Recently, I was thinking about how we are already in the middle of this decade and had an epiphany – most of the people who’ve inspired me over the last decade don’t seem to inspire me anymore.
TJ has been very quiet. I respect the guy a lot. I reached out to him on Twitter to see if he was doing okay. He’s doing fine and confirmed that he was taking time off from social media.
Coming to Dwayne Johnson, DHH, and Casey – I am not inspired by them anymore. I liked them for the most part of the last decade, but now, it looks like they’ve changed. Each have their own weirdness taking over them and I don’t like that.
Dwayne just feels very fake and artificial now. It’s like he does everything for the visuals.
DHH has started acting like a Elon wannabe, which is just sad and lame.
Casey seems to be in a different stage of his life. IDK what’s going on with him but he feels very unrelatable now.
I guess that’s the process of evolution. You find new sources of inspiration and move on.
Today (March 20th) marks the 15th birthday of my blog. It has been the only and the most consistent place that provided a creative outlet for my thoughts over the past 15 years. I have, for the most part, only used it for long-form writing.
15 years ago, after trying various platforms and techniques, I chose to run my blog on WordPress. It’s crazy that I’m back on it after switching to multiple other ways during this time span. I’m not going to say that WordPress, the CMS, is great, but the CMS + their hosting offering is definitely a solid package. I’m grateful for all the work that’s being done by the open source community around WordPress.
I used to run my own instance back then on Rackspace, but then I got tired of maintaining it. I felt like it took my focus away from writing. It’s crazy that I still feel the same about hosting my own blog after all these years. I tried it and I didn’t enjoy it.
I have been a very happy customer ever since I settled in on WordPress.com. Now, I am able to focus on the writing and not the non-fun aspects of maintaining a blog.
One of the reasons I got my first professional opportunity was my blog. Ever since, I’ve gotten a lot of recruiters reach out to me after reading my blog. This is why I tell others to start their personal blogs. You don’t know how it might help you. Also, it’s a great way to express yourself.
Anyway, here’s to another 15 years and more. Cheers! 🍻
While I was trying to figure out how to attack my problems in 2023, I devised a technique to help with exactly this. Even though this is only a part of my effort, it played a significant role in helping me achieve what I wanted to.
The Achievement Log
The idea of using Done lists have been around for a while now. You can search for it and find a lot of high quality resources to know their usage. My idea is based on Done lists.
I maintain an umbrella list of 12 Achievement Logs for the year, one for each month. Each of these logs contain events that I consider an achievement, during that month. This helps me review my achievements later and motivates me to be consistent.
I journal on a daily basis. While I do, I just log my achievements. The log is populated over the month and I soon understand what I’m doing right and where I need to improve. This doesn’t put any pressure on me. Instead, it helps me get better at the things I don’t do.
Achievement Log
This is especially more useful if you use a Personal Knowledge Management tool that supports backlinks. You can add achievements in a more seamless way since you don’t really have to go to the log to add the entry. You can just backlink the entry to the log from anywhere in the knowledge graph.
I’ve always been interested in monitoring indoor Air Quality. I think the itch to monitor indoor Air Quality grew over the years as the wild fires started getting worse, here in California. I even have a dedicated Watch (Apple) face that includes the Air Quality Index (AQI) complication.
Indoor Air Quality
Monitoring air quality typically includes monitoring Carbon dioxide (CO2), Particulate Matter (PM2.5 – represents particles that <= 2.5 microns in diameter), Temperature, Humidity, and Total Volatile Organic Compounds (TVOC). Some monitors include a few other stats, but these are more common.
There are many monitors available online that monitor these. Most of them are either bulky, wired, fugly, or just inaccurate.
After some research, earlier this year, I found 2 very good indoor air quality monitors.
One is from Awair, called the Element. It monitors all of the above, but it’s wired. Even though it looks cool, it’s slightly bigger than what I wanted. So, I went with the other one that I liked, the SAF Aranet4 Home.
This one is wireless, replaceable battery operated (2 AAs), has a cool E Ink display but it doesn’t include PM2.5/TVOC monitoring. It’s apparently quite accurate and the best part is that it’s tiny.
My palm for reference.
The moment I switched it ON, I was shocked at the initial reading!
The first reading at my place.
