thoughts

If you can use open source, you can build hardware


šŸ”— a linked post to redeem-tomorrow.com » — originally shared here on

Iā€™ve been dreaming of building my own electronics since I was a kid. I spent so many afternoons at Radio Shack, and even tried my hand at the occasional kit, with limited success. Every few years in adulthood, Iā€™ve given it another try, observing a steady downward trend in difficulty.

Iā€™m telling you: weā€™re at a special moment here. The labor savings of open source, the composability, the fun: all of it has come to hardware. You can build things that solve real problems for yourself. I first imagined my heat pump devices over a year ago, and I have been frustrated they didnā€™t exist every day since.

Now my dreams are real, and the largest energy consumer in the house can be automated and remotely controlled.

Thatā€™s amazing.

As soon as I gain employment again, the very first thing Iā€™m buying is a 3D printer, and Iā€™m gonna start building stuff.

I donā€™t quite know what yet.

But Iā€™ll find something.

Continue to the full article

Tags for this post:

Every Billable Hour is Amateur Hour


šŸ”— a linked post to daedtech.com » — originally shared here on

If, on the other hand, you view freelancing as a path to real business ownership, your first step is to recognize that the billable hour is a binkie that keeps you in amateur purgatory for the entire time you rely on it.Ā  A kind of Hotel California with timesheets.

And thatā€™s really my only call to action ā€” the recognition as the first step.

Iā€™m not suggesting you fire all of your hourly clients or do anything dramatic.Ā  Iā€™m not even suggesting any immediate change.Ā  Rather, Iā€™m just suggesting that you change your viewpoint.

If you want to be a professional business owner, you need to become an expert in delivering outcomes that add value.Ā  And youā€™ll never achieve that without enough reps to flat price your work and enough skin in the game to feel it when you get it wrong.

I found it difficult to do ā€œvalue-based pricingā€ when running my agency.

But I think it took a little time away to really understand my value. It was never about programming stuff. It was about making something that could turn $1 into $2.

And knowing what to spend that $1 on.

Continue to the full article

Tags for this post:

Dear Self; we need to talk about ambition


šŸ”— a linked post to lesswrong.com » — originally shared here on

Like the programming path, the legible independent ambition path works for some people, but not you. The things you do when pushed to Think Big and Be Independent produce incidental learning at best, but never achieve anything directly. They canā€™t, because you made up the goals to impress other people. This becomes increasingly depressing, as you fail at your alleged goals and at your real goal of impressing people.Ā 

So what do we do then? Give up on having goals? Only by their definition. What seems to work best for us is leaning into annoyance or even anger at problems in the world, and hate-fixing them.Ā 

Youā€™ve always hated people being wrong, and it turns out a lot of things can be defined as ā€œwrongā€ if you have the right temperament. Womenā€™s pants have tiny pockets that wonā€™t fit my phone? Wrong. TSA eating hours of my life for no gain? Wrong. Medical-grade fatigue? Wrong. People dying of preventable diseases? Extremely wrong. And wrong things are satisfying to fix.

Yesterday, I was doing the dishes when I saw a mostly eaten yogurt cup laying in the sink.

As I started rinsing it out, I wondered whether I should throw it in the garbage or the recycling bin.

I thought about this quiz game that my county has on their website where they present various household items and you have to say whether it can go in the recycling, compost, or garbage.

The last time I played it, I found myself just getting mad.

Mad that I was getting questions wrong.

Mad that I canā€™t tell if this quiz is up to date with the latest recycling advice.

It occurred to me, while rinsing the cup, that I donā€™t really like learning most things for fun. I learn them because I like to ensure I have the best chance at complying with the rules.

I like passing through the hoops that were laid out for me.

I liked school so much because there was a clearly defined metric for success and failure.

But as Iā€™m now 36 years old, success doesnā€™t really get defined in that way anymore.

I am glad this article surfaced in my Instapaper queue this morning, because I think itā€™s mostly the article I wouldā€™ve written for myself.

I really enjoyed the authorā€™s advice on determining authentic motivation, viewing procrastination as a workersā€™ strike, and realizing that your taste will often outpace your abilities.

Continue to the full article

Tags for this post:

npm install everything, and the complete and utter chaos that follows


šŸ”— a linked post to boehs.org » — originally shared here on

We tried to hang a pretty picture on a wall, but accidentally opened a small hole. This hole caused the entire building to collapse. While we did not intend to create a hole, and feel terrible for all the people impacted by the collapse, we believe itā€™s also worth investigating what failures of compliance testing & building design could allow such a small hole to cause such big damage.

