What I learned this week 08-08-2026
What I learned this week Software Business/Finance Interesting Links What “their ilk” means Heat Training Math/Stat Travel Other
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What I learned this week 08-01-2026
What I learned this week Software Elevators Business/Finance Interesting Links Bacteria are cool Math/Stat Travel Other challah Hayden Flour Mill & Silos
What I learned this week 07-25-2026
What I learned this week Software Scaling pg listen/notify Perceptual hashing Business/Finance One man bike shorts company Red White Interesting Links Types of flour Math/Stat Travel Other
What I learned this week 07-18-2026
What I learned this week Software Business/Finance Camel Racing brought to you by Pogba Interesting Links Insane Music video Kalshi infecting the news Don’t Take the Black Pill Math/Stat Travel Flaming Gorge · Flaming Gorge, Utah looks nice Fish Lake - Utah also looks nice Other Did You Know TLDs Can Be Websites?
What I learned this week 07-11-2026
What I learned this week Software Fun games site Business/Finance ALL SEASON SPORTS ETF… sports betting bet its an etf this time Fraud…. Fraud everywhere Interesting Links Australian inflation Dolphins smoking pufferfish Math/Stat Travel Cool train trip Lifetime united airlines pass Other Coconut for bbq
What I learned this week 07-04-2026
What I learned this week Software Classic DBA mosh an alt to ssh Business/Finance David_Ogilvy Interesting Links Screwworm Math/Stat Switchback experiments Switchback experiments solve the problem of network effects rendering traditional A/B tests impractical by switching between test and control treatments based on time, rather than randomly splitting the population. Travel Other Spent the long…
What I learned this week 06-27-2026
What I learned this week Software The Transfer Station Economy, buying cheap tokens Business/Finance Interesting Links Porsche from the guy he helped put in prison Math/Stat Travel Other Crazy what corruption and incentives will lead to
What I learned this week 06-20-2026
What I learned this week Software Sandboxes Business/Finance Interesting Links Leader of Egypt Math/Stat Travel Other
What I learned this week 06-13-2026
What I learned this week Software Reverse Tabnabbing PI File System Business/Finance Telescope Ranching Interesting Links Drinking water from jacket Math/Stat Travel Mt Laguna looks nice Channel Islands National Park looks cool Hannagan Meadow Other Heavy mugs…
What I learned this week 06-06-2026
What I learned this week Software Probably going to be hot garbage Business/Finance Interesting Links Conformal coating Diode Balsamic vinegar background Miner’s Breakfast Math/Stat Travel Other
What I learned this week 05-30-2026
What I learned this week Software Redshift with Graviton based instances, no spectrum scan cost any more Probably a DC2 -> RA3 situation based on price and performance… will need to elastic resize once > 4xl iss available Business/Finance Uh Oh more insider trading in markets that are based on… insider trading…. Interesting Links Love the way this is shot GLP-1 sustained…
What I learned this week 05-23-2026
What I learned this week Software Git clone off a custom port: git clone ssh://git@mydomain.example:[port]/home/whatever git branch -a for remote branches Git tagging $0 is a way to invoke bash FFUF fast web fuzzer HTTP referer was misspelled in the original RFC and then kept hahaha WAT types Business/Finance Who’s on the other side of your NVDA trade? This google x gentle monster collab is…
Over The Wire
After a few months of sporadic work, I finally finished the “Bandit” games on OvertheWire. These are fairly basic challenges where you’re essentially trying to retrieve a hidden password from a Linux VM. Proof, Base64 encoded...…
Typos as a feature
How do I prove to you that I’m a person? Do I need to spell strawberry correctly or maybe wrong? Tell you to take your car to a carwash? Draw a pelican riding a bicycle? Do I need to stop using dashes? Should I start cursing? I’m going to curse profusely in this. What about typos? Should I misspell stuff? Should I write gibberish? LLMs are so good at churning out tokens.
