Weekly Thing 281 / Fediverse, Odyssey, Echo Chess
Weekly Thing 281 with twenty-eight links and twenty-five journal entries between Mar 15, 2024 and Mar 29, 2024. Sent from Faribault, MN.
Good morning! š
I missed getting the Thing to you last week. It was very busy and we left for Spring Break and there wasn't any time. So, that means Iām here this week with a double issue. We had a great time in Milwaukee seeing fun museums, checking out interesting attractions, and trying some delicious restaurants. Milwaukee may not be on your short list for Spring Break and it was much colder and rainier than we would have liked but we had a fabulous time. Lots of pictures below highlighting some of those things.
Hope you have a fabulous remainder of your weekend! š
Impressive flower blooming in the Tropical Dome at the Milwaukee Domes.
Mar 27, 2024
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Notable
Holding Hands with the "Fediverse" ā ActivityPub at SFO Museum
Truth be told I haven't spent a ton of time digging into ActivityPub and the Fediverse. Largely if the Fediverse is just "Twitter, err, X, that doesn't suck" that just isn't that compelling to me. Iām not sure why this article caught my attention, but as I read it I got excited about the potential here for the first time.
Twenty-ish years in to the contemporary "social media" landscape (social networking, social messaging and sharing, social objects) it seems reasonable to ask: If people see value and meaning interacting with things that aren't "people", like venues or brands or services, then why wouldn't that same behaviour extend to individual objects in a museum? And why wouldn't a museum embrace that opportunity as a chance to share what it knows, understands and appreciates about an object beyond the limited space afforded by a wall label or an exhibition catalog, both in the moment and in the future? What happens when a new and exciting essay about an object is published and how is it shared with all the people who've seen that object in an exhibition and love it just as much the curator who chose it? Usually, if we're being honest, nothing happens.
I love the framing that a museum could have its own Fediverse instance not just to host one account, but an account for every object in it? I love this. This is actually interesting and fun. It made me instantly think how fun it would be to have a Fediverse instance for our home and what accounts could that have. The mind whirs. Worth noting though that I am someone that created a Twitter bot for my house in 2007. š
Onboarding roulette: deleting our employee accounts daily
Chaos testing can be great for testing, but this kind of random deletion of your profile is next level.
Our solution at Graphite has been to run a roulette script, randomly deleting one of our engineers' Graphite accounts every day at 9 a.m. We donāt just reset onboardingāwe delete their account, tokens, configured filters, uploaded gifs, and more.
I like the reasoning that went into why they do it. The developers building the product would otherwise never experience the onboarding process.
Starbucks Is Shutting Down Its Odyssey Beta NFT Rewards Program ā Will It Return? - Decrypt
I wish that programs like this were successful, but Iām not surprised they are turning this down.
Coffee giant Starbucks announced Friday that it is shutting down its Starbucks Odyssey Beta platform, which provided NFT-based rewards minted on Ethereum scaling network Polygon.
Let's think for a moment about why a loyalty program would be implemented with crypto. I think there are two reasons.
- It is open and public, so other systems can build on top of yours. For example, if you have achieved some level in the Starbucks loyalty program you get a benefit in a different, unrelated one.
- You could do it cheaper. By putting the transactions on the blockchain you don't need to keep the database and manage the information yourself.
Starbucks didnāt do either of these. I don't think the tech and user experience is far enough along to do the second item yet.
It's just a blog - annie mueller
Annie Mueller sharing her love of blogging, of personal websites, of writing and sharing.
What a wonder. People all over the world, logging on. Typing out little thoughts. Posting them. Someone else reading them. Boom. Instant. Happening now. Someone responding. Now there's a little discussion in the comments. Now there's a new post, responding. There are trends and tribes and camps and disputes. There are deeply thoughtful discussions. There are genius-level things written and shared, casually. There are creative expressions and there are mundane little daily observations and there are ultra-specific hobbies explained in ultra-specific details and there are reams of advice, bad and good.
I love this and hope it encourages a few people to start a blog and keep the web personal. Keep the web human. Keep the web about people.
