We're nearly halfway through October
Updates for the second half of September til middle October
Hello readers,
Some of you might have noticed that the last email covered June through Mid-September and the update prior to that also covered June and July.
This was not done on purpose. This is an example of losing track of what has happened during the covid-19 pandemic.
The entire time I wrote up the previous update I was thinking “This seems familiar.” I double checked the Substack interface and missed that I had already sent out a June + July update so I kept writing.
Sigh. It was a perfect embodiment of how I was feeling.
Updates
I’ve published one new article on jakemccrary.com since the last newsletter. The article, Go create silly, small programs, contains some of my thoughts about software development and how powerful it is in a world with an increasing amount of technology and connectedness.
I could wax on and on about this topic. The inspiration for this article came from my partner. She expressed amazement at some of the ways I’m able to change my world by changing how technology in it works. This came about after finishing Default Equipment and her noticing that my Facebook usage is vastly different from the usage of most people.
I’ve started another Twitter bot, @high_levine. I thought it might be amusing to mash up some of the best writing on finance with Erowid trip reports and this bot is the result.
Probably because of the upcoming Dune movie there has been an uptick of interest in my custom Kindle Dune Dictionary. As far as I know, I was the first person to publish a fiction focused custom Kindle dictionary. I never wrote about the process but will be publishing about it soon as I’ve needed to dig back into how I did it to make another dictionary for Greg Egan’s Diaspora.
Books
Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler - This is the second book in the Earthseed series. It was incredibly good. Octavia Butler tackles some serious societal issues in this book while constructing her own religion. So many good things in this book series. I’d highly recommend it. Here is the opening paragraph
I HAVE READ THAT the period of upheaval that journalists have begun to refer to as “the Apocalypse” or more commonly, more bitterly, “the Pox” lasted from 2015 through 2030—a decade and a half of chaos. This is untrue. The Pox has been a much longer torment. It began well before 2015, perhaps even before the turn of the millennium. It has not ended. I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises. I have heard people deny this, but I was born in 1970. I have seen enough to know that it is true. I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people. - Octavia Butler
I also read Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People for a book club at work. It takes a research focused approach at looking at implicit bias. Here is a longer review about it that pretty much matches my feelings.
Random Articles
Your Time Scale - I like a ton of Tynan’s writing but this one really resonated with me.
Anatomy of a Catastrophe (warning, this is about the Kenosha shooting) - This is mostly an article about the stupidity and failure the entire Kenosha shooting.
How Many Atheists Are There? - Article that uses Bayesian estimation to guess at the percentage of atheists in the United States.
A Pipeline Made of Airbags - A nice take on how sometimes technology choices that seem like a given in recent years can actually be a step backward
Nice thread thinking about how to price products you build
An entertaining thread digging into the operational security of the potential kidnappers of Michigan’s Governor
Medieval paintings of animals that look nothing like the real animals
Till next time,
Jake