What I learned this week 05-16-2026
What I learned this week Software Mock data/api calls Slopsquatting the new bucket sniping Business/Finance “the de-rating from a premium multiple to a normal one eats every cent” Interesting Links On Bear spray’s effectiveness Japan bear problems solved? SA Search and rescue Being someone who does things Math/Stats Travel Other Each good intention of unification creates another…
What I learned this week 05-09-2026
What I learned this week Software Jevons paradox “when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource’s use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption of that resource” “It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but…
Are you leaving? No, I’m just telling you I love you.
Wednesday I took my grandma out to dinner on Wednesday. We talked about when she moved to Phoenix, Arizona from New York in 1968. She’s 94 now. She reminisced about the travel, the young kids, the time. She said that’s gone now, those days are passed, that she had a good life. She wants to spend more time with my mom. Why they don’t? She says they let silly things get in the way.
What I learned this week 05-02-2026
What I learned this week Software I like what Manus are trying to do here. It feels like they’ve got some good tooling/steering to have the LLM traverse the surface of the human internet. It’s a bit rough but I didn’t use the pro models. I think this hammers home in my mind how critical tooling/harness/testing is, it takes usefulness to another level. Also RIP Facebook acquisition.…
What I learned this week 04-25-2026
What I learned this week Software ps -p <PID> -o comm= Looks up a specific process by its ID and prints the executable path Laws of Software Engineering ggsql looks pretty cool Exe dev from tailscale’s founder Remotion looks like a fun way to generate videos Flipbook… kind of cool, idk about increasing the nondeterminism of websites though, but maybe it works for some stuff…
What I learned this week 04-18-2026
What I learned this week Software Business/Finance Interesting Links Gas tax by state Wood powered car Cat5e Cable Math/Stats Travel Other Juggling machetes
To Have and Have Not
a The book This will serve to store notes/insights/thoughts about To Have and Have Not Quotes Notes This was brutal. Good story, well written and all that but wow it was just a brutal look a humanity. Especially juxtaposing one vile person after another with some nice happy family on a yacht. Nothing is held back, it’s honest from the start. Might try and watch the movie which seems loosely…
What I learned this week 04-11-2026
What I learned this week Software Ngrok looks cool Debug your LLM Cloud flare tunnels are dope. python3 -m http.server 8080 & cloudflared tunnel --url http://localhost:8080 On profiling a git repo before reading it Business/Finance Interesting Links They’re made out of meat!? Brainstorming is about making yourself look good, not the THING actually good Math/Stats Travel Other recalcitrant…
A Review of Hex
Hex Review It’s Easter Sunday. After a long day of chocolate mogging and stealing eggs from small children, I’ve decided to check out Hex which calls itself the “The AI Analytics Platform for your whole team”. I’m going to toss a small csv into it, if it does well I might hit it with a 20GB Parquet file. I’m not going to connect a data warehouse to it (This is…
What I learned this week 04-04-2026
What I learned this week Software Python cad library Build a GPU Business/Finance Interesting Links Pallet camper Rescue fraud Fun fusion overview Poker lecture at Harvard Math/Stats Travel Other
What I learned this week 03-28-2026
What I learned this week Software Alan M. Turing allowed himself to be drawn into the discussion of the question whether computers can think. The question is just as relevant and just as meaningful as the question whether submarines can swim. The goat Copy all rendered html copy(document.documentElement.outerHTML) Common Design Diagram Mistakes Eggs… and high token cost Business/Finance…
What I learned this week 03-21-2026
What I learned this week Software Voltage glitching 7x better because “composition” Bellman equation Business/Finance Suno AI music… Autonomous driving might have the biggest positive impact on the world this decade Interesting Links Plant watering: Making things shitty Billiken One Trillion brackets Math/Stats Travel Other “the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well…
Meltdown
a The book This will serve to store notes/insights/thoughts about Meltdown Quotes Notes I don’t have a lot to say about this one other than Credit Suisse did a ton of terrible shit for 100s of years and basically nobody got in trouble. I feel like the industry solves for a certain type of risk-taking and brash individual that leads to this sort of thing occurring over and over again. Normal…
What I learned this week 03-14-2026
What I learned this week Software SQLite skip scan Dead internet arrival Namespace prevents bucket squatting Business/Finance Interesting Links Wow, 21 years off grid Clacker news Math/Stats Travel Other Doom
What I learned this week 03-07-2026
What I learned this week Software I did not know that appending a shell command with & runs it asynchronously. You can view running things with jobs. nc ip port to send a message to a port, nc -lv port to listen to it. yes just pipes y to stdout over and over pstree for viewing process tree on Linux (all starts from systemd) powermetrics is useful for cpu/process info.
