BasilPH

The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. It merges science and storytelling in an amazing way, I can highly recommend it. The books are long, but they didn't seem like it.

Neuromancer by William Gibson. The book that started cyberpunk. I love the genre, but I think it's well worth a read just to see how he can craft a world with language. I sometimes found it hard to understand what exactly was happening, but the vibe was always crystal clear.

I listened to the course on Waking Up too, and I can highly recommend it.

I would try to understand why you can't sit for the task for long. Maybe it's too boring, or too hard. Maybe it's unclear what the task even is.

A somewhat spiritual take on the whole issue is Steven Pressfield's "The War of Art". One of my favourite books, and I'm as non-woo-woo as you can be.

They mention that users can invest in them through SAFEs. This only makes sense if they plan an exit, either by selling or through an IPO, or am I missing something?

Pretty cool, it taught me how to write a Haiku:

> Monkey eats apple

> Monkey prefers banana

> Suck it up monkey

Thank you for that rabbit hole! The most expensive one is the 777-9. It's apparently the longest and widest plane ever[^1].

[^1]: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/boeing-777x-9-first-fligh...

I agree with you. Last weekend I had the same realisation and thought how that as a programmer it's comparatively very easy to make weird stuff for fun. But somehow we rarely do.

I made a page that converts sentences to GIFs a couple of years ago[^1]. I remember how I revelled in the fact that I could create absurd stuff likes this out of nothing.

I want to do this again.

[^1]: https://gaga.lol

I'm sticking with my monthly company updates. I hope they are interesting in their straightforwardness and honesty.

I've done fun things with p5.js, which might have the primitives you need to do what you described.

> Boom’s other partners include Safran Landing Systems, Collins Aerospace, fuel-system company Eaton and Northrop Grumman, which is helping with a military variant.

Does anybody know more about this "military variant"?

Any opinions on what this means for speech-to-text companies like rev.ai and assmembly.ai ?

We've tested open source solutions for s2t, like kaldi, but the quality was not good enough. However, one of the main advantages of a service like assembly.ai to me was that they offer sentence splitting in form of punctuation and speaker detection, which Kaldi does not.

So I guess I answered my own question to some degree: A S2T service is more than just S2T. We already see assembly.ai add more and more features (like summarisation, PID redaction ect.) that are a value-add to plain S2T.

Still, curious to hear what your take on that is.

I'm currently reading Yvon's book "Let my people go surfing"[^1] and so far, I can highly recommend it.

The first, shorter half, is about how Patagonia grew, which is interesting from an entrepreneurial point of view. The second half is about their philosophies and contains a lot of wisdom on creating great, lasting products.

[^1]: https://www.patagonia.com/stories/let-my-people-go-surfing/s...

This is the first monthly update I wrote. I used it as an opportunity to get both the team and our investor on the same page. I think it offers a candid behind-the-scenes look and I hope it's interesting.

"The Mom Test"[^0] is an excellent and short book about how to conduct those talks that I can highly recommend. It teaches you how to truly listen, and not bias the person you're interviewing.

Two points that stuck with me:

- Humans are bad at estimating, so make your questions very concrete. Don't ask "How often do you look up recipes on your iPad", but rather "How often did you use your iPad for recipes last week?".

- Nobody likes telling somebody else that their baby is ugly. Show the prototypes at the end of the interview, once you learned everything about the problem they had to tell you. If you show them your solution too early, you'll bias them.

[^0]: https://www.momtestbook.com

Totally agree. SESTA-FOSTA is just the current instalment of this pattern.

The relevant law here is called SESTA-FOSTA. It forces companies to ensure they don't host content that facilitates sexual exploitation. This has impacted full-service workers (i.e., prostitutes). Before SESTA-FOSTA, they could put up ads on specialized websites, chat with the clients and then have them come to a room they had rented. This arrangement gave them basic security.

After SESTA-FOSTA, the pages hosting those ads folded, as they couldn't comply with the new rules. Many full-service workers are now walking the streets again and have to have sex in their clients' cars. It's obvious that this makes them much more vulnurable.

It even goes further: Banks will close your account if they think your business has something to do with "sex", even if what you do is legal. If they feel you might be a risk, they freeze your account.

This law has hurt many sex workers, often people already at the very bottom of society. On the other hand, it's unclear how many lives it saved from sexual exploitation.

Sex workers are vulnerable, and many women are being abused. But the way this law was enacted, I can't help but think that pushing sex work further into illegality was a desired side-effect.

Source: I know a couple of sex workers in NYC.

That sounds very cool! Did you share this list by any chance? I'm interested to stock up on some "efficient" products for the times that I'm not meal-planning but want to quickly whip something together.

I'm a happy user of Kitchenful and it has definitely saved me a lot of time when meal-planning. The recipes are tasty too.

I signed up just when they were still in the "e-mailing every client personally phase", and it's been a joy to talk to Christian and see their product improve.

The author of this article is Cal Newport. A computer science professor and the author of my favourite non-fiction book: Deep Work. It's the one book I recommend to any knowledge worker.

Nice to get his perspective on this topic.

I've been enjoying the Culture series by Ian M. Banks a lot and I'm currently reading the second novel. It's about a future where a part of the Universe lives in the Culture, a society governed by superintelligent AIs. It's objectively cool, but also deals with deep questions like "What do you do as a human, if you don't have have to do anything?".

When Descript[^0] came out with automatic overdubbing, it was absolute magic and it stayed magic for a long time. Happy to see that there is now an open-source alternative, although I'm not sure how easy their models are to use.

Does anybody know how they prevent you from creating a voice that isn't yours? I expect the text they make you read to be random, but if you have a large enough corpus of the person you want to imitate you could just piece it together.

[^0]: https://www.descript.com

I didn't understand the screenshot from the mining dashboard: Is there a way to estimate how much money the attacker made so far?

I've built dynomight's DIY filter[^1], and I love it. No DRM issues either.

[^1]: https://dynomight.net/better-DIY-air-purifier.html

I've been using Kagi for search and it's much better than DuckDuckGo. As much as I like DuckDuckGo, I think I'll stick with Kagi.

> Meticulous captures network traffic at record-time and stubs in responses at replay-time, which removes the need for a backend environment to replay against.

That's neat.

We've only just started using Playwright, but we're surprised at how easy it is to get going; but we're also all developers. We primarily use it to test large feature flows that are hard to mock in unit tests. For example, one test logs you in, uploads a file, waits for the result, clicks on the download button and makes sure the downloaded file is what we expected. We mainly want to ensure that we don't accidentally delete or hide the login widget or the download button while working on something tangentially related.

In the example outlined above, we don't mind spinning up the backend locally, as this allows the test also to make sure the response is correct.

However, I see how being able to only test front-end code quickly and easily without the need for a backend can be helpful in many applications. Congrats on the launch, and good luck!

What do you think the pros and cons are compared to playwright.dev? The top-level features of recording, replaying, and diff-ing seem very close in my understanding.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of a jailbroken Kindle compared to one with the official firmware?

> but the problem with that is: when you manually play music in there you indicate you are going to do something embarrassing!

I'm honestly not sure how big of a problem that is. What else would you go to the bathroom for, then pee or poop?

I'm a paying customer of TailwindUI. TailwindUI is more advanced in my opinion:

- There are more components.

- One thing I love are the fully styled landing pages. They are made up of components as well, but I like seeing them put together in a coherent fashion.

- You get not only pure HTML code, but also Vue and React code to copy/paste.

- IMHO it's nicer looking and feels more polished.

However, all of this comes at a price, I think I paid $250 for it. I also find the designs to be nicer, but sometimes they are a pain to change because somewhere in the nested `div`'s there's some magic happening that I'm not dealing with properly.

I do think there is a place for such free, simpler and clean component libraries and I appreciate their creator for making it available.

He is into crypto.