• [l] 2024 / Apr 24 / 09:24 CEST „No one buys books“ is an analysis of a merger hearing transcript, book publishers talking numbers: „…58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.“. A few big books drive most of the profit, followed by backlog purchases (Hungry caterpillar, LotR etc.). The only money most authors ever make from their books is the advance paid by the publisher.
• [l] 2024 / Apr 12 / 09:17 CEST “Ads Don’t Work That Way” makes the case for advertisement working by cultural imprinting rather than emotional inception. The idea of inception assumes that exposure to an ad creates an emotional bond in your brain. Resulting in your brain going “Nike good shoe” when shopping for new shoes. Cultural imprinting seems more comprehensible to me: You learn to associate a given brand with a given message. On top of that you learn that other people got the same message. “Wearing Nike shoe shows my peers how athletic I am (or want to be)”.
• [l] 2024 / Apr 09 / 14:12 CEST The German podcast “Wohlstand Für Alle” analyses the election manifestos for the upcoming European Parliament elections: Die Linke, FDP, SPD, BSW (episodes for AfD and CDU are still to come).
• [l] 2024 / Apr 09 / 08:44 CEST Will Larson outlines how to use LLMs in a product. He clears up some common misconceptions and misleading mental models.
• [l] 2024 / Mar 30 / 14:39 CET I’ve been porting the Postlight Parser (formerly Mercury Parser) over to Swift to use in my read-later app. It’s a great use case for picking up a new language: It’s a bit like building legos from the manual. You already know what the end result should look like. Individual functions and their unit tests help you proceed in manageable steps.
• [l] 2024 / Mar 30 / 14:32 CET A well-thought-out approach to collecting user data: Don't store it in the first place. Don’t identify users. Don’t bolt privacy on “later”.
• [l] 2024 / Mar 29 / 07:18 CET Looks like converting Substack to a social hub isn’t going well. Writers are complaining that the follow feature is costing them a lot of valuable subscriptions. I guess that’s the feature enabling their feed that I noted last year.
• [l] 2024 / Mar 18 / 09:03 CET There finally is an online registry for organ donors in Germany. Currently you need an eID (Personalausweis mit Onlinefunktion) to register. This means you can stop carrying around that physical donor card. Next stop: Make organ donations opt-out not opt-in.
• [l] 2024 / Mar 03 / 19:38 CET And one more link: A very frustrating war story from Ludic: Flexible Schemas Are The Mindkiller.
• [l] 2024 / Mar 03 / 19:36 CET Listening six hours to Matthew Cox conning the sh*t out of banks is one of the most entertaining Lex Fridman episode as of yet. He’s a great story teller, and boy, does he have stories to tell.
• [l] 2024 / Mar 03 / 19:34 CET The FTC offers some very stern words against price fixing using algorithms: “When you replace once-independent pricing decisions with a shared algorithm, expect trouble.” and “And even if some of the conspirators cheat by starting with lower prices than those the algorithm recommended, that doesn’t necessarily change things. Being bad at breaking the law isn’t a defense.”
• [l] 2024 / Feb 21 / 09:22 CET We have a streaming amplifier from Bluesound (the powernode edge). Their iOS app is pretty mediocre, but it got one feature that’s as simple as it is delightful: Plus and minus buttons to adjust the volume, in addition to the usual slider. It’s such a boon on touch devices. The relevant part of the slider is just hidden behind my thumb when I use it. That leads to a lot of fiddling and listening. They could improve it even more by showing me a volume number. I don’t even care whether the scale makes sense or not. But this way I’d have a way to get back to previous value without guessing and listening. Anyway, neither Denon nor Sonos got those lovely buttons, props to Bluesound.
• [l] 2024 / Feb 20 / 13:47 CET This article gives an insightful overview of the states of carbon capture and sequestration. Even the largest facility produces about 25 times the CO2 it sequesters. Others are even less efficient. Globally, a single year’s output of wind and solar has avoided 35 times CO2 that has been sequestered in the last 50 (!) years.
• [l] 2024 / Feb 20 / 09:28 CET Media companies crying about people not looking at their ads anymore never gets old. Most recently complaining about the Arc browser, which uses a summary model for search queries. It won’t display „traditional“ search results. As if ads are the only way to make a profit in the space. There are options, there’s no law against offering more than one. Ryan Broderick had a great write up on this. Subscriptions work, if the content is worthwhile. There are many examples of media companies increasing their profits in the “digital age”: The Guardian, Slate, NYT, 404 Media, Defector. If nobody wants to read your click baity stuff to get the info that would have fit in 140 chars, maybe it’s okay if an AI summarises it.