Last day at AMXL
Leaving AMXL after 5 years What I learned from ~5 years at Amazon all of which were spent at an organization called AMXL. I’m moving to a new organization within Amazon, and I felt like it was a good time to reflect. Reflecting on people Being negative and short with people is almost always detrimental to both you and them. If this is occurring figure out why and fix it asap.
What I learned this week 02-28-2026
What I learned this week Software One step from magic the bottleneck in AI-assisted development isn’t the quality of your ideas - it’s the quality of your feedback loops. Business/Finance Why isn’t GDP growing faster????? Insider trading pt 1000 Insider trading part 1001 Levered single stock etfs Interesting Links The best college hockey player My new favorite hickey team name Obree…
What I learned this week 02-21-2026
What I learned this week Software your org rarely has good ideas. ideas being expensive to implement was actually helping Sony pictures hack The “AI makes people boring.” Thesis Business/Finance Interesting Links Belarus likes to drink A new word I learned Ski ballet AI proof business? 2 Rubiks Cubes 2 Cig 2 Beer Lasers Math/Stats Jensen’s inequality, I’d like to write an…
What I learned this week 02-14-2026
What I learned this week Software Nice overview of PolyMarket activity Another interesting “deploy software here” business Amazing website, good content as well - how is data stored Fast LLM inference, we’re going to get model on a chip soon Business/Finance The Economic Impact of Mass Deportations Interesting Links Paddy lost DIY noise canceling headphones Math/Stats Travel…
What I learned this week 02-07-2026
What I learned this week Software 3D engine The Website is down Nobody knows how the whole system works Business/Finance Good overview of sub penny rule Physical products are… difficult Oops Interesting Links Vacant land fraud Math/Stats Travel Other The Tenkara bum blog Places to fish: Willow springs creek hike behind the dam Canyon creek, passed woods canyon Silver creek (upper) show low
Scaling markets with non-human operators
I’m jotting this down quick so apologies for run-ons and shit that doesn’t read well. Scaling markets with non-human operators There’s this common adage that you should do things that scale beyond yourself. Doing things that are limited by your capacity to complete them and garner little long term value moving forward don’t “scale”. Uber, autonomous trucking, and scaling If…
What I learned this week 02-01-2026
What I learned this week Software SQL > Business/Finance SUbstack tv Gambling on…. wait… gambling TSMC pushing risk to hyper scalers Interesting Links On the saw, this dude is the CEO of Obsidian First make me care Removal of security theater Slop Markets in everything Math/Stats Travel Other
What I learned this week 01-24-2026
What I learned this week Software Being useful Business/Finance Stupid title but interesting Interesting Links “Put differently, there were fewer births in China in 2025 than in 1776” I got some of these spicy peppers from my neighbor Evil exists primarily in the eye of the beholder, especially in the eye of the victim. Math/Stats Travel Other
What I learned this week 01-17-2026
What I learned this week Software Need to try out sprites Tailscale remote into device Prepared statement, the anti-sql injection The over engineered data pipeline Business/Finance The Blog that made me start writing Pair trade Iron Condor Interesting Links Existential choice paralysis Math/Stats Travel Other
What I learned this week 01-10-2026
What I learned this week Software Planet scale Andy’s annual review Modern column storage Business/Finance Interesting thoughts about modern work Interesting Links FogCam 18000 water cups Math/Stats Travel Traveling »»> Other The Crazy Alberto The real issue people miss is that code isn’t an asset, it’s a liability. Every line of code is a potential bug or something that will slow down…
What I learned this week 01-03-2026
What I learned this week Software Setuid Business/Finance Accounting explained in graphs Interesting Links A Modern Movie Ranking Cool site for learning knots Ghost guns Math/Stats Travel Other New Years Resolutions: Become conversationally proficient in Spanish Be able to fish for myself both shore fishing and stream fishing (not fly fishing) Continue to Travel as much as possible
Puerto Peñasco
About Trip to Puerto Peñasco with Kenta, Kenta’s dad (John) and Tristan. 12/26: Played some poker the night before and got up around 7:20. Ally woke me up. Packed up the last bit of my stuff and had Ally drive me over to Kenta’s. Met up with Kenta, his dad John, and Tristan. Piled in the four-runner and headed to Mexico. It was about 4 hours to get to rocky point.
