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I’ve been hearing whispers in the parents-of-young-children circles about Chattanooga since we moved back to the Atlanta area 3 years ago.

New around here If you want to get my posts via email, now you can: jdilla.xyz/subscribe.

An incredibly ambitious book by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Some shameless self promotion Apollo by James Edward Dillard.

Worth your time Do not end the week with nothing by Patrick McKenzie The Internet of Beefs by Venkatesh Rao How to run major projects by Ben Kuhn, via Mark Larson The Decline of Industrial American Science was an interesting read.

Loving this deep dive on Hyman Rickover by ChinaTalkand Charles Yang.

Set in a noir version of post Spanish Civil War Barcelona where somehow everyone is one degree removed from a brilliant yet fantastically unsuccessful author.

Worth your time The making of Richard Scarry.

Some changes around here Individual posts now have related posts at the bottom of them, leveraging the infrastructure I built for Search.

Things I learned D.A.R.E. anti-drug interventions in schools may have increased drug use among suburban students.

Some changes around here: I’ve made some changes to the blog: I’ve added search.

Last week I quoted Greg LeMond on cycling.

Worth your time Matt Holden on Fuzzy computing.

Worth your time A deep dive on how a clothing brand prices their clothes.

My bias is to think that the most useful AI is the one that has your personal context — your documents, your emails, and all that stuff.

I think GLP-1 drugs might be the most underrated technological change currently underway.

Worth your time Rohit on AGI.

I tried using Operator on a couple of tasks.

Things I learned “In 2022, adults spent an additional 99 minutes at home on any given day compared with 2003.“ Increasingly, we are living an isolated and remote existence.

Worth your time Uri Bram on Noble Lies Zheng Dong Wang on productivity.

A message from my sponsor: OceanMade has announced pre sales of its Kelp Pots.

The proper response to losing, I learned as a child, was to hate it.

Second Act is a book about late bloomers.

Worth your time Boris planning Many wonderful public servants made valiant efforts and scored some great wins, but Democratic leadership did not make it a top priority to clear out the underbrush that jams the gears of government.

Things I learned Already my first correction of my 2024 list: it appears that 75% of the world's saffron probably does not end up in Fernet.

My coding stack as of December 2024 looks like this: I keep a running Google doc that functions roughly like a PRD: What’s the product — what’s the vision, where does it stand today, what am I building towards What’s the current project — e.g., set up a s…

Learning How To Learn, suggested to me my Melanie.

Worth your time Literally worth your time: Telling the time by sundial and history not only was custom, but also was understood as following God’s time.

Pisgah National Forrest, North Carolina, USA.

I adapted this from a recipe my mother gave me.

If you're in tech and not in the Bay Area, you lack either judgment or ambition. — Flo Crivello (@Altimor) November 15, 2024 Flo’s tweet is my favorite scissor statement of 2024.

Things I learned Smiling was once considered a sign of drunkeness.

A message from my sponsor Macro Oceans received a grant to use kelp for sustainable aviation fuel.

At this time in 2022, I was pro-online sports gambling.

I’ve spent most of this fall with the Swiss reformers John Calvin and Huldrych Zwingli.

Public Service Annoucement Macro Oceans joins forces with Everything Seaweed . 🌊 Let’s make waves together 🏄.

Things I learned There are more deaths from alcohol each year in the US than all illicit drugs combined — Charles Fain Lehman via the Ezra Klein Show Worth your time How Density Zones can solve America’s housing Crisis — Agglomerations A Character.ai char…

Things I learned The last person to be guillotined in France was put to death in 1977.

One of the things that I’ve noticed about AI tools is that they’ve changed the way that I think about the role of intelligence in success.

Things I learned: “the Milky Way builds between two and six sun-size stars a year.”

How to make millions as a professional whistleblower.

Relative to trend US obesity is down about 7 percentage points (~20%) among graduates (the group most likely to be using GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic).

How the psychiatric narrative hinders those who hear voices | Aeon Essays - an exploration of the “Targeted Individual” community, people who hear voices in their heads.

I’m really coming to appreciate the value of scaffolding in product development.

One of the grand challenges of artificial general intelligence is developing agents capable of conducting scientific research and discovering new knowledge.

Link to the book is here.

A fantastic piece by Paul Kedrosky on how California's Atmospheric River is changing and the implications of these changes.

and want to know the insane fact about this stat?

Lattice made a splash this weekwith a pretty crazy announcement about adding AI workers to their platform.

When I was growing up, I never used first names with adults.