• [l] 2024 / Feb 18 / 10:38 CET Whoopsie, there goes your free labor: “Reddit has signed a contract allowing an Artificial Intelligence (AI) company to train its models on the social media platform's content…” (Source). “Social democracy is unimaginable in a world where cloud-proles are reduced to automata, while almost everybody else works for free as cloud-serfs, without even realising that their labour replenishes the dominant form of capital”, writes Yanis Varoufakis. He outlines the concept of techno-feudalism in his recent book.
• [l] 2024 / Feb 09 / 18:30 CET SwiftUI is very approachable if you have some React experience. I’ve cobbled together a read-later app: It accepts links via a share extension and stores a cleaned up version of the article. The reading view tracks the progress and lets you archive the article after reading. I’ve never done anything in the iOS ecosystem before. Apple‘s documentation assumes a lot of prior knowledge, I’ve found it difficult to navigate the UiKit/SwiftUI differences. The NetNewsWire codebase is a huge help. Here are two screenshots of the app: Link list, reading view.
• [l] 2024 / Feb 08 / 08:12 CET After banning e-scooters, Paris voted to triple parking fees for SUVs. Both vehicles are huge risk factors, but more generally are just fricking annoying. They block street crossings, visually and physically. Already narrow side walks have to bear them as an additional burden. In Hamburg, the SPD and Grüne are pushing for more dedicated scooter parking spots. There are currently 34 in all of Hamburg. At least a tiny sliver of hope.
• [l] 2024 / Feb 03 / 13:09 CET JetBrains bundles an AI assistant plugin in some of their products. Now they have trouble getting it out: „The problem with removing a bundled plugin is that it can break application signatures and cause problems with updates.“. Hey, it’s not a plugin if you can’t easily unplug it. It’s right in the name! That’s just hype driven, irresponsible product development.
• [l] 2024 / Jan 31 / 20:24 CET Today‘s Garbage Day newsletter posits two interesting questions that nobody else seems to ask: Do people actively seek out news content? And secondly, do they want summaries of information once they receive it? I agree with the resounding „No“ to both questions. Conversely, many emerging AI products assume just that.
• [l] 2024 / Jan 22 / 08:25 CET I just learnt about the NASA Osiris-Rex mission to collect dust samples from a near-earth astroid. Wikipedia has a video (4min) of the impressive mission. The satellite-like spacecraft orbited the astroid a few times, then sprayed it with liquid nitrogen to loosen up dust to collect. It sent the dust back to earth and continues to travel to another, smaller astroid.
• [l] 2024 / Jan 18 / 11:13 CET I found “Nutritionist Answers Diet Questions From Twitter” has some pretty useful, actionable insights around your diet. Related, the John Hopkins Institute for Medicine has an editorial on the effects of multivitamins. Spoiler, they don’t reduce risk for heart disease or cancer. They also found that they didn’t reduce risk for mental decline. The only exception being folic acid for pregnant women. It prevents neural tube defects in babies.
• [l] 2024 / Jan 12 / 09:09 CET DHH suspects that GCP eliminates exit egress costs because of impending EU anti trust laws or to steal market share from its competitors. I think there’s also a tiny possibility that this might be step one in spinning down their cloud business. Not completely shutting down, but making larger cuts, focusing on the money makers.
• [l] 2024 / Jan 11 / 19:54 CET An interesting study on social influence. They replicated the Asch experiment on conformity and extended it by introducing incentives. It tests how individuals yield to a majority group in simple tests. They replicated the results of the original study, additionally, they analysed whether the big five personality traits had an influence on the results.
• [l] 2024 / Jan 08 / 10:29 CET I’m currently dabbling with Swift UI and iOS development. It really is a whole other world, though SwiftUI has strong React vibes. Language-wise Swift looks very productive and easy to pick-up. These two posts about motivated me to keep at it: An App Can Be A Home-Cooked Meal and 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
• [l] 2024 / Jan 05 / 18:31 CET It took a class action lawsuit to get 23andMe to enforce 2FA for all its users. They still say it's the user's fault for reusing passwords. It sort of is, but it's also hugely negligent not to offer better protection when storing DNA (!) data.
