Notes for week 52 of 2021

I’ve been mostly relaxing as I’ve enjoyed building antibodies. In response, quite a bit of reading and board gaming happened.

I am 5 weeks away from a consistent year of week notes! I have conflicted feelings; I see the value here for myself (and I do search them regurarly), but I am not sure how useful is it for others. Since polishing takes a bit time, I have a feeling it’s related to the fact that I haven’t wrote many other long-term notes or essays for this blog since. I will try to kickstart that and than see.

I will also move them to their own space for other notes not to be flooded and to give them more screen space on the home page.

I went to take a look at the blog analytics…after a year or so? I’ve decided that’s not worth feeding the surveilance capitalism, so I went and deleted the GA codes. I was thinking about doing something larger with the blog when I started, but then life happened and I decided I am more happy doing what I am doing. This remains my writing venue and I am not optimizing for visits. I may use some ethical analytics in the future, but as someone said, those are “just counters”, but that’s actually all I am interested in.

Random

• TIL rank() SQL function and the fact that SQLite supports it
• System Design Primer seems to be a good resource for beginners as well as a good refresher
• I’ve walked 10 km. I’ve been active for 2.1 hours during 2 activities. This week’s max speed was 11.2 km/h and I conquered 67 elevation meters

Kotlin

• Custom Health Check in Spring Boot Actuator - amitph
• Type-safe builders are neat!
• delay() and functions for testing coroutines are also very nice; I love when features in the language are designed with testability in mind

Graveyard

• It was only a 3 day work week, so finally there was time. I was mainly polishing backend and making pipeline work again since the new release of Python 3.10 broke it
• Found backups from the complete beginnings. They awesome; I may publish them for a memory blogpost. I think the only constant there are my design skills.

Recommended Readings From This Week

• [https://twitter.com/stevestuwill/status/1475496701393784841?s=21](Reversals in psychology): studies that do not replicate. The list is…long.
• SpaceX Starlink satellites responsible for over half of close encounters in orbit, scientist says: Orbit fun is coming, I wonder if there will be space traffic control in five years
• The Truth About Inflation – Economics from the Top Down: Very cool! Data research into nonuniformity of inflation and that it benefits the largest businesses the most. I’d be interested in non-US data though.
• The secondary market in gift cards: US financal system is fascinating
• Now We Know Why Pluto has These Strange Features on its Surface: Science is cool. Universe is cool.
• The fraud supply chain: Excellent overview of fraudchain, and why you shouldn’t sell your company for recycling
• Why TurboRepo Will Be The First Big Trend of 2022: An evolution of monorepo (although it’s kinda weird that half-commercial)
• The Web3 Fraud: The technology breakdown of web3. I’d argue the computational throughput doesn’t matter as much as author thinks for its use-case.
• How to go from being a super hot company to lucky to get acquired in less than 24 months: VC-backed startups commit to a trajectory they can’t deviate from
• The rise and fall of rationality in language: A hell lot of confounds in this study as well as apparent bias. An interesting POV and data nevertheless.
• 17 Reasons NOT To Be A Manager: Great summary. There is a reason why finding good managers is hard—lots of people refuse to go that way, and for a good reason.
• Crypto Will Change Value, NFTs Will Change Society: I disagree with almost everything written there (beside gaming), but it doesn’t matter: memes are powerful and this is how a lot of people see the future world.

(I think they are also headed for a disappointment as I don’t see anything that prevents centralizations on those technically decentralized platforms and everyone raving about cutting out the middleman goes and buys/sells NFTs at marketplaces…but maybe it will be different this time™)