Weekly Updates - Apr 13 • #100DaysToOffload

Unwinding in the Seattle spring

A relaxing week filled with swimming, strolling and enjoying the sprouting spring in Seattle. Today's Mega Heracross raid was a huge success for O and H. I tried some Ricoh recipes for XPRO from Ritchie's Ricoh Recipes and it certainly helps get some beautiful shots straight from the camera. It made me want to go shooting again. Of course, the lure was already placed by the recent video from The Verge:

I still own the Ricoh GR II and I have no intention spending more money on cameras. However, this video was just the right push to get me start shooting again. Phone cameras are great but they've made me lazy when it comes to making pictures.

Here are some samples from the walk today:

The XPro is a great setting to capture the cloudy, yet warm feel of a sultry Seattle spring.

📖 / ▶️Slow Horses

I'm done re-reading Mick Herron's Slow Horses book. The book certainly leans into how the system has beaten down the agents in Slough House and it also highlights how there's a hero complex despite being mostly sub-par agents. I remember the show being a bit more heroic and highlighting the naive but earnest nature of the agents. So, I plan to rewatch the show.

Other articles I read

The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con: Balder Bjarnson's posit highlights an area of the LLM debate that interests me - what's intelligence? What might explain the zealotry (besides talking the book) that might be going on here? I really liked how HC phrased his summary: the burden of proof is on the side claiming intelligence. There is a line of thinking around - but we don't need to understand how this all works and/or if there is an actual intelligence here to make this all useful for a new set of enterprises. I've always been that guy who likes to understand things deeply. It's been a blessing and a curse since college. So, I found this article delightful.

No more boring apps: Andy posits that we must all make a promise to ourselves not to make boring apps anymore. This is especially true of enterprise apps. The counterargument here will be that it's just a means to an end. However, I've never wanted to create just another app. I've strived to at least bring new thought into creation whenever I've taken the reign of any app I've worked on. At a certain point in time, I must spend some cycles narrating the whole thing down.

A note on smallness: Ever since I've heard about a lifestyle business (in business school), I've been a big fan of small enterprises that can continue to generate EV. This essay resonated with me because there's nothing that must make someone accept that "big" is the way to do everything and every business in life.

Marissa Meyer's Eternal Sunshine: Apart from the h/t to an epic movie, this article highlighted that successful products are not just about one person. Despite the consistent, evergreen narrative of the singular founder, product creator, business owner, the exponential success of something is always because of a significant combination of a crazy number of variables that all went right. I'm also very concerned for the corporation given the amount of dish and the surprisingly small (yet shockingly large) number of people required to make that app happen.