Why I hate sleeping

Also: my favorite board games, cute birds, and a ton of life updates :)

What I thought about this week

Hi everyone! As you may have noticed, it's been a while since my last post. Lots of stuff's been going on — work, travel, spending time with friends and family — but also the stuff I want to share with y'all has been piling up. I've been feeling very out of practice with sharing my thoughts (also posted on Twitter about this), so to clear my mental state, I'm opting for a brain-dump approach this week. Here's more recaps/thoughts/ideas than you probably know what to do with. Let's dive in!

In the past few weeks, I:

• Traveled to Banff and NYC!
• Started preparing for a half-marathon I'm running in three weeks
• Saw my favorite band (The Midnight) live in SF for the third time
• Finally concluded a months-long saga to migrate my 150GB of photos from my Berkeley Google Photos account to my iCloud account. I finished the day before Berkeley IT would've permanently deleted all my data.
• Bought a new Sol Reader. I have mixed thoughts, but to summarize: I really like the product, but it's clearly a V1. It's a little rough around the edges. For most people, I think this is a worthwhile purchase, but I would wait until the V2.

• Made a comprehensive list of all my favorite board games.
• Thought about why I've had trouble sleeping my whole life, and what I've done recently to change it.

What I read this week

• OpenAI's new models "instrumentally faked alignment" (5 min read)
• How-To-Succeed-At-MrBeast-Production.pdf (40 min read)
• Kenya Hara On Japanese Aesthetics (3 min read)
• Urban sprawl is a tragedy of the commons | annotated by Manan (6 min read)

• 4B movement - Wikipedia (6 min read)
• For Whom the Bell Tolls. Started reading this with a book club! Haven't read a "classic" in a while, so I'm pretty excited.

Other cool links

• Flow by Wispr | Effortless Voice Dictation. I've been using this app for the last few days, and it's been pretty incredible. I'm a fast typer, but this still saves me so much time + mental energy.
• Baba Is You. I forgot how good this game was until I redownloaded it recently. This game is the perfect intersection of linguistics, math, and strategy. Bashing your head at a level 20 times and figuring it out on the 21st time feels incredibly satisfying. The only issue with this game is that sometimes it's a little too hard and gets frustrating, but that's not enough for you to want to stop playing it.
• Did you know that Johannesburg is the largest city in the world that’s not situated on a coastline river or lake?
• Cassowary - Wikipedia. I didn't know these birds existed until today and now they're possibly my favorite bird. I mean, just look at this.

• I think modern air conditioners are a top-5 invention of the 20th century, and everyone should know how they work. Vapor-compression refrigeration (the way most A/Cs have worked for the last 100+ years) is surprisingly simple to understand and pretty genius.

• TIL about the Youngest Toba eruption, a supervolcanic eruption in Indonesia ~75,000 years ago that is theorized to have caused a genetic bottleneck in humans.
• Roamcalm - Travel Planner and Expense Manager. I just used this app to plan my family's New Zealand vacation. This app is simple, uncluttered and functional - in other words, excellent.
• Why Do Some Years Produce More Acorns Than Others?
• LLM: A CLI utility and Python library for interacting with Large Language Models. This is an excellent API — both in CLI and Python library format — for working with LLMs locally and in toy projects. This is magical:

history | head -n 1500 | llm -s 'What do you think about my shell history?'

• Speaking of LLM tools, Google's NotebookLLM lets you upload documents and build your own RAG/chat app that answers questions about your document with well-cited sources. You can even create a fake "podcast episode" where two AIs discuss the arguments in your documents, which is slightly bizarre but unnervingly good.
• Screen Studio — Professional screen recorder for macOS is probably the best screen recording tool I've seen.
• Where have electric insect bite treatment devices been all my life?
• Nothing: Simply Do Nothing. A website that helps you do nothing. Pretty great way to start the day.

Phew! Thanks for reading, if you made it this far, and see you next week!