Over the past couple of years, I've shifted away from my podcast time being all software-related all the time to being much more about entertainment. So that means a lot of improv / comedy podcasts. But also a lot of general educational stuff. I'm a curious fella and just love to learn about pretty much anything. I have always especially loved science. Since becoming a dad, I've (inevitably?) become a history guy too.
So here are 3 podcasts that I can highly recommend!
This is a comedy / learning show from QI where the 4 hosts each bring a fact to the show and discuss. The facts range absolutely all over the place. The hosts seem to be voracious readers who are curious about everything. Great banter and chemistry. If one of the hosts has to miss, they get a guest - usually an academic or comedian who is already a seasoned podcaster / presenter.
A comedy / history show from BBC 4. Host Greg Jenner (a historian) brings on one historian and one comedian to cover some specific topic. The topic selection is excellent, and I've added a ton of books to my backlog written by the historian guests/ The show is energetic and well-organized. Greg is great at helping the professors sequence the discussion, and the comedians are always a great stand-in for the listener layman.
This is a long-running BBC4 podcast that just got taken over by a new host, Misha Glenny, who's doing a great job imo. This is pure education and topics range all over the place. Misha has on a panel of 3 experts (usually professors) in some topic and you just learn all about it for an hour. Misha must do an unhinged amount of prep work, because he always has a deep enough knowledge to really guide the panel into interesting, nuanced, and emerging areas of the subject.
]]>What I want:
I don't have strong feelings about vertical versus horizontal tabs. I don't use native browser bookmarks much.
Zen Browser is giving me all of this!
I have a pretty simple set up: 2 Spaces: Personal and Work. Each uses the built-in profile of the same name.
One point of confusion: If I make a second space that uses the Personal profile, it still has isolated cookies / sessions. So I'm not really sure what the relationship between Spaces and Profiles are, but I take it Profiles are a Firefox native thing and Spaces are not.
I did have to modify a couple of keyboard shortcuts:
Taking a moment to reflect on my priorities. This list is not comprehensive - there are some things that are too personal to publish on world wide web. And of course this list is evolving all the time! But these below have been pretty stable for a couple years now.
These are outcomes that I want in life. Some are somewhat binary goals, others take consistent practice and I'm at varying degrees of attainment.
I had Claude whip up this little utility function, which is working perfectly for me!
function toggle-reduce-motion {
local current=$(defaults read com.apple.universalaccess reduceMotion 2>/dev/null || echo "0")
if [[ "$current" == "1" ]]; then
defaults write com.apple.universalaccess reduceMotion -bool false
echo "Reduce motion: OFF"
else
defaults write com.apple.universalaccess reduceMotion -bool true
echo "Reduce motion: ON"
fi
}
You can see it here in my dotfiles.
]]>My colleague Matt shared this amazing track at work. I've been listening to the album on repeat for a couple weeks now. I'm a sucker for layering, for reverb, for a song that makes a big lush space to vibe out in.
Hat tip to Brendan Bigley for the "a good song" post format.
]]>There are phone videos from several angles showing the killings.
Kristi Noem, Sen. Johnson, Stephen Miller, Trump and more are lying about what happened. With no evidence, they claim that both of these murder victims were trained domestic terrorists. That they approached officers with intent to kill.
This is not true. These are lies.
These are hard but important watches. Witness these murders.
I am calling my representatives today. In particular Sen. Todd Young is reasonable. He believes in truth, justices, rule of law. Yet he won't stand up for them. He always starts in a position fighting for these things but then caves to pressure after getting a call from Trump.
]]>A recent episode of No Such Thing as a Fish reminded me that flossing is linked to heart health and longevity (e.g., this study). That lead me to buy some interndental brushes and... not use them.
Later, I read The Wealth Ladder by Nick Maggiulli. It had a section on investing in your health, and it also talked about the link between flossing and longevity and heart health.
For the past year or so, I've been articulating to myself that "I want to have time and energy for the people I love." I was reading this book to help figure out what I want the rest of my life to look like.
In this context, the information finally hit me in a way that made me want be a person that flosses.