• [l] 2023 / Dec 30 / 15:22 CET Voice dictation got really good on iOS. I wonder why people still send voice messages, they take so much time to listen to and are impossible to skim. Telegram has a transcript feature in its paid version. WhatsApp is also working on such feature. Looking forward to it.
• [l] 2023 / Dec 28 / 21:26 CET I’ve got a few Bluesky invite codes. That’s the Twitter/AT Protocol social thingy. Send me a message at atoms[at]franz.hamburg if you want one.
• [l] 2023 / Dec 27 / 09:45 CET PSA: Liquid water has a significantly higher thermal conductivity than air. If you want to thaw something frozen quicker, put it in a room temperature water bath.
• [l] 2023 / Dec 26 / 18:47 CET Geee, what’s up with Goodread‘s search. Misspelled the name of an author and noticed it only returned perfect matches (8). While the correct spelling returns about 650 results. I missed one of the Ls in „Connelly“. Very frustrating, especially considering that authors and book titles consist of, well, names not nouns, hence no autocorrect.
• [l] 2023 / Dec 24 / 08:06 CET The WSJ is drooling over how good Uniqlo’s self-checkout is. Uniqlo is a big Asian fashion retailer. They have a store in Hamburg that I went to, and I’ve got to say that the checkout experience is spectacular. You just have to dump your clothes in a bin, confirm the list of items on an iPad-powered register, pay, and leave. Please give me that experience at a regular supermarket's self-checkout. Both Edeka and REWE are horrible UX-wise. As the article states, they only shift the labor of scanning everything from the cashier to you. Uniqlo's process actually makes it more efficient.
• [l] 2023 / Dec 19 / 11:16 CET Even early 19th century meetings sucked: “How many useless words are spoken in this kind of a meeting cannot be imagined by a person who has not attended one,” he later wrote. “There are the earnest and the impetuous, who want to speak to satisfy their temperaments and soothe themselves by declaiming at random. There are the boobs, who want to tell what they have seen or heard, believing it very important because it is all they know. There are the vain, who, preoccupied with themselves, insist upon explaining their conduct.” Sound familiar? That’s what Rémusat wrote about a 1830 political meeting.
• [l] 2023 / Dec 15 / 07:14 CET Off to six months of parental leave now. Super excited! It can’t be overstated how much a (mostly) fully paid parental leave gives me peace of mind for the coming weeks. Want to be an attractive employer for (future) parents? That’s how. I can’t think of any German company with a similar offering. I hope I’ll be able to write a bit more, especially my longer posts haven’t seen an addition in the last year.
• [l] 2023 / Dec 07 / 08:44 CET Spotify laid off another 17% of its employees. If you’re currently hiring, here’s a list of all those talented people.
• [l] 2023 / Dec 01 / 13:28 CET You know those sign-up forms where they initially ask for the first and last name? Well, I encountered one recently. Because it was for a not-so-likeable company, I chose to only give the first letter of my last name. And that’s when I encountered one of those “Password Rules Are Bullshit” situations: I couldn’t use my randomly generated, 64-character password because I wasn’t allowed to use my first or last name in there. It contained a single capital L.
• [l] 2023 / Nov 22 / 10:52 CET Skynet is in capable hands /s
• [l] 2023 / Nov 19 / 07:30 CET I’ve added a link section to my blog. It’s still in its infancy and I intend to grow it over time. This post by the Marginalia search engine’s creator inspired me.
• [l] 2023 / Nov 19 / 07:25 CET I’m taking another stab at Hades, a rogue-like from Supergiant Games. Before that, I played a bunch of Dead Cells. With over a hundred hours on both games, I’m allowing myself a little comparison: They’re both extraordinary if you're into the genre at all. Dead Cells is a little less casual, especially if you consider all the DLCs. It becomes overwhelming when you come back to it after a longer break. All the little decisions that go into your build increase significantly with each extension. It’s also more demanding in terms of mechanics. Enemies punish you hard when you do screw up those mechanics. On the other hand, the game is much more rewarding when you succeed. Hades has all these aspects, but tuned down. It’s perfect for an hour or so in the evening. Its pace is more forgivable. You don’t have to clear all the floors flawlessly to have a realistic chance at succeeding at your run. Both games are great on the Steam Deck, I haven’t turned on my Windows PC this month.