Value at the limit
An unbounded supply of Chess I used to play chess only on lichess everyday. Lichess is great, it’s free, open source, and I’ve been donating to the site monthly for years. I prefer Lichess to Chess.com in nearly everyway, but, recently, I’ve been playing/practicing on chess.com. Why? Because it offers a stopping point. Chess offers me a slippery slope. On one hand it’s an…
What I learned this week 12-27-2025
What I learned this week Software Livecoding melodic DNB music in Strudel Business/Finance Selling onions > Selling software Sell your… voice Interesting Links Nonce When a measure become a target it ceases to become a good measure… goof background on Goodhart’s law sepulchral Math/Stats Great Transformer explainer Travel Other Chicken Stock
What I learned this week 12-20-2025
What I learned this week Software readability, hackability and abstraction Reverse a hexdump cat some_file.txt | xxd -r >reversed_hex_dump.txt Databento looks great Start a dev container Business/Finance Insider trading? Interesting Links Cool rugs Think before grabbing Why are so many peds killed by cars Math/Stats Travel Other Need to build this custom big mouth bass
LLM Weaponized Spam Circle
Right now, circular financing and AI bubble takes are a dime a dozen. These may prove true, but be warned: “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” ― John Maynard Keynes I think another kind of circle is forming: The Weaponized Spam Circle. Thesis LLMs are great at commoditized tasks because it lowers the cost to produce them. People love this so much they leverage them…
What I learned this week 12-13-2025
What I learned this week Software Cool designs Interesting points That’s also why I see no point in using AI to, say, write an essay, just like I see no point in bringing a forklift to the gym. Sure, it can lift the weights, but I’m not trying to suspend a barbell above the floor for the hell of it. I lift it because I want to become the kind of person who can lift it.
The Count of Monte Cristo
The book This will serve to store notes/insights/thoughts about The Count of Monte Cristo Quotes Page 34 - A curse on those who fear wine: it’s because they have evil thoughts and they are afraid that wine will loosen their tongues. Page 54-55 - God can change the future, He can not alter even an instant of the past. Page 90 - He looked up with the satisified air of a man who thinks he has…
What I learned this week 12-06-2025
What I learned this week Software Write stderr to dev/null: 2>/dev/null To find a file based on user+group+size: find / -type f -user bandit7 -group bandit6 -size 33c Only unique lines in a text file: sort some_file.txt | uniq -u strings command in Linux is a utility used to extract printable character sequences. Business/Finance Yikes, but not surprising… insider trading applies only…
What I learned this week 11-29-2025
What I learned this week Software Business/Finance Interesting Links Transfer back to VHS Math/Stats Travel Other Jason Williams was teammates with Randy Moss I think I deleted all my saved links this week so only these this week.
Korea
About Trip is South Korea (Seoul and Jeju) from 2025-11-07 -> 2025-11-21. Below is my daily notes from the trip, lightly edited post trip. (Edits are bolded). I’m picking one photo from each day to include. Summary Thoughts Korea Travel Log Korea journal 2025-11-07: Currently waiting to take off for SF. Today was very chill compared to yesterday where I got a flat tire on my way to present…