To give you context on why this value is shocking, here’s list of the expected CO2 levels –
420 ppm – fresh outdoor air
< 1000 ppm – indoors
1000 ppm to 1400 ppm – brain cognitive function decreases by 15%
> 1400 ppm – brain cognitive function decreases by 50%
CO2 levels are expressed in ppm – parts per million
So yeah, I was shocked to know we were living in conditions where we had 50% less brain cognitive function. Maybe this explains all the dumb shit I do ☺️
One way I could think of lowering this number was by improving ventilation and that’s by opening up the windows and doors. This improved the CO2 level very quickly. After monitoring it for a couple of days, I’ve gathered the CO2 data and how proper ventilation affects the value.
Green to Red
Closed the windows @ 22:30Peak CO2
The above is data from my bedroom, with two people sleeping (no, I don’t go to bed at 22:30, I just closed the bedroom windows at that time).
Red to Orange and then to Green
Opened the windows at 11:00The moment CO2 dropped to < 1000Green readings while the windows were open
This morning, I opened the bedroom windows at 11:00. As you can see from the above graphs, it took about 55 mins for the CO2 levels to drop from 1670 ppm to 999 ppm.
The green region shows an uptick and that’s because I moved the monitor into the hall. Opening bedroom windows seemed to lower the overall indoor CO2.
Possible ways to improve indoor CO2/Air Quality
There are a number of solutions to fix different aspects of indoor air quality.
Improving ventilation – Simplest way is to open the windows and balcony/patio doors to let the air circulate around. I’ve been using this technique and it has been working wonders.
Air Purifier – These are not cheap, at least the good ones. These are great when the outside air quality is poor or during winters, when you can’t really open your windows while it’s cold outside.
Indoor Plants – Plants need CO2 to function. Naturally, these are great to help improve indoor CO2 levels.
Replace AC’s Air filters – Replace air filters to improve your indoor air quality.
I suspect my home AC’s air filters. They might need to be replaced. I will monitor the data from my sensor for another week and see if it indeed does require a replacement. I will report back my findings soon.
In the past, I tried using a PM2.5 monitor with my Raspberry Pi. It worked wonders but having the Pi run all the time seemed like a hassle for this use case.
I’m starting a new series called Taming Computers. It’s my new side project. It’s a little meta, in that, it’s a side project for a few other side projects. I will be blogging Computer Science concepts varying from basic to advanced. I’ll try to include my Banksy-esque artsy illustrations.
The main purpose of this effort is to create a collection of content that I’ve learned while researching my side projects. It’ll also be a channel for interesting stuff in the world of Computer Science. This is me, sort of applying the Feynman Technique. I hope to make it fun and interesting for myself and for anyone reading them.
I originally drafted this post to be posted around late January. I had to undergo a surgery in January and ended up finishing it late.
There I’ve finally said it.
I’ve been rooting for Twitter (I refuse to call it by its new name until they stop redirecting to twitter.com when I type in x.com in the browser) to get better under Elon and now I’ve completely given up. I backed Elon and thought he’d improve it. I was so wrong. The man destroyed one of my favorite social networks.
I mean, look at this nonsense –
An 𝕏 spam/scam bot accidentally flagged many legitimate accounts today. This is being fixed.
I never received these spammy mentions or DMs before Elon took over. I specifically point that out, because he mentioned that Twitter, before he bought it, had millions of spam bots and he deleted about 80-90% of them. This should’ve fixed the issue. Instead, it made it worse. I refuse to believe that he did anything about it.
Quantity over quality
Elon tried to compete with Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube to draw content creators to the platform. For this, he created premium subscriptions. In this process, he’s made the platform so bad that the emphasis is now on quantity than quality.
Open any random tweet that has over 100 likes and check the replies. It’s filled with random users posting unrelated content to drive up their tweet’s engagement. I find it so annoying seeing people use these lame tactics for their benefit. All the top replies are from other premium users trying to hijack the popularity of that tweet.
Removing limitations
One of the things that I enjoyed about Twitter was its character limit. It forced people to think and articulate better.
Dirty tricks to promote content
Elon has been begging content creators to post their videos directly on Twitter. Now that Mr. Beast finally caved and posted his recent video on it, Elon immediately Quote Tweeted it. He did that to boost the views. Even a dimwit would know that. He didn’t stop there though. Check this out: https://mashable.com/article/x-twitter-elon-musk-mrbeast-video-unlabaled-ads-creator-monetization
To this, Elon responded by saying –
To the best of my knowledge, we have done nothing to amplify his viewers
He’s the CEO of the company and says “to the best of my knowledge”. He’s usually very confident in saying things. It’s uncharacteristic of him to say “to the best of my knowledge”. But now, he chose his words very carefully.