Multiple parties involved, myself included, are still students and/or do not code professionally. How could we have been allowed to do this by accident?

Itā€™s certainly no laughing matter, neither to the people who rely on npm nor the kids who did this.

But man, it is comical to see the Law of Unintended Consequences when it decides to rear its ugly head.

I applaud the students who had the original idea and decided to see what would happen if you installed every single npm package at once. Itā€™s a good question, to which the answer is: uncover a fairly significant issue with how npm maintains integrity across all of its packages.

But I guess the main reason Iā€™m sharing this article is as a case study on how hard it is to moderate a system.

Iā€™m still a recovering perfectionist, and the older I get, the more I come across examples (both online like this and also in my real life) where you can do everything right and still end up losing big.

The best thing you can do when you see something like this is to pat your fellow human on the back and say, ā€œman, that really sucks, Iā€™m sorry.ā€

The worst thing you can do, as evidenced in this story, is to cuss out some teenagers.

Continue to the full article


Meta to build $800M data center in Rosemount, Minnesota


šŸ”— a linked post to cbsnews.com » — originally shared here on

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced plans to build a new data center in Rosemount, Minnesota. The more than 700,000 square foot center will be located along County Road 42, just east of the Dakota County Technical College.

During an announcement Thursday, officials revealed the project had been under wraps for several years. They called the secret project "Project Bigfoot."

This will exist roughly a mile from my house.

Itā€™s a lot of feelings, to be sure.

A quibble I have with this report is that Iā€™m not entirely sure we can say with a straight face that Meta is a great representative of ā€œemerging techā€. What does that phrase even mean?

But maybe Iā€™m just being a NIMBY. A hundred jobs at this data center isnā€™t bad, Minnesotaā€™s cold season1 is perfect for naturally cooling these systems, and the folks I know who work at the city are extremely capable and thorough; they would not let something like this go through if they didnā€™t do their diligence regarding impacts to our various shared infrastructure.

So I guess, uh, welcome, Meta? I hope yā€™all do, as our Iowan neighbors reportedly claim, ā€œstep up.ā€


  1. With the notable exception of this winter, which Iā€™m trying to practice gratitude that Iā€™ve been able to wear a t-shirt outdoors in February in an attempt to stave off my climate doomerism. 

Continue to the full article

Tags for this post:

Seabound: Charting a Course to Decarbonize Shipping


šŸ”— a linked post to collabfund.com » — originally shared here on

Seaboundā€™s carbon capture technology diverts a shipā€™s exhaust gas into a container full of small pebbles of calcium oxide, which chemically react with CO2 in the exhaust gas to form calcium carbonate. In other words, we make limestone onboard ships, effectively locking the CO2 into small pebbles. When the ship returns to port, we offload the limestone and either: 1) sell it for use as a building material, or 2) recycle the pebbles to separate the CO2 from the calcium oxide so that we can reuse the calcium oxide to capture more CO2 on another ship, and then sell the pure CO2 for clean fuel production or geological sequestration.

Our process is unique because we only capture the CO2 onboard and leave it locked in limestone, rather than trying to separate and liquefy the pure CO2 from the limestone onboard as well. These steps of separation and liquefaction are typically the most complicated, expensive, and energy-intensive for carbon capture technologies, which is why weā€™ve shifted them to shore where we can leverage economies of scale and land-based energy infrastructure.

This is the sort of solution I want to be a part of. How cool of a concept is this?!

Continue to the full article


I donā€™t care if you force close your apps


šŸ”— a linked post to birchtree.me » — originally shared here on

My official position is a fact followed by an opinion: The fact is that iOS is built to work best when you just let the system handle things for you. The opinion is that I donā€™t particularly care how you use your own phone because it impacts me precisely 0%.

Iā€™ve only recently noticed a direct impact on the correlation between my own acceptance of a personā€™s flaws and the improvement of my own mental health.

There are several posts on here about ā€œletting goā€ and ā€œdropping fucksā€ and whatnot that speak to this exact thing, but Mattā€™s explanation here is beautiful.

It doesnā€™t really matter why you swipe up on all your apps. If it makes you happy, and you donā€™t mind the slight hit to your UX by way of a tiny battery drain and longer initial load times, then by all means, you do you.

Reminds me of the Bluey episode where Bluey and Bingo are playing Grannies, and Bingo thinks Grannies can Floss (the dance).

After a bitter fight with her about it, Blueyā€™s mom says, ā€œWell, do you want to be right, or do you want to keep playing the game?ā€

Continue to the full article

Tags for this post:

Anti-AI sentiment gets big applause at SXSW 2024 as moviemaker dubs AI cheerleading as ā€˜terrifying bullsh**ā€™


šŸ”— a linked post to techcrunch.com » — originally shared here on

I gotta find the video from this and watch it myself, because essentially every single thing mentioned in this article is what I wanna build a podcast around.

