2024-04-10: Sleep, Aided Code, Gay Girl Gone
(If you work at FF/FFDW 🄽 links will send you to a local, editable page in the Filecoin Foundation Notion. If you are in the Filecoin ecosystem, you may be able to join the #monologue-danny Slack channel where I answer questions, take meeting bookings, talk to myself and the other voices in my head. In the glorious decentralized ocap-enabled future, such data-hoardings will be a thing of the past, but we live for now in a fallen ACL world.)
Three Things I Did
1. Stayed Too Long in the Incident Room
Of course, I did not follow my own advice, and did not get enough sleep last night while keeping track of STFIL🄽 news, which means I feel very stupid at this point. Must chart decline in IQ points against hours slept. (I realised at some point that lack of sleep lowers my inhibitions, which I’ve historically used to self-treat my anxiety. If I stay up long enough, eventually I’ll be too sleepy to worry. I’m much less anxious now than when I was younger, but it’s a hard habit to break. (Notice how my sleep deprivation now means that I don’t mind telling you all of this in my corporate newsletter.)
2. Checked in with another potential non-profit partner
Pretty sure we’ll give money here, and I just wanted to understand what their preferences were, so if we needed to change the proposal internally on the fly, I could accurately model which option they might want us to pursue. I try very hard to convey that nothing is a done deal, and that the best option might not be the one that ends up on the table, but I’d rather do this than try to mind-read what they would really like us to do.
3. Hacked on code to make this newsletter easier
Writing it is pretty quick. but all the reformatting to send it out on Slack and email out is a little crazy-making. This python code now takes care of the text-formatting (and lets me link to Notion and external page alternatives, hooray).
TIL
- These days I use GPT (via Simon Willison’s llm package) to give me advice on coding utilities like the above. It’s incredibly useful but a bit cobbled together itself from multiple tools — like I’ll pipe some code into llm, tell it to tidy it up, and then cut and paste the result. Today I found aider an AI coding helper that runs in the terminal, and it seems a great, more integrated alternatve. Definitely worth playing with you have some sense of how to benefit from GPT-style co-coding.
Links Du Jour
- Gay Girl Gone. Gripping and subtle podcast mini-series based on the Amina affair. If you know the story already, and you just like Liz Henry🄽 being cool, Episode 5 and 6 are a blast.
- How John Von Neumann, the smartest man in the world, wrote code for ENIAC in 1947 (it’s in the appendix to this letter).