When we moved into our new flat last year, Maru made a great suggestion: ensure everything has a home.
When things don’t have a home, we are more likely to accept clutter and mess. However, when everything has a home, there’s no reason why something should be left out of place.
Overall this leads to the home feeling a lot more organised. And when there is a mess, it’s much more manageable.
I’ve been playing around with Replit agent recently. Replit is a web-based integrated programming environment, and its agent is an AI tool that creates apps for you based on natural language prompts.
I wanted to use Replit agent to experiment with building a simple app. I gave myself 30 minutes to see what it could do.
I decided to build an app that takes the 1,000 most common Spanish words and puts them into flashcard format to vocabulary revision. The flow is: when you see a Spanish word, you guess the English translation, click on the card to reveal the English word, and mark your answer as either correct or incorrect. There is progress bar on the right-hand side that measures your results throughout the session.
I was able to build a prototype within the 30 minutes. I used a simple table of the 1,000 most common Spanish words from this website as my source data. And I wrote a prompt asking Replit agent to create a database with the 1,000 words and a simple user interface to serve my flashcards and progress bar. After a series of back and forth prompts and debugging, I arrived at this prototype.
It cost me $3.5 USD to build the prototype. Wild.
There’s an amazing fish called Sicyopterus stimpsoni, or the “Rockclimbing Goby”. It’s a Hawaiian small fish—about 1 inch in size—that uses its mouth as a suction cup to scale waterfalls of up to 30 meters.
The goby attempts this arduous climb to lay eggs at the top of the waterfall—it’s a place well protected from predators. However, only 1% of goby’s make it to the top, the rest perish in the climb. After the successful ones lay their eggs, and those eggs hatch, their offspring are carried out to see via the waterfall and river, and those fish repeat the journey 6 months later.
It’s one of the most stunning and stark examples of natural selection at work. Nature sometimes doesn’t feel fair, but it’s certainly amazing.
We embarked on an epic road trip today. A group of seven of us who attended this weekend’s wedding woke up early, travelled five hours from Jaipur to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, and then drove another four and a half hours to Delhi airport before our flights home.
The Taj Mahal is spectacular; hands down one of the most impressive structures I’ve seen in my life.
The mausoleum was built by Emperor Shah Jahan for his wife, and the perfectly symmetrical structure took more than 20 years to build. Right down to the red, green, and black rocks set into the marble, every detail was thought through with such care and precision.
I was beyond impressed and am so glad we chose to do the lengthy and roadtrip to make seeing it possible.
Maru and I are in Jaipur, India for the weekend. We’re attending the wedding of one of Maru’s university friends and we’re always blown away by the magic of Indian weddings. The multiple days of celebration, the colours, the dancing, the food; it’s a beautiful showcase of India’s rich and wonderful culture.
Over the two days, the parties go on until the early hours of the morning. Conveniently I’m staying in London time for the five days we’re here.
Although I’m sure we’ll be very tired when we arrive back in London, we’ll look back on a truly special weekend with close friends.
Many songs from The Beatles catalog were written in an afternoon. I Want To Hold your Hand, Paperback Writer, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, to name a few.
Because a lot of art is digital nowadays, it gives us an infinite canvas where there’s a temptation to tinker ad nauseum.
However, the constraints and simplicity of older recording methods also resulted in faster creative decision making. There’s something magical about seeing or listening to art made in an afternoon.
There have been projects where I’ve had endless energy to work on them.
I find it easy to get into a state of flow, and even the setbacks feel like small speed bumps.
When considering a new project or opportunity, I think about how much energy it will require of me, and if I’m lucky, the answer may sometimes be: endless energy.
What if credit cards were called mini-loan cards? Or short-term debt cards?
I’m sure they’d sell fewer cards, but maybe it’d help people better understand what they’re really signing up to.
Note: Of course, there are benefits, such as transaction protection, but I think it would pay to have more people aware of the downsides.
Every so often I pick up a copy of the Economist when I’ve got some extra time. When I do, I’m reminded why I love the their style of writing.
They take big, complex topics and make them simple and easy to understand. That’s hard work.
They have a consistent structure, tone, and point of view that helps me quickly orient myself on a topic. It’s a high amount of signal with very little noise.
I may have shared this before, but it’s summed up well in their mission statement: to take part in a severe contest between intelligence and ignorance obstructing our progress.
In Tennis’ 2024 US open, the average number of shots per point was about 3.8. That’s an astounding figure. Once you take into account the serve and the return, there are only two more shots, on average, before a point is won. And although this is data from the US Open, I’m confident that this data carries over reasonably well to the general population.
Players love to practise rallies. But the data doesn’t lie: we’re likely better off focusing on our serve.
Tennis is just an example, because I’m confident this prioritisation phenomenon exists in most fields.
There’s a special lunar new year tradition from Malaysia and Singapore called Yee Sang (translated as raw fish) or Lou Sang (stir up). It’s also generally known as the “prosperity toss”.
The dish is a mixture of vegetables, pomelo, raw fish, crunch (like peanuts), and a special sauce. The ingredients are laid out beautifully on a large plate, then all the guests use their chopsticks to mix the salad by tossing the ingredients into the air whilst shouting auspicious phrases to bring good fortune for the coming year.
It’s a wonderful tradition. The dish itself is delicious, and it’s a great way to welcome the new year. Here’s a photo from our Yee Sang.
I mentioned the other day that Maru and I are making a special effort for lunar new year.
Today I attempted to make Cantonese braised beef and daikon. It turned out really well, but the supermarket journey took a long time. More than three times as long as my typical trip.
The ingredients were new to me, I had no idea where they were in the Asian supermarket, and I had to double and triple check against my recipe to make sure I had the right things.
I usually get frustrated at wasting time, but I deliberately chose to enjoy the slower pace today. The effort, the work, the journey; was part of the reward.
The All You Can Eat seems nice at first glance. However, once you realise they have to take a shortcut on quality to deliver on price and quantity, the trade no longer looks so appealing.
Most good things in life require a trade-off. When you see an All You Can Eat type deal, it’s rarely worth it.