Even Mr. Beast was surprised by the number of views he got on the platform. By now, every one knows these tricks.
I am a big fan of journaling and I use Roam to track my Daily Notes. I also track my mood using Roam’s hashtag feature, which is another way of backlinking in Roam.
Last year, right around this time, I learned that Roam has a command called /Streak and I never found a good use case for it. A year later, last week, I was looking back at what I had written the previous year that day (I love doing that) and found my notes on this command. As soon as I read it, I got an idea on where I could use it.
Streak command
The Streak command lets you pick a page and tracks how often you’ve updated that page. The cool thing is that Roam considers references to the page as updates. So, whenever you backlink or use a hashtag of that page, Roam tracks it as an update to the backlinked page and updates your streak.
This gave me an idea. The way I track my daily mood is by using Hashtags. Let’s say one of the hashtags I used to describe my mood today is Relaxed, I can just do the following to see how many times over the past year or even overall, I felt relaxed.
I first trigger the Streak command by using /Streak. Roam then replaces the text with this text: {{[[streak]]: [[$]]}}. I put a $ to denote the cursor position. Now, I just put in the name of the page I want to see the streak of. In this case, {{[[streak]]: [[Relaxed]]}}. That’s it. Once I hit enter, Roam displays the streak for the page/hashtag Relaxed.
It’s embarrassing how few times I felt relaxed over the past few months
I use it with various other pages too, but this to me seems like one of the best use cases for me.
This press release seems quite direct. I’ve read some of the comments online and I find it funny that people think Spotify made Apple’s App Store famous. This is just not true. Apparently, Spotify has a bigger market on Apple’s platform than Android.
There’s a lot to the story and let’s see what happens in the coming days. I would like to see how Spotify respond to this.
I was reading up on Completely Fair Scheduler the other day on Wikipedia. While doing so, I hovered over some of the references as I always do, to get the title of the linked page before I click on ’em. I noticed something strange and interesting. Some of the references showed the tooltips when hovered, while the rest soft highlighted the reference at the bottom of the page.
At first, I thought it was a bug and then I realized it wasn’t. It was the new UX from the latest version of Wikipedia. If you hover over a reference link and have the reference from the reference section actively showing on your screen, the tooltip isn’t displayed. Instead, the corresponding reference from the references section is highlighted with a background fade animation. If the reference from the reference section isn’t actively displayed on your screen, a tooltip is popped instead.
The UX is subtle and nice. I like it.
I didn’t look at Wikipedia’s implementation, but it’s actually not that hard to implement that. Here’s a sample implementation that works by displaying the tooltip when the element is not seen in the current viewport.
2023 has been kind to me. I’m grateful to the year it has been. My main focus for 2023 was my Health. That was it. I had no other priorities.
Health
In 2012, I was diagnosed with BPPV. I suffered episodes of BPPV since then. Each episode typically lasts for about a week to 12 days (only once it lasted for 16 days). These episodes started off from being once a year. They slowly got worse – the length of the episode and the frequency. By 2021 November, it got so worse that I had BPPV almost every month in 2022. 2022 was one of the most challenging years of my existence. It pushed my limits in terms of most aspects of my life. Looking back at it, I’m just so glad that I didn’t break at any point.
Besides my BPPV, I ended with a few other issues, chronic neck pain, back issues, severe dry eye issue, etc. So, towards the end of December 2022, I decided to fully prioritize Health in 2023. What this meant was that I wanted to be able to do all of what I usually do, while prioritizing health.
I consider my effort to focus on health, a grand success! 🎉
I made a list of all of my health issues and came up with ways to attack them. Every month, I would religiously rate my effort at which I was trying to get these issues under control. I tracked these in my Roam graph. If I wasn’t following a certain path properly, I would figure out the friction points and update the path to avoid those. This really helped me achieve a lot of my goals in 2023.
I wish I could dive deep into what information I tracked to improve my health issues, but I can’t since they’re very specific to my issues.
Sleep
I’ve never given importance to sleep until 2023. In 2022, I noticed that I was barely getting 7 hours of sleep and most nights it was less than 6 hours. It was ridiculously low. So, I decided to force myself to sleep more, on a daily basis. Here’s how the 6 month averages look from the data I tracked every single day.
