as we were talking about coding-based team games. If you haven\u0026rsquo;t looked at this before, worth trying. Can simulate things without needing to buy a car. I never did get around to building the full size track, so the car just sits on a shelf as a cool knicknack in my house. 😬 New Jailbreak Code for John Deere Is Here to \u0026ldquo;Liberate the Tractors\u0026rdquo;: Software is everywhere, DRM is following it, and the right-to-repair feels different when it\u0026rsquo;s a piece of equipment your entire business relies on. A Dad Took Photos of His Naked Toddler for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal.: I\u0026rsquo;m generally not super-opposed to this sort of scanning, but this article changed my mind. I realized this scenario was a possibility, of course - my wife and I actually faced a similar scenario with my daughter during the pandemic and chose to avoid taking photos. The fact that Google isn\u0026rsquo;t reinstating these accounts, and seemingly has concluded they\u0026rsquo;re in the right on that is really disturbing. Good read. Watches \u0026amp; Listens # How Video Game Economies are Designed: We\u0026rsquo;re building a video game at work, if you didn\u0026rsquo;t know, and recently we were reviewing the plan for the game economy and the Game Maker\u0026rsquo;s Toolkit channel came up. This episode is great, covers the basics really well. My son got sucked in as I watched at my desk, both to see the game play footage they used, but also because the problems (Bovine Defense Force Initiative!) were super interesting. Code \u0026amp; Tools # Linear\u0026rsquo;s UI implementation choices: Saw this in Assaf\u0026rsquo;s newsletter last week. We use Linear at work, as well, and it really is snappy. Good thread from one of their founders. Maker \u0026amp; Home Automation # 1U server rack mount \u0026hellip; for Raspberry Pis: Really simple build, love it. I\u0026rsquo;ve been debating getting a small rack for my basement to house a few things. I have a lot of Raspberry Pis in my house now doing various chores, and this might tip me over the edge to buying one. Bottle cap for watering plants: A simple idea with a really clever printable solution. Thoughtful about supports, etc. A neat home automation closet setup: If i don\u0026rsquo;t do the rack, lots of inspiration from this guy\u0026rsquo;s little mounted solution for his HA server and related hardware. ","date":"22 August 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-08/22/","section":"Posts","summary":"Some easy reads this week and a small treasure trove of printable maker projects.","title":"\"Do/Build/Create/Practice\" - Monday Links - 2022-08-22","type":"posts"},{"content":"One core principle of product development that I\u0026rsquo;ve come to hold dear is that products must solve some problem for real people. That\u0026rsquo;s what makes them successful. I have more to write about this soon, but the short version is that most of our content products have lost their way in a race to the bottom - to be the free-time fillers and attention grabbers of our day. Push notifications, algorithmic feeds that try to drive engagement with no actual idea of what users actually want.\nI can\u0026rsquo;t believe this is the best we can do as product developers. As summer winds down, this is something I\u0026rsquo;m starting to coalesce into a product philosophy. More soon.\nReads # Elon Musk Is Convinced He\u0026rsquo;s the Future. We Need to Look Beyond Him: Some interesting tidbits in here, but the broad takeaway is to keep a real, practical perspective on the things we\u0026rsquo;re building. Hype bubbles are hype bubbles, no different when it\u0026rsquo;s a crypto asset that seems like a Ponzi scheme or a hyperloop the creator isn\u0026rsquo;t willing to invest their own money into\u0026hellip; FTC Explores Rules Cracking Down on Commercial Surveillance and Lax Data Security Practices: FTC starts talking tough about privacy and advertising. Does this actually have legs? Also, will it actually make things better? Teens, Social Media and Technology 2022: Teenagers have the most free time to fill, and it\u0026rsquo;s no wonder that the oxycontin of content that is TikTok is the most popular of the gap fillers. YouTube is a lot more interesting - it\u0026rsquo;s algorithmic, for sure, but it\u0026rsquo;s a destination unto itself. Is App Tracking Transparency Actually Doing Anything Truly Significant?: This line resonated: \u0026ldquo;Internet content networks grow until they stop growing, and then they lose their advertising demographic \u0026mdash; and investor \u0026mdash; appeal.\u0026rdquo; Code \u0026amp; Tools # Amazon posts article on Rust, Go tech lead: don\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;pull the plug\u0026rdquo; on us: Two takeaways for me: first, sustainability is an interesting metric. Second, I often read source code and feel like I\u0026rsquo;m seeing the Latin behind all of these languages. So many similar ideas floating in Typescript, Rust, Go, Swift. Lots of differences, of course. I DDoSed myself using AWS CloudFront and Lambda@Edge and got a $4.5k bill: Nightmare fuel, but also a really interesting build out. Gave me some ideas on testing and the importance of limiting points of presence until things are proven out. Maker \u0026amp; Home Automation # An system resource monitor that clips onto your laptop: Really cool implementation. Uses a USB connection, which solves data \u0026amp; connectivity. The design tucks the wires mostly out of site when the laptop is open. Clever. ","date":"15 August 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-08/15/","section":"Posts","summary":"The one truth of the tech world is watch what people actually build, not what they hype.","title":"The future is what we make. Not what we hype. - Monday Links - 2022-08-15","type":"posts"},{"content":"A very light list this week, as I\u0026rsquo;m mostly away for a family event. Hope you\u0026rsquo;ve all gotten a little R\u0026amp;R this summer! Onto the links!\nReads # Human Touch: From the tweet that brought this article to me: \u0026ldquo;Behind every successful AI system lies\u0026hellip;a network of low-cost human labor that laboriously label the data.\u0026rdquo; Fascinating story. Are you an Elite DevOps performer? Find out with the Four Keys Project: I hate the title of this post, but agree with the metrics. Every good team I\u0026rsquo;ve been a part of has tried to speed up all of those things. Code \u0026amp; Tools # editor.experimental.stickScroll.enabled: Saw this in Assaf\u0026rsquo;s newsletter, and immediately wanted to try it. Great way to keep context in VSCode as you go into deeply nested function trees. Prisma Data Platform: One of the frightening recommendations on Vercel\u0026rsquo;s site is to allow traffic to your datasources from all IP addresses. In other words, put your database on the internet. On one hand, this is bascially Fauna or Atlas, but these services were developed with the intention of being hardened against the vagaries of the internet (and can even be self-hosted). Postgres? Not so much. Stumbled across this while looking at Prisma as an ORM for one of our projects. Looks like an interesting workaround for traditional databases - at least you get a fixed IP address range to whitelist. Step in the right direction. Maker \u0026amp; Home Automation # Oura Ring: Oura is running a refer-a-friend program right now - I was reminded of this last week during our company meetings in NYC where a full 3 of us PLUS a rock-climbing, tri-competing advisor all were wearing Oura Rings and raving about it. If I had to choose between my Apple Watch and the Ring, the Ring gives me more actionable information and data - it\u0026rsquo;s the must use daily device. The Watch is more social (gotta close those rings!) and allows easier access to my laptop and phone, so in practice I always want to wear both. The Ring is way better for sleeping and recovery metrics. The data is actionable. For example, my sleep isn\u0026rsquo;t great when my heart rate takes longer to slow down over the night. The app offers reasons why the heart rate can stay up (e.g. eating too close to bedtime), and I can usually map them to something I did the night before. So, you get an affiliate link today. Not a maker things, per se, but a wonderful set of tiny sensors you can work into your life. ","date":"8 August 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-08/08/","section":"Posts","summary":"Would ML exist without cheap, offshore labor?","title":"Thousands of fingers 10 thousand miles away - Monday Links - 2022-08-08","type":"posts"},{"content":"Busy travel week - while the new variants are worrisome (and pushing me back toward more masking), it\u0026rsquo;s nice to be able to get back to the places I love. Let\u0026rsquo;s get to the links.\nReads # The future of cars is a subscription nightmare: Just a straight \u0026ldquo;nope\u0026rdquo; to this from me. It irks me enough that my car requires an Audi-managed cell connection to use the remote features of the car. This is an expensive subscription, rivaling my cell phone bill (for a single line). Tesla Remotely Extended The Range Of Drivers In Florida For Free\u0026hellip; And That\u0026rsquo;s NOT A Good Thing: This article is from 2017, reminding us that horrible ideas seem to come from Musk at least as often as his good ideas do. I really hope this is regulated out of the market\u0026hellip; (though, the comments in that article indicate that perhaps this model already exists in other industries\u0026hellip; ugh.) Tweet from @KathrynTewson: \u0026ldquo;See, right here, here\u0026rsquo;s the problem with \u0026ldquo;code is law.\u0026rdquo; If the code is the law, then the funds weren\u0026rsquo;t stolen, because the code allowed it to happen.\u0026rdquo; So many things to figure out in this space. Related question: how decentralized do you want things to be? Du Minitel à l\u0026rsquo;Internet: In French, a brief history of the Minitel, France\u0026rsquo;s homegrown smart terminal that pre-dated widespread adoption of the Internet. I studied this (a little) in school - was fascinated by the idea that the government would launch something like this. My French is rusty, so I didn\u0026rsquo;t read most of this (full disclosure), but the charts are accessible with rusty French, and are worth looking over. This wasn\u0026rsquo;t cell phones, but it also wasn\u0026rsquo;t a tiny service for the era. No-code isn\u0026rsquo;t scalable. Our learnings at FINN going from 1000 toward 100,000 car subscriptions: This has also been a topic of conversation at work. Airtable and Retool look great on the surface. I feel similarly about Vercel, too, for that matter. I\u0026rsquo;m used to being able to twiddle all the knobs, but I also used to have teams big enough to support knob maintenance. Life is tradeoffs, best to go into these decisions with intention. That means having an exit plan or metrics that can trigger the \u0026ldquo;time to move off X\u0026rdquo; conversations. Code \u0026amp; Tools # Snippets in Visual Studio Code: I\u0026rsquo;m sure most folks know this, but you can create your own snippets in VS Code. I use them to author this site in Markdown, to put in the bullets for each entry with the correct formatting, for example. Using Text Shortcuts: Speaking of shortcuts, Apple has the ability to define them across the OS so you can use them in any app. They\u0026rsquo;re not quite as coding friendly as they are in VS Code, but I use them to simplify things. For example, just typing in \u0026amp;myz will expand out to my zoom link for my personal meeting room. I never have to look it up. Replibyte: Assaf linked to this in his newsletter this week. Guess what I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing a lot of this week as we get closer to launch\u0026hellip; Maker \u0026amp; Home Automation # How far can you go by train in 5h?: Very cool little project that visualizes the answer to that question on a map of Europe. Very cool little project. ","date":"1 August 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-08/01/","section":"Posts","summary":"This week, we read about an awful move to subscriptions and some French history.","title":"Subscriptions for Everything - Monday Links - 2022-08-01","type":"posts"},{"content":"I went into a small rabbit-hole this weekend, around other work and a nice family day on Saturday at Fenway. Assaf linked to Gleek, which got me looking into similar tools. I think in terms of outlines, and the diagrams I do in Keynote or Paper or whatever usually start out as an outline. Gleek/Mermaid/etc. let you create diagrams through a text outline, using a syntax similar to Markdown. This is perfect for me - I love Markdown (it\u0026rsquo;s how I author this site). The three tools I played with the most are below in the Code \u0026amp; Tools section. I will say I ended up coming back to Gleek because I liked the look \u0026amp; feel of the diagrams the best.\nReads # Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech: Mike Masnick wrote this in 2019 but it just hit my feed this week. The piece resonated with me - when you boil Web3 down to pure technology, it\u0026rsquo;s all about forcing everyone to think in and, more importantly, build in protocols, creating shared burdens and shared benefits. Masnick touches on this a little toward the end of the article. I\u0026rsquo;d love to see this refreshed for more modern blockchains that have lower transaction costs (and thus fewer negative externalities). Below MSRP and Only Getting Cheaper: The GPU Deluge Begins: Crypto, especially intensive Proof of Work blockchains, were driving demand for high end GPUs. GPU prices have been coming down as the market has cooled. This link gives the best context, even though it\u0026rsquo;s from June. Prices continued falling into July, so the general trend is holding. Might be a good time to build a gaming rig. Facebook\u0026rsquo;s growth woes in India: too much nudity, not enough women: Buried in this piece are some notes about gender-biased family rules on internet/mobile use, which I imagine are bigger factors than the piece makes out, but the whole piece serves as a reminder to know your market. Performance comparison: counting words in Python, Go, C++, C, AWK, Forth, and Rust: I\u0026rsquo;m still working on my Rust skills. Thought this was a fun but also very useful article on language differences, gave me a different lens to look at some Rust behaviors. The Rust entry comes with 3 different implementations. I\u0026rsquo;ve learned a few things from the descriptions in the article, am looking forward to finding a little time to dig into the code. Hacker news comment thread is good for this one, too. Code \u0026amp; Tools # Gleek: This was my favorite of the text -\u0026gt; diagram tools. A slightly richer syntax and a nice visual design for the diagrams. My only issue was having some trouble with layout, but I was able to produce service architecture diagrams that I needed for my team. Flowchart.fun: This is a lightweight tool that has a sponsorship model (~$10/year at time of this post). The free diagram was a little too plain for my tastes, but I did prefer the syntax to Mermaid. Mermaid: This tool was way more flexible at the cost of a much plainer visual output. It\u0026rsquo;s still quite usable, but I was dipping into the docs a bit too much for my liking. Unlike Gleek, this is open source. Maker \u0026amp; Home Automation # Equipping a go-kart with an omni wheel for endless drifting: This is such a cool looking build. Fascinated by the motion of that omni wheel, which I now know are also called Mecanum Wheels. Impressive build (not surprising, coming from James Bruton!) ","date":"25 July 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-07/25/","section":"Posts","summary":"This week, we use text to make diagrams, talk protocols, and admire one of the coolest builds I\u0026rsquo;ve ever seen.","title":"Markdown got it right - Monday Links - 2022-07-25","type":"posts"},{"content":"Spend any time around Web3, and you\u0026rsquo;ll find a lot of true believers. Lots of deeply interesting but deeply complicated decentralization schemes and products that can\u0026rsquo;t help but have sharp edges for users to bump into. Then you have the TopShots and Sorares of the world that use the blockchains but simplify things enough for users to just\u0026hellip; use them.