2021-08-09

Notes for the week of 2021-08-09

How we fix the climate

This past week, the latest IPCC report on Climate Change came out and the news was bad in terms of projections, but there are still many things we can do. Hank Green laid out what we can do. In his video, he starts with carbon pricing, and then gets into the wide array of items that are currently being worked on in the US Congress infrastructure bills. We should do them all!

SQL in the browser

This week, James Long wrote about and released absurd-sql, an implementation of SQLite based on SQL.js (actual sqlite compiled to WASM) and a backend that works on IndexedDB and is faster than IndexedDB.

Also cool along these lines is AlaSQL.js which is a JavaScript database for the browser and Node with lots of flexibility in how it works with data.

Free AI art generator

Hilel Wayne has put up a Collab notebook that’s free and makes it easy to use AI to generate art.

GitHub moves to online dev environments

GitHub uses CodeSpaces for their own engineering, and they’ve made it so that an engineer can get set up with a dev environment in 10 seconds. Nifty and impressive work.

Life improvements since the 1990s

Gwern wrote an article about improvements to ordinary life since the 1990s, and it is an interesting and striking look. Having been alive and grown in the ’90s, I saw many of the changes firsthand, and 100% agree that there is much to be thankful for today.

The Cognitive Bias Codex

Wikipedia has a long list of cognitive biases. Additionally, they have a nifty visualization of them.

Keyboard shortcut shortcuts

My coworker Jeff Yates has a collection of keyboard shortcuts to display keyboard shortcuts on a variety of sites.

Obsidian web clipper

The Obsidian web clipper is a bookmarklet that lets you clip a page from the web to Obsidian.

Andy Slavitt on the coronavirus end game

Andy Slavitt provided guidance based on his discussions with experts on likely futures for COVID-19.

SARS-CoV-2 will be contagious enough that everyone will get the virus. The aim is simply that more people get it be vaccinated when they do so fewer get COVID.

Cory Doctorow on copyright protecting creativity

In Provocateur copyrights a Magic: The Gathering Deck, Cory Doctorow goes through a bunch of case law and resources that dig into the weird edges of copyright law.

Glass: paid social network for photography

I hope ideas like this gain traction: Glass is a social network for photography that you pay to join. It provides a reverse-chronological feed and doesn’t include the various negative aspects of social media in which they try to game your attention.