• [l] 2023 / Nov 16 / 07:36 CET I just have been reminded about Kagi‘s „Small Web“ site. It’s a directory of small (personal) blogs. The site helps you randomly pick one that has fresh content. So, you always land on something recent and dead pages are filtered out. Not that dead content is bad, but Kagi tries to find people that you can actively „follow“.
• [l] 2023 / Nov 12 / 11:11 CET A 5-minute video on improving text editing on mobile. The accompanying website is here. Editing (not writing) sucks on mobile, both on Android and iOS. This looks to improve that by unifying gestures.
• [l] 2023 / Nov 08 / 20:35 CET In “A Thousand Streams in Your Pocket” Kristin Graziani explains Spotify’s new royalty model. It also makes it kind of obvious why there’s a huge outcry from distributers. Those sitting between Spotify and actual artists. The won’t continue to bank micro payouts from Spotify while maintaining thresholds for payouts towards their artists.
• [l] 2023 / Nov 05 / 16:05 CET “Charles's Rules of Argument” from 2004 still applies today. The piece discusses how to avoid online arguments altogether. And if you do find yourself in one, use this two-step approach: (1) State your case (2) Clarify any misunderstandings. Martin Fowler summarized this concisely as "only reply once".
• [l] 2023 / Nov 05 / 15:59 CET Cookie banners need to go. You and your 1544 partners don’t value my privacy. Edit: The pictured banner lead me to search for a new banner blocking extension. I’ve used Super Agent in the past, but everything even slightly popular needs to be a hustle. So, they started charging money. A quick web search and a Reddit post (talk about a hustle…) lead me to Hush. Open source, native iOS and macOS, does the job.
• [l] 2023 / Oct 31 / 15:26 CET Why would drug companies pay for DNA data from 23andMe? They could just wait for their next security breach.
• [l] 2023 / Oct 24 / 09:45 CEST Part of Germany's left-wing party around Sahra Wagenknecht is splitting off. They want to try to not sink into obscurity like the Linke. The reaction of the remaining party is incredibly telling: Instead of acknowledging the signs of the times, they spend their dwindling resources looking into terminating official party membership of the “renegades”. They’re kicking off a bureaucratic act despite the migrating members already terminating their membership. Well, if your party agenda consists of being juuust a little less horrible compared to the rest of the political spectrum, introspection will be really too painful. Better fall back to virtue signalling, making things right. As a voter, I'm tacitly excited about the new party, let's see where this goes.
• [l] 2023 / Oct 19 / 19:11 CEST Why you would trust a site that doesn’t require strong passwords or 2FA with your DNA is beyond me. But here we are. I think this is as much on the user as it is on the company. If you allow simple passwords, users will use simple passwords. If you want to allow easy passwords at least have the courtesy to check against known breaches.
• [l] 2023 / Oct 14 / 15:04 CEST Found this one hiding under my bed (my bookmarks folder): How To Like Things. A pleasant explainer how you go about liking things. Why would you want to like new things? How do you go about? Finding joy in the things you don’t like (but want to). I even got a personal example related to the previous post on Java: While I never liked Java, I learnt to appreciate it. Not for its verbosity, not for its build system, not for Spring but for its ubiquity. It’s literally everything, especially at Spotify. I can ask about a thousand colleagues if I have an issue with it. I can read and understand another team’s code, heck, even help them fix a bug. The barrier is just so fricking low. That’s how I like Java. (And how it’s such an huge enabler for Clojure).
• [l] 2023 / Oct 13 / 08:11 CEST No interesting links this week. So, here’s a nice Friday read from the past (2014): Java for Everything.
• [l] 2023 / Sep 27 / 19:01 CEST Wordpress has come a long way since my last touch points with it in 2015. If you have reservations about it that are as old as mine, go ahead and give it a spin. I recently spun up an installation with docker compose on my home server. Followed the installation steps, tried a few themes, and experienced their block editor for the first time. Top notch stuff. I’m using a plugin to export a static version of that site that I can deploy to my public server. No PHP and MySQL idling „on the edge“.
• [l] 2023 / Sep 21 / 21:08 CEST Oh, Substack started their downhill journey today. The iOS app now opens to an algorithmic feed instead of my inbox that contains my subscriptions. Medium lead the way.
• [l] 2023 / Sep 19 / 22:00 CEST Moved my Atoms experiment to my main website. All the post links should still work, they redirect to the post on the new site.
• [l] 2023 / Sep 16 / 13:53 CEST The book review of The Educated Mind I wrote about a few weeks ago went on to win the ACX review contest. Well deserved! The author, Brandon Hendrickson, has his own Substack. There he tries to convey more of Egans theories on education.