\nReads # Sufficient Decentralization for Social Networks: How much blockchain is too much blockchain? I like this outline. I\u0026rsquo;ll just point out, once again, this piece is largely about user identity as a compelling use case. Sorare Community Update: Sorare\u0026rsquo;s product update barely mentions the underlying blockchain tech, but clearly still carries forward the community-focused ethos of Web3. ‘Lost Ark,\u0026rsquo; a years-old South Korean video game, is 2022\u0026rsquo;s surprise big hit: Found this story as I was researching ARPG games this week. Good overview of gameplay and audience dynamics at play with this genre. Big Ten Blame: A contrarian take on who\u0026rsquo;s to blame for the weird consolidations in college sports. I love Ben Thompson diagrams. An Interview with Barry Jenkins: Bias creeps in where you may not think of it. A good reminder\u0026hellip; Apple and Google both were working to fix these sorts of biases in their image processing for iOS and Android. Code \u0026amp; Tools # JavaScript just got way faster: Thought this was a nice quick overview of Bun, the project I linked to last week. If the web page was too dry for you, this is a good overview. Instagram Q\u0026amp;A: Friend and extraordinarily talented designer Aaron Weyenberg has been teaching himself 3D design with Blender for a few years now, posting amazing work on his Instagram. If you\u0026rsquo;ve ever thought about learning Blender, a good set of resources here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joPca0-fl00: I\u0026rsquo;ve always been surprised at how much tooling Unreal doesn\u0026rsquo;t have yet. No cloud build service, for example. Am about halfway through this video. Some good ideas here. Design through play is a good philosophy. 10 Best Practices to containerize Node.js web applications with Docker: Guess what I was doing last week. I liked this list. Maker \u0026amp; Home Automation # Building a Lego-powered Submarine 4.0: This is a really clever build. The whole series is worth watching. Such a great little design. ","date":"18 July 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-07/18/","section":"Posts","summary":"Ben Evans had the best line this week, in his newsletter: \u0026ldquo;web3 projects that fail the ‘purity test\u0026rsquo; are likely to be fruitful.\u0026rdquo; That\u0026rsquo;s today\u0026rsquo;s inspiration.","title":"Sufficient Decentralization - Monday Links - 2022-07-18","type":"posts"},{"content":"This week we cover creator perspectives on TikTok, building 3D assets for games and content, new programming languages, and the usual dash of crypto/blockchain on top.\nHave any feedback/thoughts on this week\u0026rsquo;s list? Hit me up via Twitter or email (sujal@ this domain with the www).\nReads # How An OG YouTube Creator Thinks About the Rise of TikTok: MKB knows video content - easily one of the best channels on YouTube, both in quality and authenticity - so his perspective here is really interesting. I\u0026rsquo;ve been watching a lot of Twitch lately (for work reasons, interestingly enough), and have heard similar thoughts from the big streamers. I never go to TikTok (or more likely Instagram Reels in my case) for anything useful. If I want to learn something or look something up, I\u0026rsquo;m going to a search engine which will likely take me to YouTube. There\u0026rsquo;s really no question. TikTok and Oracle teamed up after all, but concerns about data privacy remain: Privacy remains complicated in a multinational service. Of course TikTok engineers in China can access data in their global datacenters. What compels them to take on extra cost of having strict data sovereignty policies for US users? Is a US data sovreignty law something that what we want? DALL-E, the Metaverse, and Zero Marginal Content: We\u0026rsquo;re building a video game at POL, and easily one of the biggest costs in time and actual cost is art and content. I keep thinking about this piece from Ben Thompson when working through those timelines and plans. I would also note that images have a pretty standardized set of formats that are largely interoperable (i.e. converting from JPG to PNG is easy with a known loss/gain of information). 3D models and textures are a little more complicated. Ran into that at Disney, too, as we thought about unifying art pipelines for content across ads and tv animation. That feels like an important predecessor to a DALL-E for 3D models/assets. Is FBX enough for that step? Do we have enough open source or accessible examples to build a DALL-E for 3D models? Bear market will last until crypto apps are actually useful: Mark Cuban: I agree with Cuban on this, and believe Metacrafters could be one of those useful use cases. Crypto traceability and market rules agreed by EU lawmakers: A sign of things to come - strong KYC requirements in the EU, at least on paper, with no minimum transaction size. Code \u0026amp; Tools # Bun: This was a fun find - several newsletters highlighted this one. I\u0026rsquo;m going to try this out with our main platform at work, just to see how good compatibility is at the end. What seems nice is that they have a lot of the \u0026ldquo;glue\u0026rdquo; dependencies built in, so there are fewer foundational decisions I need to make as a developer around bundling, ESM module setup, etc. Zig: Bun\u0026rsquo;s documentation claims it\u0026rsquo;s so fast in part because it\u0026rsquo;s implemented in Zig. Zig\u0026rsquo;s author describes Zig as a \u0026ldquo;a system programming language intended to replace C.\u0026rdquo;. Bold ambition. Also, it feels like we\u0026rsquo;re living through another new era of programming languages inspired by the ease of JS but with the robustness of C/C++/etc. Rust, Zig, Swift\u0026hellip; lots of basics to relearn when switching languages, but the performance and correctness upsides seem worth it. Maker \u0026amp; Home Automation # DIY Light Up Blinky Bow Ties Kit - 10 Pack: I picked up one of these kits from Adafruit to have a little craft time with my kids and their cousins. The kids loved it, super simple assembly with no soldering or real wiring required. Everything was done in about 20 minutes, including helping the younger kids. I wish they had a few more colors for the bows, but the kids were really happy. They\u0026rsquo;re still rocking their bows in their hair or as bow times hours later. Neopixel Ring Lamp: Speaking of Adafruit orders, my son and I are going to give this project a shot. Requires some 3D printed parts and some soldering, but it looks like a nice desk toy. With RGB LEDs and a Raspberry Pi Pico W powering it, could also use it to display information about the weather and other data through a nice, Apple Health style ring readout. ","date":"10 July 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-07/11/","section":"Posts","summary":"This week we cover creator perspectives on TikTok, building 3D assets for games and content, new programming languages, and the usual dash of crypto/blockchain on top.","title":"Monday Links - 2022-07-11","type":"posts"},{"content":"Identity and interoperability are the two ideas that are most interesting to me in the modern web, especially one where blockchains exist. Let\u0026rsquo;s just get to the links for this week.\nReads # Toys, Secrets, and Cycles: Lessons from the 2000s: Chris Dixon on building through downturns. FIDO Alliance UX Guidelines: The FIDO Alliance released UX guidelines for authenticator apps and for sites relying on security keys. \u0026ldquo;So here are they are, with Star Wars examples\u0026rdquo;: A very accessible distillation of writing concisely for busy people, written by someone who used to prepare the President\u0026rsquo;s Daily Brief. Lots of things I\u0026rsquo;ve learned through hard-earned experience myself. I F***ing Hate Jira: We ended up trying Linear because I really hate Jira, too. Listens # The Future of Decentralized Identity and Reputation | Evin McMullen from Disco: When I began trying to get smarter about Web3, Evin McMullen was on several lists of \u0026ldquo;must follows,\u0026rdquo; which is how I heard about this episode. I really like the way she\u0026rsquo;s thinking about Disco. Some really good ideas here. Code \u0026amp; Tools # SeaORM: Really liking this library for a Rust/Actix ORM. Maker \u0026amp; Home Automation # Raspberry Pi Pico W: THe Raspberry Pi foundation launched a possible alternative to the ESP32-based boards out there. Of course, I pre-ordered a few. ","date":"4 July 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-07-04/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Identity in the modern web - Monday Links - 2022-07-04","type":"posts"},{"content":"I was really, really present on social media this week, but in case you missed it, our startup held a party at NFT.NYC, a major crypto conference. The party was held at the New York Stock Exchange, including on the trading floor. It was very cool to see our logo up on the screens there. Maybe we\u0026rsquo;ll be back when Proof of Learn goes public. 😉\nAt the same time, driving back after the Solana event the next day, I heard the news from the Supreme Court decision. I won\u0026rsquo;t hit the politics of this decision much here; suffices to say that I\u0026rsquo;m pro-choice for a myriad of reasons, even though I have moral qualms about the procedure. There are so many exceptions to the usual trope of \u0026ldquo;consequences\u0026rdquo; of voluntary sex that I\u0026rsquo;d much rather leave this to women and their doctors.\nFor this space, I do want to highlight some angles that are important for product managers and businesses to consider. Because of how anti-abortion state laws are being written, your companies and products may become involuntary investigators against pregnant women seeking medical services (and beyond, if this trend continues). It\u0026rsquo;s no longer just state AGs you will need to worry about, but any activist\u0026hellip; or worse, I fear, someone with an entrepreneurial mind that wants to collect the \u0026ldquo;bounty\u0026rdquo; on each lawsuit. We should all be thinking abou what data we need to collect and whether the risks outweigh the potential business benefit we\u0026rsquo;re seeking.\nRelated Links # We Need to Take Back Our Privacy: First, Zeynep Tufekci spells out the risks of these aggregated data pools, and how they will likely get abused. Good place to start, even though it\u0026rsquo;s a long post. What Companies Can Do Now to Protect Digital Rights In A Post-Roe World: Follow that up with this article from the EFF, which spells out some things you and your company should consider to make sure you\u0026rsquo;re not a data source. Taking this seriously will prompt difficult conversations for your company - tradeoffs where the default or easiest path is to just collect and share data. If you care about your customers, you want to be a brand that people trust. Don\u0026rsquo;t end up in an article about how your app contributed to some woman going to jail for possibly life-saving treatment. Four Takeaways From a Times Investigation Into China\u0026rsquo;s Expanding Surveillance State: The Chinese government is the world leader in surveillance. Much of the data in private hands in the US could be aggregated and used in very similar ways. Reads # Designing and Implementing Avatars for the Metacrafters Metaverse: The first in a series of posts about how we\u0026rsquo;re generating our avatar NFTs for our game. Our company has an education mission, and part of that is making sure we share our approaches and learning as developers. Solana is making a crypto phone with help from former Essential engineers: I was at the announcement (and POL/Metacrafters is a launch partner for the device). This article captures both the hope and reality of a new phone manufacturer in 2022. I\u0026rsquo;m still excited to work with Solana Labs on this because they\u0026rsquo;re very clear-eyed about why they\u0026rsquo;re doing this. In every conversation, team members have said they don\u0026rsquo;t expect to become a big phone company. What they need is access to the trusted enclave to really build a crypto UX that was user-friendly AND secure. Easiest way is build the phone. Solana Mobile Stack announcement: The real value of this release lies in the SDK and supporting specifications that Solana is releasing as open source. Casey Liss on Twitter: \u0026ldquo;Probably the best #WWDC video I\u0026rsquo;ve seen on async/await is actually wrapped in a \u0026lsquo;Check out new Instruments features\u0026rsquo; package.\u0026rdquo; This was also recommended by a number of other Swift devs I follow on Twitter. Web3 games Million on Mars and Sunflower Land will do cross-chain event (updated): An early example of cross-chain interopable gameplay. Nothing too special here, but interoperability feels like the most compelling long term payoff for users in Web3 gaming. Netflix Meets With Google In Cannes To Discuss Its Ad Business: Netflix is indeed doing ads. The Nothing Phone: Speaking of new phones, this hit my radar a bunch this week. Looks interesting. Code \u0026amp; Tools # Solana Mobile Stack: The actual SDK I referenced above. ","date":"27 June 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-06-27/","section":"Posts","summary":"A light list this week becuase of travel: quick hits on the Solana announcements this week at NFT.NYC (the chain we\u0026rsquo;re starting with at work), some data privacy reads, and then the usual assortment of randomness.","title":"NFT.NYC fun, post-Roe tech concerns, and more - Monday Links - 2022-06-27","type":"posts"},{"content":"This week\u0026rsquo;s list is a bit of a link dump of some of the technical things going on behind the scenes at Proof Of Learn, the startup I joined in late May.\nOur first product is a game called Metacrafters, \u0026ldquo;a learn-and-earn game that teaches players, or Crafters, how to write smart contracts and build on-chain. We want to onboard the next 1 million blockchain developers to web3.\u0026rdquo; We\u0026rsquo;re building a game using Unreal with lore and challenges that together will teach you about different blockchain technologies while picking up practical skills. This is married to a learning platform that will offer courses to really go deep on programming skills. This ends up being a lot of game dev, the platform services backing the game, the learning platform, and integration with a blockchain which, in our case, is Solana (see below).\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve got a lot more information coming later this week and regularly coming out every few weeks. If you\u0026rsquo;re interested in any of the topics below, please reach out! I\u0026rsquo;m happy to nerd out on any of this. We\u0026rsquo;re also hiring across the engineering team. Come join us in this adventure.\nRelated Links # Consensus 2022 | Sheila Lirio Marcelo - Proof of Learn: Sheila Marcelo, our CEO, spoke at Consensus 2022, explaining the origin of Proof of Learn and our mission. She also announced a few significant partnerships. Metacrafters: There\u0026rsquo;s a trailer available here on the game. I can\u0026rsquo;t wait to share more about this soon. Why Metacrafters is Bullish on Solana: This is a really high level overview of the Solana blockchain and why we feel this fits with our goals. A more technical post will be up soon. More information on our Genesis NFT drop: This isn\u0026rsquo;t just a beautiful NFT, but the way for you to be a part of shaping our final gameplay and course material through early access and a shortened feedback loop. We\u0026rsquo;re minting on Solana, which is a low-transaction-cost, high throughput blockchain built on Rust. (more on that in a minute) ok so what the f*** is the deal with Solana: The official Solana site links to this, and I think it is both informative and will give you an overview of the general feel of working in the lower levels of Web3. 