Daily Log Digest – Week 42, 2024
2024-10-21
Facts: Software Engineer Titles Have (Almost) Lost All Their Meaning #titles #engineering #swe
Fullscreen Screenshots on Windows
I watch a lot of video content on my TV that is hooked up to a Windows PC. I wanted a smooth workflow to take fullscreen screenshots with a hotkey while I was watching, without any dialogs or popups.
The Logitech K400 wireless keyboard that I to use with the PC does not have a dedicated PrtScrn key. The standard shortcut key Win + Shift + S opened up the Snipping tool which was too disruptive and clunky.
Finally, I download and Installed ShareX and setup the Hotkey for fullscreen capture to be: Ctrl + Shift + Backspace. By default, the screenshots are automatically saved in a folder under Documents/ShareX. I use the hotkey to snap screenshots while watching shows and movies, and they get saved in the background without interruption. I can browse them later and create memes 😀! #screenshots #windows
CSS trick to balance text as well as icons
You can use text-wrap: balance; on icons – Terence Eden’s Blog #css
Streamlining Go Project Creation
Go-Blueprint Docs #go #boilerplate
Powerful CLI tool designed to streamline the process of creating Go projects with a robust and standardized structure. Not only does Go Blueprint facilitate project initialization, but it also offers seamless integration with popular Go frameworks, allowing you to focus on your application's code from the very beginning.
A Philosophy of Travel
Some great tips on travel, and how to travel well: A Philosophy of Travel - by Tracy Gustilo - Pose Ponder
I read up on history, geography, and culture. I love to browse street markets and bookstores. If I do touristy things, I prefer secondary or tertiary sites, or locations that domestic travelers themselves go. I travel to learn — and I want to learn to travel well. I have no real desire to collect “experiences” of places — just say No to bucket lists! My goal is to stretch to accommodate what’s around me, and to try hard to see beyond whatever’s become habitual and mundane at home.
Economist Special Report on the US Economy
The envy of the world | Oct 19th 2024 | The Economist #usa #economy
On Productivity:
This year the average American worker will generate about $171,000 in economic output, compared with (on purchasing-parity terms) $120,000 in the euro area, $118,000 in Britain and $96,000 in Japan. That represents a 70% increase in labour productivity in America since 1990, well ahead of the increases elsewhere: 29% in Europe, 46% in Britain and 25% in Japan.
On Shale Oil:
The Marcellus is just one of several such rock formations around America, from the oil-rich Bakken shale in Montana and North Dakota to the Permian basin, endowed with both oil and gas, in Texas and New Mexico. The revolution in tapping their hard-to-reach hydrocarbons got under way in the latter half of the 20th century as companies and government researchers worked to combine hydraulic fracturing, or fracking (the injection of specialised liquids to open cracks in rocks), and horizontal drilling. As they honed these techniques in the early 2000s, production surged. Now, America produces some 13m barrels per day of crude oil and 3bn cubic metres per day of natural gas, making it the world’s biggest producer of both.
On the yuan displacing the dollar:
On the IMF data, the dollar’s share of reserves has fallen back only roughly to where it was in 1995. And it has not been China absorbing its share, or even the euro, which Europe uses for most of its own trade and is the dominant currency in parts of Africa. Rather, it is, as one joke goes, other currencies called “dollar” or “krone”: those in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. “They are the currencies of small, open, well managed, in the main inflation-targeting economies,” says Mr Eichengreen.
They are also mostly America’s allies, making it hard to sustain an argument that the fall in reserve share says much about lost Western hegemony. And among remaining official holdings of dollars, three-quarters are owned by governments with a military tie to America, says Colin Weiss of the Federal Reserve. Strikingly, note Mr Arslanalp and his colleagues, the yuan’s share of international reserves has shrunk since 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, sparking American sanctions and much speculation that countries would jettison the dollar for fear of similar treatment.
On why the dollar is the preferred global reserve currency:
Looking in the round, researchers at the Federal Reserve concluded in 2023 that dollar dominance “has remained stable over the past 20 years”. Why is it so tough to displace? One reason is network effects: the more people use dollars, the greater the incentives to use them. This is visible in currency-trading, where the dollar’s liquidity means that for some currency pairs it is cheaper to trade through the dollar—ie, to sell a holding for dollars, then buy the desired currency—than to trade two non-dollar currencies directly.
Network effects do not guarantee the status quo for ever, as shown by the fall of past reserve currencies such as the British pound and the Dutch guilder. The problem faced by rivals now is that they simply cannot offer as safe and liquid a store of value, and in such quantities. China’s authoritarian system and controlled capital account, which restricts how much money can be taken out of the country, make investors skittish. Europe lacks safe, jointly issued assets on the scale of the Treasury market. Nowhere offers America’s combination of the rule of law, deeply liquid markets and an open capital account, meaning that investors know they can get their money out easily.
On the dominance of US stock markets:
There are two ways for a stockmarket to outperform its rivals, setting aside ephemeral ups and downs (and America’s stockmarket is no more volatile than those of other major economies). One source of high returns is if the companies comprising the market make more profits. The other is for investors to value those profits more highly. America’s recent stellar record reflects primarily the latter effect. In a paper last year Cliff Asness, Antti Ilmanen and Dan Villalon of AQR Capital Management compared the American market with a currency-hedged index of large- and mid-cap stocks in other developed countries. They found that once the effect of rising valuation multiples was stripped out America’s outperformance fell by nearly three-quarters and became statistically insignificant. Today America’s valuations are unmatched: the US market trades at 24 times forward earnings, compared with 14 in Europe and 22 in Japan.
2024-10-22
brain rot
Why teenagers are deliberately seeking brain rot on TikTok | Psyche Ideas #culture #media
…brain rot is what we might call a ‘genre of participation’, to borrow a term from the work of the cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito. On a digital social media application like TikTok, with its endless different types of content, one way of participating is to seek out brain rot and therefore turn off, so to speak, one’s brain. And it’s clear from my research that this type of mindless TikTok video serves an important purpose in the larger ecosystem of the internet.
You might say that brain rot is a necessary strategy for managing the particular anxieties of being a teenager at this precise moment in history, fraught as it is with conflict, catastrophe, and predictions of future doom.
As adults, we can have an unfortunate habit of forgetting our youth as soon as we’ve left it and policing the next generation according to our own expectations. But when it comes to teenagers on TikTok, I think the emergence of the term brain rot suggests that members of this generation possess a highly sophisticated approach for navigating the complexities of their media lives. Much in the same way that teenagers in the 1980s navigated changing economic landscapes through their video games and music video consumption, or earlier generations pushed back against restrictive social values using pirate radio and television, teens today are using TikTok and other digital media to negotiate and make sense of a complex world that is very often designed for adults. In a time of heightened global anxiety and fear, rather than restrict their digital access, we might stand to learn from teenagers about how and why they spend their time on TikTok.
2024-10-23
all the information I consume on the internet
I feel like one of my big failings, and simultaneously my big flex is the amount of information I track on the internet. On the one hand - after years of doing this I seem to have developed a remarkable ability to hold a conversation or spout random bits of knowledge on a wide variety of topics, which seems like a useful skill to have 🤷🏽. On the other, I think the time and effort that I dedicate to this has prevented me from engaging in some forms of deep work that I would very much like to do and might be potentially rewarding.
In any case, there is no question that I push myself to the verge of information overload, but tbh I actually really enjoy myself while doing it. Here is my rough system by which I manage to have some sort of discipline and efficiency in the process:
- Mainstream Media: The easy part is subscribing to mainstream media stuff - i have subscriptions to Economist, Financial Times (the international one), Bloomberg News, NYTimes and The Hindu. I have subscribed to the Economist since a decade ago, and I highly recommend it for their sheer breadth of coverage. Their China coverage is one of the best.
- Podcasts: I listen to podcasts on Podcast Addict. I listen while doing chores, commuting, walking, when I want to shut out the world, and times when I am waiting for stuff to happen. Over the years I have gotten used to listening to stuff at 2x speed most times without too much loss of context. Here is the OPML file export from Podcast Addict app that contains a list of all 180+ podcasts I am subscribed to: OPML file listing all the Podcast feeds I subscribe to · GitHub
- Other Internet Content: For most other reading I rely on RSS/Atom feeds. RSS and Atom are web feed formats developed in the early 2000s that allow users to receive updates from websites in a structured way. It is often used by news sites and blogs to aggregate new periodic content like news articles or blog posts. Most people don't know that a lot of sites and blogs on the internet syndicate their content via feeds (for e.g. Substack does, and so do blogs powered by popular software like Wordpress). To read these feeds you need a software called a Feed Reader. I use NewsBlur, which is reasonably priced hosted service. There are other hosted options like Feedly which are more popular. One can also use a feed reader app on a Mac or PC.
- Email Newsletters: Both Feedly and Newsblur also support reading email newsletters using their feed reader interface. You can either use a custom email address they provide and subscribe to the newsletter, or have Gmail filters forward the email to their custom email address (if for some reason you have no choice but to send the email to your personal inbox first). Once the email lands on their servers, it is integrated into the same interface as the rest of the feeds.
- Other Stuff: X, Hacker News and YouTube (I have Premium). X and Hacker News great for finding random great stuff which I otherwise would not come across from my standard sources. Sometimes, if I really like a source, I end up subscribing to them to receive future updates in my feed reader.