• [l] 2023 / Sep 11 / 10:29 CEST The meta study Effectiveness of wearable activity trackers comes to the conclusion that “…there is sufficient evidence to recommend the use of activity trackers”. Specifically they notice an increase of 1800 steps per day, 40 mins more walking and an reduction of 1kg in bodyweight (on average). Fits with my anecdotal evidence.
• [l] 2023 / Sep 08 / 09:13 CEST What consumers can expect from Microsoft and Google beautifully summarized in two Hacker News comments. Context is an “ad privacy” (what a contradiction!) toggle within Chrome: “Does Google do the scummy thing where these toggles get reset to default after an update?”, reply: “No, this is mainly Microsoft's domain. Google's thing is boiling the frog under the hood.” [1]. The discussion happened below this post describing how Chrome starts to directly track users. It’ll share a list of your “topics” with advertisers. I remember a huge uproar when they announced FLoC, they let that the attention cool down and basically turned it on.
• [l] 2023 / Aug 30 / 08:42 CEST Impressive work by Meta AI on motion prediction in videos. Judging from the demo videos, their model even handles temporary occlusion of the objects. Here is the paper’s site and here’s a demo on Hugging Face. The pessimist in me sees this abused for surveillance.
• [l] 2023 / Aug 28 / 13:53 CEST The BigQuery web console is so slow. For larger query building attempts, I opted to push the necessary partitions in a local SQLite DB. Then using something like “DB Browser for SQLite” to iterate much faster. No network round trips, instant feedback.
• [l] 2023 / Aug 17 / 15:03 CEST DIY Espresso, a 3D printed espresso maker powered by liquid CO2 cartridges. Awesome!
• [l] 2023 / Aug 14 / 15:35 CEST This is what medium.com looks like in 2023. I’m so pleased to have moved my posts off from their on my own site. Own your content, but feel free to cross post to other platforms.
• [l] 2023 / Aug 13 / 10:10 CEST “Credit card debt collection“, alternatively dubbed „waste stream management“ by patio11 goes into the intricacies of debt collection. As you might suspect, a lot of abuse happens within this system.
• [l] 2023 / Aug 07 / 09:10 CEST There are RSS feeds for Wikipedia‘s „On this day…“ feature (link) and for the article of the day (link). You can change the language by editing the subdomain of the url. I only found these feeds on the German front page, the English one weirdly doesn’t link to them.
• [l] 2023 / Aug 04 / 17:25 CEST Dictator Book Club: Putin. A review of Masha Gessen‘s „The Man Without A Face“. (Yes, I’m rediscovering Scott Alexander‘s blog)
• [l] 2023 / Aug 02 / 19:50 CEST I found an unexpected yet fascinating read this weekend: A book review of Kieran Egan‘s The Educated Mind. In the book, Egan outlines his vision for a revamped education system. His primary critique on the status quo is that it ignores what students at a particular are naturally good at. He argues that kids in the elementary age are good at understanding stories, metaphors, binaries and jokes. We should use those as tools for teaching. In middle school, extremes, gossip, heroes and idealism join the party. High school students are eager to look at the big „simple“ questions, come up with general schemes, find their place in the world and seek certainty. I haven’t thought about education a lot, but that piece had me on the hook. It’s about a two hour read and I enjoyed every single minute of it.
• [l] 2023 / Jul 29 / 08:28 CEST A less pessimistic and actionable write-up On Climate Change by Bert Hubert. The first time I heard about solar radiation management, injecting sulfur in the stratosphere to cool the earth. It has been a taboo until recently, but is gathering more acceptance. The sulfur converts to sulfur dioxide, which then reflects a tiny amount of sunlight back into space.
• [l] 2023 / Jul 25 / 10:35 CEST Ultra-processed foods are correlated with poorer health (increased risk of mortality). That’s what a study across 21 countries, 140k participants, and a 10y follow-up period found out. Daniel Lemire regularly posts science and technology links, highly recommended!
• [l] 2023 / Jul 22 / 15:09 CEST The German government starts postings screenshots (!) of their tweets. „…It contradicts the principles of the Federal Government to provide the official communication of the Federal Chancellor and the government spokesman alone registered users of a commercial service…“. Yeah, so how about not using privately held platforms to communicate with your people? What a half-assed solution to a problem that was foreseeable from the minute they opened a Twitter account. It looks exactly like some kind of meme page.
