• [l] 2023 / Sep 21 / 21:08 CEST Oh, Substack started their downhill journey today. The iOS app now opens to an algorithmic feed instead of my inbox that contains my subscriptions. Medium lead the way.
• [l] 2023 / Sep 19 / 22:00 CEST Moved my Atoms experiment to my main website. All the post links should still work, they redirect to the post on the new site.
• [l] 2023 / Sep 16 / 13:53 CEST The book review of The Educated Mind I wrote about a few weeks ago went on to win the ACX review contest. Well deserved! The author, Brandon Hendrickson, has his own Substack. There he tries to convey more of Egans theories on education.
• [l] 2023 / Sep 11 / 10:29 CEST The meta study Effectiveness of wearable activity trackers comes to the conclusion that “…there is sufficient evidence to recommend the use of activity trackers”. Specifically they notice an increase of 1800 steps per day, 40 mins more walking and an reduction of 1kg in bodyweight (on average). Fits with my anecdotal evidence.
• [l] 2023 / Sep 08 / 09:13 CEST What consumers can expect from Microsoft and Google beautifully summarized in two Hacker News comments. Context is an “ad privacy” (what a contradiction!) toggle within Chrome: “Does Google do the scummy thing where these toggles get reset to default after an update?”, reply: “No, this is mainly Microsoft's domain. Google's thing is boiling the frog under the hood.” [1]. The discussion happened below this post describing how Chrome starts to directly track users. It’ll share a list of your “topics” with advertisers. I remember a huge uproar when they announced FLoC, they let that the attention cool down and basically turned it on.
• [l] 2023 / Aug 30 / 08:42 CEST Impressive work by Meta AI on motion prediction in videos. Judging from the demo videos, their model even handles temporary occlusion of the objects. Here is the paper’s site and here’s a demo on Hugging Face. The pessimist in me sees this abused for surveillance.
• [l] 2023 / Aug 28 / 13:53 CEST The BigQuery web console is so slow. For larger query building attempts, I opted to push the necessary partitions in a local SQLite DB. Then using something like “DB Browser for SQLite” to iterate much faster. No network round trips, instant feedback.
• [l] 2023 / Aug 17 / 15:03 CEST DIY Espresso, a 3D printed espresso maker powered by liquid CO2 cartridges. Awesome!
• [l] 2023 / Aug 14 / 15:35 CEST This is what medium.com looks like in 2023. I’m so pleased to have moved my posts off from their on my own site. Own your content, but feel free to cross post to other platforms.
• [l] 2023 / Aug 13 / 10:10 CEST “Credit card debt collection“, alternatively dubbed „waste stream management“ by patio11 goes into the intricacies of debt collection. As you might suspect, a lot of abuse happens within this system.
• [l] 2023 / Aug 07 / 09:10 CEST There are RSS feeds for Wikipedia‘s „On this day…“ feature (link) and for the article of the day (link). You can change the language by editing the subdomain of the url. I only found these feeds on the German front page, the English one weirdly doesn’t link to them.
• [l] 2023 / Aug 04 / 17:25 CEST Dictator Book Club: Putin. A review of Masha Gessen‘s „The Man Without A Face“. (Yes, I’m rediscovering Scott Alexander‘s blog)
• [l] 2023 / Aug 02 / 19:50 CEST I found an unexpected yet fascinating read this weekend: A book review of Kieran Egan‘s The Educated Mind. In the book, Egan outlines his vision for a revamped education system. His primary critique on the status quo is that it ignores what students at a particular are naturally good at. He argues that kids in the elementary age are good at understanding stories, metaphors, binaries and jokes. We should use those as tools for teaching. In middle school, extremes, gossip, heroes and idealism join the party. High school students are eager to look at the big „simple“ questions, come up with general schemes, find their place in the world and seek certainty. I haven’t thought about education a lot, but that piece had me on the hook. It’s about a two hour read and I enjoyed every single minute of it.
• [l] 2023 / Jul 29 / 08:28 CEST A less pessimistic and actionable write-up On Climate Change by Bert Hubert. The first time I heard about solar radiation management, injecting sulfur in the stratosphere to cool the earth. It has been a taboo until recently, but is gathering more acceptance. The sulfur converts to sulfur dioxide, which then reflects a tiny amount of sunlight back into space.
• [l] 2023 / Jul 25 / 10:35 CEST Ultra-processed foods are correlated with poorer health (increased risk of mortality). That’s what a study across 21 countries, 140k participants, and a 10y follow-up period found out. Daniel Lemire regularly posts science and technology links, highly recommended!
