Dispatch #15 (May 2024)

By David Eisinger · View original post

Big news, friends: we’re expecting a second kid in June. To celebrate, Claire and I headed to Lisbon for a long weekend. Highlights included the castles in Sintra (especially Quinta da Regaliera), biking in Cascais, and attending a Benfica match. We missed our Nevie, but she had a great time with Grandma and Grandpa, and it was nice to be able to stay out past 7pm.

While we were over there, I was pretty diligent about using Shazam whenever a song caught my ear and saving everything into Apple Notes. When I got back, I compiled all the tracks into a playlist¹ that’s been on repeat ever since. It’s a pretty neat way to create a memento that’s unique to me and that doesn’t cost anything or take up any space, and is something I’ll plan to repeat on future trips.

I took part in Viget’s annual Pointless Week hackathon, building a tool to surface book recommendations based on messages in our #books Slack channel. We used Laravel to build the backend, something I’d heard good things about but have never used – it was easy to pick up and fun to work with. We also used an LLM to analyze the messages and pull title / author / sentiment. Some of the results were very impressive, some were hot nonsense (it frequently matched generic messages to The Great Gatsby or Gone with the Wind).

For our quarterly company event, I made this track with a bunch of samples I pulled from our Google Meet archive:

The Simple Secret Formula.mp3

Probably funnier if you’ve ever attended one of these events, but I think it holds up pretty well musically. Credit where it’s due, I pulled that Fm11/Ebmaj9 chord progression straight from this Lofi Chord Progressions article (the shaker’s all me though).

A comment on Reddit sent me down a little bit of an iPad music rabbit hole, and now I’ve got my Circuit Tracks driving two software synths on the iPad (digging Neo-Soul Keys and Minimoog Model D) in addition to the two built-in ones. It’s a tight little setup for travel, and I can even run a MIDI controller into it for more direct control of the synths.

Claire and I are both big fans of Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service. They’re on a tour for the 20th anniversaries of Transatlaticism and Give Up (man what a year 2003 must have been for Ben Gibbard) and we got tickets for the Raleigh show. They played both albums straight through. It was awesome, though when they finished Give Up and we were waiting for the encore, it sure made me wish Postal Service had ever made another record – we just heard their entire catalogue.

This month:

• Adventure: lake for Memorial Day; enjoy these last few weeks of only-child Nev
• Project: make a song with my iPad, maybe in a novel location; get the house ready for this BABY
• Skill: get back into running (fell off in April)

Reading:

• Fiction: Magician’s Gambit, David Eddings (enjoying this series)
• Non-fiction: The Creative Act, Rick Rubin

Links:

• The One Big Thing You Can Do for Your Kids

  When one of my now-adult kids was in middle school, I had a small epiphany about parenting. I had been haranguing him constantly about his homework and grades, which were indeed a problem. One night, after an especially bad day, I was taking stock of the situation, and came to a realization: I didn’t actually care very much about his grades.

• Parents Can Counter the World’s Cruelty With Joy

  Parenting is always an exercise in hope, a gift given to a future we cannot see to the end. At some point, if God is merciful, our children will continue forward without us, left with the memory of love shared and received.

• The Boox Palma is the best purchase I’ve made in a long time

  When I first saw this device from Craig Mod, I didn’t think I’d end up loving it so much. It is, after all, just a phone-sized Kindle with access to an Android store that costs $299. What I didn’t expect is that this is precisely what makes it such a fantastic device. A few weeks in, it has become the device I use the most day by day—yes, even more than my phone.

• AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?

  But I find one common thread among the things AI tools are particularly suited to doing: do we even want to be doing these things? If all you want out of a meeting is the AI-generated summary, maybe that meeting could’ve been an email. If you’re using AI to write your emails, and your recipient is using AI to read them, could you maybe cut out the whole thing entirely? If mediocre, auto-generated reports are passing muster, is anyone actually reading them? Or is it just middle-management busywork?

• The Judgement of Magneto

  A fault-line yawned open within the global Jewish community, exposing the divide between those who had understood “Never Again” to be a humanistic warning, and those who saw it as permission in advance for whatever they deemed necessary to ensure it.

• On giant piles of cash, and their origins

  The previous generation of venture capitalists were, for the most part, actual engineers and scientists. They had spent time in the lab. They had experience being “close to the metal.” They made some real money early, then started to point that money in the direction of funding audacious high-risk/high-reward projects that didn’t fit anywhere else. The sector was small, compared to government money and corporate R&D money.

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