Letā€™s start with this:

As Kwan first explained, modern capitalism only worked because we compelled people to work, rather than forced them to do so.

ā€œWe had to change the story we told ourselves and say that ā€˜your value is your job,ā€ he told the audience. ā€œYou are only worth what you can do, and we are no longer beings with an inherent worth. And this is why itā€™s so hard to find fulfillment in this current system. The system works best when youā€™re not fulfilled.ā€

Boy, this cuts to the heart of the depressive conversations Iā€™ve had with myself this past year.

Finding a job sucks because you have to basically find a way to prove to someone that you are worth something. It can be empowering to some, sure, but I am finding the whole process to be extremely demoralizing and dehumanizing.

ā€œAre you trying to use [AI] to create the world you want to live in? Are you trying to use it to increase value in your life and focus on the things that you really care about? Or are you just trying to, like, make some money for the billionaires, you know?ā€Ā  Scheinert asked the audience. ā€œAnd if someone tells you, thereā€™s no side effect. Itā€™s totally great, ā€˜get on boardā€™ ā€” I just want to go on the record and say thatā€™s terrifying bullshit. Thatā€™s not true. And we should be talking really deeply about how to carefully, carefully deploy this stuff,ā€ he said.

Iā€™ve literally said the words, ā€œI donā€™t want to make rich people richerā€ no fewer than a hundred times since January.

There is so much to unpack around this article, but I think Iā€™m sharing it now as a stand in for a thesis around the podcast I am going to start in the next month.

We need to be having this conversation more often and with as many people as possible. Letā€™s do our best right now at the precipice of these new technologies to make them useful for ourselves, and not just perpetuate the worst parts of our current systems.

Continue to the full article


TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants


šŸ”— a linked post to newyorker.com » — originally shared here on

The era of social-media monopolies has been unhealthy for our collective digital existence. The Internet at its best should be weird, energetic, and excitingā€”featuring both homegrown idiosyncrasy and sudden trends that flash supernova-bright before exploding into the novel elements that spur future ideas and generate novel connections.

This exuberance was suppressed by the dominance of a small number of social-media networks that consolidated and controlled so much of online culture for so many years. Things will be better once this dominance wanes.

In the end, TikTokā€™s biggest legacy might be less about its current moment of world-conquering success, which will pass, and more about how, by forcing social-media giants like Facebook to chase its model, it will end up liberating the social Internet.

I saw Cal reference this article in his most recent post, and Iā€™m glad he mentioned it because I mustā€™ve missed it a couple years back.

I have been grossed out by TikTokā€™s blatant predatory behavior ever since hearing how their algorithms work.

Sure, most major social media companies have resorted to similar tactics, but there was something brazen about the way TikTok does it which feels egregious.

Calā€™s analysis seems spot on to me. TikTok represents what happens when youā€™ve won the race to the bottom, or when the dog catches the tire.

As soon as youā€™ve got the thing, what else is there to do? Where else is there to go?

Itā€™s all sizzle and no steak.

Iā€™m sick of having my attention stolen from me under the guise of ā€œconnectedness.ā€1 Real connections require compromise, empathy, and growth. Sure, I get some dopamine hits when I see a funny or enraging video, but I donā€™t seem to get much else.


  1. When viewed under those terms, reflecting on Facebookā€™s mission to connect the world gives me even more of the heebie jeebies.  

Continue to the full article


More People Buy, Number Go Up


šŸ”— a linked post to ofdollarsanddata.com » — originally shared here on

This rally is so different because no one is beating around the bush anymore. Itā€™s not about technology. Itā€™s not about use cases or improving the world. Itā€™s just, ā€œMore people buy, number go up.ā€ The veil has been lifted and we all know it. Itā€™s a momentum trade plain and simple. We turned a bunch of computers into a casino and then dressed it up as something else.Ā 

But people know the truth. I got my hands on an early copy of Nat Eliasonā€™s upcoming book Crypto Confidential that convinced me of this point. The book, which provides an insiderā€™s perspective on the 2021 crypto bull run, made me realize how much of a game crypto is. More importantly, it made me realize how many people know itā€™s a game as well. They understand the rules and they play accordingly. They know they can get scammed. They know they could lose it all. Nevertheless, they still play.

The article goes on to talk about reasons why people gamble knowing they have little to no chance of winning, and honestly, itā€™s depressing but rational.

Continue to the full article

Tags for this post: