Hey friends!

Welcome to Issue 010 of Marginal Thoughts. Hard to believe we are at double digits already.

The Meditation

Gratitude is a superpower.

💡 How can you truly practice gratitude today?

The Blog

Endurance - Book review of Endurance by Alfred Lansing. This book was a great read that tells the true story of Ernest Shackleton’s incredible voyage to and across Antartica.

Get the Most Out of AI Post 2 - The second of a 10 post series outlining how to leverage AI to get personal ROI. This post covers how to use AI to perform research on any topic you’re interested in.

The Coming Wave - Book review of The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman, one of the 3 DeepMind founders who has literally shaped our modern world by creating true artificial intelligence. He outlines the impact that AI will have, along with potential implications if we don’t control it.

JavaScript Game Course - I put together a tutorial on building the version of tic-tac-toe that exists on my site. The course walks you through building the app yourself and creating 3 levels of difficulty when playing an AI (CPU) opponent - including a mode that will never lose.

The Marginalia

Use Excel to Write Novels - This episode of the How I Write podcast interviews Andrew Hunter Murray and he discusses how he’s successfully written several novels using his method of starting longhand and moving into a plotting tool he’s built in excel to flesh out the story.

The Story of C++ - A YouTube documentary that tells the story of how the programming language that really underlies almost all modern languages came to exist. Not only is the story interesting (if you’re a nerd like me), but it’s very well produced.

The Story of Python - The same team that produced the C++ documentary mentioned above made one about Python, which is my current favorite language. It is also an interesting story and has some inspiring moments about how the creator sought to bring women in tech to the forefront.

Gratitude

I am thankful that taking a moment to focus on your breath can bring peace and calm.

-Ian