• [l] 2023 / Jul 21 / 10:37 CEST There’s an ongoing HN thread about a fly.io outage and the non-response of their support. You can read about multiple commenters migrating to AWS. It’s ridiculous how resilient the Amazon cloud is. But that’s what you get by dog fooding your product. They’ve got a whole other billion dollar business arm relying on their infra. A lot of smaller hosting companies don’t have that luxury and it shows in cases like this. When Bezos calls you because his bookstore is down once a week, you sure as shit put the effort in. And all your smaller customers profit from that. (And you‘ll profit too because you’re going to charge them for that extra 9).
• [l] 2023 / Jul 17 / 10:01 CEST Shell Script RSS Publishing or „shinobi website“ is a shell script for generating and deploying a static website. It also publishes a RSS feed, alle based on .txt files and a bit of metadata. I like the simplicity of that. Wouldn’t be a good fit for me as I do most of my writing here on my phone. (Also not a fan of monospace fonts for longer reads)
• [l] 2023 / Jul 16 / 14:10 CEST China is going green fast, faster than any other nation. It’s not just renewables, forestry and transportation too.
• [l] 2023 / Jul 11 / 14:34 CEST PSA: You can pay Amazon 10 bucks to remove the ads on your kindle‘s lockscreen. Here’s the support page.
• [l] 2023 / Jul 10 / 21:27 CEST Last week, I read three interesting pieces describing how automation through technology affects jobs. “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation” from 2015 looks at the history of automation. It mentions ML only in passing. Otherwise, it goes very deep into affected jobs and skills. First time hearing about job polarisation, where mid-skilled jobs are substituted by tech. Moreover, my first encounter with the lump of labour fallacy. “AI and the automation of work” acts as the perfect segue to the latter piece. It, too, goes into the history of automation, but details LLMs and AGI specifically. “Why customers don’t want chatbots” finally adds a bit of product and UX perspective to the mix. The author warns that most of the chatbot hype is on the business side, while nobody is looking at the need of the customer.
• [l] 2023 / Jul 05 / 14:56 CEST Me (and you) can link to individual posts now, yey.
• [l] 2023 / Jul 04 / 20:10 CEST I‘ve been using goaccess as a web log analyser for a few years now. Only used the terminal view in an ad-hoc fashion until this week. Switched to generate an HTML report once a day. Love being able to check stats from my phone.
• [l] 2023 / Jun 28 / 15:42 CEST The Deep Sea is a fun little web feature that lets you scroll through ALL THE depths of the oceans. I was fascinated the most by how deep penguins are able to dive. From a technical perspective, I like the simplicity. Kept me scrolling without being to much in my face.
• [l] 2023 / Jun 27 / 10:09 CEST Love James Vincent‘s spin on how „AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born“. The „old web“ being the SEO optimised shit show of websites and social platforms. There’s a chance of those sites AI-cycling themselves into oblivion. Personal blogs and private, fractured forums might flourish from there self-inflicted downfall. I can already see glimpses of that in my bubble. AI has already been dictating what you consume online. All and every „home“ feed on social media is curated by tech. That isn’t to say AI is bad, we’re in the hype cycle where all the talk is about it replacing everything. I hope we will end up with it complementing is instead. That’s were technology has always shined the brightest.
• [l] 2023 / Jun 20 / 09:29 CEST Some links that have been sitting in my draft notes for far too long now: “Simply explained: how does GPT work?” is a short, concise explanation of how LLMs work. It’s a very high-level take, explaining probabilistic approaches; no prior knowledge required. That whole probabilistic thing ties very well into “LLMs are good at playing you”. This one highlights the obvious limits of those models and warns not to anthropomorphize them. In “What are we going to do about ChatGPT”, Daniel Lemire argues that halting AI development for a given period wouldn't help anyone. It's not even enforceable. He gives a bit of history on similar initiatives.
• [l] 2023 / Jun 14 / 09:16 CEST “Speed matter: Why working quickly is more important than it seems”, a lovely blog post from James Somers. He describes how doing things fast, but not sloppy, improves your efficiency in the long run. Conversely doing things slow will make you want to do less of them, which leads you to do them even slower. There’s something true about that, it holds for fixing bugs, writing, but also for clean your bathroom. “The general rule seems to be: systems which eat items quickly are fed more items. Slow systems starve.”
