Effective Technologist Book Club

A friend showed me Simple, Non-Commercial, Open Source Notes. (Warning, this video will berate you for 30 minutes.) My values are different from the author’s, but I appreciate their methodical(??) approach to articulate their needs and explore the solution space of digital note-taking systems. Here, I do some of the same. Composing and Editing I...

Warnings: This topic, personal eating habits, is tired. Anything I could say, a different nerd has said better. I currently eat meat but try to avoid eating mammals, which I learned today is called mafism. I’m a mid-30s knowledge worker who lives with a partner. We share some meals spontaneously but don’t plan around it, each keeping our own...

It seems that you want my help making a personnel decision? Sadly, I have little to say about the agent who answered my phone, email, or chat inquiry. They appeared to be a competent human. If I was unknowingly interacting with an LLM, you did a great job fine-tuning it. While I’d have preferred someone with forensic troubleshooting skill and...

I sponsor development of technologies that answer to their users’ own interests, rather than the interests of megacorps (who harvest users’ data and attention, extract rents, impose lock-in, and so on). I particularly support indie developers who are heading upstream of their own economic incentives. I also support some creative work like music...

Every major city in the USA provides transportation as a public service. 1 Not only streets, but also vehicles, with professionals who drive them, and anyone can ride these vehicles, for a price between free and cheap! And it’s not intended only a service for the poor: transit agencies encourage everyone to ride. These services are expensive to...