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robust-cactus

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Hi y'all, today I'm sharing Jot, an offline, source available note taking and personal assistant app. You can read all about it in the blog post. This is definitely an app geared towards privacy and free expression.

The main question I expect I'll get is, "but what about Obsidian". Yea, Obsidian is cool if you want to work primarily in markdown and with tools that support it. I wanted to make something with a bit more rich content, experiment with local LLMs and really lean into user friendly text editing. Jot's my take on that problem!

Would love any feedback yall have - comments here are welcome or on our feedback page https://jot.canny.io/features-bugs

Btw, these social media giants curate content wayyyy more than you'd expect. TikTok curates it's trends and gets it's biggest influencers to engage first. Pinterest seeded it's network with a few noteworthy creators. Even Airbnb famously took pictures for the top stays in NY. Curation is now just more opaque. Even in the AI age, human in the middle is going to be pervasive.

Popularity aside, I have been feeling lately that cross-platform and familiarity are reducing in importance. LLMs make it easy to pick up something new. Maybe "right tool for the job" will win more often over "familiarity".

I'd just describe this job market as competitive and every company appears to be looking for some specific persona now. Believe it or not you could thrive in this job market. For you, I'd say you'll have figure out what you love to do, figure out how to speak positively/enthusiastically about your previous experience, and find companies that value what you bring to the table. AI is not taking all the jobs yet (seems clear that it produces garbage code that's untenable at scale), and neither is off-shoring (it's very out of trend).

Question - what can you actually control about companies you're applying to? The answer is not a whole lot, so why stress about it? What you can control is a funnel:

1. How many jobs you've applied to

2. What quality those companies are

3. How much they're aligned with your skill set

Other than that, you're stressing about stuff you can't change. Let it go, gain inner peace. There's a lot to unpack in your post, step back examine the stories you're telling yourself. Are they actually real? Is there something more nuanced going on?

Another solution - drop numeric phone numbers all together and switch to alphanumeric or verified contact only. With numeric, sequential phone numbers you can just robocall all the numbers until you find a victim. Making the search space significantly larger should solve that attack vector. Of course, this will effectively be the same as transitioning from IPv4 to v6 - with all the same associated pain

It'll help with so many things: - in contact syncing systems you can't rainbow table your way to decrypting numbers - numbers can be permanently burned once they're released or deemed as spam. This means every service could ban spammers safely without fear of burning a real user. - people could more easily have alt numbers, non-voip numbers for untrusted services.

The biggest midwit vibe is throwing everything out when the pendulum swings to no process mode and then adding a whole bunch of process/methodology when that doesn't work.

This is 4 year cycle tied to economic conditions

Moderation is key

Step 1: The main folks you should convince to get onboard are actually the designers. The argument I've seen work pretty well is "having a consistent design means your designer don't need to QA quite as often and it raises the baseline quality for everything." Finally "we will have shared components no matter what, we want you to influence them"

Step 2: Just start building the components. Don't wait for approvals. With enough of a foundation you can show some value and go from there.

Step 3: Show evidence of time savings, how many of those components are used by how many projects.

Step 4: Share a vision and strategy. I really like how others said "don't be the bottleneck" the component library will be left behind if it turns into that. Encourage contributions. Share your roadmap. Encourage incremental and experimental components so that people can share less refined components. Finally clearly indicate what isn't shared and what it will take make something "shared".

I think getting too bogged down in reusability of lots of things is eventually the downfall of component libraries. Additionally, "too much categorization" is also problem. Atomic design for instance is great but I feel like it's a concept to teach designers how to think about componentization and for engineers it actually ends up getting in the way.

If it's going about 70% well at that point, the thing to take it to the next level is to collaborate with design leaders to get them to hold their designers accountable for matching to the design system. They may end up needing to recreate a version of those components in something like figma. If there isn't support for this, the whole system will be a pain till the end of time.

There are likely ways to have your cake and eat it too. Rather than replace the existing system, consider augmenting it with your own and then eventually, over time replace the existing system.

Showing short term and long term wins concurrently is a good recipe for success for tech as much as it is for business.

Some questions that may help you: 1. What are the biggest problems with your existing system and how does that relate with the biggest problem for your business?

2. Is there an API or any manual process you can use to communicate between new systems and the existing system?

3. Is there an engineering leader you can bring on to help or consult?

Meta 3D Gen 2 years ago

At this point GLTF seems pretty darn good and seems broadly usable. It embeds the mesh, textures, animations right in a single file. It can represent a single model or a scene. I also has a binary format.

3d need not be so complicated! We've kinda made it complicated but a simplification wave is likely coming.

