Stuff Jesse Likes

Mechanical clocks are wildly fascinating, and a tourbillon is one of the coolest additions: a rotating cage containing the escapement and balance wheel to average out any directional errors from the effects of gravity over time. (It is apparently debated how useful this actually is.)

If you need convincing that this is fascinating, you can skip to the gorgeous completed product at the end (or just watch that).

He goes on to make a stunning triple-axis tourbillon as well.

I love this guy who re-appears on youtube about once a year to update us about trying to mass produce and sell forks made out of solid blocks of salt.

Tom 7 (the 7th of his name) makes consistently amazing, very high effort, funny, math and computer science videos. Often for "SIGBOVIK", a yearly conference and journal by the "Association for Computational Heresy."

Some of his videos that I think will be interesting to you even if you're not into programming:

How I ran the length of every street in Pittsburgh: PAC TOM

Over the course of 16 years, he runs along every single street in Pittsburgh, starting or ending each run at his home, requiring increasingly long runs to collect them all, and using GPS and google maps to track and confirm every segment of every street has been covered.

I figured I'd combine a bunch of links I'd recommended to friends on discord in the past:

3d printing a film camera The results are pretty stunning and he's a great video editor. Lot of cool details about how film cameras work.

4 axis 3d printer with non planar slicer It turns out a big part of 3d printing arbitrary shapes without lots of supports that need removing afterwards is the algorithm for converting the shape into individual flat "slices" that 1. won't collapse and 2. are physically reachable by the printer nozzle.

Lego Island: Great documentary with real interviews from many of the devs, with a lot of info about the very early days of 3d games on pc.

The sounds of the ice shelves breaking are amazing.

When is easter? I like when things turn out to have very complicated histories. This dives into the calculation on how the date for Easter is determined each year.

Backyard Ultramarathons Keep running 4.167 miles every hour until, everybody else gives up (potentially for 24+ hours). (wikipedia)

The Crafsman makes hundreds of plastic figures Guy with a soothing folksy voice uses injection molding to mass produce a little figurine. The paired video of another youtuber CNC'ing the mold is also fascinating.

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.