Topic
weekend reading
- Weekend Reading: Bullets in Games, Lessons of History, and BrickLink
🎮 How Do Bullets Work in Video Games? A cool analysis of methods for rendering bullet physics in games. 🏟 Notes on "The Lessons of History" Maksim Stepanenko's notes on Will and Ariel Durant's The Lessons of History…
- Weekend Reading: Tradeoffs, the Margins, and PR FAQs
⚖️ Tradeoffs: The Currency of Decision Making Farnam Street: Time is our most fundamental constraint. If you use an hour for one thing, you can’t use it for anything else. Time passes, whatever we do with it. It seems…
- Weekend Reading: Neutrinos and Math, Waymo Progress, and Freemium in SaaS
🧮 Neutrinos Lead to Unexpected Discovery in Basic Math As long as you consider linear algebra and eigenvectors "basic math": They’d noticed that hard-to-compute terms called “eigenvectors,” describing, in this case,…
- Weekend Reading: The Worst Year to Be Alive, Chinese Sci-Fi, and Slack Networks
🌋 Why 536 Was the Worst Year To Be Alive You may have thought the entire 14th century was pretty bad, or maybe 1918 with its flu pandemic and millions of war casualties, but how about the 6th: A mysterious fog plunge…
- Weekend Reading: MiLB, Naming Public Transit, and Soccer Playing Styles
⚾ Mapping the New MiLB Landscape Combining baseball and maps? Sign me up. The MLB has a plan to “improve” the MiLB system costs, standards, compensation, and other things through shuttering 42 ball clubs around the co…
- Weekend Reading: Figma Multiplayer, Rice vs. Wheat, and Tuft Cells
🕹 How Figma’s Multiplayer Technology Works An interesting technical breakdown on how Figma built their multiplayer tech (the collaboration capability where you can see other users’ mouse cursors and highlights in the…
- Weekend Reading: Darwinian Gastronomy, Humboldt, and Taxes
🌶 Darwinian Gastronomy Turns out cultures from warmer climates evolved a taste for spicy foods to combat the presence of more diverse bacteria: Alas, nothing in nature turns out to be that simple. Researchers now sug…
- Weekend Reading: Blot, Hand-Drawn Visualizations, and Megafire Detection
📝 Blot.im Blot is a super-minimal open source blogging system based on plain text files in a folder. It supports markdown, Word docs, images, and HTML — just drag the files into the folder and it generates web pages.…
- Weekend Reading: Strasburg Tipping, RapiD, and TikTok Investigation
⚾️ How the Nationals Fixed Stephen Strasburg and Saved Their Season Strasburg tipping his pitches almost ended the Nats’ run: He remembered the game Strasburg pitched in Arizona on August 3. The Diamondbacks pounded S…
- Weekend Reading: Ancient Text, StarLink, and Chinese Origins
📜 Restoring ancient text using deep learning: a case study on Greek epigraphy A project from DeepMind designed to fill in missing text from ancient inscriptions: Pythia takes a sequence of damaged text as input, and…
- Weekend Reading: Baseball Graphics, the Mind Illuminated, and the Crucial Century
⚾️ How Many Outs? Baseball Graphics Compared Some top-notch baseball geekery, with Jason Snell comparing the graphics overlays from Fox, MLB Network, and ESPN’s telecasts. I’ve thought about this, too, but have to giv…
- Weekend Reading: Kipchoge's 2 Hours, Future Ballparks, and the World in Data
🏃🏾♂️ Eliud Kipchoge Breaks 2-Hour Marathon Barrier An amazing feat: On a misty Saturday morning in Vienna, on a course specially chosen for speed, in an athletic spectacle of historic proportions, Eliud Kipchoge of…
- Weekend Reading: Attention, Hill Climbing, and Enforcing Culture
🧠 To Pay Attention, the Brain Uses Filters, Not a Spotlight For a long time, because attention seemed so intricately tied up with consciousness and other complex functions, scientists assumed that it was first and fo…
- Weekend Reading: Signaling, Busyness, and Magic Ink
👏🏼 Applause Lights This is from 2007, but is still a very astute observation in how politicians and activists use rhetoric to signal rather than recommend a real, actionable way forward on issues: The substance of a…
- Weekend Reading: Ted Chiang, Renewable Energy, and ColorBox
✍🏼 Ted Chiang Uses Science to Illuminate the Human Condition I enjoyed this interview with author Ted Chiang. It covers his recent short story collection Exhalation: Stories with nice context and background on the id…
- Weekend Reading: Iceland, the Use of Knowledge, and CLI Search
⚖️ The Use of Knowledge in Society I've been reading some of Hayek's famous articles this week. This one is all about what he probably considered one of the most important concepts, since these basic ideas form a cent…
- Weekend Reading: Observable Edition