Podcast roundup
From now on, instead of keeping a daily cadence, I will just list interesting podcasts I came across whenever I get around to it during a week. #podcasts
- Podcast #1,032: Lee Child the Writer, Jack Reacher the Character, and the Enduring Appeal of Lone Wolves | The Art of Manliness #tv #books - Big fan of the Jack Reacher franchise. I didn't think too deeply about the plot and themes in the show. I just enjoyed the characters and the style of the show. But this interview provides a very different dimension to the work. It goes deep into the lone wolf aspect of Reacher's character and questionable moral universe in which he resides.
- BBC World Service - CrowdScience, Why do my armpits smell? #smell #body-odor - quote from the episode: advertising had a lot to do with the modern notion in many cultures that body odor is repulsive. It's certainly a clever way to sell more soap, especially the idea that your perspiration could be stopping you from attracting a partner. Also found a good book reco: The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History - Kindle edition by Ashenburg, Katherine. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
2024-10-24
Hyprland
TIL about: Hyprland - a tiling window manager for Linux #linux #tiling
Hyprland provides the latest Wayland features, dynamic tiling, all the eyecandy, powerful plugins and much more
GenZ lingo
After the NYT, it is the Economist's turn to write about GenZ slang: TikTok is changing how Gen Z speaks #genz #slang
2024-10-25
Starlink
The rockets are nifty, but it is satellites that make SpaceX valuable #satellites #internet
TIL about satellite internet:
Using satellites to provide internet access is not a new idea. Such firms as Hughes, SES and ViaSat already offer exactly this service, bouncing signals from subscribers back down to ground stations and on to the wider internet. But they rely on small numbers of satellites mostly in high orbit. That allows a single satellite to see a large portion of Earth’s surface and thus to serve many customers at once.
Unfortunately, flying so high also means that signals take a noticeable amount of time to get up to the satellite and back down to Earth. That makes remote working, video calls and online gaming a pain. And having lots of people share one satellite risks congestion. For that reason, says Mr Potter, satellite internet has been seen as a last-resort option, useful only when nothing better is available.
Starlink’s satellites fly in very low orbits, around 500km up. That slashes transmission delays, allowing Starlink to offer a connection similar to ground-based broadband. The trade-off is that each satellite can serve only a small area of Earth. To achieve worldwide coverage you therefore need an awful lot of satellites. According to Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, the 6,400 or so Starlink satellites launched since 2019 account for around three-quarters of all the active satellites in space (see chart 3). SpaceX has firm plans to deploy 12,000 satellites, and has applied to launch as many as 42,000.
Text fragments
I kept seeing this everywhere and just assumed it was some proprietary Chrome feature. Turns out it's a web standard: Smarter than 'Ctrl+F': Linking Directly to Web Page Content #css #standard #search #text
Historically, we could link to a certain part of the page only if that part had an ID. All we needed to do was to link to the URL and add the document fragment (ID). If we wanted to link to a certain part of the page, we needed to anchor that part to link to it. This was until we were blessed with the Text fragments!
2024-10-26
Daily Log Digest Newsletter
Tweaked some code to fix newsletter generation code that I originally wrote during LearningDev hack hours: Tweaks to newsletter code after testing · deepakjois/debugjois.dev@d45cfee · GitHub
Put out a call for folks willing to test it. Will add a link to it in a few days after I have sent out a couple of newsletters to the early testers.
Podcast Recap
- BBC Radio 4 - Thinking Allowed, Gender and Radicalisation : Generally speaking, when we talk about gender equality and feminism, this gives the impression that all women care about the same issues. Reproductive choice and abortion, worthy causes to feminists. But different women have different ideas of what women's issues look like. And this is really depending on where they live. In 2016, researchers interviewed women in the now defunct Tea Party Movement in the US, who really outlined how constitutional politics impacted upon how they framed motherhood and their role within their family. • So particularly, second amendment rights, the right to bear arms to protect their families from an existential threat. So I think it's really important to drill down into the context of where these beliefs are being fermented and developed. Voting or electoral data gives us a great overview of the macro level issues that people find interesting, so immigration, crime, terrorism, health, education. But this doesn't reveal very much about the person casting their vote at the ballot box. If we're to gain a better understanding of women and their support of the far right, then we need to take a closer look at the micro politics of their everyday lives.
- Two podcasts from the Evolving Psychiatry podcast - Mental Health in the Jungle | Camila Scaff | Evolving Psychiatry Podcast #33 - YouTube - Very interesting way to frame the question - how relevant is the DSM-5 among indigenous tribes residing in the Amazonian jungle. - Combat Stress and PTSD | Matt Zefferman | Evolving Psychiatry Podcast #32 - YouTube
- Part of the NPR Love Week series. - Romance writers are thriving in a tough book publishing industry : The Indicator from Planet Money : NPR - Good insights into the romance book publishing industry. - Hinge CEO Justin McLeod and Nobel laureate Alvin Roth on the dating app backlash : The Indicator from Planet Money : NPR
- The story of Apple Pay with Jennifer Bailey - a16z Podcast | Listen Notes