There's a field of study called identity-based motivation, that helps explain why this identity-oriented shift has actually sustained the flossing habit since I started a few weeks ago:
]]>When action feels identity-congruent, experienced difficulty highlights that the behavior is important and meaningful. When action feels identity-incongruent, the same difficulty suggests that the behavior is pointless and “not for people like me.”
I think my time ends up following the path of least friction by default. I spend more time exploring possibilities. And starting things that I would otherwise think are "too big" to work on right now. These are good things...
But I have to remind myself that nothing actually happens for our users until I merge a PR.
]]>Katie and I went to meet Juneau Black yesterday at the Westfield Library. Jocelyn read from their new (and last) book, talked about the origins of the series, and answered questions.
Some cool stuff I learned:
Sharon and Jocelyn were completely lovely and answered all of our questions with thoroughly. We got a book signed.
This is the second time I've met a creator of something I loved and I kicked myself for not directly thanking them for their work and the joy it's brought me. I won't make that mistake a 3rd time!
]]>It’s exactly what it sounds like: a miniature forest, packed with more than 260 native plants
These are also known as Miyakawi forest, named after the inventor of the native-plant pocket forest.
A few choice quotes below:
Within five years, “you’ll get the same oxygen production and carbon sequestration that a forest that’s 50 years or older is producing,” Mr. Evangelista said. “So you can make a huge impact quickly.”
Thermal drone images show that the microforests can be 4 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than mature trees, and 50 degrees cooler than the asphalt in adjacent parking lots, which can reach 132 degrees in the summer.
Because the forests start with small seedlings and require little maintenance after the first few years, he said, microforests are one of the cheapest options for boosting nature and biodiversity in cities.
This was all brand new to me, and seems exciting! The biggest hurdle is preparing the soil, which can be expensive depending on the land you're using. I would love to see these in Indiana. Maybe the Indiana Forest Alliance would be excited to partner on this.
]]>I am more than okay with knowing that whatever life out there holds for them, they will be more than ready for it, having indulged in the stories held within books. They will understand story line and plot twists and happy endings. They will know about character development and underlying themes and sad endings as well. Through the novels they've read, they will know more about the stories they want to be a part of, what kind of character they might be. They'll be better prepared to read situations and understand context and to search for meaning in the face of the seemingly incomprehensible. They will know how to break a story down to its essential elements and draw conclusions. They will be able to read people and situation themselves and others in the world.
From How to Raise a Reader by Pamela Paul and Maria Russo. Emphasis mine.
A lovely reminder about the power of fiction, not just for my son but for me as well.
]]>I finally subscribed! HoS, like many programs, is impacted by public radio funding cuts. They sent me an email:
The recent defunding of public radio hits both stations and program suppliers, and will soon force us to limit the amount of free streaming we can offer to public radio listeners and non-subscribers.
I just cancelled my Brain.fm subscription, so I've been searching for my next go-to for work music. I'm really happy sending HoS some money, and now I don't need to scroll Apple Music in the morning finding what to put on.
I guess I'll just go ahead and plug 'em while I'm here. I did the annual plan for Standard Service, which cost me $45 USD after using code 25OFF25.
]]>With both of those running, these rooms stay with 1 or 2 degrees of the thermostat! It was wild the first time we had it all set up. I watched the temp go from 76 to 71 on my son's monitor in like 3 minutes.
Would definitely recommend to anyone facing similar issues. Much cheaper than zoning the house!
]]>They have so much to say.
Generally, I respect people who say less. Words that are sparse and weighty.
But as I’ve gotten older, conversation occasionally becomes quiet or strained. My friends and I just have less to say. We’ve had plenty of time to say what we think and feel, and maybe we just don’t have as many new thoughts and feelings.
Oberst and Dylan - maybe they are cynical, but their songs are earnest. They have youthful idealism. Things are not as they should be. The current state is not inevitable. It’s wrong. And it should be right. And we’re not going to stop talking about it.
I love that and I want more of it. Earnestness and energy.
]]>I was in a remote development environment and wanted to inspect the contents of a bytea column containing gzipped JSON data. Here's what I did:
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install xxd
$ apt-get install jq
$ psql database_name -t -c "select encoded_column from table_name where id=1;" | xxd -r -p | gunzip | jq
As a business book, my biggest takeaway is a paraphrase of the book's thesis:
If something is important to you, you can observe it. If you can observe it, you can measure it.