The big unlock for 3d though will have to be some better compression technology. Games and 3d experiences are absolutely massive.

I think people forget, it's literally your money. Yea it's theoretically subsidized but the amount of money you put into the system over 40 years is probably more than you'll ever get out of it.

- You pay roughly 1-2% of your salary to it every year

- The max weekly benefit in California is $450 for 26 weeks, so roughly $11k. But it's also a percentage of your salary

- Unless you get fired/quit jobs every year it's probably very hard to get more out than you put in and even then there's probably other safeguards

The size of the printing mechanism is an innovation for sure, but I think after you add up all the other components to make a functioning printer you end up at nearly the same size: a resin vat, space to print, various leveling mechanisms, filters, UV light shield etc - the form factor doesn't really change all that much.

The form factor here is cool, but as someone whose been resin printing a bunch lately, the pitch to carry it around in your pocket sounds questionable.

1. Where are you going to store the resin? It isn't good to touch it. Are they also expecting people to carry around somewhat toxic resin in their other pocket and then make a little puddle on the ground to print? Resin printing is messy and cleaning is hard. Make sure to carry isopropyl alcohol in your other pocket.

2. It produces toxic fumes while printing that you need to exhaust. So you at least need a mask.

3. It takes hours to print on a large machine: you need a model file, to edit the model to print in resin well and then the actual print can be multiple hours long. Not to mention multiple print failures which is often the case.

Everything mentioned about the surgical application sounds possible today, but it's still not fast enough or reliable enough in that scenario. Also... Resin isn't that strong, you want to graft it to a bone, what?

Complexity is a great reason to implement something like this in-house. It's probably better to understand (and fully control) the sharding and transaction mechanism than to trust a third party with such a core piece of infra.

As companies get larger they move further up the stack whether it's sharding techniques, databases, custom orchestration software, their own networking hardware, etc.

About 7 years ago now I'd say I had an identity crisis. Startup life is rough whether you're working for someone or on your own. I've done both. I wanted to find work life balance but that stressed me out more.

Ultimately, Jiro Dreams of Sushi kinda re-ignited that building passion for me. I read some books that made me realize I give to many F*s about things that don't matter. I have my day job and am doing things I'm proud of on the side and oh-ya I have a family and work life balance now some how.

I guess looking back, it was about finding the right mix of what I want to spend my time on day-in-day-out, and matching it with the right people and work around me. It was about seeking out and trying different things until I found the "happy path" for me.

I want to build cool stuff people use, but I hate feeling like I'm in free fall. I'll end up choosing the 30% risky path these days, and maybe that doesn't make a billion dollar startup but I don't really care. Or maybe it will because I'm just building stuff I want shrug

Finding the right abstraction is hard. To me in seems clear Next is tuned for Vercel Now. If you build in a compatible way it works great, it's a nice "serverless" setup for serving pages. There's a whole range of use cases this doesn't work for: eg realtime apps, apps that care more than average about security, etc.

Another insidious thing in Next: their middleware is completely sandboxed and you can't use any standard Node functionality. It doesn't matter if you're using vercel now or not, and there's no way to disable this.

This is pretty important for things like sessions with httpOnly cookies. And it forces you make an API call to yourself to resolve.

OKRs Are Bullshit 2 years ago

I think so much of the commentary misses the point. Goals drive focus, they help folks say no and ask "how does project x help get more sign-ups?". If nothing else it's a communication tool. If you want to get another team to do something, show them how they'll succeed at their goal and help yours too.

The opposite of a system like this means - every VP has an initiative they're trying to push and now there are 50 new projects to maintain and eventually sunset.

My only advice is, just play around, and try different things. Freelance for a while and charge terribly low amounts of money. Partner up with different types of people on ventures - yea this requires trust and you will get grifted from time to time.

But through it all, you're learning and building skills. Hell you're having fun.

Maximize for "f**ing around and finding out"

This was me - made websites for my band, friends bands, made ticketing website for promoter friend, made websites for custom gear companies, ended up in a events startup then to the moon. Yes CS degree happened in the middle of all that too.

At this point, I'd pay for iMessage on Android. There's a lot of conversations android users are not a part of because of iMessage.

Ceramic pans these days seem like a pretty great option - non stick and non toxic. Only trade off is lower heat.

I use ceramic mainly then switch to cast iron for high heat

The praise for the public market in this article is a little disingenuous. Yes it has some nice properties but it's also a mess: 1. Algorithmic trading and the rules by which the big organizations play in the market make it rough for both companies and individuals 2. Margin trading seems to be making company stoke prices way more volatile 3. Overall corporations constant need to appease the shareholders (aka maximize profits) by law causes them to act like sociopaths at times.