This week's links are all interactive notebooks on Observable. Their Explore section always highlights interesting things people are creating. A great learning tool for playing with data and code to see how it works.…
- Weekend Reading: Intellectual Humility, Scoping, and Gboard
🛤 Missing the Light at the End of the Tunnel Honest postmortems are insightful to get the inside backstory on what happened behind the scenes with a company. In this one, Jason Crawford goes into what went wrong with…
- Weekend Reading: tracejson, Euclid, and Designing at Scale
🛰 tracejson An extension to the GeoJSON format for storing GPS track data, including timestamps. GPX has been long in the tooth for a long time, but it works and is supported by everything. This approach could have s…
- Weekend Reading: Terrain Mesh, Designing on a Deadline, and Bookshelves
🏔 MARTINI: Real-Time RTIN Terrain Mesh Some cool work from Vladimir Agafonkin on a library for RTIN mesh generation, with an interactive notebook to experiment with it on Observable: An RTIN mesh consists of only rig…
- Weekend Reading: nvUltra, Progress, and Comma.ai
📝 nvULTRA This is a new notes app from Brett Terpstra (creator of nvALT) and Fletcher Penney (creator of MultiMarkdown). I used nvALT for years for note taking on my Mac. This new version looks like a slick reboot of…
- Weekend Reading: Universal Laws, Tandem, and Computers That Can See
📚 Universal Laws of the World A list of broad laws that apply to all fields. Thoughtful stuff as always from Morgan Housel: Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. In 1955 histori…
- Weekend Reading: Brain MRI, Flash Cards, and Movie Maps
🧠 7 Tesla MRI of a Human Brain This is one of the highest resolution scans ever performed on a human brain, at 100 micrometer resolution. Scroll down to see some awesome images. 👨🏻🏫 Anki Anki is an open source fr…
- Weekend Reading: Rhythmic Breathing, Drowned Lands, and Fulcrum SSO
🏃🏻♂️ Everything You Need to Know About Rhythmic Breathing I tried this out the other night on a run. The technique makes some intiutive sense that it'd reduce impact (or level it out side to side anyway). Surely to…
- Weekend Reading: Atlas of Moons, Opendoor and Redfin, and Thinking While Walking
🌕 The Atlas of Moons This is an absolutely phenomenal project showcasing each of the major satellites in the Solar System. The full interactive maps of each one are incredible. It shows how much data we've gathered a…
- Weekend Reading: Summer Solstice, Zoom Learnings, and TeachOSM
📺 5 Learnings from Zoom Zoom is one of those admirable SaaS companies built on solid product and amazing execution. I love this — not relying on anything sexy or super inventive, just solving a known problem better t…
- Weekend Reading: Satellites, Antilibraries, and Libra
🛰 How to Profit in Space: A Visual Guide Fantastic visualizations from the WSJ team. Shows the history of satellite expansion divided by country, year, and orbits, both LEO and geosynchronous. A great use of maps for…
- Weekend Reading: Term Sheets, Customer Loyalty, and Epictetus
📑 Opening Up the Atlassian Term Sheet This is great to see from a company like Atlassian with “openness” as one of their core values. Their take is that the standard M&A process affords too few protections for the co…
- Weekend Reading: The Next Mapping Company, Apple on Pros, and iPadOS Workflow
🗺 (Who will be) America's Next Big Mapping Company? America's Next Big Mapping Company?") Paul Ramsey considers who might be in the best position to challenge Google as the next mapping company: Someone is going to t…
- Weekend Reading: Real Time Analytics, Georeferencing, and Fulcrum Code
📉 Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Give Real-time Analytics I thought this was a great post on how unnecessary "real-time" analytics can be when misused. As the author points out, it's almost never necessary t…
- Weekend Reading: Data Moats, China, and Distributed Work
🏰 The Empty Promise of Data Moats In the era of every company trying to play in machine learning and AI technology, I thought this was a refreshing perspective on data as a defensible element of a competitive moat. T…
- Weekend Reading: Rays on a Run, Apple's Pivot, and Mapping Grids
⚾️ The Rays are a Surrealist's Delight Love to see the Rays getting some deserved attention in the mainstream sports media. They've put together a great, diverse lineup of consistent hitters that have performed well a…
- Weekend Reading: Product Market Fit, Stripe's 5th Hub, and Downlink
🦸🏽♂️ How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit As pointed out in this piece from Rahul Vohra, founder of Superhuman, most indicators around product-market fit are lagging indicators. With his compan…
- Weekend Reading: Human Leverage, Alan Kay, and Mapping the NBA