• [l] 2023 / Jun 12 / 07:29 CEST Google search trained me to definitely not click on the first search result (that isn’t an ad). Too often it ends up being an SEO optimised, ad riddled hellhole. I’ve been using Kagi for a good month now, and I had to retrain myself that the first item is worth clicking on. That is also something that shows up on large e-commerce sites like Amazon or OTTO. The first few items will be sponsored ones that only very loosely match your search. That's one of the reasons I enjoy shopping on smaller sites: Their search matching might be a bit worse in detail, but the overall experience is much less enshittified.
• [l] 2023 / Jun 05 / 10:43 CEST Mitchell Hashimoto writes about approaching large technical projects. In his post he emphasises the importance of tangible results. Making every small iteration visible to keep yourself motivated. You’re not always building something visual like an UI. For those cases he suggests automated tests. I really like that! What helps me is having a frictionless, but manual way to deploy my project to a place where I can show it others. Even if it’s just an empty HTTP server starting up, showing “Hello World”. This allows you to get every small hack out of the door with ease.
• [l] 2023 / Jun 02 / 13:24 CEST Bye bye Reddit. I’ll especially miss /r/AskHistorians, /r/explainlikeimfive and the awesome bakers over at /r/Breadit.
• [l] 2023 / Apr 17 / 21:39 CEST I haven’t had hot-reloading for my Clojure project until last week. Working on a frontend project the week before, reminded me how powerful fast feedback loops can be. Make a change and instantly see its effect. No restarting a server or rerunning a query. Those break your development flow. They’re just un-fun. Now for the http-kit based project I expected it to be a bit of a hassle to get it working. But the Clojure world doesn’t treat code reloading as an afterthought. Added a middleware behind an environment flag and it-just-worked.
• [l] 2023 / Mar 30 / 14:33 CEST It’s Hack Week at Spotify. I’m having a blast building a Backstage extension for Raycast. Raycast is an alternative to Spotlight, the launcher/search bar thing on macOS. The API’s design is well thought out. You get just enough levers to not feel constrained. But not too many to confuse you when considering an implementation. There’s a right way or no way. Awesome platform to build on.
• [l] 2023 / Mar 24 / 15:33 CET Today I learned about the “Minto Pyramid Principle”, a tool for clear and efficient communication. That lead me to untools.co, collection of methods around problem solving, decision making and communication.
• [l] 2023 / Mar 19 / 15:35 CET My NLP experiment for parsing recipe ingredients is going so-so. I’ve used both tensorflow and scikit to implement a CRF model for labelling. Tensorflow has been a mess, it’s complicated to approach if you don’t have ML expertise. I still haven’t figured out how I can pass multiple features for a single token („word“) into the model. The crfsuite wrapper of scikit makes that really easy. Throw in a python dict and off you go. Really shows how a specialised API can help beginners to get started. The keras/tf API basically has to work for all things ML, making it extremely generic (and thus flexible). On the upside both experiments had me look into the data itself much closer. I have a good grasp of what needs to be cleaned up, normalised or removed. That paved the way for a hand-rolled approach. Regex all the way down. A big thanks goes out to Tom Strange and his model guide.
• [l] 2023 / Mar 12 / 17:36 CET „There is a pattern. Malthusians raise the alarm about resource or environmental problems and then attack the obvious technical solutions. Malthus had to attack birth control to predict overpopulation. Holdren and Ehrlich had to claim fossil fuels were scarce to oppose the extension of fertilizers and industrial agriculture to poor nations and to raise the alarm over famine. And climate activists today have to attack natural gas and nuclear energy, the main drivers of lower carbon emissions, in order to warn of climate apocalypse.“ from Apocalypse Never, M. Shellenberger
• [l] 2023 / Mar 11 / 09:27 CET Chris Voss explaining empathy and specifically separating it from sympathy was interesting. We frequently talk about empathy, but actually mean sympathy. As in “being on your side” (sympathy) vs “I can see where you’re coming from” (empathy). Agreement (sympathy) vs understanding (empathy). Source: Chris Voss on the Lex Fridman Podcast [8:47]
• [l] 2023 / Mar 08 / 21:53 CET Cory Doctorow on the „Enshittification of Platforms“.
• [l] 2023 / Feb 28 / 09:11 CET Things I’ve read in the past week, that are worth sharing: People can read their manager’s mind, The Power of “Yes, if”: Iterating on our RFC Process, 35 Lessons from 35 Years of Newsletter Publishing. Looks like I need to implement list support for my blog.