Jan to Jul sleep data from Apple HealthJul to Dec sleep data from Apple Health
Improving on sleep changed my life. The way I did it was by using the Sleep/Wake Up feature in the Alarm clock in the watchOS and iOS. Every day, I would set an alarm and made sure the alarm was 8 hours 15 mins out from the time I went to bed. In the beginning, I would force myself to stay in bed and sleep. After 2 months, it got much simpler. I still have trouble some nights, but most nights, it works.
Track your sleep with whichever sleep tracker you have access to (If you don’t invest in one, get one. It’s a game changer f’real) and plan your sleep.
Getting enough sleep actually helped with a lot of my health issues too, which was fantastic. My dry eye completely went away. I went from using Systane eye drops 4/6 times a day to 0. I don’t feel as fatigued all day anymore.
Running Races
In October 2022, I signed up for a 5K race. I was pumped since I thought I was slowly getting better. The day of the race, I woke up at 05:00 AM. I had BPPV that morning and I felt miserable. I was looking forward to being able to run 5K after a long time and it bummed me out.
In 2023, I ran two 5K races. This is a huge milestone for me. I used to casually run 5K earlier, but ever since my health deteriorated, it became hard for me to walk for a while and not feel anxious/dizzy. So, being able to run 5K again was massive. Being able to finish these races helped me a lot with my anxiety.
Anxiety
Ever since my health got fucked, I developed a strong anxiety. I couldn’t do anything without getting anxious. My vestibular therapist helped me a lot with my dizziness and this in turn helped me deal with anxiety better. She changed my life. I’m forever grateful and indebted to her.
Over the past few years, I developed techniques and strategies to stay positive during tough times. It has been a process and I am glad I believed in myself and the process.
Dealing with anxiety takes a lot of mental effort and for those trying, please don’t give up. You’re so much closer to dealing with it than you think. Keep at it. ❤️
Blog
I set a new PR in 2023 in terms of blogging. I wrote 47 blog posts in 2023! That’s an average of 4 posts per month. I have been more regular at it, something I always wanted to do since 2009. I still have 80 more drafts that I need to get to. I don’t think I will be able to finish all of them in 2024, but I intend to get to most of them.
Fitness
In terms of Fitness, I think I did a decent job. Here are some graphs to compare against my previous years.
Travel
I traveled a decent amount in 2023. I visited the following cities –
Austin, Texas
Houston, Texas
Las Vegas, Nevada
Cancun, Quintana Roo, Mexico — I finally got a vacation for the first time in such a long time.
I cannot stress enough how grateful I am for everything that happened in 2023. I rarely get years like these. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it, but it’s time to move on now.
I envision quite a few challenges in 2024. I will give it what I’ve got and see where it takes me. That’s what we all do. We figure things out and do what needs to be done.
I wish all of you a successful, healthy, and happy New Year 2024. Cheers! 🍻
The Listen to Page feature on Mobile Safari has been a lovely new addition to iOS. I’ve been using it since iOS 17 released and it has been great. The feature basically lets you listen to articles/posts opened in the Safari browser on iOS.
Safari has always had the Speech feature, which would let you select text on a web page and select Speech from the context menu. It sounded awful and there were no controls. If you accidentally selected a large text and select the Speech option, you’re screwed. I don’t remember if you could stop the Speech by closing the tab. Anyway, it was an awful implementation.
The new Listen to Page feature addresses all the issues with the previous inferior implementation.
Awesomeness
1. It shows user controls 🎉
2. It supports Dynamic Island 🏝️
3. You can end it, whenever ✅
4. And finally, the best part – It uses Siri’s voice! 🤖 It doesn’t feel robotic anymore.
if you’re like me and have a ton of articles that you need to catch up on, this would be the ideal way to go. You can basically listen to them all while commuting or exercising.
Ideally, I would like to make all of this seamless by using my “Read later” list to create a personal podcast for myself that I could listen to whenever. That way, any time I add a url to that folder on my bookmarks bar, it’d get picked up and added to my podcast for me to consume later. I haven’t done any kind of research on whether I can achieve this using SiriKit yet. Something like this could be a Safari extension or a basic iOS app.
I’ve had my Logitech MX Master 3S have its low res moments from time to time, but lately, it has gotten way worse. After trying out various solutions, I found the following works perfectly well. I’ll share the solution first and then explain what it is.
is used to change the Bluetooth coexistence mode on a Mac computer. Bluetooth coexistence mode is a setting that determines how Bluetooth and Wi-Fi devices share the 2.4 GHz radio frequency band. There are three possible coexistence modes:
Performance: This mode prioritizes Bluetooth performance, which can sometimes cause interference with Wi-Fi.
