Recently I archived an old github repo log project. In the readme I referenced this great article on logging. In the article Dave Cheney makes a great case that log levels should be limited to just Debug and Info. Some of the log levels out there can get out of hand, so it’s nice to see an argument for a simplified approach. Since reading the article I have been zealous about removing Warning and Fatal logs from my code.

The Atlantic looks at the impact that non-enforcement of the Robinson Patman act has had on the ecosystem of grocery stores. The conclusion of the article is that it has created food deserts through decreased variety.

I recently wrote up my experience with DuckDB as a replacement for a web app datastore. Certainly not the best use case for duckDB, but it was a great way to dig into the technology and the larger world of serverless database technologies. Migrating a web application to DuckDB

I closed down a browser window today and found a bunch of great links that I’d been saving up.

Here are some looks at Token Verification, Energy, Tech Monopolies, and LLM’s.

It sounds like Twitter is suing people for not buying from them. From Wired: Elon Musk’s X Sues Advertisers Over Alleged Boycott .

Hopefully they don’t find out I’ve never paid a dime to twitter/x.

My brothers and sister’s in code: Software quality is hard to define. But I think we can all agree that the bash version of base64 encoding

echo "Encode this string" | base64

is cleaner, easier to read, and easier to remember than the Powershell base64 encoding

[System.Convert]::ToBase64String([System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes("Encode this string"))

Warp has a pretty nifty product : Warp : agent mode. What I found particularly fascinating was pulling up documentation based on a natural language query. In the demo video, they use the prompt “What’s the command in postgres for listing all the tables?”.

Recently Elon Musk diverted a $500M in Nvidia GPU’s from Tesla to X. CNBC: Musk has chips shipped to X At first glance I thought this was about Musk’s Tesla pay package and previous threats to shareholders. Give me 25% of Tesla or you don’t get AI and Robotics Which seems incredibly likely looking at the headlines. But how could such a thing be legal or good business? If you look at the ordeal from the perspective of a shareholder in one or the other company, it seems like malfeasance.

These are a few recent links about AI from around the web. One is about the massive human work force involved in labeling data for use in generating AI models. The second link looks at the products, potential products, and weighs that against the current costs of AI response generation.

I really enjoy listening to this speech by John F. Kennedy. While listening to the speech it seems that he is building the case that space exploration will drive US enterprise by convincing other nations to align with the US over the USSR. And that will make the US a destination for high tech equipment. Somehow that doesn’t come across as well while reading. The whole speech is a “masterclass in alignment and buy-in”.