Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Yesterday Kim and I were looking at homes on acreage. We’re hoping to find our final home and have enough land our kids could build on it if they want to. It’ll also be the perfect place to setup for the coming zombie apocalypse! 🧟♂️
Hope you enjoy the links.
Aisha Nyandoro, Ph.D. • Forbes
You come into a lot of money suddenly, and it’s like you’ve won the lottery. I had to think a lot about, “what is the purpose of money?” Why do we have money, and how much money is enough? The more I looked at it, the more I thought the money should be actually out there working to make the world better in some form. I didn’t see the purpose of holding on to a bunch of wealth if it’s not doing anything.
There are some extremely wealthy people who are empathetic to the human condition and want to help. See, not all of them are building dick shaped rockets or trying to take over the United States. 👍🏼
For a long while, I’ve felt that the design of iOS is too top heavy. While our phones seem to grow larger every year, our hands do not and so interface elements are pulled ever further out of reach.
Reading tealeaves is not my thing any longer, but this is a really great take on what the next version of iOS may hold for us. 👩🎨
Ruben Cagnie • Toast Technology
At Toast, we believe that GraphQL is the right technology to build efficient web and mobile applications.
I know a lot of shops really love GraphQL for its flexibility, but I’ve never had the pleasure of working with it. It is my understanding Twitter was using GraphQL for the updated Twitter API that Space Karen scrapped.
In a groundbreaking step for the future of construction, the first-ever 3D-printed Starbucks is taking shape in Brownsville, Texas.
How cool is that? I wish I could’ve seen the machine during the process. You can see the layers in the pictures and see a very visible seam or rib where it came together. Overall it’s extremely cool and it’s supposed to be less expensive than traditional construction. I hope these become options for young folks getting their first home.
This magical DIY Book Lamp teaches kids about creativity and electronics. It combines paper crafting and paper circuits using conductive tape. The materials used are simple, but the result is truly fascinating.
This could be a really fun project for me and my grandchildren.
DESIGN WAS so much easier before I had clients. I assigned myself projects with no requirements, no schedule, no budget, no constraints. By most definitions, what I did wasn’t even design—except that it ended up creating new things, some of which still exist on the web.
This is how I’d imagine most indie software developers feel. I know when I work on Stream or RxCalc or Arrgly or [top sekret project] I find the most joy there because I don’t have to worry about someone looking over my shoulder to make sure I’m coding thing the proper way. I’m just coding, crafting an application the way I see it. I don’t have to use all these different latest creates frameworks or new patterns. I can be my curmudgeonly self and use tried and true methods of old because I’m the only one who needs to worry about it. 😃
I’ve got a post-graduate certificate in artificial intelligence (AI). I’m also an author, and I believe writers and publishers should not use AI in publishing. So that’s why I was disturbed when a reviewer asked if I had used AI in writing my recent coming-of-age novel, Under the Gulf Coast Sun.
I won’t go as far to say you should never use AI, even though I won’t on my personal projects, but you need to understand your craft so you can make an educated decision about the quality of any code you use from a third party. You do this with third party code you get from whatever packages you use, right? Why should AI be any different. In fact AI generated code should get more scrutiny than human written code. Don’t vibe your way to poor quality. 🌹
Nvidia’s GPU drivers have been a disaster over the past four months. It all started when Nvidia released its drivers for the RTX 50-series cards in January, and introduced black screen issues, game crashes, and general stability problems for new and existing graphics cards.
When I hear about something like this my brain always asks “I wonder if they rewrote the driver code.” That could definitely be a huge mistake. I don’t know if that’s what they did or if it was just rushed to get it to market but it’s not good to break something so many folks rely on. Software development is just plain difficult. All the best fixing your drivers, Nvidia!
Yes, AI-assisted development is transforming how we build software, but it’s not a free pass to abandon rigor, review, or craftsmanship. “Vibe coding” is not an excuse for low-quality work.
Ah, I mentioned this above. Check those outputs for accuracy and fix problems so you don’t get bit. ‘Nuff said.
The Sakura might be Japan’s best-selling EV (indeed, strong demand led to Nissan having to pause sales in late 2022 because it had too many orders), but it has the potential to be far more than that. It is the EV that many city EV drivers have been crying out for.
This is a really cute little car that would be perfect for city dwellers. Heck, I drive one these to work and back daily if I could convince my wife I needed it. 🤣 As it is I work from home and need a truck for towing our camping trailer and hauling dirt and rock. (You’d be surprised how often we used to do that!)
Finally got a bunch of tattoos on my laptop. I ordered a case for it so I could keep my stickers and make it easier to cleanup the laptop when I have to turn it in. 😃