Balanced: This mode tries to balance the performance of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
Hybrid: This mode prioritizes Wi-Fi performance, which can sometimes cause a slight decrease in Bluetooth performance.
The bluetoothCoexMgmt Hybrid setting tells the computer to use the Hybrid coexistence mode. This mode is generally recommended for most users, as it provides a good balance of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi performance. However, if you are experiencing Wi-Fi interference, you may want to try changing the coexistence mode to Balanced or Performance.
Conclusion
I will keep an eye out to see if there’s any performance hit on my Wifi experience. So, far I’ve been using it for a couple of days and haven’t had any issues.
Update 12/07/2023: 10 days later, this seems to be working perfectly well.
Before we get to the post, I just want to say one thing. Yes, even I was offered the Interim CEO role at OpenAI. I declined it. Now let’s go on with my post.
better cable management for simpler switching between the two cables, power and display
I wanted to solve these in a sleek and minimal way too. This seemed like a bigger challenge.
Considerations
At first, I considered having a better cable management strategy and researched a lot for it. I almost finalized on a solution that basically required me to fix a casing to the table that’d hold the cables underneath it.
Then, one day, at work, I noticed a Dell monitor that had support for both power and display. Immediately, I realized that this essentially would solve both the problems. This made me switch my research into monitors that supported this feature.
Solution
I searched a lot of monitors and fixed on the Apple Studio Display. There’s a few particular things that made me pick this one to solve the remainder of my targeted problems and then some.
No extra cables. Just one power + video cable. This replaces 3 cables on my desk with 1.
Ability to control the brightness and not having to deal with different contrast/color levels nonsense. I hated configuring the contrast, sharpness, brightness, etc on my old monitor.
Tilt + Height control is an underrated feature.
In-built webcam so I can use it in meetings with much ease. I refuse to use a third-party external webcam and instead, been using the iPhone camera with continuity.
Here’s the old setup –
Old setupOld cable setup
Here’s the new setup –
New setupNew cable setup
With that, I don’t think I have anything else I would like to change on my desk at this point of time. To switch from one computer to another, I do the following –
You know what’s harder to scale than performance of web servers? Finding foundational ideas that scale for 20 years and still feel good. That requires a level of foresight.
11 years ago, I wrote a post about The Cloud & I. I wanted to revisit it and provide an update on my current usage.
In terms of the tools and services I use, not a lot has changed over the decade.
Music
Apple Music
I don’t store music anymore. I just use Apple Music. I rarely download songs for offline listening. It doesn’t seem necessary anymore given the ubiquity of mobile data service. However, I was curious to see what happened to my music collection on Google Music and tried clicking the link and it led to this –
figures…
I tried checking Grooveshark and it just looked spammy. I forgot my Last.fm credentials and I didn’t bother resetting the password either.
Photos
I still use Flickr. I’ve been a paid subscriber since 12 years. I rarely use Dropbox. I haven’t logged into my SkyDrive (now OneDrive) in ages. iCloud is my primary cloud storage. It’s just convenient.
Notes
Evernote was great, but it just couldn’t compete with the other tools. For the longest time, I used Apple Notes. Right when the pandemic started, I switched to Roam and it serves as my primary note-taking tool. I still use Apple Notes every now and then.
Code
GitHub. I love it. Shows how good the service is. I’ve never thought of switching, even once.
Articles
I stopped using Pocket a few years ago. I started using it when it first came out. Back then it was called ReadItLater. I used to be a paid subscriber for a long time and then ended my subscription once I realized that I was just saving the articles and never actually reading them. It just wasn’t for me anymore.
Browsers have evolved to support storing your bookmarks and syncing them over to other computers, natively. So, I use Chrome/Safari bookmarks and sync them across my computers.
Files
iCloud. Again, it’s the convenience.
That’s it. This is how I use the cloud now-a-days.
Today, I’ve enabled it on my blog and it is live. Feel free to follow my blog at https://mastodon.social/@cx@iam.mt on any of your federated platforms such as Mastodon.
Recently, I had to learn Scala for a project at work. I wanted to share the path I took and my thoughts on the Scala programming language the same way I did when Learning Go.
Features I like
My absolute favorite feature is the case classes. Combine them with pattern matching, that just makes it such a powerful feature. This alone changes the way you write Scala code. It’s such a cool feature. I wish other programming languages copied this feature. It’s that good.
