Weekly Links

I spent some time over the past week tweaking and improving this site. Not all the changes are live yet, but every post now has an OpenGraph preview image to go along with it. I got a lot of guidance from Arne Bahlo’s post on how to generate SVGs in Astro and a lot of inspiration from Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s preview images.

I find frontend development to be a creative outlet where I can still write code without feeling like I’m doing something too similar to my day job. I’ve had fun thinking critically about my design inspirations and trying to build something that feels like an authentic expression of how I want to present myself on the Internet.

Without further ado, on to the links!

Happy February! I had a high school teacher of mine call month #2 the F-month: a month so terrible it wasn’t even worth naming. While February does tend to be the coldest month here in New York, there’s still plenty to take advantage of — It’s always easier to find tables at my favorite bars when the weather’s bad outside :)

I have Lobsters and Hacker News blocked on my devices because I’m way to prone to refreshing those constantly. I rely on my RSS feed that I’ve curated over the past few years which also includes some other curators like Simon Willison and John Gruber. I’m thinking about how I can still discover new authors without scrolling on autopilot, especially on Lobsters, where I find the submissions to be really high-quality.

Maybe these weekly links posts can be part of a prompt to an LLM that can trawl through all the submissions and help find a sample that I’ll be most interested in? Rather than filtering out any posts, it could just rank them from “most likely to be interesting” to least likely. I’m still trying to rely less on algorithms, but I’m curious how I could incorporate an algorithm that I control into my own curation.

Anyways, on to the links.

Happy Sunday! It was a short week this week, and I didn’t do as much reading as I would’ve liked. I did, however, finally start getting content I enjoy out of my YouTube recommendation algorithm: who could’ve known the Like button was useful for something?