Links #10

How to Get on a Podcast - This is a short and invaluable post for anyone who wants to be a podcast guest. It puts you in the shoes of a podcaster, showing you what they need, and how you can be a “sure thing” for them. As usual, there are no short cuts. You gotta do the work!

A manifesto for small, static, web apps - I’ve been pushing for this kind of web development for years (see here, here, here, here, and here), but this post does a great job of summarizing the whole idea all in one place (something I’ve failed to do thus far, apparently). Can you imagine an internet chock-full of these mini apps? I wish the philosophy behind them (and the techniques to build them) were more well-known and wide-spread.

Finding the Mona Lisa in the game of life - A fun exploration. I enjoyed learning about boolean equations and SAT Solvers, and the gifs were great. Most of all, I love the approach to the whole post. Kevin isn’t trying to make some grand point, or prove some fundamental computer-science limits. He’s just saying, “here’s what I tried and here’s what I found.” Sometimes, I have ideas for technical posts like these but I talk myself out of writing them because I know I’ll overlook or misunderstand something which will undermine the entire point of the post. But do my posts even need to have a point? It’s tempting to frame my writing as something truly novel but it’s also a ton of pressure and I suspect it kills a lot of otherwise good writing. Having a mindset of “this is just me exploring something” feels healthier and less prone to getting stuck.

Touch Pianist - This app gives you a little taste of how it feels to be a pianist. It made me realize that memorizing your sheet music is valuable because it frees up more of your brain to focus on rhythm and dynamics. It’s hard to play with emotion when all your energy is focused on playing the right notes.

Work hard and take everything really seriously - Honest advice on the benefits that hard work brings, with all the nuance the topic deserves. “I worked pretty hard and was pretty unrestrained in pursuing interests. It worked out fine. Now that I’m older, my priorities have shifted slightly and I spend a little more time on other things, and am slowly becoming more balanced. But balance isn’t how I got here. Balance isn’t how a lot of the people I admire got to where they are now.” I think if we are honest with ourselves, we’d all agree.

Earth is Becoming Sentient - I read this post twice before I realized that it was about AI. Once I saw it, I had to tell someone. I ended up discussing it with my wife and we had some fun extending the metaphor even further than the author did. As a side note, Steph Ango’s blog is quickly becoming one of my favorites, and I’ve enjoyed finding more gems in the backlog (Choose optimism is also excellent).

The elemental foe - From the comfort of our modern lives, it’s easy to forget that desperate survival is our birthright. It’s only in the last hundred years or so that industrial advancements have lifted some of us out of poverty. This is an aberration of history and instead of taking it for granted, we should double down in our efforts to reduce poverty in the places where it still exists. What a perspective.

BuildTheEarth - An online community with the stated goal to create a 1:1 scale replicate of every building on Earth in the computer game Minecraft. They’ve completed 58,121 buildings so far, including 55.55% of Toronto. Only 99.9999765% of Earth’s land mass to go! More fun statistics here.

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