Infix notation which allows you to define method names such that you don’t have to call them using the “.” notation. This is very similar to Ruby.
Function currying implementation seems well implemented and the syntax is actually pretty good. This is a unique take, very specific to Scala.
Developer Experience (DX) 🐎💨💩
Like Java, Scala has a horrible DX. Programmers defending Java/Scala’s DX are typically the ones suffering from Stockholm Syndrome or plain masochists. You haven’t seen or tried good DX, so STFU. Disagree with me? That’s fine. Scala has been around since a long time now and still isn’t a popular programming language for this very reason, besides poor marketing.
Documentation
Their API docs and landing page definitely need some love from the community. Compare that to Golang, it’s night and day. The Golang tour is by far, the best tour a programming language has. It’s fantastic and just going through the tour would be good enough for you to get a decent amount of knowledge for a beginner. Java, JavaScript (MDN), Ruby, Golang etc, all have top-notch documentation. Everything is clear and concise.
Ease of setup
This is where Scala shines and blows the other languages out of the water. You essentially install Coursier using Homebrew, that installs the cs command and run cs setup to install Scala. That’s it. Coursier made it so simple. I had Scala installed on my computer in less than 6 mins. Didn’t have to struggle with the setup at all. I don’t think I have ever had such an experience with any other programming language. Installing Ruby for the first time on Linux took me longer than that. Kudos to the team for coming up with such a tool.
IDE
The fact that I have to use an IDE to get the most out of Scala is a buzzkill. I’m not a fan of IDEs and I just like my light weight text editors as my coding environments.
Getting Started
I recommend the following resources to get a good idea of the Scala programming language –
Also, I was going over this video of Martin Odersky, a seemingly nice dude, and found it funny when he mentioned that Scala is superior to Python as a first course in universities.
I was a fan of Elon Musk and his vision in late 2000s and early 2010s. As he became more active on social media, I found him annoying.
I wanted to pick a new book to read and started looking into any interesting books out there. I enjoy reading biographies. So, I chose to go with Elon’s biography, which seemed like an interesting one to pick up next, especially since Walter Isaacson authored it. Oh boy, the book did not disappoint. I highly recommend the book.
The way Walter navigates Elon’s life is fascinating. Going over the various incidents covered in the book was exciting to say the least. My favorite part was how Elon achieved manufacturing 5000 cars/week throughput from the Fremont and Nevada factories during the Model 3 production in 2018. They could totally make a Hollywood movie around the whole Tesla saga. While I was going over this section, it felt like Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay in my head. The quick cuts with a high tempo storytelling as fixing one thing leads to breaking another. It was thrilling.
Some of the highlights I really enjoyed from the book –
Obviously, Walter’s navigation of Elon’s life.
The way Elon solves problems and his Algorithm (I’ll list it towards the end of the post) and his willingness to jump in to solve problems.
How people around Elon perceive his actions and how he switches from being a fun guy to an asshole.
How Elon executes his vision, particularly around SpaceX and how SpaceX achieved rocket reusability at a low cost.
How Elon inspired his teams at Tesla, Starlink, SpaceX, The Boring Company and Twitter.
Elon’s business genius. His focus and sheer will to see his ideas succeed.
The Algorithm
Elon has a famous algorithm that came out of the struggle around manufacturing around 2018. Here it is –
Question Every Requirement: Doing anything without knowing why there’s a requirement is just counter productive. Tying a name to the requirement makes it easy to question it and get clarification.
Delete Any Part or Process You Can: If you delete too much, it’s fine, you can add them back later. In fact, if you don’t add at least 10% of them back later, it means you haven’t deleted enough.
Simplify and Optimize: Simplifying and Optimizing is not meant for parts or processes that don’t need to exist in the first place. It’s meant to simplify and optimize the absolutely necessary ones.
Accelerate Cycle Time: Only after you perform 1, 2, and 3, execute this step.
Automate: This is the very last step where you automate your process that’s efficient.
Personally, the Algorithm hit home with me, ’cause I operate the same way, especially 1, 2, and 3. I highly recommend the book.
My rating of the book: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 5
Walter Isaacson closes the book by saying the following –
Would a restrained Musk accomplish as much as Musk unbound? Is being unfiltered and untethered integral to who he is? Could you get the rockets to orbit or the transition to electric vehicles without accepting all aspects of him, hinged and unhinged? Sometimes great innovators are risk seeking man-children who resist potty training. They can be reckless, cringe-worthy, sometimes, even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.
