Articles Matt Levine’s explanation ot the significance of the west’s exclusion of Russia from the international financial system is really good. This is a major precedent in using the international financial system as a weapon of war and the implications are potentially quite expansive. Here’s one excerpt (which he laudably precedes with caveats arount the rule of law and the neutrality of money): But what I want to suggest is that this weekend’s actions are evidence that the basic structure is good....

Podcasts This Conversations with Tyler episode with Chuck Klosterman was great. There are a lot of really interesting sections! At the end, Tyler breaks his Very Serious Interviewer mode and they just chat for a while. It’s still super interesting and fun to hear something a bit more conversational than ususal. I still love his standard no-nonsense approach though and wouldn’t want him to change as there is much less of that out there than there is just people chatting about stuff....

Twitter Tweets on underrated ideas by Ethan Mollick and Derek Thompson. Makes me want to think about the ideas that have had the biggest influence on my recent thinking/doing. The first ones that comes to mind are: Small, consistent effort is much more impactful than major, intermittent effort in the long run. Sunk cost fallacy. I’m not a huge fan of the simplistic version of this (never make decisions based on past investments), but find that it can be quite useful to deemphasize the past when making decisions about the future....

Happy V-day, lovers. Podcasts Season Two, Episode Two of What had happened was has a gem of a section that could easily be turned into a 5,000 word think piece on art, ephemerality and the responsibility we have (or don’t) when it comes to preserving art that may just fade into nonexistence under current legal and economic conditions. It’s this section where I realized that El-P is seeing the whole chessboard....

Podcasts Open Mike Eagle’s What had happened was is a gift to humanity. It’s the history of weirdo, independent hip hop from the horse’s mouth. Season One with Prince Paul (producer for De la Soul, Stetsasonic, MF Doom, Paul Barman, etc. etc.) was easily one of my favorite podcasts of 2020. I’m late to the Season 2 party with El-P (Company Flow, Run the Jewels, etc.), but it’s sounding good so far....

Basic syntax awk [ options ] script filename Where script is either a single awk command or file of awk commands. Awk commands look like this: TODO and filename can be omitted if you’re piping in standard input. Commands Options Examples Length of the longest line in a file awk '{ if (length($0) > max) max = length($0) }; END { print max }' file Selecting, filtering, and basic arithmetic Sum a field, specify delimiter awk -F '\t' '{print sum+=$1;} END {print sum}' file....

Articles A complaint about Google ditching Pixel 3 support. I have a Pixel 3 and sympathize. Google? More like Boo-gle. 👎 As the author says: here I am, with another piece of premature junk, made by the company that pledges to “maximize the reuse of finite resources” and “enable others to do the same". Books I’ve been listening to Ted Chiang’s collection of short stories, Story of Your Life and Others, on Audible....

This is an ongoing work in progress, please let me know if you have any suggestions/feedback. Basic syntax sed [ options ] script filename Where script is either a single sed command or file of sed commands (must use with -f option). Sed commands look like this: action/pattern/replacement/flag Filename can be omitted if you’re piping in standard input. Actions p: print s: substitute s accepts the following flags which are appended to the end of the command (e....

Contains spoilers This was a great novella. A slow burner, it drops its core themes quickly and densely about three quarters of the way through. Language, time, free-will, purpose, parenting are all front and center in this very human human-alien encounter. I love stories that focus on that slippery line between what we have the ability to change and what we don’t and how we make sense of this partial self-determination....

I stopped updating this when I started a new job in October. I think I’m settling in a bit and hope to get back to providing weekly or near weekly updates to what I’m consuming. I also want to do some best of lists - books, albums, etc. Stay posted. 2022-01-03 Music Bunny is a Rider by Caroline Polachek. Try not to groove. Acclaimed Music’s 10,000 best songs of all-time Spotify playlist....