I love this lineā¦
And we're all still hanging out here, in little corners around, wondering: Is the part I love still alive?
Yep, it is. It is as long as we are part of it. š
8 years later: A world Go championās reflections on AlphaGo
I tracked when Lee Sedol played these historic games against AlphaGo, and ultimately lost.
After those matches, Go became even more popular in Korea. And AlphaGo itself has now completely changed how we set game records by setting the bar higher. Teaching Go in an AI era looks very different from the pre-AlphaGo world, because students can learn far more by studying games that have been played by AI.
How wild is it that students of Go can learn better by watching the AI play than a grandmaster.
Take Ownership of Your Future Self
If you've read books like Atomic Habits, Tiny Habits, or others this article covers similar ground. I like that it gets to what I think is the root around identity, and how we identify ourselves.
Identity is far more powerful than personality. Identity drives behaviors, which over time, become personality. Your personality -- the sum of your consistent attitudes and behaviors -- is merely a byproduct of identity.
Your identity narrative is the story you tell about yourself: past, present, and future. If your identity is rooted in your past and present alone, that fixed mindset can make personality feel permanent. But if you focus on envisioning your future self, instead of fixating on your current self, it becomes possible to change your identity narrative.
This is the part that meditation practices of keeping the "self" as small as possible get so right. Self is identity, and the more things you attach to self you remove or make change harder. If your identity has 20 things attached to it, change will be very hard.
Even more importantly I would suggest is to ask yourself what are the labels you've attached to your identity? And how did they get there? Were they your choice, or someone else's? Make sure they weren't a marketers choice.
Dead air on the incident call ā Dan Slimmon
This wont come as a surprise to folks that have worked with me and managed a production incident ā I don't do well with silence in incident response. This article lays out the huge role of communication during an incident, and also shares what can be good silence.
When incident response is going right, everybody understands what's being done by whom, and why. As information comes to light and our strategies evolve, it takes more or less constant communication to maintain this state. That's why silence on an incident call is so often an indicator of trouble: when there's silence, communication isn't happening.
There is, however, a healthy kind of dead air.
Sometimes an investigator needs to go silent for a while to chase down a hunch, or collect some data, or research some question. As long as such a silence is negotiated in advance, with a specific time to reconvene, it can serve a crucial purpose. I call this functional dead air.
Functional silence is a good way to think of it.
04: photography as a result of life
I like this reflection from Toh. I like the "softer philosophy" and just being.
Photography as a result of life. This frames photography as a natural act, like breathing. You have a camera and you take photos. Are they meaningful? That's not for you to say. Is there a narrative? The more you try to force a narrative, the uglier things become. Instead, breathe.
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NVIDIA's STUNNING Breakthroughs: Blackwell AI Chip, Robots, AGI, World Model and more! - YouTube
This highlight video from Nvidia's recent event has amazing announcements. The processing power of the Blackwell chips, and what they are doing with it, is no less than amazing. Worth watching for sure. Also, Ben Thompson's Nvidia Waves and Moats is a good follow-on read. š¤Æ
Understanding the DOJ's Antitrust Complaint Against Apple - MacStories
Every tech blogger under the sun has been writing about this case. Ben Thompsons take was thorough and well informed. Voorhees perspective is interesting to me because he is actually a lawyer. Voorhees breaks down the same five core arguments:
According to the DOJ, Apple has used a combination of contractual requirements, policies, APIs, fees, and other tactics to lock in users and stifle innovation in five areas:
- Messaging
- Digital Wallets
- The Apple Watch
- Game Streaming
- Super Apps
Worth reading for another perspective on this.
The drift to normal | Seth's Blog
Godin's struck a chord with me on this observation.
As an organization grows in scale, the idiosyncrasy and distinctiveness that was originally informed by the taste of the founders moves toward the mean.
Over time, things get more average.
A corollary that should go with this is that everything being unique and different isn't necessarily a benefit.
So how do you identify where you are distinctively not average, not normal, and protect that at all costs?
United States v. Apple ā Stratechery by Ben Thompson
Thompson providing context and a breakdown of the case the Department of Justice has brought against Apple. Nearly everyone that has asked me about this goes to the App Store and the issues around it. As Thompson highlights though, this case isn't about the App Store.
