I’m sure most people are aware of how expensive it is to go out and see shows, but I’m not sure if most people are aware of why.

This video does a great job of explaining how the Ticketmaster + Livenation monopoly works.

We’re quickly approaching election season here in the US. Growing up, the importance of an informed electorate was driven into my brain.

This is the kind of stuff more voters need to be aware of. How do monopolies form? What market conditions lead to consolidation of power, and how do we hold those in power accountable?

Disposable vape pens are incredibly unsustainable. I’m glad people are finding clever ways like this to recycle them.

I finished this video and felt the same way I felt reading Hope and Help for your Nerves: seen.

When I talk to myself, there are times that I say unpleasant things to myself. I’ve spent the better part of 20 years trying to completely silence those thoughts.

When I started listening to them and welcoming them, my depression and anxiety improved almost immediately.

If you feel like you say mean crap to yourself and are looking for a way to stop, start with the advice that Karen Faith gives in this TEDx talk. It’s pretty much spot on, with what I’ve experienced.

One of the best parts of YouTube Premium is being able to run audio in the background while your screen is turned off.

I utilized this feature heavily this past weekend as I drove back from a long weekend of camping. I got sick shortly before we left, so I drove separately and met my family the next day.

On the drive back, I threw on this video and couldn’t wait to tell my wife about it when we met up down the road at a McDonalds.

If you are completely uninterested in large language models, artificial intelligence, generative AI, or complex statistical modeling, then this video is perfect to throw on if you’re struggling with insomnia.

If you have even a passing interest in LLMs, though, you have to check this presentation out by Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI.

Using quite approchable language, he explains how you build and tune an LLM, why it’s so expensive, how they can improve, and where these tools are vulnerable to attacks such as jailbreaking and prompt injection.

I’ve played with LLMs for a few years now and this video greatly improved the mental model I’ve developed around how these tools work.

Leave it to Cal Newport to show up in my algorithm and give terminology to part of the struggle I’ve faced for several years now: deep procrastination.

Deep procrastination is when you’re physically unable to work up the motivation to do work that needs to be done. Even with external pressures like deadlines, your body is unable to find the drive to do the thing.

This is different from depression because deep procrastinators were still able to feel joy in other areas of their lives, but not work.

He also mentions dopamine sickness, an effect from being constantly rewarded by quick hits of dopamine for an extended period of time.

If you are dopamine sick, you are unable to focus for long periods of time because your brain is literally wired for short term wins, not for deep, difficult thinking.

His solutions to both of these problems are infuriatingly simple: use an organizational system to handle doing these tasks, make hard tasks easier, use time boxing, remember your vision for your life and aim your work toward that.

In the video, Cal says, “we appreciate hard things when we know why we’re doing them.” It reminds of the episode of Bluey called “Ragdoll” where Bandit agrees to buy the kids ice cream only if they are able to physically put his body into the car to drive them to the ice cream place.

After a series of mighty struggles, Bluey is finally able to take a lick of an ice cream cone and is instantly greeted with a moment of euphoria, made possible only after all that hard work.

There are several pieces of content that I’ve consumed today which are all colliding into one potential blog post about how I’m deciding to be done with my crippling anxiety. Maybe after this video, I’ll pull out my laptop and start some deeper writing.

I love videos like these because it highlights just how few major players there are in Hollywood.

I knew Disney was responsible for a large part of my childhood, but until this video mentioned movies like “Sister Act” and “3 Ninjas”, I didn’t realize the full extent.

🫡 to one of the greats.

An internet friend sent this to me when it happened, saying, “this seems like something you’d watch.”

This was so delightful. I love these nerdy, competitive communities who all rally around joy.

This joy was noticeable when Fractal was live streaming his reaction to when Scuti got the crash. He didn’t look mad or disappointed. He looked proud, excited, and happy for his competitor.

Supremely feel good nerdy content right here.

I am a big fan of Deena Kastor. She’s an Olympic bronze medalist and former U.S. record holder for the marathon.

Deena shared her approach for injecting joy into miserable situations in her TEDx talk, which is certainly something I can empathize with as a former marathoner myself.

Doing wind sprints up the hill behind Coffman Union doesn’t sound like much fun, but when you’re doing it with others and trying to make each other laugh while you do it, it’s an experience you’ll never forget.

I am supposed to be camping with my family today, but I feel like death, so instead, I’m gonna lay on the couch and clear through my watch later queue.

First up, this inside look at Apple’s approach to chip fabrication.

It’s videos like these that make me feel as though hardware is an approachable hobby to get into.

Yeah, maybe I don’t know how to put a billion 6 nanometer transistors onto a piece of silicon… but I don’t think I need to know that in order to make something useful.

Also, this was delightful to experience with the hindsight of 8 months. We now know about Apple Intelligence, and we also know how the Vision Pro rollout went.

I haven’t felt like much of an Apple fanboy lately, but this piece made me appreciate how hard their engineers are working to build super useful products.

Once again, I’m amazed and terrified at how good YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is, because this is my kind of content.

I’m sure most of you non-nerds who read my blog will pass over this (as you maybe should), but I thought it was neat to see what happens to the physics of a game when π doesn’t equal 3.1415926535.

Fun fact: I didn’t know that Doom’s creator misremembered the tenth decimal of π when coding the game. I suppose it’s easy to forget that it’s only pretty recent in human history where we have instant, accurate recall to that sort of detail.