• [l] 2023 / Jul 22 / 15:09 CEST The German government starts postings screenshots (!) of their tweets. „…It contradicts the principles of the Federal Government to provide the official communication of the Federal Chancellor and the government spokesman alone registered users of a commercial service…“. Yeah, so how about not using privately held platforms to communicate with your people? What a half-assed solution to a problem that was foreseeable from the minute they opened a Twitter account. It looks exactly like some kind of meme page.
• [l] 2023 / Jul 21 / 10:37 CEST There’s an ongoing HN thread about a fly.io outage and the non-response of their support. You can read about multiple commenters migrating to AWS. It’s ridiculous how resilient the Amazon cloud is. But that’s what you get by dog fooding your product. They’ve got a whole other billion dollar business arm relying on their infra. A lot of smaller hosting companies don’t have that luxury and it shows in cases like this. When Bezos calls you because his bookstore is down once a week, you sure as shit put the effort in. And all your smaller customers profit from that. (And you‘ll profit too because you’re going to charge them for that extra 9).
• [l] 2023 / Jul 17 / 10:01 CEST Shell Script RSS Publishing or „shinobi website“ is a shell script for generating and deploying a static website. It also publishes a RSS feed, alle based on .txt files and a bit of metadata. I like the simplicity of that. Wouldn’t be a good fit for me as I do most of my writing here on my phone. (Also not a fan of monospace fonts for longer reads)
• [l] 2023 / Jul 16 / 14:10 CEST China is going green fast, faster than any other nation. It’s not just renewables, forestry and transportation too.
• [l] 2023 / Jul 11 / 14:34 CEST PSA: You can pay Amazon 10 bucks to remove the ads on your kindle‘s lockscreen. Here’s the support page.
• [l] 2023 / Jul 10 / 21:27 CEST Last week, I read three interesting pieces describing how automation through technology affects jobs. “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation” from 2015 looks at the history of automation. It mentions ML only in passing. Otherwise, it goes very deep into affected jobs and skills. First time hearing about job polarisation, where mid-skilled jobs are substituted by tech. Moreover, my first encounter with the lump of labour fallacy. “AI and the automation of work” acts as the perfect segue to the latter piece. It, too, goes into the history of automation, but details LLMs and AGI specifically. “Why customers don’t want chatbots” finally adds a bit of product and UX perspective to the mix. The author warns that most of the chatbot hype is on the business side, while nobody is looking at the need of the customer.
• [l] 2023 / Jul 05 / 14:56 CEST Me (and you) can link to individual posts now, yey.
• [l] 2023 / Jul 04 / 20:10 CEST I‘ve been using goaccess as a web log analyser for a few years now. Only used the terminal view in an ad-hoc fashion until this week. Switched to generate an HTML report once a day. Love being able to check stats from my phone.
• [l] 2023 / Jun 28 / 15:42 CEST The Deep Sea is a fun little web feature that lets you scroll through ALL THE depths of the oceans. I was fascinated the most by how deep penguins are able to dive. From a technical perspective, I like the simplicity. Kept me scrolling without being to much in my face.
• [l] 2023 / Jun 27 / 10:09 CEST Love James Vincent‘s spin on how „AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born“. The „old web“ being the SEO optimised shit show of websites and social platforms. There’s a chance of those sites AI-cycling themselves into oblivion. Personal blogs and private, fractured forums might flourish from there self-inflicted downfall. I can already see glimpses of that in my bubble. AI has already been dictating what you consume online. All and every „home“ feed on social media is curated by tech. That isn’t to say AI is bad, we’re in the hype cycle where all the talk is about it replacing everything. I hope we will end up with it complementing is instead. That’s were technology has always shined the brightest.
• [l] 2023 / Jun 20 / 09:29 CEST Some links that have been sitting in my draft notes for far too long now: “Simply explained: how does GPT work?” is a short, concise explanation of how LLMs work. It’s a very high-level take, explaining probabilistic approaches; no prior knowledge required. That whole probabilistic thing ties very well into “LLMs are good at playing you”. This one highlights the obvious limits of those models and warns not to anthropomorphize them. In “What are we going to do about ChatGPT”, Daniel Lemire argues that halting AI development for a given period wouldn't help anyone. It's not even enforceable. He gives a bit of history on similar initiatives.
• [l] 2023 / Jun 14 / 09:16 CEST “Speed matter: Why working quickly is more important than it seems”, a lovely blog post from James Somers. He describes how doing things fast, but not sloppy, improves your efficiency in the long run. Conversely doing things slow will make you want to do less of them, which leads you to do them even slower. There’s something true about that, it holds for fixing bugs, writing, but also for clean your bathroom. “The general rule seems to be: systems which eat items quickly are fed more items. Slow systems starve.”
• [l] 2023 / Jun 12 / 07:29 CEST Google search trained me to definitely not click on the first search result (that isn’t an ad). Too often it ends up being an SEO optimised, ad riddled hellhole. I’ve been using Kagi for a good month now, and I had to retrain myself that the first item is worth clicking on. That is also something that shows up on large e-commerce sites like Amazon or OTTO. The first few items will be sponsored ones that only very loosely match your search. That's one of the reasons I enjoy shopping on smaller sites: Their search matching might be a bit worse in detail, but the overall experience is much less enshittified.
• [l] 2023 / Jun 05 / 10:43 CEST Mitchell Hashimoto writes about approaching large technical projects. In his post he emphasises the importance of tangible results. Making every small iteration visible to keep yourself motivated. You’re not always building something visual like an UI. For those cases he suggests automated tests. I really like that! What helps me is having a frictionless, but manual way to deploy my project to a place where I can show it others. Even if it’s just an empty HTTP server starting up, showing “Hello World”. This allows you to get every small hack out of the door with ease.
• [l] 2023 / Jun 02 / 13:24 CEST Bye bye Reddit. I’ll especially miss /r/AskHistorians, /r/explainlikeimfive and the awesome bakers over at /r/Breadit.
• [l] 2023 / Apr 17 / 21:39 CEST I haven’t had hot-reloading for my Clojure project until last week. Working on a frontend project the week before, reminded me how powerful fast feedback loops can be. Make a change and instantly see its effect. No restarting a server or rerunning a query. Those break your development flow. They’re just un-fun. Now for the http-kit based project I expected it to be a bit of a hassle to get it working. But the Clojure world doesn’t treat code reloading as an afterthought. Added a middleware behind an environment flag and it-just-worked.
• [l] 2023 / Mar 30 / 14:33 CEST It’s Hack Week at Spotify. I’m having a blast building a Backstage extension for Raycast. Raycast is an alternative to Spotlight, the launcher/search bar thing on macOS. The API’s design is well thought out. You get just enough levers to not feel constrained. But not too many to confuse you when considering an implementation. There’s a right way or no way. Awesome platform to build on.
• [l] 2023 / Mar 24 / 15:33 CET Today I learned about the “Minto Pyramid Principle”, a tool for clear and efficient communication. That lead me to untools.co, collection of methods around problem solving, decision making and communication.
• [l] 2023 / Mar 19 / 15:35 CET My NLP experiment for parsing recipe ingredients is going so-so. I’ve used both tensorflow and scikit to implement a CRF model for labelling. Tensorflow has been a mess, it’s complicated to approach if you don’t have ML expertise. I still haven’t figured out how I can pass multiple features for a single token („word“) into the model. The crfsuite wrapper of scikit makes that really easy. Throw in a python dict and off you go. Really shows how a specialised API can help beginners to get started. The keras/tf API basically has to work for all things ML, making it extremely generic (and thus flexible). On the upside both experiments had me look into the data itself much closer. I have a good grasp of what needs to be cleaned up, normalised or removed. That paved the way for a hand-rolled approach. Regex all the way down. A big thanks goes out to Tom Strange and his model guide.
• [l] 2023 / Mar 12 / 17:36 CET „There is a pattern. Malthusians raise the alarm about resource or environmental problems and then attack the obvious technical solutions. Malthus had to attack birth control to predict overpopulation. Holdren and Ehrlich had to claim fossil fuels were scarce to oppose the extension of fertilizers and industrial agriculture to poor nations and to raise the alarm over famine. And climate activists today have to attack natural gas and nuclear energy, the main drivers of lower carbon emissions, in order to warn of climate apocalypse.“ from Apocalypse Never, M. Shellenberger
• [l] 2023 / Mar 11 / 09:27 CET Chris Voss explaining empathy and specifically separating it from sympathy was interesting. We frequently talk about empathy, but actually mean sympathy. As in “being on your side” (sympathy) vs “I can see where you’re coming from” (empathy). Agreement (sympathy) vs understanding (empathy). Source: Chris Voss on the Lex Fridman Podcast [8:47]
• [l] 2023 / Mar 08 / 21:53 CET Cory Doctorow on the „Enshittification of Platforms“.
• [l] 2023 / Feb 28 / 09:11 CET Things I’ve read in the past week, that are worth sharing: People can read their manager’s mind, The Power of “Yes, if”: Iterating on our RFC Process, 35 Lessons from 35 Years of Newsletter Publishing. Looks like I need to implement list support for my blog.
