A Roundup (July 2022)

A collection of podcast and reading recommendations, cool people or projects I have found online recently, any new tools or tips, and some personal updates. Subscribe to my blog (in the footer of this post) or Substack to get these roundups in your email once a month.

Podcast Recommendations

1.) Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life, Conversations with Tyler

This is an incredible podcast episode that is extremely info-dense. I learned so much from this one, and Barkha expertly navigates each topic discussed with style and ease.

2.) How Would the End of Roe v. Wade Change America?, Plain English with Derek Thompson

This episode is important and expertly executed by Derek, Melissa Murray, and Margot Sanger-Katz. It was recorded after the leaked draft of the Roe decision, but everything discussed is perfectly relevant now that the Supreme Court has indeed overturned Roe v. Wade.

3.) Robin Hanson, Lex Fridman Podcast

I discovered Robin Hanson from this episode (see below for more), but suffice to say that his range left me in awe. This episode touches on so many important topics, and with Robin at the wheel you feel safe even as he guides you through things like: alien civilizations, artificial intelligences, war and existential risk, and the taboo topics we ignore to be accepted by our group. The first topic is about Robin’s latest research on what he calls “Grabby Aliens”, aliens that want to colonize their neighborhood of the Universe (and maybe more). It is his fascinating approach to the Fermi paradox.

Twitter

Here are some new Twitter accounts I started following recently that I’d recommend:

• @robinhanson: Robin Hanson is a professor at George Mason University who has published research on a wide variety of topics, including: hypothesis on the Fermi paradox (where are all the aliens?), self-deception of the mind, emulated minds, and more. He is such a brilliantly methodical and careful thinker who has curiosity to spare. I just started reading his book with Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain, which surveys the nature of human’s self-deception especially on important topics.
• @garymarcus: Gary Marcus is an AI researcher. I found out about him from this fantastic essay he wrote following the “Google made a sentient AI” silliness and then read this great New Yorker essay by Gary about moving beyond the Turning Test for testing the sentience of modern AI. I recommend checking out his Substack too if these topics interest you.

Cool Projects

New section, woo! This will be where I put any awesome side projects, companies, or products I find throughout my month.

1.) Fahrenheit 52: this is a super cool writing challenge Charlie Harrington (software engineer at Cruise) gave himself for 2022. Inspired by Ray Bradbury’s advice, Charlie is writing one short story a week. He is also reading and releasing them as podcasts if you prefer that. This project is right up my alley as a huge fan of Ray Bradbury, science fiction, writing in general, and challenges in consistency. I am excited to work through the twenty-five existing stories (good selections for your next Printernet issue) and follow along for the rest of the year. Check out Charlie’s personal website too, super fun stuff including a SQL library browser (his book recommendations). More from Charlie in the recommended reading of this post.

2.) Nothing Phone

The Nothing Phone is set to launch this month. Nothing is a company founded in 2020 whose mission is to “remove barriers between people and technology”. They launched the ‘ear (1)’ headphones, and now their first phone is launching. I didn’t realize this, but Jesper and Tom from Teenage Engineering are a part of the founding team, and are reportedly the “visionaries behind [the] product designs.” I’ve contemplated trying a non-iPhone for my next upgrade like the Light Phone, but this one could be cool too. I will definitely be keeping an eye on this.

Tools and Tips

1.) Send to Kindle

This Chrome extension allows you to send articles, essays, PDFs, and more straight to your Kindle. It only takes two clicks. I never knew this, but each Kindle has a special “Kindle email address”, so you can also send yourself content using that email. This specific extension is integrated with your Amazon account, so you can easily select which device you want to link to the extension.

Reading Recommendations

As always, you can keep up with what I am reading here. Here are some recent reads that stood out to me.

1.) Walking the Cotswolds, Walking Japan – Craig Mod

This is a gorgeous write-up on a group of friends’ walking party and a meditation on the emotion of living spaces. Craig and some friends (including Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired mag) planned a trip to walk together in England, Hobbit-style, talking about a new topic each day and strolling from town to town, inn to inn. This essay is beautiful and calming.

2.) Truth vs Trust – Kevin Kelly

A good short presentation on how we might find truth in the digital age of information abundance using a ledger like system built around trustworthiness.

3.) The Year We All Became Reactionaries – Noah Smith

A good summary of the politics of Liberals throughout the pandemic years, and what we might face in the coming years of a conservative backlash.

4.) The Chairman of the Board – Joe Posnanski

A beautiful and intimate essay about Chess, family, getting older, and staying young.

5.) Where did the Long Tail Go? – Ted Gioia

This is a fascinating post on a topic I have been thinking more and more about lately: where did all the cool shit go? Of course whenever we contemplate this, we must be on guard against the glaze of nostalgia and romanticization. And yet it does seem to be true that coffee shops, architecture, popular music, brands and corporate logos, movies and art, technology and UI, restaurants and bars, and much more are sliding into sameness. This post is a narrower approach to the topic, exploring the early promise of the internet that every niche would have a viable market once the world was connected. Did this come to pass? Ted has a few posts and tweets on these ideas, and after Tessa pointed this out to me I haven’t stopped spotting examples of it.

6.) My New Old Apple IIe Computer – Charlie Harrington

This is for anyone interested in hardware, consumer tech, the Apple mythos, design, and hacking / DIY. You will absolutely love Charlie’s documentation of finding an old Apple IIe in a neighbor’s trash and getting it up and running again.

What I have been up to lately

I am working on a backend Python program to generate Printernet issues automatically each time a new issue is ordered. Currently, I use a semi-manual process that involves designing the issues with Adobe InDesign. With my new approach, I take users’ article and essay selections (five URLs) as the input and then the program outputs a PDF copy of the Printernet issue automatically. This will primarily be based off of Apache Arc90’s Readability work and ‘FPDF’. This is hard work for my level of programming knowledge, but I have already made some progress. As of today, I can pull clean text (the body of an article or essay) from a URL for many websites and generate a PDF with them. The challenges I still have to solve are getting the formatting right across many different article formats, handling the various HTML structures to pull the right info every time (not all sites put the body of an article or essay in the same HTML classes), and generating the QR codes automatically for any images present. Excited to continue work on this though, it will be a huge help towards scaling Printernet.

I also built myself a simple tool for being more productive during the work day. A while back I started using Google Timer for twenty minute “work sprints”. I pick a task that I want to get done, set the time, and work on that task for twenty minutes straight. After the timer goes off, I take a three to five minute break before repeating. It has been super helpful with getting more done, but I have to use several tools to do this: Google Timer, Notion for my tasks for the day and for the twenty minute sprints, and my calendar for blocking out my entire day. So instead of that, I built myself a simple dashboard via Replit that combines all three of these on one page.

After documenting this project a bit online, it received some interest (gaining over 600 likes and 180 saves!) so I threw up a waitlist for anyone who wants access to the tool. There is some work I will need to do in order to make it viable for others because I hardcoded a lot of the usefulness since this was originally made just for me. If you want me to email you the link when it is ready, you can sign up here. I’ve also Open Sourced it for anyone who wants to peek at the code or help improve it. This has been fun to work on and brush up on my HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills.