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How Markdown Took Over the World
The trillion-dollar AI industry’s system for controlling their most advanced platforms is a plain text format one guy made up for his blog and then bounced off of a 17-year-old kid before sharing it with the world for free. You’re welcome, Time Magazine’s people of the year, The Architects of AI. Their achievement is every bit as impressive as yours.
Funny thing is that this post is also written in Markdown.
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Slow Lift
Robin Sloan writes about the slow lift:
At my gym they say, you’re not here to do reps. You’re not even here to lift weights. You are here to exhaust your muscles, as efficiently as possible, so your body understands very clearly that it’s time to get stronger.
My strength training has also dropped to a weekly schedule these days. So this gives me a good strategy to try.
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Ferrari x LiveFrom
Not everyday that you see a reimagining of a car dashboard. Good to see that the folks from LoveFrom are working across different domains and bringing new ideas.
Ferrari’s first electric car has an all new dashboard design. It’s familiar but also very different. I like it. My only complaint would be that, today I can use any car from any maker and the controls and locations are basically the same, but I might fumble to find common controls in this car. Say, for example, the turn indicator. All design evolves. This is just the first iteration, and I’m sure they’ll land on a middle ground which would be great. Can’t wait for some of these great ideas to be adopted/stolen by other makers over the next few years.
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Terms Every Runner Should Know
Runna has a document where they have collected all the common terms used in running. Just reading through this list gives you an idea of things you should be doing as a runner.
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Inertia
Inertia is so real. When I wrote here regularly, I kept at it. And then I couldn’t for a few days, I stopped writing altogether. Here’s hoping that this post provides a new inertia - that of writing regularly here.
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In my Bangalore locality, a pharmacy opens next to every new bakery. Coincidence?
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Typeface Search on Google
Found a neat Google Easter Egg today. If you search for a typeface on Google, the page with results is then rendered using that typeface.
Check out some examples:
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Apple's Holiday Ad: A Critter Carol
Made with real effects. Not AI generated, unlike the Coca Cola ad.
One bad AI-generated ad doesn’t mean that the problem is tech, it could just be a problem with taste of the people involved in the Coca Cola ad. At least as of now, seems like it’s the wrong set of people who are using AI fully for creativity. With today’s tech, AI has not proven to be very creative. Three years of AI uprising and there is not one song, video, article, book, painting, etc. which has captured people’s imagination. Maybe it will change in the future, I’m just conservative on the timelines unlike many others.
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Size of Life
New project by Neal Agarwal - Size of Life. Loved its ambient music and artwork. I went through this with my son, and was impressed with his awareness and knowledge of most of the entries.
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Flossing
I bought a water flosser. It was an impulse buy, I became aware of water flossing based on a review and a Black Friday deal for buying one. I have never before flossed in my life, but have always read how it is imporant.
One day into using it, I can already feel a funny feeling in my mouth. The pleasant kind. It’s as if I can feel that there’s nothing stuck in my teeth, when before it was probably subconscious that something is not right.
I asked ChatGPT more about water flossing. It appears that I should see most benefits within the first 4-6 weeks. This is a short enough timeline, and I’m looking forward to it.
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Kevin Kelly on the cultural changes
While listening to the On Margins podcast, the segment where Kevin Kelly talks about how cultures change struck a chord.
Over time, cultures change in the following order:
- Costumes
- Architecture
- Food
- Language
I recently visited Bhutan with my family. What amazed right from the get go was that all their buildings, including the airport, still retain the traditional Bhutanese style. Everyone still wears their traditional costume on a daily basis. Some of it is due to the official mandate, and it makes such a difference to making the place unique in a world where every country is increasingly starting to look similar.
In India where I live, traditional costumes and architecture are increasingly going away. Food and language are slowly starting to become western. Official mandate to bring back traditions will only meet resistance. Traditions have to evolve to keep their place, as illogical as that sounds.
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Meet the Aphantasics
This was a fascinating read. It’s fascinating to me how there’s a wide range of mental imagery among people, and the extremes are so hard to imagine (pun intended).
PS: There are some words where you go months or years without reading or hearing them. And then sometimes you have the strangest coincidence where you read a word twice within minutes in completely different contexts. I had to figure out the word “aphantasia” in today’s crossword, and then this article popped up in my feed.
PPS: Also in the same crossword I across “synesthesia”, which is just as fascinating.
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Strength Training: The Ultimate Guide
Earlier today, TrainingPeaks’s sent out this guide to strength training. It covers a wide range of topics - why strength training is important, types of exercises, nutrition, recovery, etc. I wish I had known all this a couple of years ago when I started running. I have found that my running plateaued after a point, and not doing strength training and nutrition properly seems to be the key reason. Better late than never though.
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Retirement corpus
Good article by Zerodha on how to calculate the retirement corpus amount.
According to this, I should build a corpus of 20 crores if I want to retire by age of 55. Or about 26 crores if I want to retire by age of 60.
Sounds daunting, but it is not impossible if we take advantage of the magic of compounding. How I wish I had started disciplined investing at least 5 years earlier in my life.
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Yuval Harari on how meditation made him a better historian
Yuval Harari does 60-days of Vipassana every year.
First of all, it’s very difficult. You don’t have any distractions, you don’t have television, you don’t have emails, no phones, no books. You don’t write. You just have every moment to focus on what is really happening right now, on what is reality. You come across the things you don’t like about yourself, things that you don’t like about the world, that you spend so much time ignoring or suppressing.
What happens along the 60 days is that as your mind becomes more focused and more clear, you go deeper and deeper, and you start seeing the sources of where all this anger is coming from, where all this fear is coming from, and you just observe. You don’t try to do anything. You don’t tell any stories about your anger. You don’t try to fight it. Just observe. What is anger? What is boredom? You live sometimes for years and years and years experiencing anger and fear and boredom every day, and you never really observe, how does it actually feel to be angry? Because you’re too caught up in the angry. The 60 days of meditation, they give you the opportunity. You can have a wave of anger, and sometimes it can last for days and you just, for days, you do nothing. You just observe. What is anger? How does it actually feel in the body? What is actually happening in my mind when I am angry? This is the most amazing thing that I’ve ever observed, is really to observe these internal phenomena.
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Golem Effect vs. Pygmalion Effect
Came across these two effects today, on dealing with someone whose performance is not up to expectations.
Managers who contribute to the Golem effect believe that certain employees lack the skills, potential or willingness to succeed. This leads to a change in leadership style, where managers may:
- Set more explicit targets and deadlines
- Assign more routine tasks
- Monitor employees on a regular basis
- Emphasize operational concerns instead of strategic ones Whether explicitly communicated or not (often these beliefs aren’t), managers make it clear to their subordinates that their trust in them is limited. When faced with this reality, employees do, in fact, become less motivated and less likely to achieve, thus completing a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Upon reflection, I realise that I have done this myself. Instead I should do the opposite - understand their motivations, set high expectations and clear outcomes, and help them achieve it in their own way.
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A Whole Lotta Vipassana
Craig Mod’s post on Vipassana is a good one to follow up from my previous one on Vipassana.
Am I glad I did the ten day course? You bet. It continues to pay clear dividends — the feeling of focus and sensitivity to my own physiology have become a touchstone I return to a dozen times a day. The goal is to attend at least once a year. And I really would like to give a whole month a try.
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Full Days and the Long Walk
Insightful piece, as usual, by Craig Mod.
It sounded crazy to me when I first read his rules for the solo walks. I’m fully onboard with no news, no social media. I wasn’t prepared for no music, no books, minimal to no talking. When I go for a run, I have to pop my earbuds in. When I drive, I have a podcast, audiobook, or music playing. And they end up not giving me time with my own thoughts. All these are habits which I have built myself though, precisely to give my mind something to be occupied with. What we make, we can break. I’ll start to introduce stretches of time everyday where I just think for myself or pay attention to the moment.
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ChatGPT Atlas
First thought, cool name. Second thought, so it begins. We have had AI browsers before - Dia, Comet, etc. But this one feels like the start of an era.
I find the memory feature to be most compelling. I browse a lot, and I’d love to be able to recall and use that information sometime in the future in new ways.
I’m ambivalent to the agent feature. The examples didn’t appeal to me. We have had the capability of Alexa ordering things for us, but I have never used that feature. I would probably like it for taking away mundane activities which I might do from time to time.
Not much info about their Apps SDK integration. Curious about that one.
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One monkey mind's 10 days of silence
Every time I read someone’s account of Vipassana, I feel a longing to enrol myself. One day…
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ChatGPT’s Atlas: The Browser That’s Anti-Web
Anil Dash rips into ChatGPT Atlas after giving it a try. I still like the idea of memories, but all other points are 100% valid.
How do you make a “web browser” that doesn’t let you use the open web?
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App Recommendation: NetNewsWire
Continuing my series of app recommendations, the new one is NetNewsWire. It’s a free, open source software for RSS feeds.
After the death of Google Reader, there has been a surge in RSS services and apps. Many of the apps are great - Reeder and Unread to name a couple. I just like NetNewsWire more because it is and feels native, and it is fast.
Kagi News and NetNewsWire have become my primary source of daily news and interesting things to read. A simple trick I did to invest into these apps rather than Twitter, Bluesky, Reddit, etc. is to simply sign out from them and not install their apps.
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ChatGPT Atlas
First thought, cool name. Second thought, so it begins. We have had AI browsers before - Dia, Comet, etc. But this one feels like the start of an era.
I find the memory feature to be most compelling. I browse a lot, and I’d love to be able to recall and use that information sometime in the future in new ways.
I’m ambivalent to the agent feature. The examples didn’t appeal to me. We have had the capability of Alexa ordering things for us, but I have never used that feature. I would probably like it for taking away mundane activities which I might do from time to time.
Not much info about their Apps SDK integration. Curious about that one.
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App Recommendation: Bear
Apple Notes is free and pretty good. But I have always had an itch to find another note taking app, which I would like better. I explored many apps over a long time - Agenda, Craft, Notion, Joplin, etc. Ultimately, it was Bear that I loved best.
I have previously written about how I love software that is fast, native and has good UX. I have usually found that indie software developers do better in these respects than big companies. Indies stick to the core essence of the app, while the corporations either end up catering to enterprises or come up with a React-based implementation for wider platform support.
Just like Due and Things which I wrote about recently, Bear is an app that just works for me. It looks sleek and pretty, runs very fast, opinionated with its workflows, supports Markdown well, syncs well, works offline, feels native, and more. I love writing in this app. I have been using it for months now, and it has integrated well with my workflows.
It’s the only subscription-based productivity app that I use, and I find their pricing to be reasonable especially because it’s available on all the platforms I care about. It’s a true testament to a piece of software when you pay to use it and there are solid free alternatives available, don’t you think?
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Fika
I came across an Apple Music playlist today called “Fika” which had music to help you slow down and relax. It was a new word that intrigued me, so I had to look it up.
Turns out, it’s a big thing in Sweden. It’s a short break where you take your mind off work or worldly things, and enjoy a cup of coffee and something light to eat.
From my experience, I have found such breaks (though we didn’t call them that) to be so important to nurture friendships and also not burn out. Not surprising that Sweden is one of the happiest countries in the world. I mean, of course I know that it’s not fika alone that makes them among the happiest people on earth. But I’m sure it contributes a big part.
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