Here is the most important thing to understand about this entire App Store discussion ā the topic that has many people who are normally skeptical of government involvement in tech cheering on the Department of Justice: basically none of it is pertinent to this case. Oh sure, the initial case filing aired all of these grievances ā along with a bizarre and factually wrong assertion that iTunes was only ever on Windows because of a DOJ Consent Decree ā but the actual assertions of wrongdoing barely mention the App Store at all.
There are five points of this filing.
- Supressing Super apps
- Supressing cloud streaming game apps
- Prohibiting third-party apps from sending or receiving carrier-based messages
- Suppressing key functions of third-party smartwatches
- Denied users access to digital wallets
These are the areas of focus. Thompson goes through each one with some great context. If you are curious about this topic it is worth a read.
How to Figure Out What Your Car Knows About You (and Opt Out of Sharing When You Can) | Electronic Frontier Foundation
First we had Smart TV manufacturers surveilling us and selling data. Now car companies are collecting our data and selling that too? We need privacy regulations in this country. The devices that we buy are increasingly connected, and are increasingly surveilling on us.
vCard + RSS as an alternative to social media - nfraprado
Iām not sure this could get traction but I like the approach of using existing open standards.
So that's when I realized, if there's a widely used open standard for feeds, and another for profiles, why not join the two? By embedding an RSS/Atom feed URL in a vCard, it becomes a single file that has all the information needed to identify a person and follow their updates. Since it's a single file, it's easy to share it with others as well as store the vCards for all your connections locally.
You could have such a thing be entirely decentralized as well ā just like blogs and their feeds are today.
5 ways to actually use the notes you take | Dann Berg
Iām digging into Obsidian recently and trying to improve my note taking process. Iām still struggling with it. I don't think I've ever been a very good note taker and it seems like something I would get value out of doing better. This list from Berg is interesting, but also seems daunting.
- Always āprocessā article, book, meeting notes after writing or importing
- Start doing Random Note Fridays
- Use Graph View to find lone notes, make them less lonely
- Add a Summary property to all applicable notes
- Publish your writing
What struck me about this list is how similar it is to blogging. The fifth item literally is to blog. The first four are things that I do every day when I do blog gardening. Maybe I need to stop thinking about note taking and think about private blogging?
LinkedIn is not a social or professional network, it's a learning network
Critchlow has a fresh perspective for LinkedIn's positioning. There are no shortage of "LinkedIn is cringe" blog posts out there. And the updates are sometimes particularly, well I guess, cringe. But this focus on learning would be a brilliant push.
What if LinkedIn positioned itself not as a professional network or social network but as a learning network. A personal learning network for every user - centered on their personal development.
Critchlow says he already did this.
The magic here is that LinkedIn is already the best place for learning. I took the time to re-orient my feed from old connections to people I actually wanted to follow and now my LinkedIn feed is higher signal to noise than Twitter, Threads, Bluesky and the rest of em.
For what itās worth, LinkedIn is the one place that I've found serious engagement and uptake with the Weekly Thing. I try to focus my emails on learning and I think it aligns with this approach.
First Float Tank Experience ā Random Musings
My friend Hadar wrote up his first experience in a floatation tank. I've never seriously considered doing this, but his writeup has me thinking I may want to give it a try.
As for what I was thinking about, with the exception of a few distractions, this was mostly a mindful meditation. I was completely aware of the entire experience, including the breathing and the heart beats, which is the point (as I understand it) of being present. So, I wasn't detached, but I wasn't thinking about the past or the future either, just experiencing the very relaxing present.
As a regular meditator I wonder if this experience may be a delightful meditation experience. However, Iām wary that I would not have as good of a reaction to the complete darkness.
Journal
Picked up new Tesla Model Y today.
Also see list of vehicles.
We watched Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves tonight. Good story and fun D&D vibes.
Quinn, Tyler, and I went to the Minnesota United friendly versus St. Patricks Athletic FC. The combination of a friendly and cold weather resulted in the lowest attendance Iāve seen at Allianz Field. The United won and we got to sing Wonderwall for Quinnās first professional soccer game.
After arriving in Milwaukee it was time for lunch at Archieās Flat Top. We are always game for a great cheeseburger. Tyler and I opted for a triple not realizing that they were 4 oz patties. The three pancake size patties were all I could handle! š
Tammy loves Rice Krispie bars so when we passed Carrieās Crispies we had to stop! We tried Original, Pretzel White Chocolate, Peanut Butter Cup, and S'mores. They were all fabulous!
Milwaukee Spring Break: Day 1
Mar 23, 2024 at 9:47āÆPM
- 7:07a Depart home
- 7:24a Fill Mazda CX-9 with gas
- 12:03p Lunch at Archieās Flat Top in Milwaukee: Triple Cheeseburgers for Tyler and Dad. 4 oz patties. Triple patties were a mistake. Brilliant French fries.
- Mazie and Dad had Scratch Ice Cream (Raspberry White Chocolate Chip, Door County Cherry).
- Carrieās Crispies for awesome unique Rice Krispie bars (Original, Pretzel White Chocolate, Peanut Butter Cup, Sāmores).
- Milwaukee Public Museum. Particularly enjoyed Old Streets of Milwaukee.
- Checked in at Saint Kate Art Hotel.
- Dinner at SafeHouse.
- Champagne and shopping in hotel lobby.
Looking good this morning Milwaukee!
Family selfie in the atrium of the Milwaukee Art Museum with Lake Michigan in the background.
The architecture in the atrium of the Milwaukee Art Museum is amazing. It sets an incredible tone.
The Milwaukee Art Museum was incredible. It was one of our favorite art museums that we have ever been to. Incredible art set in an incredible museum.
There was a stack over two feet high of large sheets of paper in the Milwaukee Art Museum. They all had printed in very small print in the middle āVETERANS DAY SALEā. We brought one back figuring Mazie may want to do a drawing on it. In the meantime it became Tammyās own movable art piece.
We went Duckpin Bowling tonight at Kozās Mini Bowl. Kozās has the oldest original Duck Pin bowling lanes with manual pin setters that sit behind the pins while you bowl.
Tammy won with 198, Mazie second at 194, Tyler third at 177, and I came in last at 140.
Milwaukee Spring Break: Day 2
Mar 24, 2024 at 10:08āÆPM
- Breakfast at Toast.
- Amazing time at Milwaukee Art Museum.
- Tyler did amazing job flying at Extreme Flight Simulation.
- Tammy and Jamie see Brett Goldstein at the incredible Riverside Theater.
- Dinner at Tupelo Honey.
- Duckpin Bowling with manual pin setter at Kozās Mini Bowl.
Enjoying one of the most unique drinks I've ever had -- Motƶrhead Latte (espresso, milk, pork fat + apple caramel, root beer bitters, apple powder, smoked salt) at Discourse Coffee. Rich and deep flavors. āļø
The barista āworkbenchā at Discourse Coffee has an incredibly broad array of mixologist components. š§āš¬āļø
Milwaukee Spring Break: Day 3
Mar 25, 2024 at 10:46āÆPM
- Jamie has morning coffee at Discourse Coffee.
- Brunch at Blueās Egg.
- Milwaukee Zoo. Rainy and pretty quiet.
- Big Puttās Mini Golf -- very well done course with a lot of fun holes. Jamie got four āhole in onesā.
- Attempted to see Call Me Dancer at the Oriental Theatre but the theater was closed. š«
- Milwaukee Public Market for choose your own dinner: Freeseās Candy Shoppe, Foltz Family Market, C. Adamās Bakery, and West Allis Cheese & Sausage Shoppe. Olive Oil for home from Oro Di Oliva.
- Battle House Laser Combat. Tyler and Jamie were on Blue Team with more players and won most of the games.
All of us were very sad that the Oriental Theatre water and heat were out of order.
I like this sculpture in combination with the buildings in downtown Milwaukee.