😉 (Obviously, from the title, it contains strong language and is quite\u0026hellip; irreverent. Consider yourself warned - this may be NSFW depending on your workplace.) Reads # SoFi Stadium\u0026rsquo;s converged network saw 53 petabytes of traffic for Super Bowl 56: This is amazing. The vast majority of the data seems to be the video streams to power all the screens in the stadium, which means that this total is likely close in rough magnitude to what a normal game would see every season. The network topology is the point of this article, which is also fascinating (and a bit of an infomercial). $6 Billion for Cricket?! Jiminy! Why?: This was shocking news from my perspective. When I was working in India on ESPN.in and the Sony ESPN network partnership, Star \u0026amp; Hotstar seemed like an unstoppable force for cricket rights. Sports rights are going to be an interesting battleground between traditional media and Apple/Amazon/Everyone else. (Worth also noting the NESN News) Disney Offers Global Travel Package To All 12 Of Its Parks For $110,000: I have to admit, this itinerary seems pretty cool. Sadly, I don\u0026rsquo;t have a few hundred grand lying around to take this trip. 🙃 What would RBG (probably) say?: A weird experiment built using analysis of RBG\u0026rsquo;s writing and media appearances. The Post wrote up a decent article about some of the questions this work raises. Code \u0026amp; Tools # The Rust Book: Solana is built on Rust, and my day job therefore uses Rust a lot. I\u0026rsquo;m coming to really like it. This is the best place to get started. actix-web: I have a love/hate relationship using Node.js for API stacks. The fact that we\u0026rsquo;re using a fair amount of Rust already has led me to experiment with using Rust for a few API services. This framework seems mature, and has decent performance in benchmarks. Diesel.rs: There are a couple of ways to interact with a DB, but I do like having an ORM if it\u0026rsquo;s not too heavy. Mixed feelings about this so far. I\u0026rsquo;m also looking at something like SQLx or one of the ORMs built on top of it. If you have experience with any of these let me know! Web Framework Benchmarks: Thought this was an interesting list of benchmark results. The associated github repo is a pretty good source for configurations and setup code, too. Maker \u0026amp; Home Automation # LEGO sculpture of two planes flying: This is so clever and very cool. ","date":"20 June 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-06-20/","section":"Posts","summary":"Today\u0026rsquo;s links lean into the work I\u0026rsquo;m doing in the day job, a startup focused on Web3 education.","title":"What am I working on? - Monday Links - 2022-06-20","type":"posts"},{"content":"So, I\u0026rsquo;m a little proud of last week\u0026rsquo;s post coming out right before Apple announced Passkeys, their take on FIDO/WebAuthn. I actually deleted a few lines speculating that they would launch using Keychain or maybe secure enclave capabilities in their hardware to enable this functionality. Alas, you\u0026rsquo;ll have to take my word for that. Regardless, though, this is good news. As much as I\u0026rsquo;m a fan of password managers, they\u0026rsquo;re clunky, especially on iOS. Broader adoption of WebAuthn/FIDO will make a lot of this easier for everyone.\nThis week, I want to dive a little deeper into this idea of getting rid of passwords. We\u0026rsquo;ve got overviews from Google, an interesting authentication product from the Web3 world, and some analysis of Apple\u0026rsquo;s announcement.\nRelated Links # WWDC 2022: Meet passkeys: A good rundown of Apple\u0026rsquo;s announcement along with thoughts about the choices Apple has made. If you compared their announcement to even just what I described last week, this isn\u0026rsquo;t the same thing as a hardware token. If you can share it, it\u0026rsquo;s different. That said, this is really similar to the behavior of Web3 wallets. That\u0026rsquo;s why I believe there will be some convergence on this stuff. FIDO authentication with passkeys: Google has a good overview of FIDO/WebAuthn that\u0026rsquo;s a good overview of the technology. Reads # In defense of crypto(currency): I like this essay by Matthew Green because of the intro, honestly. It basically describes my own route through Web3 over the past few months: skeptic, happily calling out the bullshit, but still recognizing something interesting is going on in the space. I\u0026rsquo;d also suggest reading his Twitter thread - the comment about interoperability describes the reason I\u0026rsquo;m intrigued by blockchains: composibility seems natural to smart contracts, in part because they look like programs running in a universal computer in the sky. The Verge\u0026rsquo;s WWDC 2022 page: Good rundown of the big announcements. I know everyone is skeptical about the Carplay announcement, BTW, but I use my car\u0026rsquo;s built-in navigation because it integrates with the screen that\u0026rsquo;s behind the steering wheel. There are many times I\u0026rsquo;ve wished CarPlay could at least control the map portion of that display for navigation. Developer Center Room Names: Just thought this was a fun observation from WWDC. This is the first time a public event was held at the new Developer Center on Apple\u0026rsquo;s campus. It\u0026rsquo;s been fun seeing all the photos and stories from that part of the week. The campus looks AMAZING, by the way. Avalanche Subnets \u0026mdash; Bridge The Chasm: I\u0026rsquo;ve been poking into permissioned blockchains, but came across Avalanche\u0026rsquo;s idea of subnets while looking into something else. Feels like an example of Matthew Green\u0026rsquo;s line that engineers will figure scaling out. Some interesting ideas here, will be curious to see where it goes. Code \u0026amp; Tools # Sign In with Fractal \u0026mdash; A Wallet for Web3 Gamers: Fractal, a Web3 marketplace focused on gaming, released their wallet product, complete with SDKs. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t require a browser extension, claims to be non-custodial, and only requires a social account of some kind. It\u0026rsquo;s an interesting idea. I\u0026rsquo;m curious how many people drop off at the \u0026ldquo;adding an extension\u0026rdquo; step of the Web3 first time journey? Also my first introduction to Shamir\u0026rsquo;s Secret Sharing. Maker \u0026amp; Home Automation # Jasco Products on Twitter: Jasco announced they were releasing a bunch of firmware updates for their smart switches (often sold in the US under the Embrighten/GE brand) after public pressure led by a big YouTuber in the HA space. This Reddit thread has some good information on how to use those updates with Home Assistant. Long story short, hope you used ZwaveJS2MQTT (I didn\u0026rsquo;t\u0026hellip;). Bet this ups the pressure on the core devs to release that functionality. ","date":"13 June 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-06-13/","section":"Posts","summary":"Some follow up on last week\u0026rsquo;s password topic, other updates from WWDC, and some interesting movement from a smart home device manufacturer releasing firmware after public pressure.","title":"Hey, look, I called it - Monday Links - 2022-06-13","type":"posts"},{"content":" Read this first # The most interesting things about Web3 are coming from beyond the blockchain ideas that are taking up most of our attention. At my day job, for example, we\u0026rsquo;re looking hard at protocols around education and credentials. Part of that problem will requires us to think about how credentials and identity work in a decentralized world.\nOf course, Web3 applications require authorization/authentication solutions today. Go to most any Web3 app, whether that\u0026rsquo;s Steve Aoki\u0026rsquo;s Aokiverse to a marketplace like OpenSea or MagicEden and you\u0026rsquo;ll almost certainly see a \u0026ldquo;connect wallet\u0026rdquo; button. I\u0026rsquo;ll link to some overviews below, but long story short, these sites treat cryptocurrency wallets as your login \u0026amp; password. Unlike traditional solutions, the web site has no secret stored: no password, no seed for 2FA\u0026hellip; nothing. The private keys are in your wallet, and your browser and your wallet extension determine whether you\u0026rsquo;re logged in or not. I\u0026rsquo;m oversimplifying but you get the point.\nThis is coming forward at a time when the major OS \u0026amp; browser companies are pushing to get rid of passwords using FIDO U2F hardware tokens. That\u0026rsquo;s great - you have a hardware token you plug in or pair with your device. It\u0026rsquo;s really simple - strongly encourage you to pick up a Yubikey if you want to play with this. Limited Mac OS and iOS support, but hopefully Apple\u0026rsquo;s announcement will change that.\nIf you squint, what I\u0026rsquo;ve described is a lot like having a Web3 wallet, except the wallets have a better UX. Basically, users prove they have control over the private keys for a specific account. Connecting the wallet to the site serves as registration, and the wallets have secure methods for doing that.\nUses browser extensions to store or mediate access (for hardware wallets) to private keys. Allows recovery of private keys using secret key phrases (useful if your hardware wallet gets damaged or lost). Lots of choices: mulitple browser extensions and hardware wallet vendors. I recently invested in a hardware wallet, a Ledger Nano X, and it has support for FIDO U2F. I would love to use it to log into everything even beyond crypto sites. The question is whether the crypto experience will take over or whether U2F adoption will make it more common for folks to have hardware wallets.\nRelated Links # A Guide to Common Types of Two-Factor Authentication on the Web: EFF overview of two-factor authentication options - their section on FIDO U2F is very good. This is from 2017, btw - this standard is not new. The Best Security Key for Multi-Factor Authentication: An overview of U2F hardware keys from the Wirecutter. They do a good job explaining the basics in the \u0026ldquo;who is this for\u0026rdquo; section of the article. Soulbound: Creator of Ethereum on making NFTs that are bound to a single person, not just a wallet, and not transferrable by simply buying it off of someone. \u0026ldquo;Tough to forge\u0026rdquo; digital driver\u0026rsquo;s license is\u0026hellip; easy to forge: A good reminder that modern bringing identity and credentials into software can be tricky. Reads # Tweet by Benedict Evans: How hard is it to buy an ad on Instagram? He found out it\u0026rsquo;s not as easy as it should be. Code \u0026amp; Tools # Gitbook: New to me, but it\u0026rsquo;s been around a while. Lots of Web3 projects relying on this to publish their whitepapers and other documentation. Notion: Another Web3 favorite that I\u0026rsquo;m now using a lot. Linear: Our team is looking hard at Linear for our issue tracking. Some nice functionality in there, including an integrated roadmapping feature. In my previous job, I brought in an entire new tool just for better roadmaps. This seems like a good compromise. ","date":"6 June 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-06-06/","section":"Posts","summary":"Hardware tokens, recovery phrases, and a coming change in authentication - let\u0026rsquo;s talk about some of the good things coming out of the Web3 ecosystem.","title":"Web3 wallets, FIDO U2F, and the death of passwords - Monday Links - 2022-06-06","type":"posts"},{"content":" Reads # The Making of a Corporate Athlete: Treating yourself well, taking care of your health, your mental health, and your sleep makes you perform better, be more empathetic as a leader, and be happier. Lots of practical advice we all know, but may not have put together completely. I hope you\u0026rsquo;re all taking some time off (US friends).\nCode.org AP CSA curriculum is a hit with teachers and students: Code.org launched a new AP Computer Science A course to focus a little more on creativity and real world problems that should better appeal to more students. Looks fun. Course is here.\nSony Announces Horizon Series for Netflix, God of War Series for Amazon, and a Gran Turismo Show: (That\u0026rsquo;s a long headline\u0026hellip;). Sony, the only major studio without a streaming service, following up on the success of the Halo series on Paramount+ and partnering across several services. If you\u0026rsquo;re building games (and I am in my day job), your lore is now potential material for a series. Pretty cool to see these things converging on the story side just as we\u0026rsquo;re seeing animation slowly converging on the tech side (e.g. using Unreal for TV or film content).\nCode \u0026amp; Tools # WhatsApp Business Platform: If you do anything in the rest of the world outside the US, WhatsApp is ubiquitous and essential. Facebook finally rolled out their development platform. This will likely be very important.\nPastel Sense: Since Apple made everyone in tech learn a bit about perceptual image hashing, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure a million people had this idea - using those techniques to identify image ownership/rights on chain and off. This looks like an interesting implementation, though I haven\u0026rsquo;t used it myself. There are several others out there.\nMaker \u0026amp; Home Automation # Low Battery Warning Sensor in Home Assistant: If you don\u0026rsquo;t want wires everywhere, you end up with a lot of battery-powered sensors in your smart home. I really want consistent warnings when batteries are dying so I don\u0026rsquo;t find out when some automation just stops working. The reddit thread has some good ideas, too.\nSwitchbot Curtain: If you\u0026rsquo;ve given this a try, please let me know. I\u0026rsquo;d love to use something like this, but am wary of battery-powered things that aren\u0026rsquo;t part of the curtain system.\n","date":"30 May 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-05-30/","section":"Posts","summary":"A very light list for this Memorial Day weekend in the US. I hope all of you in the US are getting a little extra time to recharge with the family and friends.","title":"I hope you're taking time off - Monday Links - 2022-05-30","type":"posts"},{"content":" Read this first # Introducing Seaport Protocol: Ben Evans gets the credit for inspiring this week\u0026rsquo;s title. (If you don\u0026rsquo;t read his newsletter, I strongly recommend it.) He highlighted this announcement, observing this is one example of how much plumbing really needs to get built to take blockchains to a \u0026ldquo;mass-scale development model.\u0026rdquo; Bitcoin has no future as a payments network, says FTX chief: I remain skeptical of blockchains-as-currency. Apparently, I\u0026rsquo;m not alone (duh). Why This Computer Scientist Says All Cryptocurrency Should \u0026ldquo;Die in a Fire\u0026rdquo;: This is\u0026hellip; an aggressive stance, but worth reading even if you\u0026rsquo;re a true believer. Good background on key attributes of our current financial system (the normal one, not the crypto one). It also serves as another very good list of things that need to get fixed (plumbed, if you will) before we\u0026rsquo;ll see any megascale crypto opportunities. Introducing the 2022 State of Crypto Report: This is the bull case for Crypto. Reads # Frédéric Arnault talks Tag Heuer, Web 3.0 and NFTs: Some interesting background on the luxury watch business, and a tiny bit about NFTs. Apple\u0026rsquo;s hidden setting instantly makes your video and audio calls sound better: Another good tip. The Root of Haiti\u0026rsquo;s Misery: Reparations to Enslavers: Not really a tech story, but I thought this was worth sharing in light of the conversation stirring up around Elon Musk\u0026rsquo;s Twitter bid. History is really complicated because societies are really complicated. Moderation is therefore complicated. This beautifully (though slightly annoyingly) rendered story from the Times illuminates some of those hidden layers in one particular bit of history. It\u0026rsquo;s never just corruption or just bots or just free speech. Making the metaverse: What it is, how it will be built, and why it matters: Nick Clegg, Meta\u0026rsquo;s (Facebook\u0026rsquo;s) president of global affairs (and former UK Deputy PM\u0026hellip;) wrote this massive essay on how Meta thinks about the metaverse. Worth skimming. Code \u0026amp; Tools # Tailscale: I meant to link to this weeks ago, but I\u0026rsquo;ve been impressed with this service. It\u0026rsquo;s a VPN service that\u0026rsquo;s is entirely peer-to-peer in it\u0026rsquo;s topology. Clever conceptually, and potentially very interesting if they can make it enterprise friendly. I do run my own Wireguard server at home, but I\u0026rsquo;ve been playing with Tailscale and am debating if I should move more use cases over. Maker \u0026amp; Home Automation # Hot glue tip from Adafruit: You can clean it up with isopropyl alcohol, which I didn\u0026rsquo;t know. That makes it useful as temporary cushion, which I also didn\u0026rsquo;t know. Nice tips. Menlo Micro switches on an opportunity for its tech to be in every device you touch: I\u0026rsquo;m currently reading Fadell\u0026rsquo;s book, Build. He\u0026rsquo;s mentioned his investment into Menlo Micro in a few interviews, which launched me into a mini rabbit hole about relays and why they\u0026rsquo;re so big. I\u0026rsquo;ve taken apart my share of smart plugs (in order to flash open source firmware onto the MCU)\u0026hellip; the relay is easily the biggest thing in the case, let alone on the circuit board. Never thought about their power consumption. I hope this tech is for real. Could be huge. ","date":"23 May 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-05-23/","section":"Posts","summary":"Web3 skepticism is in vogue right now. Some is healthy, but some misses just how early we are in whatever this wave of technology will be. Web3\u0026rsquo;s biggest advocates don\u0026rsquo;t help, conflating implmentation and aspirations into one conversations. I tried to unpack that a bit with this week\u0026rsquo;s reads.","title":"The plumbing that needs to get built - Monday Links - 2022-05-23","type":"posts"},{"content":" Read this first # Announcement: I\u0026rsquo;m Going to Miss You, But I Am Taking a Sabbatical: Jason Kottke\u0026rsquo;s announcement is personal, but it touches on what allows great people to do great work: to have space to think, to value connections, and to get out of routines and habits that aren\u0026rsquo;t serving you well. A vacation isn\u0026rsquo;t enough - sometimes you need to find space with no end date in mind. I feel this - I mean if you want to know why I chose to leave Disney instead of taking a leave of absence, this is basically it in one sentence: \u0026ldquo;In this NY Times feature, Alexandra Bell said this about how art is made: \u0026lsquo;I need some space to think and live and have generative conversations and do things, and then I\u0026rsquo;ll make something, but I can\u0026rsquo;t tell you what it is just yet.\u0026rsquo;\u0026rdquo; In a way, my dad\u0026rsquo;s health may have helped me find that space to get more creative. Reads # Cautionary Tales from Cryptoland: Get ready for a couple of back-to-back links to stuff from Molly White, the creator of Web3 Is Going Just Great. This interview is part of a series from Harvard Business Review on Web3. It\u0026rsquo;s one of the most thoughtful sketpic posts I\u0026rsquo;ve seen. Love that she included so many links that go deeper into a broad set of concerns about the Web3 vision. The (Edited) Latecomer\u0026rsquo;s Guide to Crypto: The second post from Molly White is her annotations on the NYT feature on Crypto (I linked to it a few weeks ago, too). A Metaverse Manifesto, Part 8: Do I Need a Metaverse Strategy?: Lest I seem like a blockchain hater, I\u0026rsquo;m actually not. I just think the hype has leapt ahead of where the technology itself is. If you look at a number of projects out there that are not as shiny as the popular NFT stuff, there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of interesting work going on. What that means, though, is that if you\u0026rsquo;re just a regular person out there running a business, it\u0026rsquo;s likely you don\u0026rsquo;t need to be doing anything in the blockchain realm. Pay attention, look for opportunities but otherwise, just wait. Katie\u0026rsquo;s piece offers a common sense framework for when you may want a metaverse strategy. How One Rogue Exec Thrust Levi\u0026rsquo;s Into the Culture Wars: What happens when a key executive becomes an active participant in the political conversation around \u0026ldquo;controversial\u0026rdquo; topics? Levi\u0026rsquo;s found out. Listens # How big companies kill ideas \u0026mdash; and how to fight back, with Tony Fadell: I started his new book, Build, late last week after listening to this episode of Decoder. That\u0026rsquo;s how much I enjoyed it. Good interview. #17: A Lighthouse, But No Captain: I just love the this notion that data is a lighthouse, but it can\u0026rsquo;t replace the need for a competent captain. Code \u0026amp; Tools # Distributed Identity Projects: An area of interest for me in blockchain tech is in identity, entitlements, and personal data. There a number of interesting projects, these are a few things I\u0026rsquo;m reading more about: ION: Microsoft founded project that builds on top of Bitcoin\u0026rsquo;s chain using the Sidetree protocol. Polygon ID: Built on top of the Iden3 protocol on Ethereum. Stych launched Vessel: Saw this announcement from passwordless auth provider Stych about a browser extension that aims to bring regular \u0026ldquo;web2\u0026rdquo; auth together with Web3 wallets. Might jog some ideas on a migration path from the old world to the new. ","date":"16 May 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-05-16/","section":"Posts","summary":"Hitting close to home, a long read on Kottke.org going on sabbatical, and a read on the healthy skepticism required when looking at the blockchain. Lots of fun odd-and-ends (and no Twitter acquisition links this week - let\u0026rsquo;s avoid that topic together!)","title":"Have generative conversations and then make something - Monday Links - 2022-05-16","type":"posts"},{"content":" Read this first # 7 Essential Ingredients of a Metaverse: The best encapsulation of the metaverse/Web3 vision I\u0026rsquo;ve seen yet. If you want to see what the true believers see (and are chasing with billions in VC dollars), this is basically it. My take is that this all hinges on the idea of permissionless interoperability, which she explores in the Composability point. To use one of the common examples about in-game digital goods: It would be wonderful to take a Marvel skin I bought in Fortnite into another game. How does that work? It\u0026rsquo;s not just about the technical realities of the 3D model and assets. How does Disney get paid for that usage? Or should they get paid? Lots of interesting questions. The closest analogue I keep coming back to is Movies Anywhere. Buy a movie once on any of the major services and it unlocks, for free, on all of the other participating services. How does one make that work \u0026ldquo;permissionlessly\u0026rdquo; with NFTs? The Ownership Economy 2022: Lots to digest in this newsletter, but a couple of key takeaways for me. First, this is a compelling vision, and fits well with the link above. What\u0026rsquo;s not to like about turning your data and your digital spending into real assets, not just crappy in-app-purchases and disappear the moment the company pivots or dies? At the same time, this is a story for people with means and disposable income to spare and then some. It\u0026rsquo;s a story for wealthy folks right now. That makes me uncomfortable - how can you change the world without improving the lives of everyday folks? But then I look back at cell phones or even the Internet - they started out at toys for wealthier folks. How many movies in the 80s tied cell phones to rich folks. \u0026ldquo;Money never sleeps\u0026rdquo; and all that. Second, if you\u0026rsquo;re looking to get into this space and make a meaningful contribution, it seems like the thought experiment to start with is this: what has to get solved between today\u0026rsquo;s nascent Web3 world and a future where NFTs (or an equivalent) make sense for low dollar digital purchases like skins and in-game assets - not just the transaction fees, but the interoperability that makes these digital assets actually function as decentralized assets? That\u0026rsquo;s the roadmap to a future where this vision actually could happen. Reads # Apple, Google, and Microsoft commit to expanded support for FIDO standard to accelerate availability of passwordless sign‑ins: This is good news. Adoption is easier if this is universal. I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a lot of time looking at Yubikeys and have been frustrated every time I\u0026rsquo;ve tried them. It\u0026rsquo;s just a little too hacky because of inconsistent support. Would love to see this become real. Passwords are dumb. We need to get rid of them. Wtch This: Unravelling the Mystery Behind a Secret YouTube URL: Sometimes a simple feature ends up having weird side effects, at least when it comes to user expectations. Interesting little story here. What Elon Musk Can Learn From Mastodon\u0026mdash;and What He Can\u0026rsquo;t: A lot of what Musk has proposed has been tried before. This is a good look at the things that can and can\u0026rsquo;t be learned from this prior work. Code \u0026amp; Tools # Stych: I\u0026rsquo;ve been looking into authentication SAAS providers. There are the usual suspects, Auth0, Okta, etc. Their emphasis on passwordless auth as their key value proposition is interesting. Appreciate any feedback if you\u0026rsquo;ve used them or anything like this. ","date":"9 May 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-05-09/","section":"Posts","summary":"Two great reads on the Metaverse that can outline a path to making the vision come true.","title":"Permissionless Composability - Monday Links - 2022-05-09","type":"posts"},{"content":" The Lede # So, Elon Musk is buying Twitter and the Internet was full of hot takes nearly every day last week. In the spirit of the moment, let me offer my \u0026ldquo;wait-and-see\u0026rdquo; not-hot-take.\nThe two pieces I\u0026rsquo;ll lead with today highlight the dangers of the push for engagement as the top metric, grounded in history, research, and common sense. Twitter is broken - first, because they tried to bolt on a \u0026ldquo;tried-and-true\u0026rdquo; advertising model on top of a unique product, and, second, because engagement as a primary motivation fosters performative outrage and behavior.\nSo, as you read the hot takes, start with the premise that Twitter, the product, is fundamentally broken already. The problems that come with engagement-first models are rampant: bots, brigading, etc. The horrible people folks are worried Musk\u0026rsquo;s ownership will encourage are already there. Enjoying Twitter takes active curation and work. Musk just can\u0026rsquo;t make it that much worse in the short term.\nIMHO - better products begin with utility first, the conceit of every product methodology out there - \u0026ldquo;as a user I\u0026rsquo;d like to\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure most Twitter users don\u0026rsquo;t want to end up as the Internet\u0026rsquo;s main character of the day\u0026hellip; unless you\u0026rsquo;re Elon Musk.\nSo, that\u0026rsquo;s my hot take: Does Musk have a product vision that\u0026rsquo;s worth $44 billion, or is being the Internet\u0026rsquo;s perpetual main character worth that much to him? His personal financial exposure and accomplishments make me hope he has some plan here that\u0026rsquo;s better for society.\nRelated Links # Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid: If you read just one thing I\u0026rsquo;ve posted today, read this one. When I say Twitter is broken, this article runs down why and puts that in the context of research on social networks and broader history. Very well done. Elon Musk Got Twitter Because He Gets Twitter: If that Atlantic piece is too long for you, Ezra Klein\u0026rsquo;s piece from last weekend covers similar ground. The Shadow Crew Who Encouraged Elon Musk\u0026rsquo;s Twitter Takeover: If there\u0026rsquo;s a reason to be pessimistic, it\u0026rsquo;s the motivations of the people around Musk who encouraged his purchase. Reads # Fidelity enters the metaverse in search of young investors: They opened a virtual 8-story building in Decentraland. They also are planning to add Bitcoin as an investment option in their 401K products. House-flipping algorithms are coming to your neighborhood: One recurring theme as I go through crypto and NFT stories is the financialization of everything: everything is numbers, and the world can be reduced to costs and quantified risk that can be compensated with money. Lost in that way of looking at the world are the practical benefits to society, the communites that these centralized services try to homogenize with their algorithms. I\u0026rsquo;m not a data luddite, but I do wonder if some restraint would lead to better outcomes for the market overall. Deep Dive: Why Ola Is Facing Criticism For Publicly Sharing A Customer\u0026rsquo;s Telemetry Data: Interesting debate going on in India about Ola\u0026rsquo;s EV subsidiary, which makes electric two-wheelers. 2022 Mac Studio (20-core M1 Ultra) Review: The new Mac Studio looks like it\u0026rsquo;s a beast. This review offers the first clear sign I\u0026rsquo;ve seen that any M-series-based Mac Pro will be a monster. Code \u0026amp; Tools # How to Mint an NFT on Solana: This is a nice little tutorial on minting an NFT on Solana. Maker \u0026amp; Home Automation # paperd.ink: I backed this project back when they tried to crowdfund it. I built something similar myself for a desktop dashboard a few months ago. This looks like it\u0026rsquo;s all in one package. A little pricey, but not a terrible deal if you want to get an all-in-one product that doesn\u0026rsquo;t need assembly. It has an ESP32 inside, and exposes the hardware/IO as a nice pin connector on the back. It looks pretty nice. ","date":"2 May 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-05-02/","section":"Posts","summary":"Twitter is a broken product already, which is reason to hope (a little) about the coming changes. Also, an interesting Mac Studio review and a promising e-ink display for hobby projects.","title":"It's already broken, don't you see? - Monday Links - 2022-05-02","type":"posts"},{"content":" The Lede # What a crazy week on the streaming front. But let\u0026rsquo;s be honest\u0026hellip; deep down inside, we\u0026rsquo;ve all known there are too many streaming services already, haven\u0026rsquo;t we? So, this felt inevitable. The point of streaming was to have a superior UX at a lower cost than traditional cable. That was it. Arguably, neither goal has been achieved. The news this past week just laid that bare for everyone to see. Those results also mean executives inside the big media companies will face more challenging questions about their strategies. After all, it\u0026rsquo;s no longer crazy to question the wisdom of Netflix\u0026rsquo;s model.\nRelated Links # Netflix is not a tech company: Benedict Evans wrote this piece in 2019, and he shared it again in the wake of the Netflix earnings. The key point: \u0026ldquo;[Netflix] used tech as a crowbar, and the crowbar had to be good, but it\u0026rsquo;s actually a TV company.\u0026rdquo; Start here to make sense of the news. WTF Netflix? W/ @loudmouthjulia - Techmeme Ride Home: If you listen to one thing about this week\u0026rsquo;s news, this is the one I\u0026rsquo;d recommend. Julia Alexander has a good perspective as an analyst working with Netflix competitors. I\u0026rsquo;d also suggest listening to the Decoder interview she did that I linked to two weeks ago. The gist of this - content strategy is at the heart of success in this business, as is the flywheel Disney pioneered between content and ancillary revenue. What is Netflix\u0026rsquo;s answer here? Have the traditional media companies figured out streaming before Netflix figured out media? They also have some good insights into the CNN+ saga. Good stuff. Reads # The Marketplace 100: 2022: A16Z releases a ranking of \u0026ldquo;the best consumer-facing marketplace startups \u0026amp; private companies\u0026rdquo; every year, now. Good read. I hadn\u0026rsquo;t heard about all of the highlighted companies in the piece, so educational for me. How Anitta megafans gamed Spotify to help create Brazil\u0026rsquo;s first global chart-topper: When is gaming the algorithm an act of love from dedicated fans vs. a violation of terms of service? How should a service combat tactics like this from super fans? Some interesting details in this story. Success and Failure at Pebble: I found my Pebble the other day, and was tempted to give it to my son to try out. Hard to believe their Kickstarter launched way back in 2007. This is an honest look at why they failed written by the founder. Back to the Future of Twitter: Ben Thompson proposes that Twitter can be more valuable by divorcing the utility of the service from the consumer monetization. The proposal turns Twitter into a protocol-as-a-service company, in a way. This is actually a really interesting idea, with some thorny bits left unexplored. I\u0026rsquo;d love to see this fleshed out some more. It\u0026rsquo;s a very Web 2.0 protocol, if Web 3 is all about decentralization. (see the next link for more context on that comment) Listens # Chris Dixon thinks web3 is the future of the internet \u0026mdash; is it?: Chris Dixon is one of the loudest and most compelling cheerleaders for Web3 and why crypto is really the next big wave of the Internet. I will say, I walked away with some more things to consider here. His point ultimately boils down to the fact that the blockchain as a protocol inherently is open and interoperable - that\u0026rsquo;s literally the point of how they work, so they will always be that way. If you want to compete with Alchemy, an oft-cited example of centralization in Web3, there are fewer gatekeepers there than if you wanted to compete with Facebook in the Web 2 world. I don\u0026rsquo;t know if I agree yet, but I can at least see and understand his argument there. Good listen. Code \u0026amp; Tools # Plausible.io: I\u0026rsquo;ve been looking for privacy friendly analytics solution for this site and for my other projects. I\u0026rsquo;ve settled on this after ruling out Google Analytics, Matomo, and running something myself. It\u0026rsquo;s got a robust feature-set, allows simple proxying of the payloads and requests so ad blockers don\u0026rsquo;t trip up on it, and stores no data about individual visitors. Pricing is reasonable for a bootstrapped startup or side hustle, too. Termly.io: Obviously, getting a lawyer is the right answer here, but I\u0026rsquo;m also looking at tools to manage (and maybe even create) terms of service for some of the side projects here. Does anyone have any recommendations for tools on this front that target small businesses/solopreneurs/side-hustles? Warp: The terminal for the 21st century: Really interesting looking project. Basically, what a terminal app would look like if you smashed together Slack and Terminal. I\u0026rsquo;ve only played with it a tiny, tiny bit, but it\u0026rsquo;s definitely interesting. But! more interesting: How Warp Works: It\u0026rsquo;s written in Rust, rendered with a stack that relies on Metal, the Mac\u0026rsquo;s underlying GPU acceleration framework. If you\u0026rsquo;re interested in native apps with cross-platform reusability keep an eye on the things folks are doing with Rust. Maker \u0026amp; Home Automation # Shameful: Insteon looks dead\u0026mdash;just like its users\u0026rsquo; smart homes: I refuse to rely on proprietary tech for my smart home projects these days, after watching something similar happen with Wink. This story is nuts, and I feel terrible for people that invested into their ecosystem. Home Assistant or OpenHAB or another open source project is the way to go. For hardware, Z-Wave or Zigbee standards are the way to go. I do use wifi devices if they\u0026rsquo;re running open source firmware, with one or two exceptions now. ","date":"25 April 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-04-25/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Netflix/CNN+ news, Startup Tools, \u0026 Fancy Terminals - Monday Links - 2022-04-25","type":"posts"},{"content":" The Lede # I was originally going to skip the lede today because, well, I\u0026rsquo;ve been busy and then traveling for Easter, so I\u0026rsquo;ve been offline a lot. However, one thing kept popping up in my conversations this week, even with family: What do I think about Elon\u0026rsquo;s offer to buy Twitter?\nIt\u0026rsquo;s worth getting out of the way that with Elon, I admire the accomplishments, but not the persona. His antics on Twitter are boring and childish, honestly. It bugs me enough that Tesla is at the bottom of the list of car companies I would consider for an EV (though his persona is not the only reason for that).\nWith that said, it won\u0026rsquo;t surprise you to read that I\u0026rsquo;m not a fan of Musk buying Twitter. I have lots of personal concerns about an Elon-led Twitter, including concerns about a Trump reinstatement being likely, but I\u0026rsquo;ll leave all of that aside.\nProfessionally, his free speech absolutism is naive and simplistic. The most interesting reactions to the news came from people with experience running or studying content moderation at scale. If you\u0026rsquo;ve ever idly thought, \u0026ldquo;How hard can moderation be?,\u0026rdquo; I invite you to read some of the links below. It\u0026rsquo;ll be fascinating to see how this plays out if he successfully completes the purchase, though I don\u0026rsquo;t believe it\u0026rsquo;ll end well for a product I still love and use every day.\nOf course, he still needs to show he can actually close the purchase. I\u0026rsquo;ve been traveling all weekend, so I may have missed any recent developments, but I didn\u0026rsquo;t see where he was getting the money to pull this off. His wealth is tied up in stock, and several reports show that he doesn\u0026rsquo;t have enough liquid cash or a ready lender to pull this off solo.\nMost of all, I feel bad for my friends that work at Twitter. Can\u0026rsquo;t imagine this feels good as an employee in a lot of different ways.\nRelated Links # Elon Musk Demonstrates How Little He Understands About Content Moderation: This reads more as a critique of Chris Anderson\u0026rsquo;s interview, which is fair enough, but I\u0026rsquo;m leading with this because it links to some interesting reads, including Kate Klonick\u0026rsquo;s paper, The New Governors (PDF Link). It\u0026rsquo;s a good place to start looking at content moderation challenges beyond the sensational things that tend to make the normal press. \\[Yishan's\\] take on Elon\u0026rsquo;s offer for Twitter: A thread from the former CEO of Reddit on what awaits Musk if he takes over Twitter. Short version: \u0026ldquo;I think if Elon takes over Twitter, he is in for a world of pain. He has no idea.\u0026rdquo; Elon replied, but of course he just made a joke and didn\u0026rsquo;t engage in the substance. How will Musk pay for Twitter?: The Times lists out some limits on how Musk can use his wealth to buy Twitter. It seems like he will need a partner or two to pull this off. Sure Elon Musk Might Buy Twitter: This gives a little more context around the shareholder response, how serious Musk might be, and how he might raise the funds if he is indeed serious. Also worth noting, Mark Levine was quoted a few times by a few of the folks I read every week as someone who has a good read on Musk. I\u0026rsquo;ve added him to my follows for now. Reads # A guide to pronouncing names of global tech companies: If you\u0026rsquo;ve ever wondered how to pronounce Shein or Pinduoduo or Eyowo, this tool will help you out. Also a good list of companies to be aware of. Shein, for example, has come up in several conversations over the last few weeks - not enough people know how big it is, and how it\u0026rsquo;s different from Amazon or H\u0026amp;M, two obvious comparison points. Decentralized Speed: Advances in Zero Knowledge Proofs: Whatever happens with NFTs and blockchains generally, there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of interesting work supporting those the ecosystem. Zero Knowledge proofs are emerging as a way to address some of the scalability concerns with blockchains, and so for that reason alone, they\u0026rsquo;re worth being aware of. This piece does a good job of mapping out a potential evolutionary path and lays out some history. It felt like a good starting point for further research. WordleBot: Your Daily Wordle Companion: The one thing I\u0026rsquo;m dilligent about is finishing the NYT Crossword every single night. I\u0026rsquo;ve since added Wordle to the evening routine, because I love the simplicity and comparing notes with friends. The Times launched this tool to help give you feedback on your Wordle game play - it\u0026rsquo;s pretty nifty, and the UX is interesting. Listens # Reply All - #185 The Rainbow Chain: What happens to an NFT stolen from someone\u0026rsquo;s wallet, and is it possible to track it down and, even better, return it? This podcast host tries, starting from a very basic knowledge of NFTs. It\u0026rsquo;s an entertaining listen, and a good way to get a sense of why regular people (aka non-tech-folks) get into NFTs, the pitfalls of today\u0026rsquo;s UX in buying and managing NFTs, and some interesting tactics in chasing down the owner of an NFT. Darknet Diaries - EP 114: HD: If you\u0026rsquo;ve ever heard of Metasploit, you know the work of HD Moore, the guest on this episode. This is a fascinating rundown of the history of Metasploit and the gray areas involved in ethical hacking. Darknet Diaries is one of those hit or miss listens for me, but when it hits, it\u0026rsquo;s fascinating! This one was one of them. Code \u0026amp; Tools # SlowSocial.us: This is eerily like the side project I\u0026rsquo;m hacking on myself, down to some of the key tech choices, but it\u0026rsquo;s different enough that I\u0026rsquo;m curious to see how people react to it. (Search for me if you end up trying it out - I\u0026rsquo;m on with my full name). The comment thread on Hacker News has some interesting observations and suggestions. A lot of interest on finding more thoughtful connection with our friends. I\u0026rsquo;m also going to give a couple of the apps linked in the comments a try. Will link to any of those that seem interesting. Maker \u0026amp; Home Automation # Athom Smart Devices: I was a little bit put off by the web site, but after reading a number of positive recommendations on various smart home subreddits, I decided to try their smart plugs. They\u0026rsquo;re working pretty well, and I\u0026rsquo;m happy with them. Their devices come preflashed with either ESPHome or Tasmota, and include smart plugs, bulbs, switches, and some other odds and ends. Since they\u0026rsquo;re running one of these open source projects, they can be easily upgraded or reflashed. I opted for the ESPHome version, since I run Home Assistant and have used it for projects in the past. Love having this company\u0026rsquo;s products as an option. More like this please. ","date":"18 April 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-04-18/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Monday Links - 2022-04-18","type":"posts"},{"content":" The Lede # Today is blockchain and web3 heavy, again. Talking with startups and younger companies, you can imagine that this comes up a lot. Everything is \u0026ldquo;spin up a coin\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;make NFTs\u0026rdquo; and so that\u0026rsquo;s on my weekly topic list all the time.\nThe conclusion I\u0026rsquo;m coming to is pretty simple: the blockchain ledger is game changing for specific use cases. NFTs aren\u0026rsquo;t the long term win. I\u0026rsquo;m happy to be wrong, given how many people I know are in the NFT world these days, but as you\u0026rsquo;ll see in the links, I\u0026rsquo;m uneasy at best about the surge in NFTs. The NFT market \u0026amp; blockchains more widely will probably follow Gartner\u0026rsquo;s hype cycle. We\u0026rsquo;ve crossed the peak of the initial hype curve, IMHO. NFT and blockchain companies should plan how they will survive the trough now. It\u0026rsquo;s coming.\nAfter the trough, we\u0026rsquo;ll see the growth in interoperability - where owning an NFT unlocks benefits in other experiences unrelated to the original company. Lots of issues to work out, but hopefully the froth dying down will get everyone to focus creating more value with the NFTs people already own. What I\u0026rsquo;m calling interoperability could be a way to add that value without building it all in one company.\nI feel like I should just say, while I\u0026rsquo;m a skeptic on the current NFT froth, I do think there\u0026rsquo;s something valuable there. I\u0026rsquo;m also very much a believer in the metaverse (with a small m). I\u0026rsquo;m still talking to folks here to organize my thoughts and get smarter. I expect I\u0026rsquo;ll write more on this in the future.\nRelated Links # Decoder Interview with Steve Aoki: I want to lead with this because it\u0026rsquo;s such a fascinating interview. First, I\u0026rsquo;m a fan. Second, he\u0026rsquo;s clearly a crypto believer and is comfortable talking about the tech. As I listen, though, I hear the Aokiverse as a membership-based fan club, with the ability to resell the membership. Ferrari already figured out how to do this without blockchains, plus buying the \u0026ldquo;NFT\u0026rdquo; gets you a pretty sweet sports car to go with it. A good mix of savvy with sound business ideas, IMHO - his emphasis on experiences enabled by the NFT is really clear, and fits his overall strategy on his brand and approach to music. Web 3.0 and the undeliverable promise of decentralization: Switching to a more technical track, this (long) piece goes through some of the technical challenges inherent in blockchain tech that will either prevent scaling or prevent the true decentralization that true believers emphasize. Official Formula 1 NFT Game Shuts Down, Tokens Are Now Practically Worthless: I\u0026rsquo;m fascinated by this story: the \u0026ldquo;official Formula 1 NFT Game\u0026rdquo; shut down after they failed to agree with F1 on a renewal of their licensing agreement. Games go away all the time, and people lose the money they spent on in-game items. I\u0026rsquo;ve recently experienced this when Vainglory shut down and will again whenever Fortnite goes away. So, what was the advantage of this being an NFT? What did the users really own? Reads # Epic Games Launches RealityScan App in Limited Beta: Two thoughts: First, Epic has a working TestFlight account? (I kid!) Second, creator tools are very, very important. I\u0026rsquo;m curious to give this a go when it\u0026rsquo;s more widely available. The Overcast Redesign: Part One: This is the podcast app I use. I\u0026rsquo;m also a fan of how Marco Arment builds his products. Lots of thoughtful details included in his writeup. Inside the Bitcoin Bust That Took Down the Web\u0026rsquo;s Biggest Child Abuse Site: A tough story to read (heads up - talks about CSAM and other abuse), but it lays out in good, layman terms, how Bitcoin\u0026rsquo;s ledger means that very little is truly anonymous with blockchain tech. Listens # Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so: Some of the links last week touched on this. Good listen, and some interesting speculation about internal drama at Disney specifically (some that resonates with me, some that seems\u0026hellip; wrong). I remain convinced that the content companies will be willing to bundle with other services, at least indirectly, as long as they get users logging into their apps or access to user consumption data. Code \u0026amp; Tools # Awesome-Selfhosted: A catalog of services and products that can be self-hosted. Found this because someone asked for a self-hosted Reddit-like product, and someone else suggested they look through this list. It\u0026rsquo;s got a lot. Maker \u0026amp; Home Automation # Optimize Your Home Assistant Database: A good article on some basic optimizations if you run HA. Lots of stuff I have done already, but I learned a few new tricks. ","date":"11 April 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-04-11/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Monday Links - 2022-04-11","type":"posts"},{"content":"Going to divide today\u0026rsquo;s list up into sections, just to shake things up. Lots going on lately.\nReads # 11am Baseball On One of 12 Streaming Services: Will be interesting to see how this evolves going forward. On one hand, this doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem conceptually more complicated than trying to find your favorite team on a cable package. Is it on ESPN or your local RSN or on your local broadcast channel? Maybe it\u0026rsquo;s on TBS? On the other hand, your cable box has gotten smarter, and allows search across all the channels. This will likely boil down to what data the streaming services want to control. Something tells me it\u0026rsquo;s not billing that matters, so I\u0026rsquo;d bet on seeing more deals like Verizon\u0026rsquo;s or Comcast\u0026rsquo;s. It\u0026rsquo;ll also be interesting to see what data the streaming services share. For example, on Apple\u0026rsquo;s or Xfinity\u0026rsquo;s boxes, you can search for individual titles from most streaming services. A notable exception is Netflix, which leads the way in terms of using data to drive their overall content programming strategy. All of this is further complicated by the fact that all of the major \u0026ldquo;connected TV\u0026rdquo; device manufacturers also run streaming services or advertising services (e.g. Roku). Even more interesting, do consumers end up in the same spot again? Prices are going up on all of these services\u0026hellip; isn\u0026rsquo;t that what drove cord cutting in the first place? Ben Thompson has a great series that laid this out in 2013\u0026hellip; Yahoo Memo: The Peanut Butter Manifesto: I\u0026rsquo;m embarrassed to say I can\u0026rsquo;t remember why I came across this again this week, but it still holds up. Good read. Managing People: If you want to do anything with any significant impact, odds are you\u0026rsquo;re working with other folks. I agree with nearly everything in the list. Servant leadership + transparency are key. If Your Boss Has an MBA, You Might End Up Earning Less Money: I know lots of people with MBAs who I\u0026rsquo;d happily work for. This study also rings true, though. What Happened When Elon Musk Set Out to Destroy a Junior Engineer: Really bizarre and disturbing story about Musk and Tesla. A Look Back At The Best MINI April Fools Pranks: These are April Fools jokes I can get behind. Some clever ones in here. Code # Mantine: React component library that looks good. I\u0026rsquo;m still staying with Svelte with the front end work I\u0026rsquo;m doing, but this looks useful. U.S. Web Design System (USWDS): The federal government began hiring from tech companies (including ESPN\u0026rsquo;s digital teams) in earnest about a decade ago, creating 18F. This design system looks interesting. Maker Projects # Battery Powered Sun Tracking Device: A nice little project using a Raspberry Pi Pico (affiliate link) and an e-ink display. The case and the graphic design are particularly good. ","date":"4 April 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-04-04/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Monday Links - 2022-04-04","type":"posts"},{"content":"This week\u0026rsquo;s list is a little more business heavy. I\u0026rsquo;ve been traveling on vacation with my family, and just got back this weekend. Very, very little code written this past week as a result. The vacation was lovely - a welcome bookend for my sabbatical/family time. I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to getting started with some consulting clients this week. Reach out if you think I can help you or your company - sujal@ this domain (or sujal.com ) will work.\niPhone 13 Pro: The Edge of Intelligent Photography: Great overview of the iPhone 13 camera system and the choices that the computational photography engine makes. This is widely shared, but it\u0026rsquo;s worth thinking about the constraints on creativity that de With highlights in this post. As we include more AI, trained on a set of \u0026ldquo;ideal\u0026rdquo; results, where does serendipity and discovery come from. These aren\u0026rsquo;t mutually exclusive outcomes. It just seems like serendipity (or discovery, if you prefer) needs to be accounted for in the design of systems leaning on AI. Could be as simple as the toggles de With argues for here. Judges Behaving Badly: Amazon Antitrust Suit Dismissed: If you\u0026rsquo;ve ever wondered how Amazon Prime makes Amazon any money, this post contains a nice summary (and links to more depth) in the context of a weird decision in an Amazon antitrust case. Lots of other things in this one, and Stoller is a great read on monopolies and antitrust. I don\u0026rsquo;t always agree with him (I worked as an executive for a mega-corp, after all), but he\u0026rsquo;s describing real problems caused by mega-mergers and acquisitions that we need to reckon with as a society. Oy! MGM, Amazon and the FTC, Explained: Speaking of Stoller, he linked to this piece. If anyone has a subscription to the Ankler and could share the whole piece, I\u0026rsquo;d love to read it. I\u0026rsquo;d love to read one of their subscriber only posts before deciding to pay for it. The Latecomer\u0026rsquo;s Guide to Crypto: A really good, comprehensive rundown of crypto terminology and concepts for normal folks, written by Kevin Roose. Good place to start if you know nothing. I\u0026rsquo;d also recommend bookending this with Bomani Jones\u0026rsquo;s monologue on crypto in sports for a harder dose of reality. I really agree with him, even though I feel like there\u0026rsquo;s something really exciting possible with the underlying tech. Also, watch his show on HBO. It\u0026rsquo;s really good. A Metaverse Manifesto, Part 2: Interoperability: I\u0026rsquo;ll end by linking to Katie\u0026rsquo;s latest piece on the metaverse. Part 1 is also a good read, but this one gets at one of those potential underlying possibilities. Publicly auditable identity database could solve a few problems if the metaverse is to be a real thing. More of my thoughts on that in the near future. ","date":"28 March 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-03-28/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Monday Links - 2022-03-28","type":"posts"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading more books during this break. This week\u0026rsquo;s main read is one of those books, recommended by a former colleague at Disney. The rest is the usual mix of randomness.\nCompeting in the Age of AI: I finally read this book after a colleague at Disney recommended it to me. This person had built an impressive ML team that did some groundbreaking and unique work analyzing Disney content to generate additional metadata for personalization, improve QC of Disney+ artwork, and a number of other things (their patent collection is pretty impressive). I\u0026rsquo;m about halfway through, but can recommend this one wholeheartedly. The first half summarizes the core data strategy I\u0026rsquo;ve espoused to my teams for a long time. The book also describes the challenges with instituting this sort of strategy at a company as big as Disney. Silos are nasty things when it comes to data, and inertia is a major force, even at a place as aggressive about reinventing itself as modern Disney. Some really good ideas in this book so far, gives me hope that the strategy we kicked off before I left may bear some fruit. Deep Learning Is Hitting a Wall: This was a really interesting read, for a couple of reasons. First, I now definitely need to read more about a possible division in the AI space between symbols and deep learning camps - I\u0026rsquo;m amazed that\u0026rsquo;s actually a fight, and the author is not a neutral observer. Yet, the history he presents is plausible and compelling. Second, the site publishing this essay seems pretty interesting. Nautilus is a science-focused outlet (with a subscription program) that seems to go pretty deep into the topics they cover. Loved this article about new hardware for Neural Networks, for example. Never thought about the power efficiency of AI models. New best-in-class driver for Waveshare 5.65in (F) 7-color e-paper display: First, wow, there\u0026rsquo;s a 7-color e-paper display\u0026hellip; hadn\u0026rsquo;t seen that! Second, this library is pretty impressive. If you need a low power periodic display, e-paper is a really compelling option. I am impressed at how far people are pushing them. This library looks good. Curious to see it more in the wild. Plain Text Sports: Two months ago, maybe I don\u0026rsquo;t share this, but honestly, I don\u0026rsquo;t see how this thing will make money, so it probably doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter to ESPN in the grand scheme of things. Also, if I were going to build a new sports product in 2022, while I\u0026rsquo;d definitely work on loading speed and privacy first advertising, I\u0026rsquo;d focus on other gaps that are, IMO, a much bigger opportunity. Lots of ways to get scores quickly out there. Yet, all the scores pages are structured and work the same, even this one. There are big, unsolved problems in that UX. ","date":"21 March 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-03-21/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Monday Links - 2022-03-21","type":"posts"},{"content":"Hitting a stride on my (very simple, likely uninteresting to anyone but me) side project, so starting to think about deployment and testing. Inspires a few links below.\nThe future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton: A wide ranging conversation with Eben Upton, the CEO of Raspberry Pi Ltd., the company that makes everyone\u0026rsquo;s favorite single-board computer, the Raspberry Pi. I didn\u0026rsquo;t know the history of the Foundation and the project, so this was a fun conversation to listen to. I must have about 10 Raspberry Pis of different sizes doing things around the house. They are brilliant little machines. Linux has been bitten by its most high-severity vulnerability in years: This is a new local kernel vulnerability, and you know it\u0026rsquo;s serious because it\u0026rsquo;s referred to by a name (\u0026ldquo;Dirty Pipe\u0026rdquo;) rather than just a CVE number. 😉 If you\u0026rsquo;re going to run lots of Linux boxes in your house on Raspberry Pis (or whatever), make sure you secure them. Project Pockit: Speaking of Raspberry Pis, saw this modular computer/sensor/anything project posted to Reddit the other day. The prototype is built on the Raspberry Pi CM4. Looks brilliant, though I have a ton of questions about the programming model and portability of code. Still, very, very cool. The comment threads on the various Reddit posts (it got re-shared a LOT) are interesting if you\u0026rsquo;re into hardware projects. Google Checks - Privacy Platform: Looks like an interesting developer tool from Google that tries to detect privacy issues at development/release time. I didn\u0026rsquo;t sign up for the beta (not developing for Android yet), but am intrigued. Secure your JavaScript supply chain: Installs as a Github app and monitors key files in your JS projects (e.g. package.json) to detect vulnerabilities in the third-party code. The dirty secret for a lot of modern app development is that developers are pulling in dozens (if not a hundred+) third party open source packages to build their apps. It makes us all faster, but creates a dependency tree that most people can\u0026rsquo;t reason about in their heads. Tools like this are valuable, and the easier they are to integrate, the most likely they are to get used. This one looks interesting, may play around with it in my project. NASA 3D Models - 3D printable: A fun one to end the list today: NASA has released STL files (printable 3D models) of a number of key missions and spacecraft, from the Apollo 11 Landing Site to the James Webb Telescope to hurricanes imaged from satellites. Pretty cool collection. Will try to print one soon. ","date":"14 March 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-03-14/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Monday Links - 2022-03-14","type":"posts"},{"content":"This past week was metaverse week in my office. Several eye-opening conversations on the scale and scope of ambition and investment in the space. Obviously, not entirely a surprise\u0026hellip; Facebook renaming to Meta and Bob Chapek getting asked about Metaverse strategy on Disney earnings calls were hints. 😉 What has been interesting is to talk to people who see beyond the hype and understand which parts matter. Inspires this week\u0026rsquo;s first link.\nWTF is going on with \u0026ldquo;The Metaverse\u0026rdquo;?: One of the best things I\u0026rsquo;ve read this week on the metaverse. It\u0026rsquo;s unpretentious and just the right amount of cheerleading optimism. The authors work for Meta, but this isn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily (only) about Meta\u0026rsquo;s ambitions. Good place to start the week. Factal: Does anyone I know work for a company with a Factal subscription? I\u0026rsquo;d love to talk to you about how well it works for your organization. I\u0026rsquo;m really curious why a traditional news organization wouldn\u0026rsquo;t want to do something liek this, especially one with a global reach. Playdate SDK: Panic is one of the software companies I really admire. Independent, fiercely opinionated about good software. Recently, they\u0026rsquo;ve gotten into hardware, releasing the Playdate, a quirky little gaming device. I\u0026rsquo;m dying to get mine (preordered during the initial week of sales), so I\u0026rsquo;m excited to get my hands on the SDK while I\u0026rsquo;m on my sabbatical. Magic Band Reader: Wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be a Monday links post without a maker project. If you have a bunch of Magic Bands sitting around from Walt Disney World, this project can give you a way to bring a little magic back home. This looks fun. Finally, a couple of links that go together:\nWith the war in Ukraine, it\u0026rsquo;s been remarkable to see the speed and near unanimity of the reaction from the global community. Sweeping sanctions, widespread public showings of support for Ukraine, and unprecedented actions from many countries - for example, Germany selling weapons to Ukraine.