Week 3 / 14 Jan 2025
This year, instead of having multiple posts for weeknotes, I have decided to make one megapost that I update periodically. The point is to have a record of roughly what I was thinking about in each week / links I liked. Also, one md file is really easy to process if I ever want to do any kind of NLP or glorified regex mumbojumbo on my own writing (e.g. ripping every link I mentioned in 2025 and categorizing it). Also, reading this requires periodically coming back to check on this post like a Tamagotchi, which will hopefully decrease the (already tiny) potential readership of this post, and hence encourage me to censor myself less.
Links
Nice explainer from Evan from SF Compute about creating markets for GPU compute
Anker introduces a solar beach umbrella that uses perovskite cells - thank u Dominika for introducing me to this :D
Solar panels that layer a perovskite film on top of a silicon base can absorb even more light — perovskite cells can be optimized at the blue end of the light spectrum while silicon cells harvest energy on the red end — to reach solar conversion efficiencies of up to 43 percent. s
User Robert Evans on bluesky:
after days of grifters and con men at CES we stumbled upon the booth for VLC. they were all dressed as wizards and told us, “we have nothing to sell, we just decided to show up”. i told them I’d been using their software to pirate media for 15 years and they said “keep doing that”
Music
Caroline Polachek covers Radiohead’s True Love Waits
Magdalena Bay - That’s My Floor
Text
Flabbergasted and deeply upset to learn that trying and facing rejection is actually a skill that needs practice. I tried a whole bunch of new things in 2024, but they didn’t involve the potential of rejection or shame. It made it easy to roll up to things like silversmithing workshops or start growing mushrooms out of nowhere, but I hadn’t tried much in terms of risking the chance of rejection.
This kind of avoidance is probably why I find the job hunt so difficult, and it’s made even harder by the fact that I would like to find a startup to join. This involves having a degree of agency and Teflon-like resistance to rejection that I don’t recall having besides that one time in 2018 where I was fuelled by a great deal of delusion. Right now, I spend ages trying to solve data structure and algo problems marked “Easy”.
When I feel silly, I think back to 2018-19 and how brave / borderline delusional I was. Tapping into a sense of unbridled agency, if you will. In that era, I got to work a shift at Native. I mostly remember faithfully cutting lotus leaves into circles - the bar has a sustainable / regional produce sort of slant, and they were using lotus leaves as coasters as they’re hydrophobic. I got to try this out because I randomly sent them an email that basically said “I’m probably kind of useless but am looking for work and used to work as a waitress at Ce La Vi. Can I come and try it out?”. I ended up being bad at it as they didn’t call me back for another shift. Looking back, I was probably way too anxious and nervous about work, which probably prompted the bartender who was stuck with managing me to say:
Look, you’re scared about only being here for a few hours but it doesn’t matter. By the time they step in, the customer’s only been here for 30 seconds. You will always be more experienced than they are. You need to chill out.
(or something along those lines.)
I think about this encounter whenever I have to do something where I feel too new and unqualified (e.g. teaching for Code in Place).
Another time where I felt like I really tried was when I walked in to the law library to ask if they wanted to hire people to shelve books. I had heard through the grapevine that they were paying students $12 an hour to do this, which sounded quite lucrative. She said no – they had enough help already – but I could leave my number and she’d text me if anything came up.
Whenever people make offers like this, I usually think they’re half-joking and won’t ever actually contact me. But she did, twice – once for a summer job at the campus Central Library (which I ended up not doing as I was interning), and another time she didn’t even text. She just called me on Whatsapp, then sent me the email of a professor from the public policy faculty. She said he was looking for a Research Assistant (What does he do? I don’t know, you have to ask him). I don’t know how effective this is as a lead generation tactic, from the professor’s point of view. I eventually got the job. To this day I strongly suspect that I was the only person who was aware of it.
I try my best to lean back and lean into that version of me. Something prospecting, curious, unfazed.