HuwFulcher

E-ink is a real missed opportunity for smart homes. This is just a hunch but I suspect there is a niche in the smart home market for people that want their homes to be "informative" but not "smart".

An example:

A voice-enabled tablet (ala Echo Show) is intrusive and disrupts the aesthetics of the home. An e-ink display that has low/no interactivity but provides useful information blends into the home a lot better.

Unfortunately the smart-device market isn't interested and building your own seems to be difficult.

Does anybody know if there are useful libraries for displaying e-ink? It should be simple to use a low cost RPi board like a pico and connect it to an e-ink display fitted into a frame.

Yes, build time will still be an issue. Hopefully if you get to a point where you’re “happy” with the binary you can avoid build issues for a while

If you used Go (or something equivalent) couldn’t you bundle it into a binary and then it can be more portable?

This is a fascinating insight, thanks for sharing. How did you get your children to the point where they could do self directed study?

I think this hits the nail on the end.

No matter what way you cut it the will of the parent is subjected on the child. In my opinion that’s how it should be.

The decisive factor is what the focus of the parents will is. Is it personal glory? Is it trying to “make the world a better place”?. I would argue that choosing what is best for the child from the perspective of the parent is the best.

Giving them a robust worldview, a good set of morals and the capabilities to effect change when their older are the right way forward.

Our children are not missionaries that go into the world to make it a better place. Our children are to be nurtured so that when they grow up they can make a positive change in the world.

Answer this, how does sending your child to public school benefit others? It’s pretty clear schools do not work at scale. Focusing on small cooperatives where teachers, students and parents are valued is the way forward.

> Can't we be more efficient as a society?

Efficient in what way? Children in public schools are now doing worse than previous generations. Efficiency does not beget quality education.

> Not to mention the privilege that is draped over every detail of this setup.

If we, as a society values families more and enables single income households this wouldn’t be privilege, it could be the norm.

Can’t wait. My son is obsessed with all things space currently. This will be something we can both enjoy

> people will come because they like what you do, not because you do the things they like (sounds like the same thing, but it isn't)

This isn’t true for all channels. The current state of search requires you to adapt your content to what people are looking for. Social channels are as you’ve said.

It doesn’t matter how you want to slice it. Understanding how many people are coming to your website, from where and what they’re looking at is valuable.

I agree the “end metric” is whatever actually drives the revenue. But number of people coming to a website can help tune that.

How horrifying that someone who does writing potentially as their income would seek to protect that revenue stream.

Services like Plausible give you the bare minimum to understand what is viewed most. If you have a website that you want people to visit then it’s a pretty basic requirement that you’ll want to see what people are interested in.

When you start “personalising” the experience based on some tracking that’s when it becomes a problem.

Definitely agree that it’s a breath of fresh air to just write HTML and it look good.

For more complex projects it’s normally Tailwind

Interesting that you mention Pico. I really like it (my personal site uses it) but it doesn’t strike me as the go to choice for a web app?

I agree in principle but being a steward doesn't put food on the table

They don't lay it out clearly but it seems that they're aiming for a mobile device that allows you to dispatch tasks that are done in the cloud using natural language.[1]

I think this is exciting, it gives me vibes of LCARS and voice commands from Star Trek. Whether it turns into something more than hype we'll have to see.

[1] https://www.rabbit.tech/rabbit-os

I love this insight thanks for sharing. Have you looked at the PARA method? I'm undecided on it yet but I like the mantra that Second Brain emphasis of only capturing what you think you'll need.

This is something I want to explore in other things I write. Being able to transcribe is definitely a big hurdle at the moment.

I agree that static preservation on digital isn't guaranteed over the long term. There needs to be a conscious effort to ensure integrity. You make a good point about photos but was writing more about ideas and notes.

A definite challenge to preservation is navigating the balance between self maintained and trusting it to a company that will disappear one day.

I would still, argue that digital is the better medium for archival as it immediately makes it easier to share and discover.

I like org-mode but don't find it as good at cross platform as I'd like. I currently use Obsidian across devices which works well but you dont get the efficiency of org. I've tried Zettelkasten a few times and need to get my day more organised to have time and categorise. For now PARA suits my needs.

> you'd think anyone who believed in the bible would follow outright restrictions like that.

I wish people would not make blanket assumptions. A portion of the New Testament is committed to explaining that certain parts of the Old Testament laws were for the Israelites only.

I don't use React or do much front-end work so I might be missing something here but what's the problem? Tailwind is a utility-first framework. If you're having to add so many classes inline that it makes things more difficult you can surely abstract it away within CSS files?

I thought the main thrust of Tailwind is that you get a sensible set of utility classes so you can mix and match them how you need? For more complicated design systems can't you combine these utility classes into your own classes in a CSS file? You still retain the advantage of easier to read CSS and easier to read JSX.

Where are you planning to move it to?