Have an audio version. So, my entire blog would be available as a podcast. Anytime I post a new blog, it’d be converted from text to audio and published as an episode in my podcast. Bonus: Use my voice to generate the audio. iOS 17 supports this feature natively. So, this is actually feasible.
Both of these will have to be fully automated. There are a few solutions out there, but none of these fully support my requirements. If I’m unable to find a solution that satisfies both of my requirements, I might end up creating something.
The other day, I was watching the MadeByGoogle ’23 Keynote and saw that Google is launching a bunch of new features powered by AI. One of the new features is summarizing the content of a webpage. It’s quite helpful really.
This got me thinking. Today, there’s a ton of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that any author of a website does to their web pages. Some, like me, don’t give a shit. But, most people do. Up until now, this was enough to have good visibility when qualifying or showing up in search results. Moving forward, with these new summarization capabilities (Google already uses these in Google Search), web authors might end up having to focus on AI Summarization Optimization (AISO) too.
I can see folks trying to make it easy for these AI tools to summarize their content. With summarization coming for free, lot of users will resort to using these and this means that most blogs, articles, website marketing pages, etc will resort to optimizing their content to manipulate the AI summarization models.
It’d be hilarious if people start using AI to AISO their content for the AI summarization tools.
Today, I woke up to the wonderful news of Chandrayaan-3 landing on the moon’s south pole. This is a phenomenal achievement by ISRO. Congrats to them and everyone involved in the project.
I see a lot of people worried about AI taking over the world. The Writers Guild of America are on a strike, while AI isn’t their primary concern, it does seem like it’s their secondary concern.
Take a look at the following video by Casey (with the help of AI).
Casey basically asked GPT-4 to write a vlog including dialogues and sort of, screenplay, too. The AI generated a screenplay and he shot it as is, following the script. It was definitely not fun. Nope. Casey also expresses how bland the vlog was and how it lacked any depth.
Casey’s idea of using the AI to solely come up with the script and make an experimental vlog in itself is a fun idea. I enjoyed the experiment, not the script the AI created. If used the right way, AI can make for a powerful assistant. AI has the potential to unlock a lot of cool ideas from existing ones.
People from various fields are already abusing the use of AI. If you search Google Scholar for “As an AI language model” (removing “ChatGPT” & “LLM”), you’ll see these surprising results. This is what it has become. There have been cases where there were lawyers who trusted ChatGPT and got their asses handed to them. There’s a ton of small content creators that use AI to create content. You can tell that the quality is low.
So, an efficient path forward is to embrace AI and improve your game. You can be an artist and focus on the art while your AI assistant handles the boring boilerplate nonsense. It’s all about finding the right balance.
Independent Publisher 2 has been the theme on my blog for about 4 years now. I love its minimalism and simplicity. WordPress has introduced several new features ever since and it looks like the theme doesn’t support these features. This maybe due to the fact that it’s not actively being developed to support these new WordPress UI features. Over the past few months, I’ve discovered many UI bugs in the theme due to these changes.
I haven’t been able to fully focus on my writing due to me spending time focusing on fixing these bugs. So, I’ve been trying out new themes.
If you’ve visited my blog every day, over the past 5 days, you might’ve noticed a different theme each day. That’s ’cause I’ve been playing around with a few themes and settled on this theme for now. It is bold and has an emphasis on typography, which I appreciate. I might stick with this until I find a new one.
If there’s a new social network doing rounds, I’m 100% going to try it out. I will genuinely give it a shot. I belong to the 1% in the 90-9-1 rule. When I use social networks, I actually post content. I don’t just lurk around and form an opinion. I share my thoughts, use the platform for a bit, be it 2 weeks or 2 months or even more, and then measure the value I get from the network.
For me, the real value is from learning from the posted content. Right now, there’re way too many of them. I don’t follow folks with monetary interests. The ones that I do follow, seem to post the same content on all the platforms. Since that is the case, why do I need to be active on all the social networks?
I got this exact thought while I was on a call with my sister last week. So, I decided to test out a new strategy to avoid using too many social networks.
