JB

Sierra Hull – Mad World (Tears For Fears) | DelFest (2022) – Rhoneisms:

Beautiful.

Write about the future you want - daverupert.com:

There’s a lot that’s not going well; politics, tech bubbles, the economy, and so on. I spend most of my day reading angry tweets and blog posts. There’s a lot to be upset about, so that’s understandable. But in the interest of fostering better discourse, I’d like to offer a challenge that I think the world desperately needs right now: It’s cheap and easy to complain and say “[Thing] is bad”, but it’s also free to share what you think would be better.

This is the challenge we need. Enough complaining, start dreaming of something better, then go build it.

Liberty as Resistance — Matt Gemmell:

Then there are the services and subscriptions. We use the iCloud family features, and so we pay for additional iCloud storage. Our photos are in iCloud, automatically shared between my wife and I, and we have a couple of AppleCare warranty plans. We currently subscribe to the Apple TV streaming service, and I use a few subscription-based third-party apps which are of course billed through the App Store. Even without money being a factor, we have shared folders of household documents in iCloud, shared notes for shopping lists and such, shared passwords for relevant sites and services, shared calendars and reminders, and we all use Messages and FaceTime extensively. I look at it all with despair.

Matt and I are in the same boat.

The Dangers of “Vibe Reporting” About AI - Cal Newport:

Both of these articles cover the same announcement, but they produce two very different impressions. The Quartz article strongly implies that Amazon is firing people because it can now offload their work to AI. (I mean: look at the Andy Jassey quote they included in the sub-head, they clearly wanted readers to believe AI caused these job losses.)

The CNBC article, by contrast, makes it clear that the connection between AI and these layoffs is more coincident than causal.

It's increasingly important to understand if the article you're reading is trying to convince you of something, trying to anger you, or actually trying to inform you.

Fantastic video. Long, but worth it. Make some popcorn and learn a thing or two.

Chris Siebenmann wrote a nice article explaining some of the early reasoning behind Linux package managers:

The abstract way to describe why is to say that Linux distributions had to assemble a whole thing from separate pieces; the kernel came from one place, libc from another, coreutils from a third, and so on. The concrete version is to think about what problems you’d have without a package manager. Suppose that you assembled a directory tree of all of the source code of the kernel, libc, coreutils, GCC, and so on. Now you need to build all of these things (or rebuild, let’s ignore bootstrapping for the moment).

Building everything is complicated partly because everything goes about it differently. The kernel has its own configuration and build system, a variety of things use autoconf but not necessarily with the same set of options to control things like features, GCC has a multi-stage build process, Perl has its own configuration and bootstrapping process, X is frankly weird and vaguely terrifying, and so on. Then not everyone uses ‘make install’ to actually install their software, so you have another set of variations for all of this.

This is good, but it does miss the biggest reason package managers exist: dependency hell. In short, imagine you’re installing a Linux system in the late 90’s or early 2000’s. You’d like to play music from your CD player, so you download a package and try to compile it, but realize that it’s missing a library. So you download the missing library and realize that to compile the library, you’ll have to upgrade an existing library in your system, so you upgrade, compile the library, and compile the music player application. Great, now you’ve got your music playing in the background, but now your web browser won’t launch because it depended on a specific version of the library you upgraded.

I’ve had this happen, and it was maddening. Having a centralized place that manages all the dependencies of a system was a godsend.

On another note, Chris' blog is excellent, I’ve been following it for a while. But the styling is so minimal it almost looks like there’s no css at all. In fact, I had to right-click and view source to verify. Turns out, Chris is using his own publishing system he calls “Dinky Wiki”, which I quite like.

The Boss.

These thugs need to be held accountable. Despicable.

Watch The Video

The wall looks permanent until the day it comes down. So it goes with all institutions. They are not immutable fixtures but human creations, designed to solve the problems of one era and replaceable when they fail the next.

This is the optimism we need right now.

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I was out for a run today and I had an idea for an app. I busted out my own app, Quick Notes, and dictated what I wanted this app to do in detail. When I got home, I created a new project in Xcode, I committed it to GitHub, and then I gave Claude Code on the web those dictated notes and asked it to build that app.

About two minutes later, it was done…and it had a build error. 😅

But it was a simple fix, I fixed it, and the app was running on my phone. And you know what? It worked. The UI wasn’t perfect, but it was damn close. And I already had a product that achieved the goal I set out to achieve. All in all, I’d say it was about 10 minutes from idea to functioning MVP (and half of that was finishing my run).

If we could figure out how to do this without consuming the power equivalent of New England in the winter, I’d be all for it.

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