I built the thing I talk about in this blog post — if you want to check it out, it’s here!
Notion, like every tech company, has been shoving AI features down our throats for the last couple of months at the cost of customer UX. So I disabled them. You can do this yourself by just messaging support — I got the idea from this Reddit thread, which is one of many. Ever since I disabled it, the UX has at least returned-to-normal, and performance of editing has increased (have you ever noticed how Notion lags a bit every time you press SPC so that it can show you the AI toolbar?).
For transparency, I’m going to recommend a paid window switcher I use for Mac OS X called Contexts. It’s saved me so much time and has made using my computer a breeze; so much so, that I’ve bound it to CMD+Tab. I’ll attempt to justify this in the doc.
The default window management paradigm in Mac OS X, for me, left much to be desired. I grew up using Windows, which has a pretty different pattern for how you Alt+Tab between windows.
Try it out here if you like pressing buttons as much as I do! GitHub if you like reading code.
During the holidays, I wanted to get better at answering questions like “what is 7 half steps up from A?1” I often found myself in the situation of having these problems as a lot of guitar chord sheets are written something like “A capo 7” which means you put the big barre thing on your guitar and play an A-shape chord. When using a capo, the actual underlying chord is ‘A + 7 half steps’. This means if you’re collaborating with another instrument or with someone not using a capo, you need to communicate the actual chord you’re playing. This requires some mental math, which I found slightly embarrassing as I didn’t always immediately know what chord I was playing.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Gen 1:1 NET
The word for God here is Elohim. There are some interesting tidbits about this:
The noun is in its plural form. Singular would be Eloah. While this seems really controversial, in most of the usages, it’s paired with a singular verb. AKA “created” up there is masculine singular. So it’s often interpreted as a majestic plural.
I’ve often encountered Christians that believe the world was created in 7 24-hour days, because “that’s what the Bible says” in Genesis 1 and they won’t believe otherwise.
There are a ton of arguments against this “fact,” but I think the most compelling one is the linguistic ambiguity for the word “day” (yom) used in the creation account. First, let’s take a look at an English translation for one of the days of creation:
edit: this blogpost was initially wrong when I published it. Thanks to some comments I got, I learned I didn’t fully understand TrueTime or Spanner — I’ve spent some time learning and understanding the core concept again, and have updated this artifact. This is an externalized resource for me that I hope can be helpful for others.
When I was reading the famous paper on Spanner, Google’s globally distributed linearizable database, I really struggled with the concept of TrueTime, which is a core component of why they were able to get their guarantees. After trying to wrap my head around it, I created the following artifact (IMO, TrueTime deserves a mini-ish paper or post on its own):
they really do. I have most of them turned off on my phone.
first, idk who to blame about these, but there is this class of notifications that are like
“feeling hungry? order UberEats now!!”
someone gave someone this lever to pull to increase engagement. the first someone upsets me, and i sometimes think about the other someone and also get angry.
i turn all of these off, when I can actually turn them off. in the case where an app doesn’t let me disable them, I turn off all notifications for that app. they’ve lost my trust.
I use git a ton in work and my personal life, and have come up with a couple of aliases that have made using it so much more pleasant and fast. First, I’ve renamed git to g. You have no idea how much typing that’s saved me (I also don’t know).
Imagine you have something to say to people. So you come up with some representation of that thing you want to say; maybe bullet points, maybe a rant, maybe even some markdown stuck in a GitHub repository. Why can’t you just publish that?
Please. It’s an insult to my brain. Like, you put the button in one place, and then you’re like “nah, let’s move it somewhere else.” Here are some examples that have annoyed me the most lately:
This one sucks as I’m often opening the Lyft app just to ride bikes. So I immediately hit the bike button and I’m trying to hit the “Scan” button as quickly as possible. But no! Depending on how fast my internet is at the current moment, that banner will appear and push the Scan button up, which means I end up hitting the banner instead 😟; this is often a really frustrating start to my daily commute.
