BasilPH

A close relative needed cortisone to manage an eye infection post eye surgery. The insurance stopped paying for the cortisone drops after a while, the only thing they would pay for were injections. The procedure consisted of a large syringe that was used to inject a literal pellet that would float around in the eye and slowly give off cortisone over multiple weeks. My relative said they could sometimes see the pellet float through their eye as it intercepted light on its way to the optical nerve. It manifested as a circular shadow in their field of vision. They called it their "satellite".

The thing that struck me the most, is that a human eye seems to be pretty puncture tolerant before it starts to leak. Also, the insurance's decision is hard to understand: The injections cost $2k compared to a couple hundred for the eye drops. And once the pellet is in, you can't get it out to reduce the dosage.

I heard that the long-winded stories also serve to make the text longer for SEO purposes. i could imagine that it makes you stay longer on the page, because you look for the recipe. Also, more text equals more opportunities to insert ads.

Here's a [video](https://www.dropbox.com/sh/s02m1eqzdp6t5jk/AAAWm4IBUn0zl0afB...).

We do actually make payroll and have a solid runway. What my salary cut does is: a) signal the investor and the team that I'm serious about this venture, b) increase my equity and c) increase our runway by a couple of months.

As I've noted in a top-level comment, my intended message about focus gets a bit muddled without me giving the proper context. I'll add an update to my post with some context.

> Why not just use your product as a source of income in itself.

This is what I'm doing. But there's just no income yet from the product.

Author here. This is my first time hitting the front page, and I'm still catching up.

Most of the critical comments point out that this is a) not a good sign to investors and b) not a good deal financially for me. I appreciate the concern, and I think I should have done a better job at explaining the context:

- We are spinning off the product from the consulting company. We are getting new money from our existing investors, and it's them I want to show that I'm serious about this.

- I have a significantly higher equity share in the product company than in the consulting company.

I'm trading of salary for more equity. This is very common in startups, so I didn't explain this in detail in my post.

What I found interesting and potentially actionable for other people is that reducing my salary (and having more equity) has increased my focus to a point I couldn't reach when still a salaried employee.

I could have done a better job at sharpening the message, and I appreciate those that still saw my point and commented about it.

It is both. I do get more equity, but I already had a big chunk before. The reason for the reduction was motivation.

What makes you so sure that it is a poor choice? It's definitely risky, but there's also a large upside. And as I wrote, I have multiple safety nets.

> you likely do not think very far into the future

This is 1-2 year bet for me.

To enter the US a rapid antigen test is enough.

I used to work with the Zettelkasten Archive and vim, but I think I'll switch to Obsidian. The graph and link autocompletion are the main selling points for me compared to my current setup.

I maintain a small open-source script[^1] to find clusters and orphaned notes in a Zettelkasten, and I find it's a good addition to groom my notes from the terminal.

[^1]: https://github.com/BasilPH/vizel

> Time and time again the wealth of the middle classes ends up as collateral damage in attempts to tax the very top.

What are examples of this happening?

I use it all the time, my favourite is the white rain: https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteRainNoiseGenerator.ph...

You can configure it and even calibrate it to your headphones.

> In completely unrelated news, upcoming versions of Signal will be periodically fetching files to place in app storage. These files are never used for anything inside Signal and never interact with Signal software or data, but they look nice, and aesthetics are important in software. Files will only be returned for accounts that have been active installs for some time already, and only probabilistically in low percentages based on phone number sharding. We have a few different versions of files that we think are aesthetically pleasing, and will iterate through those slowly over time. There is no other significance to these files.

I assume those images are going to be for the benefit of somebody looking at data extracted through Cellebrite?

This is prime r/mildlypenis material.

> You don't really want to fly them in the rain - erodes rotor and propellor

I'm intrigued, could you elaborate on why this is different from what happens with a helicopter or a plane in the rain?

As the publisher of a newsletter, why would I want to sign up?

If you use Zettlr, or any other editor to create a linked graph of text files, you might be interesting in vizel[0]:

It visualizes the graph and calculates some stats. I find it useful to track the growth of my Zettelkasten, but also to find notes and components that are unconnected to the rest of the graph.

I built it to scratch my own itch, but I'm always happy to get feedback.

[0]: https://github.com/BasilPH/vizel

I personally found the archive[0] an excellent software to get started with a Zettelkasten. The forum and the blog posts on the site are great.

I'm also developing a CLI script to visualize your zettelkasten[1]. I mainly use it to print stats, like the number of connected components and find orphaned notes.

[0] https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/

[1] https://github.com/BasilPH/vizel

I've been using The Archive (https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/) to browse a knowledge graph of markdown files i.e. a Zettelkasten. It's one-time $19 and worth every penny.

I use it to browse my notes. There is a shortcut to open them in VIM. It's powerful and simple.

Shameless plug: I created a CLI tool to visualize a set of linked markdown files, print stats, and display orphans. See https://github.com/BasilPH/vizel

At work we use write.as for the blog, and I like it so far.

For my personal website, I use Jekyll on Vercel (ex. Zeit). I only did it because I wanted to code a bit and own the domain and the content.

I find the quality of articles on towardsdatascience.com has significantly decreased in the past months. This article is no exception.