Stones Turned This Week

I found the idea of a minimum viable self interesting.

Illusion or not, we tend to see other people’s lives as works of art. And having seen them this way, we struggle to (make our lives) the same.

I was reading a bit about the Rust programming language and found a nice article about the community around Rust.

Without people who have it as their personal goal to make something happen, things just don’t happen.

I chuckled out loud at these terrific fake food ads. Several times.

I’m enjoying the renewed interest in note-taking. I stumbled on this recently popular Hacker News link which had some interesting ideas. This will be a fun year as people try to return to their old working environments using their new tools. I suspect we’ll see some new ideas born of awkward matches of technology and office requirements in the post-pandemic workplace.

I read one of the most unusual scientific papers I’ve seen in a long time. Katherine Fagel published her adventures in tracking down COVID-19 data that was deleted from an NIH server. It’s an unusual article with some interesting consequences.

Apparently Andreessen-Horowitz has a new hype machine for pumping their investments and it’s just as boring as the rest

If anything, this is a case of A16Z being terrifyingly late to the party - their content is the same played-out op-ed stuff that everyone has, formatted and presented in the same way everyone else does, and if anything exceptional is found there, it’s likely a case where you’ve had to dig for it. It isn’t even interesting enough to challenge anyone - it doesn’t bite its thumb at the mainstream media (likely to not alienate their portfolio companies), it doesn’t challenge anyone, it just is…there.

I wouldn’t have trusted a word they published anyway, so it’s good to know I’m not missing the zeitgeist of post-pandemic culture.

I learned that there is something called the “intellectual dark web” and it sounds very stupid.

Laurie Voss wrote a nice summary her experience working in data-centric companies. There are a lot of interesting points in the piece.

Firstly, the term “Data Scientist” is over-used to the point of being meaningless. To me, a data scientist is an academic with very advanced degrees. They advance the state of the art in modeling, they solve novel problems in machine learning. They write white papers in journals. This is not what you need. Unless “we solve a new problem in machine learning” is what your company was founded to do, this is not what you need done. What you need is a data engineer.

BashRCGenerator is a super easy way to colorize bash prompts.

I’ve really been enjoying the “Songs that Changed Music” series on YouTube. As a Smiths fan, this episode was a fun one

I learned what a mistake it is to use a hard drive with internet access

I also learned about the hazards of automated deployments with Docker from the NewsBlur minor emergency

I’ve worked in Oracle for most of my career and I’m enjoying learning more about other databases. PostgreSQL is nice. Here’s what I read about PostgreSQL hierarchical structures

TreeSheets seems really clever but I’m not sure I’d consider it a modern competitor to spreadsheets. It’s still neat.

I guess I wasn’t surprised, but it sounds like the US investigation of corporate espionage by China is not going well.

This article about the surprising story of human evolution was a fun little detour. It feels like we are living in an age where most of us think we already know everything, while every day we discover how little we actually know for sure.

I’m thinking of moving Macdrifter from Pelican to Hugo. So I read how other people did it. While I’m at it, I’m looking at deployment sweetners that might make it more fun. This may not be more fun. I also read up on how it’s being used for publishing Jupyter notebooks