\nTech folks tend to look at everything with a bias towards the influence of technology. For example, Ben Thompson, of Stratechery fame, made the point that Twitter forces a certain sort of conformity in public opinion. At the same time, no sanctions happen this fast without real people on the ground to do the hard work of real diplomacy.\nSo, two links to examine the two perspectives - both are very, very good and worth listening to, especially the Times podcast:\nBen Thompson on Twitter: From the Dithering podcast, a subscription only podcast with Thompson \u0026amp; John Gruber. This excerpt gets to the meat of their point (and it\u0026rsquo;s free). How Europe Came Around on Sanctions: An excellent interview by The Daily podcast at the NY Times with their Brussels bureau chief. She goes into some of the things that led to the sanctions - the role of a EU bureaucrat in rallying member delegations into alignment and the role of Volodymyr Zelenskyy\u0026rsquo;s first post invasion calls with European heads of state. Human relationships and face-to-face conversations at the center of it all. I share these things because as I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about trust and news and our political discourse (and in what will come with the metaverse, if it\u0026rsquo;s really going to happen), I\u0026rsquo;m coming around to the idea that our major social platforms really are fundamentally broken. They aim for scale and zero friction to share and engage, which makes them great amplifiers - the reason Twitter is consequential in Ben Thompson\u0026rsquo;s framing.\nThe thing is, the nuances of human relationships are broadly missing in these platforms. Each connection is the same as every other connection, and my treatment of each is largely identical on these scaled platforms - I share things and everyone sees it the same way. That\u0026rsquo;s not how real life works.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s also not how we build trust - professional or personal. The story in the Daily episode about Bjoern Seibert\u0026rsquo;s approach to the EU member states is a very consequential example, but it\u0026rsquo;s fundamentally the same way kids convince their parents to buy them a toy, or how you or I may navigate friends who don\u0026rsquo;t have identical politics.\nAll of this to say: this software guy is wondering what the software solution can be to encourage that interpersonal communication and relationship building. More in the coming weeks on this.\nSorry for the long, preachy end there. I find this stuff fascinating.\n","date":"7 March 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-03-07/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Monday Links - 2022-03-07","type":"posts"},{"content":"Hope you all had a good week. I finally got to visit my sister after 2 years of this pandemic, so was finally able to meet my youngest nephew for the first time. Suffice to say, I had a great week.\nBecause of the travel, though, my reading was less about tech this week, more about the world at large.\nWalgreens is testing digital cooler screens that track shopper behavior: Found this via a post on reddit (originally on /r/assholedesign) showing all the screens off, which made it impossible to see what was in the coolers. I wasn\u0026rsquo;t aware of this tech getting widely rolled out - lots of interesting questions and implications if this becomes popular. Here Comes the Full Amazonification of Whole Foods: While the Walgreens thing seems destined to add tech that ultimately (likely) makes the shopping experience much worse, Amazon is rolling out something that seems to make shopping a whole lot better. Underlying both are cameras and tracking\u0026hellip; like I said, lots of interesting questions and implications here. DevToys for MacOS: A set of neat utilities for developers and technical folks. Inspired by a Windows project, apparently. I tried to download this while flying\u0026hellip; Homebrew didn\u0026rsquo;t play nicely with the VPN over in-air wifi. How an obscure far-right website with 3 employees dominates Facebook in 2022: I\u0026rsquo;m spending a lot of my sabbatical thinking about news and trust on the internet. No one has cracked this, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure there\u0026rsquo;s any technology people thinking about this the right way (with a few notable exceptions). Which leads me to sharing\u0026hellip; Let\u0026rsquo;s strengthen local reporting by 50,000 new journalists: \u0026hellip; this essay, which puts some real numbers against putting better news infrastructure in place in all of our communities. It\u0026rsquo;s worth reading both parts, which I found via a tweet from Jay Rosen. A little postscript on those last two links: Every serious company investing money in tech for journalism - from The New York Times to the Post to a dozen other companies \u0026amp; non-profits - are thinking of success the way Facebook and Twitter and Uber do: scale by aggregation. That includes aggregation of both traffic and monetization. This feels wrong, at least if they hope to solve the trust issues. I feel like people have more authentic conversations in small groups and trust more easily without national attention. Think back to the Doctorow thread and the wind farm controversy I linked to over the last few weeks. Similar threads in both, in my opinion - points to some idea that maybe we can\u0026rsquo;t solve with an algorithmically scaled system. (also, Dunbar\u0026rsquo;s number seems relevant here\u0026hellip;)\n","date":"28 February 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-02-28/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Monday Links - 2022-02-28","type":"posts"},{"content":"Theme for this week is the state of Javascript in 2022.\nTHREAD covering the @Meta Quest Foo Fighters concert in VR: Before we get to the Javascript stuff, an interesting look at the state of Meta\u0026rsquo;s metaverse experiences. Read this thread, then compare it to what Epic is doing with Fortnite. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how everyone sees this, but Epic seems much further along with the Metaverse than Meta - and sans VR glasses. To me, all of this reinforces that Metaverse talent is going to include a lot of engineers with multiplayer game backgrounds. Most of the scaling issues in the concert are scenarios the Fortnite or COD ops/product/engineering teams have had to consider. That also seems harder than introducing VR into the mix\u0026hellip;\nThe Last Days of MySpace: While we\u0026rsquo;re picking on Meta, found this thread by Cory Doctorow interesting. I\u0026rsquo;m wary of his main point, that Facebook may follow the arc of MySpace (I think it\u0026rsquo;s just too big to have the precipitous fall barring some external changes - think antitrust). That said, there\u0026rsquo;s something interesting here about human relationships and how intrinsic limits in how we think about and process those relationships are product problems that no one has figured out at scale. It\u0026rsquo;s been on my mind a lot during this sabbatical - this notion of smaller, overlapping social networks that better model different ways we trust people. Hopefully more on that at some point in the near future.\nThe State of JS 2021: Easily my biggest frustration with the Node/Javascript ecosystem is just how many, many, many, many, many choices there are for every layer of the application stack. And each of them have different structures, different tradeoffs, and a lot of hand wiring in many cases. I miss the way Rails just said, here\u0026rsquo;s everything you need, feel free to swap things out - and the whole ecosystem more or less aligned with those defaults and optimized around those defaults. I mention this because a survey like this is both helpful to get a sense of where there is general alignment in the JS community while also giving a window into where the community is going.\nCarbon Design System: IBM has an open source design system, which I ran across in my dev research because there\u0026rsquo;s a solid Svelte implementation. Looks interesting, gets spoken of positively in a few forums that I\u0026rsquo;m lurking in.\n","date":"22 February 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-02-21/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Monday Links - 2022-02-21 (late!)","type":"posts"},{"content":"Light list this week. Lots going on at home, and one of these links leads to a 2 1/2 hour video that took up a big chunk of my reading time this week.\nThe Line Goes Up - The Problem with NFTs: Let\u0026rsquo;s start with the length: almost 3 hours. It\u0026rsquo;s not a light watch, but it\u0026rsquo;s worth it. Blockchain tech, for me, falls into that bucket of \u0026ldquo;there\u0026rsquo;s something there, but not any of the things out now.\u0026rdquo; NFTs and Web3 more broadly are all meh ideas to me. I\u0026rsquo;m happy some artists I follow are getting to make, in a few cases, life altering amounts of money from their work via NFTs. I\u0026rsquo;m also truly intrigued by the implications of some of the underlying trust and threat models solved by the blockchain and surrounding products. @foldablehuman makes a compelling case that none of that actually matters, and that I\u0026rsquo;m falling for the grift of many NFT true believers. This is accessible enough for anyone. It\u0026rsquo;s well put together and should make everyone pause before dropping a lot of money into crypto or NFT/Web3. Introducing Garage, our self-hosted distributed object storage solution: One of my hobbies is home automation, largely relying on Home Assistant. Home Automation is pretty invasive from a data standpoint - for example, imagine a location triggered automation like \u0026ldquo;turn on the porch light if it\u0026rsquo;s getting dark and at least one person isn\u0026rsquo;t home.\u0026rdquo; This means the service needs to track your location, which generates an entire pool of data that can be monetized. I\u0026rsquo;d prefer to self host this stuff, hence Home Assistant. When I see software like Garage, that aim to solve practical storage problems in ways that allow a different model where self-hosting is an option, I\u0026rsquo;m intrigued. The Hacker News thread was also illuminating. Skädis pegboards from Ikea: Another sabbatical project: clean up my workshop so I can use it more often. Found these cheap pegboards from Ikea that look good and actually seem really functional. Lots of fun little attachments that are available. It\u0026rsquo;s also widely supported by the maker community. I was inspired to look into these by this really nice looking set of filament spool holders on Thingiverse. If you need a peg board (not a message board), this looks nice and is relatively inexpensive. ","date":"14 February 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-02-14/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Monday Links - 2022-02-14","type":"posts"},{"content":"Been a busy week, forgot to post these on Monday. A couple of fun projects below if you own a 3D printer and are a bit of a nerd.\nA Tale of Attempted Censorship in Three Acts: One bit of news to open, then onto the fun tech stuff. Censorship and book banning is on the rise in the US as the country has lurched rightward. This post offered a little bit of hope, as long as the censorship push doesn\u0026rsquo;t extend to private enterprises. Also, Maus is phenomenal. If you haven\u0026rsquo;t read it, you should. My copy has been proudly displayed on a shelf for almost 20 years now. E-Ink Dashboard for Home Assistant: If you\u0026rsquo;re using Home Assistant, I wrote up build instructions for a simple e-ink dashboard that can display sensor data or anything else you want from your Home Assistant server. The writeup on my projects blog includes source code. Feel free to fire questions my direction on twitter. If you don\u0026rsquo;t know about Home Assistant, it\u0026rsquo;s an open source software package for automating your home - think controlling smart switches, lights, heating, etc. JWST Hanging Wall Model: This is my next project, a simple wall hanging to decorate my workshop in the basement. It\u0026rsquo;s inspired by the optical telescope element on the James Webb Space Telescope. If you haven\u0026rsquo;t been following along, read up on the telescope - it\u0026rsquo;s an amazing feat of engineering and science. Can\u0026rsquo;t wait to see what they\u0026rsquo;re able to observe with the new instrument. (I\u0026rsquo;ll have a writeup of this on my project blog when it\u0026rsquo;s finished) queue.run: One of my other sabbatical projects is to build an app. I\u0026rsquo;m still deciding and sketching out what it will be, but I\u0026rsquo;m using this time to evaluate languages and frameworks. I\u0026rsquo;m leaning toward javascript and node, but one of my big concerns is the cognitive overhead of getting started. So many decisions have to get made up front with packaging, deployment, etc. In other words, multiple rabbit holes to get sucked into, wasting time and, frankly, causing me to abandon side projects. So, I was excited to see @assaf\u0026rsquo;s work on queue.run, which is a clever framework for API services (primarily) that makes a lot of sane, opinionated, default choices. Playing around with this more this week. SvelteKit: Another framework I\u0026rsquo;m looking closely at is Svelte and their attempt at a set of sane defaults, SvelteKit. We used Svelte for a POC project in my last gig and, after a brief learning curve, I really enjoyed working in it. Simple syntax, speedy, and avoids some of the mental overhead of React (though I still like that, too). The Svelte lead was just hired by Vercel, so that\u0026rsquo;s hopefully a sign of increased shipping velocity and long term stability for the project. Making the web better. With blocks!: Joel Spolsky\u0026rsquo;s introduction to a new standard they\u0026rsquo;re sponsoring called the Block Protocol. Modern blog engines organize text into this idea of blocks. These might be simple like a \u0026ldquo;paragraph\u0026rdquo; block up to something fancier like a \u0026ldquo;spreadsheet\u0026rdquo; block. Right now, blocks are proprietary to the platform you\u0026rsquo;re using. The Block Protocol is attempting to make them interchangeable across platforms. Yew.rs and egui: One last dev trend I\u0026rsquo;m noticing is the growing use of Rust in lots of different client side scenarios. These links are to two frameworks, one shared from @assaf\u0026rsquo;s newsletter (which you should all subscribe to) and one shared by a former colleague. The common theme is Rust\u0026rsquo;s language features coupled with WebAssembly\u0026rsquo;s growing ubiquity. Another example: Disney Streaming is using Rust in their ADK - Mike Hanley and team did a great writeup a while back. ","date":"9 February 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-02-07/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Monday Links - 2022-02-07 (late!)","type":"posts"},{"content":"UPDATE Jan 3, 2026: I\u0026rsquo;m happy to say that I\u0026rsquo;ve made a few improvements to the source code for this screen, including an updated driver for the original T5 that I used. It turned out that my drawing code wasn\u0026rsquo;t great, and the original driver I used for the T5 was no longer compatible with the latest ESPHome. With the help of Claude Code, I created an updated LilyGo T5 driver and then also updated my code for this project to get more consistent, crisp drawing output. For the last few months, I really thought that the screen was failing - that\u0026rsquo;s how bad it looked. With this new code, everything is (nearly) perfectly drawn again.\nBackground # I\u0026rsquo;m a huge HomeAssistant fan. It\u0026rsquo;s an open source home automation platform similar to SmartThings that allows fully automating things like lights, sensors, and other smart devices around the house. The nice thing is that it\u0026rsquo;s fully private - runs on a computer in my house, so I have full control of the data. It also means I have a lot of data that I can display in interesting ways. The question is where and how to display it.