Stuff Jesse Likes

I have a columnar programmable split keyboard with thumb clusters and swappable mechanical keyswitches and keycaps that I love:

Split is great:

• Placing them shoulder width apart is much more ergonomic for your shoulders, letting you sit up straight with your shoulders back.
• Angling them separately allows a natural straight wrist position, especially for people with big hands like me.
• Tenting them (angling them up towards the center) allows your wristbones to rotate less.
• You can put a coffee mug or a mouse in between them.

Columnar is great:

• Instead of staggering the keys (a relic of typewriters, which needed room for the levers beneath the keys), placing them in columns allows your fingers to travel straight up and down between rows.
• You can also lower or raise each column based on the length of the fingers (mostly lowering the pinky key, mine could go even further).

Programmable is great:

• You can add layers (basically like extra shift keys that change what each key does) to place keys closer to the home row, avoiding finger travel and contorting your hands as much.
• If you want to, you can swap out QWERTY for a more efficient layout, or create custom layers and macros for your programs (think shortcuts in editing software).
• You can also have combinations of keys trigger custom behavior, though I mostly avoid this.

Thumb clusters are great:

• Your thumbs are some of your best fingers, why should they take turns only pressing a giant space bar?

Swappable keyswitches and keycaps are great:

• Mechanical keyswitches just feel really satisfying and provide physical feedback so you know when the switch activated.
• You can choose from quiet smoother ones to tactile clicky ones to loud thocky ones.
  • I started with Cherry MX silent red keyswitches and switched to tactile blues. Semira was very understanding with the noise.
• I started with flat keycaps that came with my keyboard, which allow moving them all around arbitrarily, but switched to sculpted keycaps that lovingly cradle my fingertips.
  • Since each row in sculpted keycaps have a different angle, they only work if you keep each letter in the default row supported by the seller, or by buying blank keycaps or adding stickers.

I've been using YNAB, "You Need a Budget", since 2014. It's a digital implementation of the "envelope" budgeting method. Originally, you would cash out your paycheck, and then divide it up into envelopes labeled "rent", "groceries", etc. That way you knew you had money set aside for rent, and if you want to go out to eat but don't have money in the "eating out" envelope, you have to make an explicit decision to take money from a different envelope.

You're expected to change plans and adjust your envelopes, it just forces you to be mindful about where you want your money going. This works super well compared to traditional budgets, where you set goals and then later chastise yourself for not sticking to them.

But cash is fiddly and not compatible with our modern era, so YNAB provides digital buckets or categories to replicate this idea. It can sync with most banks and credits cards to import your transactions, just requiring you to confirm or adjust which category each transaction is spending from, but I don't really trust giving software access to my bank accounts (more banks should support read-only api tokens) and just manually type in my transactions three or four times a month.

It started as a one time purchase and transitioned to a subscription model a long while ago. I still think using it will absolutely save you far more than the 9 bucks a month (paid yearly), but you could probably replicate it in google sheets if you're handy with spreadsheets. I'm pretty bought in and like having 12 years of data in my charts and tables, all in one place.

I got a ton of value out of it when I started really focusing on saving a decade ago, but still find it helpful to keep an eye on how often I eat out or buy snacks, and make sure I'm not spending too much on electric scooters, squat racks or steamdecks (recommendation posts pending).

Ezra Klein had a great section in a recent interview on writing about how reading actually works:

I wrote a piece about this a couple years back. It was called "Against the Matrix Theory of the Mind."

I think I used to conceptualize knowledge the way you see it in "The Matrix" where it's like I wanted the port in the back of my mind that the little needle would go into and then I had read John Rawls' Political Liberalism.

I thought that what you were doing [reading] was like downloading information into your brain. And now I think that what you're doing is spending time grappling with the text, making connections. It will only happen through that process of grappling.

And so the idea that you could speedrun that, the idea that it could just be summarized for you, part of what is happening when you spend seven hours reading a book is you spend seven hours with your mind on this topic. The idea that O3 can summarize it for you, in addition there's all this stuff you just will not have read, is that you didn't have the engagement. It doesn't impress itself upon you. It doesn't change you.

What knowledge is supposed to do is change you.

I first heard Ezra Klein discuss this framing on one of his own podcast episodes a while ago, and it crystalized the issue for me about some concerns about how I spend my time, and how I approach optimizing learning.

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell has been on my list for a long while, as somebody who wants to do more nothing and wants to do less compulsive scrolling of reddit and youtube.

I spend a lot of time on my computer, and a lot of time thinking about how to be a person that doesn't just want to spend all my time on my computer. I've read "Digital Minimalism" and other books by Cal Newport and liked them, about managing our relationships with technology and the adversarial relationships with tech companies that constantly want more of our time and attention.

How To Do Nothing is a very different kind of book, and not what I expected. It isn't a list of tips and strategies for managing your attention, or a deep dive on the incentives and structures of the modern tech company attention economy.

I think her thesis is that the type of attention we pay to twitter and the type of attention we pay to the real world are very different, and we need to develop rich and disciplined attention to the people around us, the physical world we live in, especially the natural world, the species and ecosystems there, the physical and cultural history of it. By doing that we'll naturally resist and reject the fleeting anxious attention to social media and apps. We don't need to set time limits or uninstall apps, once you're fully engaged to the real world you'll be able to engage with facebook or youtube in healthier, non compulsive ways.

I like her "ooooOOOOoooo"s.

What genre is this? What genre is Caroline Polachek? (Many, it feels like.)

Somebody in the youtube comments said this gives them nostalgia for 2000s Turkish and Greek pop and now I need to look into that.

Do you remember when you were a kid and you'd look out the window of the car as you were driving, and it would look like the moon was following you?

That was just cause of parallax, that wasn't me buddy, don't worry about it.

Youtube recommends this to me again about once a year and I'm always happy to see it.

And then years later watching a technical art talk on motion tracking in Blender I learned that it was the same guy.

Alpha Phoenix is a consistently great science communicator on youtube, he builds really cool experiments. Two of my favorites are:

Measuring the speed of light in a super understandable way. There's something just really cool to me that it's even possible for somebody to do this, on earth, with reasonably accessible technology.

Super stunning timelapse videos of trying to grow perfectly aligned ice crystals. Normal ice has no consistent structure, but snow flakes have perfect hexagon based shapes - what happens if you grow ice from a single snow flake?

But his whole channel is great, definitely check his history of videos for anything that jumps out at you.

I've been really loving this game for the last three months. It's in the very niche category of "games about programming", inspired by Zachtronics, another favorite of mine. For each puzzle you're shown a 3d voxel shape and need to write a program that outputs that shape.

The program runs once per voxel (x,y,z coordinate) and returns a color or no color, like a 3d version of "shader" programs in videogames, and can be an animation with multiple frames.

(Photo credit: Semira Menghes)

La Capital Tacqueria

Birria is beef or lamb stewed in super flavorful rich broth (consomé) and usually served with the broth for dipping. I've mostly seen it in tacos with and without cheese and sometimes in tortas. They usually dip the tacos in the consomé and then fry them on the plancha so they're crispy and all the flavor is seared into the tortilla.

Jalisco is famous for it, and I'm learning now from wikipedia that it's a regional variant of barbacoa.

We spent a month in Puerto Vallarta (in Jalisco) and had a lot of birria tacos and consomé, and the best I've ever had is still La Capital in Troy NY.

We love to get two orders of the birria tacos and a burrito, and then pour the consomé into the burrito as we eat it.

Definitely eat it hot at the restaurant if you can, it's still good as takeaway but best hot. I think we liked all the burritos except for the al pastor one.

Credit for the original recommendation goes to Shivon. I then forgot that entirely and excitedly told her about it a year later.

I have an idea for a new holiday I'm trying to make happen: "Mug Renewal Day".

(I'm open to other names! Renewal day? Mug day?)

On the day, everybody picks their least favorite mug from the cubbard and dramatically smashes it on the ground, as a sacrifice representing the things they want to remove from their life, and leading us to think upon the better things we want to replace them with.

Pros:

• This makes room for the new, better mugs that come into our lives.
• Smashing things is fun and therapeutic.
• Gives you a social opportunity to think about renewal in your life, what you want less of and what you want more of.

Cons:

• More consumer waste. (I'm assuming you're inevitably getting more mugs every year anyways though.)
• Somebody might step on or drive over ceramic shards if you don't clean up well.

I guess you could use something representative of a mug, like a mug piñata, but I feel like the shatter is going to be way less visceral.