Links #75
Nate Johnson on pivoting from journalist to electrician. Career pivots intrigue me, having been through one already and wondering whether I have another one coming down the road someday.
Joann is doing some really cool things with AI art.
Louise Perry responds to Brian Caplan on feminism.
0xProto, an open source monospace font, with sane ligatures.
Robert Macfarlane on John McPhee.
Adam Mastroianni on the illusion of moral decline (the “back in the good old days” claims). Interesting research. And note that this is for morality people generally agree upon.
Shapecatcher, where you can draw a Unicode character and it’ll find the code point for you.
Katja Grace on AI and people saying we don’t trade with ants. Enjoyed this.
Thierry de Pauw on letting unreviewed code go to production. Interesting! Don’t know how I feel about this.
Mike Crittenden on toddlers polluting analytics. I hadn’t thought of this before, but it makes a lot of sense.
Vsauce on whether people used to look older.
Davis Kedrosky defends Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Which was nice to see since I’ve largely only seen reviews that put it down.
Shariar Shahrabi on procedural Chinese landscapes with Blender’s geometry nodes. I need to learn how to use geometry nodes.
Chris Siebenmann on creating HTML via string templates.
Sol Reader, a reading-focused VR headset. This is the kind of thing that piques my interest (I spend a lot of time lying on my back, and holding my phone up to read is hard on my hands and wrists), but the text display does not look all that great (surprisingly low resolution with bitmapped fonts, at least from the image I saw).
Gretchen McCulloch on why pirate speech sounds the way it does. Fun.
A macOS Automator script to print booklets from PDFs. Used this to help make a girls camp booklet.
Mori, a new genealogy web app. The version control especially intrigues me.
Matthias Ott on CSS as a design tool. Agreed. Figma is great, but there’s still a fairly large disconnect between designs and implementation.
Jakob Greenfeld on talking to people. Yes.
Akshay on plain text journaling. I somehow didn’t realize I could create custom little one-off syntax highlighting rules in Vim. Ended up adding some for my work to-do file and log file.
Jennifer Sandlin on Mr. Doodle’s house. Wow.
Tomas Pueyo on how maps twist our perception of the world.
Morgan Housel on what happened to the U.S. economy after WWII. This was good.
Christian Heilmann defending frontend engineering as a full-time job.
Rasmus Andersson is hiring founding engineers for Playbit, which looks super interesting (new OS for creative work).
Nobody Has Time for Python on hype cycles. Tongue in cheek but there’s a lot of truth to it.
Saurabh with some advanced macOS commands. I didn’t know about some of these.
Julian Gough with some last-minute gravitational wave predictions. I have no idea if it’s right, but wow, the evolving universe idea (where black holes are a universe’s offspring, giving birth to baby universes) is fascinating. Also, the International Pulsar Timing Array idea is genius. Wow.
Oscar Holland on a handbag smaller than a grain of salt. Wow.
Mark Poulier’s architectural shadow art. I’ve been meaning for years to make art in this vein (monochrome art made only of shadows, basically).
James Stanley on incongruous technologies. Reminds me of the “lateral thinking with seasoned technology” idea (which I first heard about from Robin Sloan, but I can’t find a link so instead I’ll link to Alan Jacobs). I’d be very interested in seeing what else could be done with watchmaking-scale gears.
Paul Graham on how to do great work. This is super long and I haven’t read all of it yet, but the parts I did read seemed reasonable. Lots of food for thought here.