🏋🏽♀️ Finding the Point of Human Leverage Automation is penetrating every industry, but still heavily reliant on human behavior and feedback to make it effective. In this piece, Benedict Evans talks about identifyin…
- Weekend Reading: Gene Wolfe, Zoom, and Inside Spatial Networks
📖 Gene Wolfe Turned Science Fiction Into High Art Wolfe's work, particularly his Book of the New Sun "tetralogy", is some of my favorite fiction. He just passed away a couple weeks ago, and this is a great piece on h…
- Weekend Reading: Running Maps, Thinking, and Remote Work
🏃🏻♂️ On the Go Map Found via Tom MacWright, a slick and simple tool for doing run route planning built on modern web tech. It uses basic routing APIs and distance calculation to help plan out runs, which is especia…
- Weekend Reading: Brains and Language, Hillshading in Blender, and Antifragility
🧠 Your Brain Needs 1.5 MB of Storage to Master Your Native Language "It may seem surprising but, in terms of digital media storage, our knowledge of language almost fits compactly on a floppy disk," the authors wrote…
- Weekend Reading: T Cells, Creating Proteins, and SNI Awards
🦠 T is for T Cell After reading The Breakthrough, I've been doing more reading on immunotherapy, how it works, and what the latest science looks like. Another book in my to-read list is An Elegant Defense, a deeper s…
- Weekend Reading: Hurricanes, Long Games, and AirPods
⛈ Hurricane Season 2017: A Coordinated Reconnaissance Effort The NSF StEER program has been using Fulcrum Community for a couple of years now, ever since Hurricane Harvey landed on the Texas coast, followed by Irma an…
- Weekend Reading: Remote Work, Autonomous Behaviors, and AirPods 2
👨🏽💻 Why Naval Ravikant Thinks Remote Work is the Future Anyone that works in a successful company with a large distributed staff can attest to remote-first being the future for knowledge work organizations. The mo…
- Weekend Reading: Mental Models, Git History, and Notion
🧠 A Latticework of Mental Models This is an excellent archive on Farnam Street with background on 109 different mental models — first principles, Occam's Razor, probabalistic thinking, and many more. So much great re…
- Weekend Reading: Calculator, SaaS Metrics, and System Shock
💻 Open Sourcing Windows Calculator Seems silly, but this kind of thing is great for the open source movement. There’s still an enormous amount of tech out there built at big companies that creates little competitive…
- Weekend Reading: Build or Buy, OKRs, and Employee Onboarding
🖥 When to Build and When to Buy: The Lure of Building Software This was one of my favorite reads this week, on the topic of “build vs. buy” in IT organizations. In SaaS, this is one of the most common conversations y…
- Weekend Reading: Private DNS, Opportunity, and Millennial Socialism
🔌 Announcing 1.1.1.1: Privacy-First DNS This is an old announcement, but new to me. CloudFlare now hosts privacy-centric DNS at 1.1.1.1, available to all: We talked to the APNIC team about how we wanted to create a p…
- Weekend Reading: Business Applications, Rays Prospects, and the Florida Panhandle
👨🏽💻 Okta Businesses @ Work 2019 Interesting data here in Okta’s annual report. It’s clear that the way customer’s buy SaaS is very different than the “single-vendor” purchasing preferences from years past. SaaS al…
- Weekend Reading: LiDAR, Auto Generated Textbooks, and Paleo Plate Tectonics
🛣 Creating Low-Cost LiDAR This is a great breakdown of the different elements of LiDAR technology, looking at three broad areas: beam direction, distance measurement, and frequencies. They compare the tech of 10 diff…
- Weekend Reading: Fulcrum in Santa Barbara, Point Clouds, Building Footprints
👨🏽🚒 Santa Barbara County Evac with Fulcrum Community Our friends over at the Santa Barbara County Sheriff have been using a deployment of Fulcrum Community over the last month to log and track evacuations for floo…
- Weekend Reading: Shanghai, Basecamp, and DocuSaurus
🇨🇳 195-Gigapixel Photo of Shanghai Shot from the Oriental Pearl Tower, the picture shows enormous levels of detail composited from 8,700 source photos. Imagine this capability available commercially from microsatell…
- Weekend Reading: CES 2019, Tips for Satellite Imagery, and Shortcuts Archive
📱 CES 2019: A Show Report This year’s excellent report from the show floor from Steven Sinofsky. It's extensive and covers the products a-to-z, breaking down the trends by category. I'd also recommend the companion p…
- Weekend Reading: RoboSat, the State of Security, and the Equal Earth Map
🛰 Buildings from Imagery with RoboSat This excellent guide shows how to combine take imagery from OpenAerialMap and buildings from OpenStreetMap, and combine to train a model for automated feature extraction. It uses…