\nThis little project builds a small, power-efficient display solution that can run on battery power for a few days at least. I\u0026rsquo;m still testing out the full battery life, but it\u0026rsquo;s been pretty good.\nTo achieve the power efficiency, I wanted to try two things:\nan e-ink display, which only needs power to refresh the screen a microcontroller like an ESP8266 or an ESP32, which has wifi and a decent amount of RAM but a very, very power efficient deep sleep mode. On Reddit, I stumbled across a great looking build that used an off-the-shelf solution that brings both in one package, the LilyGo T5. This looked perfect, so I set about recreating that person\u0026rsquo;s dashboard with my own data ideas. I started with his code, then simplified and evolved it into something a little different. The result is in the photo above.\nIngredients # LilyGo T5 4.7\u0026quot; - E-Ink Display + ESP32 Microcontroller all-in-in Hardware ESPHome - Firmware framework for ESP microcontrollers \u0026amp; Home Assistant Inspiration for this build on Reddit Original Code from the Reddit User My source code Thingiverse link for the case Build Notes # The data displayed here is not the final use case. I have some ideas for the kids that I\u0026rsquo;m still working on. I don\u0026rsquo;t care this much about the temperature in my house. 😀 I modified the sleep code from the original to try and get an exact sleep window. The original is simpler, but prone to weird bugs if you get the math wrong on the night_sleep_time This display supports partial refresh, which is nice. Still some blinking/flickering that\u0026rsquo;s part of the update process, but it\u0026rsquo;s very localized. If you\u0026rsquo;ve used a Kindle, think about how that updates - this is like that. ESPHome doesn\u0026rsquo;t support it well, so take a close look at my display section to see how I set that up. ESPHome\u0026rsquo;s embedded C++ thing (look at the lambdas or the display logic) is weird, but ok once you get the hang of it. Helps if you\u0026rsquo;ve ever coded C or C++, though it\u0026rsquo;s not necessary. I chose the 18650 battery version, since I had a few lying around. Make sure you pick the right one and get a battery. It can be powered by USB-C without a battery, too. Other Resources # ESP32 on Wikipedia and at Espressif Have fun, and share your builds! Ping me @usefulclever on Twitter or Instagram if you have questions.\n","date":"2 February 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/simple-eink-dashboard/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Recipe: Low power, readable data display using a LilyGo T5","type":"posts"},{"content":" Roblox Return to Service 10/28-10/31 2021: Roblox posted a long, detailed postmortem of their multi-day outage back in October. I could quibble with the timing (some info earlier is better than waiting until all of this was clear), this is a great explanation of the underlying issue and the factors that exacerbated the outage into a multi-day issue. Having been in a few all-night-outage situations myself, the clarity this transparency brings is worth it. Lego\u0026rsquo;s Vintage Typewriter: Lego released a vintage typewriter that has working keys and can load paper (it doesn\u0026rsquo;t actually type, though). Includes a fabric piece, which is apparently a first for Lego. (via @assaf) CBS\u0026rsquo; RomoVision Technology, in Collaboration With Next Gen Stats and Second Spectrum, Is the Future of TV Sports\u0026mdash;Starting Right Now: While I prefer ESPN\u0026rsquo;s rendering of this data (which was built by one of my former teams - I may be biased), this is an interesting and simple way to use this data. Needs some better storytelling tooling, but I like it. Also, weird sharing sports stuff here and not into Slack\u0026hellip; :) Speaking of which\u0026hellip; Some personal news: I\u0026rsquo;m taking a little mini-sabbatical and have left Disney. Details at the link. Hit me up if you want to build anything fun while I\u0026rsquo;m on my break. ","date":"31 January 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-01-31/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Monday Links - 2022-01-31","type":"posts"},{"content":" Melatonin Isn\u0026rsquo;t a Sleeping Pill. Here\u0026rsquo;s How to Use It: An interesting rundown of melatonin and it\u0026rsquo;s uses, with links to some interesting looking jet lag calculators. When I was traveling regularly to LA or Europe or India, I basically figured out similar patterns. It looks like the calculators take the precision up a notch. Curious if folks find they work well. The Agony of Parents With Kids Under 5: A colleague sent me this as we were talking about how weird the current COVID moment is - lots of people are ready to move on and live normally and leave the unvaccinated to their own outcomes. The challenge is that not everyone can get the vaccine, and in that reality lies a real public health dilemma - even if the kids will likely be ok, isolation, care, and other stresses put parents in a tough spot. Neil Cybart\u0026rsquo;s Thread on Twitter: Another colleague and I were discussing Peloton\u0026rsquo;s recent stock slide and the state of their business. Both of us are fans of the company and owners of the Bike. Even then, it\u0026rsquo;s hard to deny that the company has missed a few things along the way. As one glaring example: they\u0026rsquo;ve done nothing in the app to capitalize on their strong community. It\u0026rsquo;s literally a bolt on. The most significant community activity happens on Facebook, Instagram, and elsewhere. Another glaring item - they claim they are a digital app company first, not an equipment selling company but\u0026hellip; their apps are underwhelming compared to the bike. Lots of interesting ideas on planning workouts, leaning into social competitiveness or reinforcement, etc just aren\u0026rsquo;t there without the big touchscreen (and even with the equipment, in some cases). I am still a fan, but I do worry if they\u0026rsquo;re in trouble. Neil Cybart\u0026rsquo;s thread lays out some business reasons to worry. J Is for Jim Crow - Typography and Racial Stereotypes: An interesting post and links highlighting a concept of \u0026ldquo;stereo-typography\u0026rdquo; - brushed fonts as \u0026ldquo;Asian\u0026rdquo; as an example. Be sure to click through to the main story and see the background on the creation of Ruby, a font that gives a new name and a new tweak to a typeface with a complicated history. Police in this tiny Alabama town suck drivers into legal ‘black hole\u0026rsquo;: A little town of 1,253 in Alabama has built a \u0026ldquo;police empire\u0026rdquo; by milking passersby to the tune of $610,000 in 2020 alone. \u0026ldquo;\u0026lsquo;Brookside is a poster child for policing for profit,\u0026rsquo; said Carla Crowder, the director of Alabama Appleseed Center for Law \u0026amp; Justice, a nonprofit devoted to justice and equity.\u0026rdquo; ","date":"24 January 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-01-24/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Monday Links - 2022-01-24","type":"posts"},{"content":"A light list today reflecting some (light) travel this weekend to visit family.\nHow Signal is playing with fire: Hard to deny that cryptocurrency is popular for illegal activity. The whole ecosystem of ransomware is boosted by Bitcoin, for example. This piece explores what might happen when an end-to-end encrypted messaging service embraces anonymous or pseudonymous payments via crypto. Will Smith turned down the role of Neo in the Matrix (YouTube Link): I both completely understand Will Smith\u0026rsquo;s logic on this, and I also cannot imagine anyone but Keanu Reeves in that role. Also, we got Wild Wild West. Thank you, Will Smith. 🙃 tkellogg/dura: Autosave for your git repos in a way that doesn\u0026rsquo;t muck with your actual branches. Seems interesting. (via labnotes.org) ","date":"17 January 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-01-17/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Monday Links - 2022-01-17","type":"posts"},{"content":"Lots of contrarian crypto posts coming out lately. Glad I\u0026rsquo;m not the only one skeptical/confused.\nCrypto: the good, the bad, the ugly: A good rundown (that\u0026rsquo;s very accessible if you\u0026rsquo;re not a crypto nerd) of the state of crypto. Like the author, I feel there\u0026rsquo;s something there, but it\u0026rsquo;s not clear any of the current ideas are anything but excitement and froth. Today on Sick Sad World: How The Cryptobros Have Fallen (warning: strong language): The other big disconnect for me has been the lofty language of crypto (\u0026ldquo;Freedom! Liberty!\u0026rdquo;) and the reality of what they\u0026rsquo;ve created so far. JWZ nails this in his typical, brutally cynical way. \u0026ldquo;Corrosive Communities\u0026rdquo;: How A Facebook Fight Over Wind Power Predicts the Future of Local Politics in America: A really well reported story on how social media enabled an intense local fight with all the toxicity emblematic of modern political debate. I could\u0026rsquo;ve linked to this article about a three percenter winning a school board seat in Washington State. Similar dynamics, scarier underlying context. How Shein beat Amazon at its own game \u0026ndash; and reinvented fast fashion: Really interesting story about Shein, a fast fashion marketplace that you\u0026rsquo;ll hear about if you haven\u0026rsquo;t already. There\u0026rsquo;s a broader trend that\u0026rsquo;s now obvious about internet-first ideas coming out of China (and India a bit) and moving west. Railway lines once connected the Middle East: Interesting bit of history that I didn\u0026rsquo;t know. Going from Istanbul to Jerusalem with stops in Aleppo or Homs, places now better known as war zones instead of thriving stops along a major trade route. Tech I\u0026rsquo;m Watching in 2022: Thoughtful people-centric list from Anil Dash. (Crypto doesn\u0026rsquo;t make the list, if you were wondering). ","date":"10 January 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2022-01-10/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Monday Links - 2022-01-10","type":"posts"},{"content":"(note: this is the first of a new weekly post where I\u0026rsquo;m going to aggregate interesting things that cross my feeds. Monday posts with links pulled together over the week prior.)\nThe Pareto Funtier: If you\u0026rsquo;re looking for an explanation of why NFTs/Bitcoin/Ethereum/etc have what seem like irrational value movement, this is article is the closest I\u0026rsquo;ve come to going, \u0026ldquo;Ok, I can kinda see that, and it\u0026rsquo;s actually an optimistic view on things I actually care about.\u0026rdquo; Embrace the 10-foot space: An article from our Disney+ teams focused on the living room experience. A good rundown of the types of things that matter. IMAX Enhanced: A Disney Streaming leader mentioned the 10-foot article in the context of sound design. Disney+ launched IMAX Enhanced versions of some Marvel and Star Wars titles, and I was curious what that branding/certification meant. Might be time to upgrade the sound at home\u0026hellip; ","date":"6 December 2021","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/monday-links/2021-12-06/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Monday Links - 2021-12-06","type":"posts"},{"content":"I bring a unique blend of hands-on product expertise, executive leadership, deep technology insight, and a relentless focus on transforming ideas into products that succeed. Our passion is bridging the gap between impressive tech demos and impactful, viable products \u0026mdash; discovering the practical value in the latest innovations and helping companies leverage their strengths to build something extraordinary.\nThe idea behind UsefulClever is simple - getting real products to real users \u0026mdash; fast. My focus is on moving beyond prototypes and actually shipping. While I\u0026rsquo;m no longer available as a part-time CTO, I\u0026rsquo;m always happy to be a technical advisor for startups and companies that can benefit from my experience. See the about page for more details.\n","date":"3 January 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/","section":"","summary":"","title":"","type":"page"},{"content":"","date":"3 January 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/mondaylinks/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Mondaylinks","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"3 January 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Posts","type":"posts"},{"content":"","date":"3 January 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Tags","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"7 December 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/general/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"General","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"7 December 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/projects/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Projects","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"5 October 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/adsb/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Adsb","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"5 October 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/flight-tracking/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Flight-Tracking","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"5 October 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/piaware/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Piaware","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"5 October 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/raspberry-pi/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Raspberry-Pi","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"12 November 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/about/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"About","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"29 October 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/updates/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Updates","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"4 October 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/lora/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Lora","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"4 October 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/meshtastic/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Meshtastic","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"17 September 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/hailo-8l/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Hailo-8l","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"2 February 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/eink/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Eink","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"2 February 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/esp32/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Esp32","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"2 February 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/lilygot5/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Lilygot5","type":"tags"},{"content":"","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/authors/","section":"Authors","summary":"","title":"Authors","type":"authors"},{"content":"","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/categories/","section":"Categories","summary":"","title":"Categories","type":"categories"},{"content":"","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/series/","section":"Series","summary":"","title":"Series","type":"series"}]