Rian van der Merwe

This post about news feeds by Lauren Goode at Wired resonated with me a lot:

“For those of us who came of age on the internet some 20 to 30 years ago, the way these recommendation systems work now represents a fundamental shift to how we long thought of our lives online. We used to log on to tell people who we were, or who we wanted to be; now the machines tell us who we are, and sometimes, we might even believe them.”

https://link.wired.com/view/5cec2fe23f92a45b30ffca69m1w0u.xq/324bade7

I bet you didn’t think you’d want to read about pennies today, but...

“Most pennies produced by the U.S. Mint are given out as change but never spent; this creates an incessant demand for new pennies to replace them, so that cash transactions that necessitate pennies can be settled.”

And here’s the kicker:

“One thing we know for sure about America’s 1-cent coins, however, is that just one of them costs more than 3 cents to produce.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/01/magazine/worthless-pennies-united-states-economy.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Lk4.Uosi.Yv4UETiWWUkf&smid=url-share

As always, this is so worth it. I clicked on too many things, and have no regrets about it. @clive@saturation.social

@andy@social.seattle.wa.us Woah that feels like a first.

Oh, as a topic wanderer myself (I don’t like the word “generalist”), I love and endorse this comic.

(via @simondlr@mastodon.social’s newsletter).

Is it even a never-done side project if you don't accidentally purchase a domain for it? https://elezea.com/2024/09/introducing-listen-to-more/

@cory@social.lol I saw that when I looked at the Kendrick page! I'm positively smitten with what you've done here 👏

@cory@social.lol Well you just gave me a whole new set of ideas, so thank you! An hourly build seems like something I should try to figure out as well.

There are worse rabbit holes to be in, so I say go for it. I'll join you.

@cory@social.lol "Plex is sending webhook events to a worker that inserts listen records to Supabase."

Ok I thought we could talk shop but this is a whole other level, I'll just stay over here at the kids table 🫠

That is really cool though. I sped my stuff up quite a bit with KV entries, but the cron trigger is a great idea, I think I'll look into that next.

How is this so fun!?

@cory@social.lol I finally moved my stuff to Cloudflare Pages/Workers/KV as well: https://music.rianvdm.com/

One question for you as I was looking at your site, how do you get your most listened genres? I don't see an easy way to do that in the Last.fm API. Or do you do some nested API calls? If so, how is your site so fast!? Ok I guess that's enough questions for now...

This is good advice for remote work. I like “no agenda, no attenda”!

https://switowski.com/blog/no-hello-no-quick-call-no-agendaless-meetings/

@andy@social.seattle.wa.us Not familiar with it but going to dig into it a little bit on Monday…

This is where we talk about weird side projects, right?

I like https://music.elezea.com/, a site for my music listening stats. But it’s built on Netlify, and now that I work at Cloudflare that’s a bit embarrassing.

So today I finally started rewriting the whole thing on @cloudflare@noc.social Pages and Workers. It has a long way to go but the bones are there and now it’s time to take a break. https://music.rianvdm.com/

Great interview with that guy who posts the weird app idea designs.

“Iverson follows a simple formula: What if you identified a problem with an app or app experience, and made it worse?”

https://embedded.substack.com/p/the-evil-genius-of-cursed-app-design

A quick 4.5 star review of "Service Model" by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which features one of my favorite robot characters in a novel in a very long time. https://elezea.com/2024/08/quick-review-service-model-by-adrian-tchaikovsky/

I loved the story of the honking Waymos, and so glad it got the classic “but what does it all mean!?” treatment from The Atlantic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/08/waymo-parking-lot-stream/679531/

Really good essay on masculinity in... well, whatever this weird era is that we’re living in now. Go Tim, even though he is flawed, like all of us are.

“The reason Walz’s brand of middle-aged husband/dad feminism seems so refreshing is because it feels so natural, unforced, even joyous. It’s strange that this joy is so threatening to some factions.”

https://biblioracle.substack.com/p/whos-the-man