Links Post | Year End 

Quite good science fiction novella. 

https://borretti.me/fiction/eog581

Standford Hates fun

https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2022/12/stanford-hates-fun.html

I noticed something similar to the no-fun policy at Standford. But I can’t say if it was because of bureaucracy or simply the schools I went to. My freshman year I went to Saint John’s College in Santa Fe studying liberal arts. The school was small with around 400 students. We had all the classic college stuff. Plenty of underage drinking, fun traditions like making the freshman class carry a keg around the campus in an imitation of the ark of the covenant. There was a lot of underage drinking and partying, everyone knew everyone else and we had lots of club activities. It was basically a fraternity experience except for everyone. 

Then I transferred to Colorado School of Mines to study engineering and things were quite different. Mines had around 4000 students in total and the dynamic was quite different. I was quite alienated from the class compared to how things were my freshman year and lived alone off campus. I made a few friends during my 3.5 years at Mines but in general it was a much less social experience. 

Saint John’s being a small private school probably reduces the amount of bureaucracy they can afford substantially. 

Best purchase of the year 

Stressless Admiral chair

https://www.copenhagenliving.com/product_detail/living/recliners/2047182

I bought a Stressless Admiral chair last year after visiting family and occupying one of their recliners for the week. Having this type of chair provides a great middle ground between the couch and my desk chair. The stressless is very comfortable and has lots of reclining options. I barely use my couch now that I have it. While some may consider it expensive, it is a lot less than a Herman Miller Eames chair. Considering how much time I spend in this chair it paid off!

What to expect for the next year in Sledgeworx? 

This year I spent mostly recovering from business ventures I attempted in 2021. I’ve managed to claw my way back into the black. But still lost a good amount of ground. Next year I’m planning to do more writing and traveling. I’m going to do at least one more sledgeconf and may launch a new info product. 

Links Post

Real time analytics article

https://adamsinger.substack.com/p/demystifying-real-time-analytics?utm_source=url&s=r

Danluu on the issues with purchasing solutions.

https://danluu.com/nothing-works/

Nuclear Stuff 

https://austinvernon.site/blog/nuclear.html

https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html

Are we really engineers?

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/

Links Post

Lots of links this round. I’ve had a lot of time to surf around the interwebz and came across a number of belief updating thoughts. Overall these updates make me feel very optimistic about the future. 

Watch out for the Zircon 5 though!

A Chemical Hunger

Why is everyone so fat these days? Is it just because humans are lazy gluttons? This series of posts dives into possible chemical factors to fatness. 

SpaceX:  Starlink and Starship

SpaceX has improved cost to orbit substantially. I haven’t paid a lot of attention recently, but I was big into space exploration in college. My original thought was to work for Space X as a materials engineer. But after realizing what my plan B was likely to be, a steel mill on the Mississippi River, I made the practical decision of switching to Physics. 

The summary is that Space X has put the competition in a rough spot. There isn’t even a reason to keep maintaining the rockets that compete with Space X because they are so much more expensive. Starlink is an opportunity for SpaceX to increase demand of satellites and thereby increase demand for launches. It is a very Amazonian style play. I like it and am pretty excited about the potential of cheap and good satellite internet. 

Solar + Batteries

I was also put onto this one by Casey Handmer’s blog. Solar panels have had a 75% or so improvement in cost since 2000 or 2010. Batteries are starting to encroach on gas powered peaker plants to the point they are uneconomical. I was always a nuclear power guy. But if solar continues improving at even half the rate it did in the last decade, nuclear is probably dead. Building a nuclear plant could take 10 years, by the time that plant starts producing power solar could have improved enough to make it obsolete. 

RethinkX

RethinkX has a great document on the potential of Solar power in the next decade. I like that document a lot. They also have a very interesting prediction paper on Autonomous vehicles.

Disruption, Implications, and Choices

Rethinking Energy 2020-2030

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/585c3439be65942f022bbf9b/t/5fa57fc9d228a73c73ec4669/1604681700368/Rethinking+Energy+2020-2030.pdf

Tesla

I’ve watched a number of Munro Tesla teardown videos and they have won me over on the Tesla question. I’ve also had the thought that an electric car is going to be more useful in a collapse scenario. A home solar installation will last for 20 years and charge your car the whole time. But you aren’t going to be able to procure gasoline in a collapse for 20 years without serious preparation compared to buying a solar roof + electric car. 

At this point I may never need to buy another combustion engine car again. In 5-10 years electric cars will have equivalent range and competitive pricing to ICE cars. Electric cars will also have more power and require less maintenance. The decision of what you buy will be pretty heavily in favor of electric at that time. 

Monro Live

January Links

Scientists Say You Can Cancel the Noise but Keep Your Window Open

They will integrate these speakers into windows/walls and make it smaller

Concept of ‘feature store’ for typed ML model inputs (tensors, vectors, etc)

https://www.logicalclocks.com/blog/feature-store-vs-data-warehouse

VM performance tests, very good blog series.

https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/why_arent_more_users_more_happy_with_our_vms_part_1.html
https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/why_arent_more_users_more_happy_with_our_vms_part_2.html

Compressing for pub/sub results in great savings.

https://blog.lawrencejones.dev/compress-everything/

The usefulness of linking email threads in stories and tickets.


Have you ever had a great email thread about a feature? You and your manager hashed out a solution with the product team and everyone is in agreement. All that is left to do, is to create a JIRA ticket and get working. Now wouldn’t it be nice if you could just LINK THE EMAIL THREAD IN THE STORY!

I have seen email archives, I know they exist. Linux has them. My employer even has email archives. But how can I link to the archive from Outlook? There should be a way to do this super simple thing to share my emails in a story. 

I am going to investigate how the email archives work at my employer.