• [l] 2023 / Feb 24 / 12:29 CET Apparently iCloud+ now comes with bring-your-own-domain for e-mail. That’s kind of huge. It both supports catch-all and dedicated addresses. I’ve been mostly using Fastmail for this. But you have to add a separate mail account (+ password) for every address of your domain. With iCloud+ you can manage those custom addresses within Mail directly. The DNS setup is the same as for most e-mail providers, two MX records, TXT and CNAME and off you go. Excited to see Apple supporting something as open as DNS.
• [l] 2023 / Feb 20 / 13:15 CET Jira has a command palette, you can open it by hitting “.” (dot). Then just type in what you want to do (assign, move, close etc.). Substantially improves working with Jira, if you’re a keyboard person. It feels much more responsive this way. And you don’t have to search around the cluttered UI to find the right button.
• [l] 2023 / Feb 17 / 10:08 CET I’ve been looking into extracting structured data from recipes recently. Especially on parsing ingredient phrases in something useful like ingredient name, quantity and unit. It’s a rabbit whole of NLP and dubious SaaS services. The NYT posted about how they used a linear-chain conditional random field model to extract data from their recipe archive. There’s even some code on Github. Sadly, but understandably, they don’t provide training data or a pretrained model. Time come up with my own!
• [l] 2023 / Feb 13 / 20:36 CET “This project is "Stable" (no longer "Active").” That is one of the best things to read on an open source project. Makes me much more confident in adopting it as dependency. Quote comes from clojure.java.jdbc.
• [l] 2023 / Feb 09 / 21:45 CET Started working on a small app that’s scratching my own itch. A web app to scrape and clean-up cooking recipes. Still riding the Clojure train for that one. Has been my „biggest“ clj project so far. I keep coming back to it, especially the structural editing makes writing and updating code such a joy. You can find the app over at pretty-recip.es (yeah I had to buy that domain)
• [l] 2023 / Feb 02 / 15:40 CET Erlang: the coding language that finance forgot talks about how being proficient in another programming language (Erlang) can improve your coding skills in others. Specifically going from an „esoteric“ functional language to a non-functional one. I feel like there’s some truth to that. A good example are immutable data structures. Bringing this practice to JavaScript, Python et al makes for readable code. It takes some discipline when not enforced by a compiler. But that applies to other high level patterns and principles too. You don’t have to be an expert in those other languages, often an understanding of the key features suffices. Go build something in OCAML, Elixir, Clojure or Crystal. It’ll widen your horizon.
• [l] 2023 / Jan 23 / 19:53 CET Today I witnessed layoffs for the first time from the inside. While not being affected myself, it was (and still is) a horrible process. Sitting there waiting whether you get an e-mail from HR or not is torturous. Reading the messages of people losing their job makes it so real. There’s a lot of criticism about how companies implement the decision to let people go. While a lot of that is valid on a case by case basis, there’s just NO good way to do this. Other than not doing it. There’re good and bad reasons leading up to the decision, but the implementation is always going to suck.
• [l] 2023 / Jan 20 / 10:43 CET First time working on a vscode extension for Spotify Hackdays. The docs explain the process and anatomy really well. One major downside is that you can’t use ESM modules. So you end up with a mixture of imports and requires. What a mess. Also went through the source code of the markdown extension that vscode is shipping with. It feels overly complex, gives me Java vibes.
• [l] 2023 / Jan 18 / 11:17 CET This „blog“ reads a bunch of blocks from a single Notion page. If a block starts with a date, it will get published to the Atom feed and the website. The block parser is really dumb right now. It only supports paragraphs and links.
• [l] 2023 / Jan 17 / 09:50 CET “Extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas” makes some good proposals. Makes you reconsider whether you’re building the right thing. Whether your organisation’s structure has purpose. Whether your processes make sense. It’s one of the downsides of doing everything iteratively, you tend to lose a sense of direction.
• [l] 2023 / Jan 05 / 18:53 CET I have been gambling around with the Crystal programming language a bit. It’s quite fun and productive. The stdlib has a lot of stuff, reminds me of Node.js. Docs are great, the cli is easy to use. What’s lacking is better editor support. The vscode extension is just way too slow. Cross-compilation is also giving me a bit of a headache, though I’m mostly used to interpreted languages and those running on VMs. I’m keeping an eye on it!