The impact of that message for me was this:
3 years later, I was managing the Cloud IDE team at dbt Labs. I tried to get buy-in from the team to elevate "PRs merged per week" to our primary metric. In my mind, this was a "golden metric." Totally ungameable. If individuals decided to juice the metric by making their PRs even smaller, all the better! More frequent, lower risk deployments.
I failed to get buy-in. They were still worried about the perverse incentives this metric could create. They were also rightfully concerned that shipping frequently does not mean you are shipping anything valuable. They were much more interested in holding themselves accountable to user-centric or product-centric. Which - I mean - what an awesome team. I think they were on the right track with that kind of thinking.
That said, I do still believe PRs merged or deployments per week is a solid metric. But it was lacking guardrails.
Nate Berkopec linked to the post Goodhart's Law Isn't as Useful as You Might Think by Cedric Chin in his "4 Lines Friday" newsletter. Cedric quotes academics and practitioners throughout. One quote that encapsulates my main takeaway is this:
Make it difficult to distort the system. Make it difficult to distort the data. Give people the slack necessary to improve the system.
I trusted my team to not distort the system. And they had every reason to trust themselves. But if I wanted buy-in on the metric's value, then I needed guardrails that protected other valuable pieces of our process.
I now realize I was suggesting we measure only 1 of the 4 DORA metrics, and didn't have a proposal to measure our impact on the business or customers. At the very least, measuring "change fail percentage" would have been a safeguard against gaming the system by quickly shipping low quality code.
dbt Labs and I have both matured a lot since I was a manager in 2021. Next time I lead a team, I intend to find ways to measure what is important in a way that incentivizes system improvement.
]]>Milwaukee is smaller than Indianapolis. But the lake front has let the city grow dense. Somehow, they can support multiple lively bars on every block. I love that in residential areas, house bars are zoned in so that you can have your neighborhood corner pub.
]]>Cuneiform is an ancient script used to write down 7+ languages. Humanity's biggest trove of cuneiform tablets was preserved because the world's first known library was burned down by enemies, inadvertently baking the clay.
That library is so cool. When it was established around 650BC, it was to preserve clay tablets that were then already ~2000 years old!!!!
]]>Smart Brevity was the most impactful book I read last year (or it was at least tied with How Big Things Get Done). I improved my work communication significantly. Great techniques in the book, but my biggest takeaway was this simple question: "What is the one thing I want my reader to takeaway?" Then just... write that one thing!
It's been interesting to add LLMs into my writing toolbox at the same time.
2 thoughts.
Regarding the second point: maybe I should try dumping all my messy thoughts into an LLM and see if it can identify 1-3 key takeaways for me.
]]>I have long been skeptical of my relationship with my phone, and have quit Reddit a few times. Expecting our son in 2023 was a fulcrum point. My wife and I read up on screen time in children and learned details of the destructive force social media can have on self-worth and attention span. We recognized this in ourselves.
I wanted to model a healthy relationship with screens for my son, and I wanted to enjoy the benefits for myself too.
During paternity leave summer of 2024 I read How to Break up with Your Phone. I learned some troubling science supporting my own experience. Scrolling on "slot machine apps" pumps your body full of dopamine and cortisol. You both pacify and stress yourself.
For the last two weeks of paternity leave I was fully detoxed from my phone. It was on a charger when unused. I used it standing by the charger for messaging friends or changing podcasts only.
My mind felt light and clear. I looked forward to being alone to think. I felt no particular pressure to have productive or "deep" thoughts. My mind felt free. I was more present than I have been in years. My off-screen life felt more vibrant and real than my screen life.
I want that again!
Do's
Don'ts
In Alacritty it's like this:
[keyboard]
bindings = [
{key= "k", mods= "Command", chars= "\u0002"}
]
I set up with Ghostty today with this config:
keybind = cmd+k=text:\x02
If your pinky hurts, try this out!
]]>The common store of our shared history is what Goethe had in mind when he said that the inability to "draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth." It isn't with symbolic icons that men make their immortality. They do so with what they've learned on their travels across the frontiers of the millennia, salvaging from the wreck of time what they find to be useful or beautiful or true.
From Force of Imagination by Lewis H. Lapham in Harper's Magazine October 2024
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