Here’s me! https://huwfulcher.com, it changes look whenever I get theme envy from someone else

Yes, I resonate with this a lot. It’s one thing to have time to capture information but a whole other thing to have the time to extract the essence out of it. I still haven’t figured out an answer yet though.

Love GOV.UK design guidelines. Working for a government department at the moment as a contractor building some internal frontends and the design system is used internally as well. Really helps keep things consistent across all areas of government.

WARNING: Stream of consciousness ahead

As someone who has just moved from Data Science to Software Engineering I feel very much the same way, liberated.

I worked in DS for 5 years and had varying degrees of success in working at companies that understood the proper use and application of Data Science. What killed my passion for it was a few things:

1. Data Science is a dubious field - Data Science can certainly be applied correctly but I and others have used the underlying statistical methods gung-ho at times. Part of this comes down to something that W.D said. That Data Scientists are generally early on in their career. We have been captivated by the shiny new field and want to use it as quickly as possible without fully understanding it. Throughout my career I've been met with varying degrees of scepticism about my profession by people because Data Science offers more than it can give.

2. Data Science professional development is poorly understood/completely neglected - If you look for resources to grow in your Data Science skills online you are invariably drowned out by the sheer volume of crappy "Intro to Data Science" courses online. As far as I can find there is very little advanced Data Science professional development resources out there. Compounding the problem is that Data Science teams are invariably managed by people who aren't native to the field. This has the effect of the manager letting Data Scientists self direct their learning which will hit the problem mentioned previously.

3. Support for MLOps is non-existent - I think this problem will change over the next couple of years but Data Science has had to go through cycles of being integrated into a business. The first "wave" of Data Science was met with the realisation by companies that they couldn't get Data Scientists to magic money out of the poorly maintained data they kept. This has caused a huge increase in Data Engineers (not just Data Science has spawned this), now we have Data Scientists who have access to nice data (thanks Data Engineers!), they can build some interesting models but how do they get it deployed? This second "wave" is seeing the rise of MLOps tools, engineers, etc but Data Scientists currently don't have the know-how to get their own models in to production. This inability is incredibly demoralizing from my experience.

4. Educating fellow Data Scientists is too difficult - Unfortunately the perception that is given to people coming in to Data Science is that you can just do model engineering and call it a day. Bootcamps, courses, tutorials are all geared towards getting people good at building models, not about considering how those models fit into the bigger picture. There is little to no knowledge about good programming practices, source control (a lot of Data Scientists I worked with only knew git as a swear word) or deployment strategies. You could argue that a Data Scientist's should only be concerned with building models, I would agree but the reality is that companies will hire a team of Data Scientists but will likely not provide complementing teams to get models in to production. When trying to upskill others on my team it's been an uphill battle. Either people don't care as they just want to build models or they have come from an adjacent field with no software engineering experience.

Apologies for the stream of consciousness but it feels good to get it off my chest. My move to Software Engineering started in my last role where I was a Lead for a Data Science team. Thankfully my boss (head of Data) understood the need for developing a whole data system from good Data Engineering all the way through to MLOps for deployments. I was very fortunate to be able to move to being the Lead MLOps Engineer and develop our capability to deploy models with CI/CD mechanisms using AWS. That really gave me the taste for building systems rather than models. I really do think Data Science has a place and can provide great value but it's still a long way off. If we can make it so that Data Science teams can deploy to production quickly and safely we can really start to reap the rewards.

For Software Engineers looking at getting in to Data Science I would suggest looking at MLOps first. You get to combine existing experience with tackling new problems (how do we keep models live and continuously learning? how do we ensure the tracking of experiments?) and will have a tremendous impact.

I may be wrong on the features on Bear 2.0 but it doesn’t seem like a lot new features. A full rewrite in C++ may be why it’s taking so long but it definitely feels like they’ve quietly dropped the web version.

It’s fair enough if they want to focus on the Apple ecosystem but they let people think they were developing the web version for a while.

Yeah I think they started with good intentions and hit some kind of blocker

I love Bear but it's been a big disappointment in how quickly it ships features. They've been working on the web version for what seems like a few years now. If you're 100% in the Apple ecosystem it's great. I have an iPhone and M1 Air for personal use but my last 3 jobs have used Windows, being able to transfer knowledge across devices is a massive pain. I ended up switching to Obsidian due to that.

There must be a good reason for why its taken so long, they've created a solid app so it doesn't make sense that they dropped the ball on the web version.

I've tried Pomodoro in the past but always felt like I was watching the clock too much. By the time I got into the zone on a task I would have anywhere between 15-17 minutes left and would prefer to keep going. Has anyone else encountered similar and found ways to adapt it?

You can use something like dynamic dns updaters[0]. They run on the box and when they detect that your ISP has changed your IP will update the DNS records accordingly.

[0] https://github.com/timothymiller/cloudflare-ddns