Currently, I use –
YouTube
Twitter
Reddit
Instagram
Threads
Bluesky
Facebook
T2
Retro
LinkedIn
I get real value from (in decreasing order) –
🥇YouTube: Pure gold. Entertainment + learning
🥈Reddit: The communities are just way too valuable
🥈Twitter: This is where I keep up with everything new
🥈Instagram: To keep up with friends’ lives
🥉LinkedIn: Strictly professional networking purposes
I don’t find any real value from the other social networks. Since I don’t delete or disable my social profiles, I just delete the apps on my phone to stop accessing them. Instagram is an exception. I use Instagram on my phone’s web browser and not the app. I install the app to post and immediately delete the app. The iOS app doesn’t have the simplicity anymore. I’ve been doing this since almost 4 years now.
Anyway, for the next 2 weeks, I will just stick to these networks and see how it goes. My goal is to see if I really miss the other social networks. If I do, why? I will post my findings and the outcome of this experiment after 2 weeks.
Update (09/01/2023): Nope, no real value. I’ll stick to the these for now. I will use FB though, I follow some friends there.
CSS has been evolving at a good pace over the past decade and CSS Container Queries is going to be huge. These are available in major browsers since almost a year now and I am excited about these. Check out the docs on MDN.
When Media Queries dropped, it changed the way the websites adapted to various window/screen sizes. This was a total game changer since websites went from using %age based fluid layouts to completely viewport based layouts. The Container Queries seem like the logical next step to it.
With Media Queries, we could query the viewport and use that information to organize our layouts. With Container Queries, we can now query the size of each container (HTML element) and change their displays based on the size of the nearest parent container.
Ever since I read it, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. The more I think about it, the more it seems to make sense. Naturally, I googled a little to see if I could find any sources to back this up and found this NYTimes article (opinion piece). Here’s another piece by The Guardian.
Palo Alto has one of the richest neighborhoods in the Bay Area (and possibly the country), and is filled with trees. It looks really beautiful. After reading more about this insight, it just makes more sense. I never thought about it this way and this blows my mind.
A week ago, I got back from Las Vegas after a trip with my buddies from school. My Southwest flight gate was in the Harvey Milk Terminal. I flew from SFO several times since the terminal opened up, but never got the chance to check it out. My god! The terminal is beautifully designed.
I was so happy looking at the terminal, it seemed state of the art. The restrooms, restaurants, water filters, staircases, etc, everything looked nice. I mean, check it out here: https://aiasf.org/the-harvey-b-milk-terminal/
The art installations are pretty cool. The walls have pictures of Harvey Milk all over. The design is beautiful and the typography is delightful.
The terminal has the whole San Francisco vibe. Any person new to SF can feel the instant cultural shift walking in to the terminal. I loved it. As I was checking out the photos on the walls and the text written underneath, I came across a welcome sign at the terminal exit, written in huge font that read – “Welcome to San Francisco”.
Something about the text seemed so beautiful that I just stood there for 5 mins looking at it. The text color, a variant of black, the font, the font weight, everything about it was so…neat. That’s it, I just had to learn more about the design.
I started reading up about the design and found a few good sources that were directly involved in the projects. Apparently, Dalton Maag consulted on the project and came up a new font for it. I couldn’t find much about the particular font, but from what I remember, it looked very similar to the Myriad font.
If you know which font it is, please let me know.
Read more about the Harvey Milk Terminal project –
Ever since I was a kid, I always loved playing video games. I played a ton of games. At one point, my friends and I even considered pursuing careers as professional video gamers, playing Counter Strike and moving to Sweden.
One of the video game developers I like is Naughty Dog. I’ve always enjoyed playing the Uncharted series and The Last of Us series.
I don’t remember liking any screen adaptations of the video games I played and liked. I didn’t like the Uncharted movie. So, when HBO announced that they were making a TV show based on The Last of Us, I was slightly apprehensive. Even though HBO has a great track record of producing high quality shows, I wasn’t fully sure about this one.
After watching The Last of Us Season 01, I felt happy. I liked the first season. I loved the fact that they chose to make the backdrop look exactly like the one in the game. There were so many resemblances to the game and I enjoyed it.
Great casting by the show producers. I’m calling it now, Bella Ramsey is going to win an Emmy for her portrayal of Ellie. Pedro Pascal did a fine job as Joel. Also, I was very excited to see Nick Offerman in the show (parks and rec fan).
I recommend watching the show.
Back in 2020, Naughty Dog released the sequel to the The Last of Us series. I liked it. The screenplay in the game is cool.
Just finished the game “The Last of Us 2”. The storyline could’ve probably been a little better with some more content, but the gameplay is nice. I enjoyed the ending too. #PS4#TLOU2