• [l] 2023 / Feb 24 / 12:29 CET Apparently iCloud+ now comes with bring-your-own-domain for e-mail. That’s kind of huge. It both supports catch-all and dedicated addresses. I’ve been mostly using Fastmail for this. But you have to add a separate mail account (+ password) for every address of your domain. With iCloud+ you can manage those custom addresses within Mail directly. The setup DNS setup is the same as for most e-mail providers, two MX records, TXT and CNAME and off you go. Excited to see Apple supporting something as open as DNS.
• [l] 2023 / Feb 20 / 13:15 CET Jira has a command palette, you can open it by hitting “.” (dot). Then just type in what you want to do (assign, move, close etc.). Substantially improves working with Jira, if you’re a keyboard person. It feels much more responsive this way. And you don’t have to search around the cluttered UI to find the right button.
• [l] 2023 / Feb 17 / 10:08 CET I’ve been looking into extracting structured data from recipes recently. Especially on parsing ingredient phrases in something useful like ingredient name, quantity and unit. It’s a rabbit whole of NLP and dubious SaaS services. The NYT posted about how they used a linear-chain conditional random field model to extract data from their recipe archive. There’s even some code on Github. Sadly, but understandably, they don’t provide training data or a pretrained model. Time come up with my own!
• [l] 2023 / Feb 13 / 20:36 CET “This project is "Stable" (no longer "Active").” That is one of the best things to read on an open source project. Makes me much more confident in adopting it as dependency. Quote comes from clojure.java.jdbc.
• [l] 2023 / Feb 09 / 21:45 CET Started working on a small app that’s scratching my own itch. A web app to scrape and clean-up cooking recipes. Still riding the Clojure train for that one. Has been my „biggest“ clj project so far. I keep coming back to it, especially the structural editing makes writing and updating code such a joy. You can find the app over at pretty-recip.es (yeah I had to buy that domain)
• [l] 2023 / Feb 02 / 15:40 CET Erlang: the coding language that finance forgot talks about how being proficient in another programming language (Erlang) can improve your coding skills in others. Specifically going from an „esoteric“ functional language to a non-functional one. I feel like there’s some truth to that. A good example are immutable data structures. Bringing this practice to JavaScript, Python et al makes for readable code. It takes some discipline when not enforced by a compiler. But that applies to other high level patterns and principles too. You don’t have to be an expert in those other languages, often an understanding of the key features suffices. Go build something in OCAML, Elixir, Clojure or Crystal. It’ll widen your horizon.
• [l] 2023 / Jan 23 / 19:53 CET Today I witnessed layoffs for the first time from the inside. While not being affected myself, it was (and still is) a horrible process. Sitting there waiting whether you get an e-mail from HR or not is torturous. Reading the messages of people losing their job makes it so real. There’s a lot of criticism about how companies implement the decision to let people go. While a lot of that is valid on a case by case basis, there’s just NO good way to do this. Other than not doing it. There’re good and bad reasons leading up to the decision, but the implementation is always going to suck.
• [l] 2023 / Jan 20 / 10:43 CET First time working on a vscode extension for Spotify Hackdays. The docs explain the process and anatomy really well. One major downside is that you can’t use ESM modules. So you end up with a mixture of imports and requires. What a mess. Also went through the source code of the markdown extension that vscode is shipping with. It feels overly complex, gives me Java vibes.
• [l] 2023 / Jan 18 / 11:17 CET This „blog“ reads a bunch of blocks from a single Notion page. If a block starts with a date, it will get published to the Atom feed and the website. The block parser is really dumb right now. It only supports paragraphs and links.
• [l] 2023 / Jan 17 / 09:50 CET “Extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas” makes some good proposals. Makes you reconsider whether you’re building the right thing. Whether your organisation’s structure has purpose. Whether your processes make sense. It’s one of the downsides of doing everything iteratively, you tend to lose a sense of direction.
• [l] 2023 / Jan 05 / 18:53 CET I have been gambling around with the Crystal programming language a bit. It’s quite fun and productive. The stdlib has a lot of stuff, reminds me of Node.js. Docs are great, the cli is easy to use. What’s lacking is better editor support. The vscode extension is just way too slow. Cross-compilation is also giving me a bit of a headache, though I’m mostly used to interpreted languages and those running on VMs. I’m keeping an eye on it!
• [l] 2023 / Jan 05 / 00:00 CET Welcome to my microblog. Let’s see how this pans out. The inspiration comes from Brandur‘s Atoms.