Stuff Jesse Likes

Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, is one of those books that seems kind of obvious in retrospect, but I think is a real challenge to Democrat politics.

The core thesis is that Democrats are comfortable re-allocating money (health care subsidies, welfare, rent stabilization) but are really bad at building real things in the real world (housing, renewable energy), and the latter is what people need to see to believe democrats are capable of governance.

"Big government is inefficient and bad at doing things" is such a conservative coded critique that a lot of people instinctively feel the need to reject it, but the book addresses it as a very real problem.

LOW←TECH MAGAZINE was part of my inspiration for making a simple static site again.

They have a lot of cool content on sustainable and renewable energy, but the most delightful bit is that their website is hosted on a single home server running on a solar panel and a battery, and if the weather is cloudy for a few days in a row the site can just go down.

They serve small, dithered grayscale images to save on the most expensive part of data transfers.

They also implement a comments section by having people just email in comments and manually adding them to the pages.

I find the idea really refreshing - I was excited to build a hyper optimized personal site using Rust, but turns out it's even more optimized to just serve static html pages, which is what this "Stuff Jesse Likes" blog is. It's a part of a larger critique of modern software, Wirth's Law, that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster, or "what Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away."

I do waffle on the usefulness of some of their specific sustainable energy suggestions - I think the perspective is really valuable, but still hope we could reach a place where renewable energy and battery storage is so abundant we don't need to worry about things like air conditioning and heating.

A few interesting examples:

Bedazzled by Energy Efficiency: To focus on energy efficiency is to make present ways of life non-negotiable.

How to Build an Electrically Heated Table

https://www.octopuspie.com

This might be my favorite comic series ever? It's funny and thoughtful and deeply human.

It originally ran from 2007 to 2017, I think I picked it up in college or soon after, so I've always been following the ages and experiences of the characters a few years behind them.

The author, Meredith Gran, has since made two adventure games about growing up on fire island and then going to college in NYC. I haven't played the second one yet but it's getting really great reviews.

If you're looking to cut Spotify out of your life for being evil and increasingly shitty, so far Tidal has been a great less evil and less shitty alternative.

https://enclose.horse/

A delightful little daily puzzle about placing a limited number of walls to enclose your horse with as large a pasture as possible. Over time they've added fruit (extra points), bees (negative points) and portals. They show a daily leaderboard and let you see what the optimal solution is.

The outro is pretty jarring and I wish they'd release a version without it.

Stick around for the killer ending 4 minutes in!

Nicky Case has a great "explorable" explanation of the science of spaced repition, called how to remember anything forever-ish.

The general idea is that you want to study flash cards as little as possible, both to not take up all your time, and based on the science of encoding things to long term memory. With spaced repitition, every time you review a flash card and get it right, the app schedules it for review again further and further out.

Anki is a desktop and mobile app that's one of the most popular formats for it. I've been told that a lot of med school students use it extensively.

Essential Craftsman's Spec House Full Build Series

This is a great, super detailed, step by step walkthrough of building a home by a career carpenter. I really liked that it went in depth on some of the mundane/tedious details that other carpentry channels skip, like permitting and inspections, and really touches every step from start to finish.

It's long!