Return visit to Discourse Coffee this morning for a Moonwater (espresso, milk, honey, cinnamon, tellicherry black pepper, and applewood smoked sea salt). Yum. āļø
While waiting for our table at Uncle Wolfie's Mazie found these stairs and got some exercise. Then Tyler caught wind and a race was required.
The Ube Toast Crunch Oatmeal at Uncle Wolfie's Breakfast Tavern is delicious and strikingly purple!
We had a great time escaping the āInvasionā room at 60 to Escape! The room was fun, surprising, and appropriately challenging. One of the best rooms weāve done! Finished with 5m 37s remaining.
See list of escape rooms.
Milwaukee Spring Break: Day 4
Mar 26, 2024 at 9:52āÆPM
- Jamie has morning coffee at Discourse Coffee and today Mazie joined as well.
- Brunch at Uncle Wolfieās Breakfast Tavern. Mazie and Jamie have Ube.
- Visit Harley-Davidson Museum.
- Attempted to visit Milwaukee Domes but they were closed.
- Explore Milwaukeeās Historic Third Ward.
- Saw Call Me Dancer at Oriental Theatre.
- Escaped āInvasionā room at 60 to Escape.
- Drop off car at hotel.
- Walk to San Giorgio Pizzeria for delicious pizza.
This is as close as we were able to get to the domes -- closed on Tuesdays.
Beautiful and tasty Cortado at Pilcrow Coffee on our final morning in Milwaukee.
We made a last minute final stop at the Milwaukee Domes before we left town. The tropical and desert domes were relaxing and pretty to experience.
Milwaukee Spring Break: Day 5
Mar 27, 2024 at 4:11āÆPM
- Coffee and pastries at Pilcrow Coffee.
- Visit to the Milwaukee Domes after it was closed yesterday. Completed all of our stops! ā
- 9:37a Depart Milwaukee for home.
- Stop at Culverās in Tomah, Wisconsin.
- 3:14p Arrive at home.
Weekly Thing Forum š
Join Aleksei Drokin, Peter Clark, Patrick Hambek, Barry Hess, Tom Mungavan, and many other Weekly Thing readers in the Weekly Thing Forum. Recent topics include:
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Briefly
This isn't going to be a widely used thing, but it strikes me as a super critical tool for those that need it. ā 20 Years in the Making, GnuCOBOL Is Ready for Industry - The New Stack
My kids have loved playing Job SimulatorĀ ā having it on the Vision Pro will be a lot of fun. ā Job Simulator Is Coming To Apple Vision Pro
The POAP Checkout feature that launched a couple of years ago is awesome, and using it to raise real money for the community is a great use case. ā Dencun POAP Raises More Than $100,000 for Ethereum Solo Stakers ā Week in POAP
Notes for my continued exploration of Obsidian. ā A Roundup of the Best Obsidian Plugin in 2024 ā The Sweet Setup
Climate models and scientists canāt connect the record warmth of this winter to anything in their systems. Are we off the map? ā Climate models canāt explain 2023ās huge heat anomaly ā we could be in uncharted territory
I still cannot find a perfect photo solution. I currently split my catalog of 200,000+ photos between iCloud Photos and Adobe Cloud. I'd like to have something that gives me more control, but it is hard to do at the scale I need. Here is another option for self-hosting. ā Memories
It is pretty rare that you scan your podcasts and see someone you know! Pete Edstrom is right here in the Twin Cities and a regular part of the tech community here. Was fun to listen to this! ā The Omni Show: How Pete Edstrom Uses OmniFocus
I would like to be better at Chess. Iām pretty bad. Tyler is working on getting better and he will soon be able to reliably beat me. Playing a daily Chess puzzle might help me out. ā Echo Chess ā Play Daily Puzzles
Another super-simple bookmarking service. ā Webtag - A free text-based bookmarking.
Redis is a rock-solid piece of software infrastructure. Good to have others looking at ways to do even better. ā KeyDB - The Faster Redis Alternative
A little bit of animation effects can be great, but not too much. ā GSAP ā A wildly robust JavaScript animation library built for professionals
Fortune
Here is your fortuneā¦
You have a truly strong individuality.
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