Link Roundup #1
I am always thinking about what to write on this blog. I am constantly coming up with great blog post ideas, but I don't have nearly enough time to write all of them. There are so many possible pieces of content that are just floating around in my head.
Lots of those ideas have the intent of sharing things I have read or seen that I think are interesting enough to recommend to my readers.
I really wanted to create themed lists of links. They are sometimes called "link love" or "Link Roundups" or "Resource Lists". I wanted to categorize those interesting things so that each post would be especially helpful to the readers that found the post. I am accumulating such a huge backlog of unshared information nuggets that I have decided to just write a totally unthemed link roundup post.
Here goes!
Window Swap - Window swap is a neat idea for a website. The idea is that people can take photos (or sometimes live streams?) of the view out their window and share it with the world. Sometimes we need a change of scenery to feel alive and motivated. What has become mundane to one person is new and exciting for someone just seeing it for the first time. Some of the sights on the site are just street alleys or backyards. To the people who see that every day, they may wish to travel to see something else, but to a stranger it can be relaxing or beautiful. This site allows you to click a button which will bring a random window to you to enjoy for as long as you care to see it, then you can click again for a new window. I think this is especially useful when you work in the same place everyday (possibly your living room or home office if you work from home) and want to have something ambient in your space which can be different to spice things up. Having window swap up on a second monitor or on your TV can be just the change you need to feel extra motivated or satisfied. Little acts of spontaneity can make all the difference.
Surf City - I learned about Surf City from a random tweet I saw on Twitter. It was from the creator of the site. He said that he was bored of the same old things to watch on cable and streaming platforms and wanted to create a way to watch new and interesting content but that felt like browsing a cable provider's channel guide. He was also motivated by boredom from the COVID-19 quarantine. Surf City is a collection of 20 channels. Each channel has a theme and plays videos mostly sourced from YouTube. You can watch the video playing on a channel when you flip to it, then when it is done a new one will start to play automatically. If you watch long enough you will find that the videos to repeat at some point, but it seems like new videos are added each month so the content does change. It seems to operate a bit like a series of video playlists, but the way that it is designed makes it feel like more. There is a channel that shows videos of people playing video games from beginning to end, a channel about hibachi and other very skilled cooking, one of downhill biking and skateboarding videos, and one of weird music videos. There are lots of interesting channels to watch and at the bottom of the page you can click on the word "source" to be taken to the YouTube video page for that video. Caution: this can accidentally consume large amounts of your time because of how fun and interesting it is.
This Person Does Not Exist - I heard about this site when listening to an episode of the Making Sense podcast with Sam Harris where he was interviewing Nina Schick about the existence of Deep Fakes and what is called Synthetic Media - media which is created or altered using Artificial Intelligence. She was saying that video and audio forms of synthetic media are getting really good and pretty hard to detect, but we can still detect the fact that they are synthetic or altered. She said that AI has already gotten perfect or nearly perfect and creating still images which cannot be detected as synthetic or altered. To any person viewing the synthetic images, they would be completely fooled into thinking they were genuine, true-to-life images. The "This Person Does Not Exist" website is meant to show you just how convincing these AI generated images are. The website displays a picture of a person that has never existed. The image is completely fabricated. AI made it up. The images are made using an Generative Adversarial Network, which is where one AI is meant to create something (like a picture of a person) and it is trying to fool a second AI whose job is to try to detect fakes. They go through tons of iterations, trying an image, it failing the test, then the image being improved and retested, until the image passes the test of the second AI. Every time you click refresh on the page a new fake image of a person is displayed. The photos are very realistic. Every once in a while you will see one with a strange collar on their shirt or an odd bump on their ear, something which lets you know the image is fake, but unless you were looking for things to be wrong, you would never notice these photos as fake. This is a very interesting (and kind of scary) site that you should check out!
Virus Total - This is a security site that was purchased by Google and is now a part of Alphabet Inc. The site is like on-the-spot antivirus software. You can upload a suspicious file or point it at a questionable URL, and the site will investigate it and look for malware. It will let you know whether the file or site was found to be clean and safe or if there was something dangerous there. This is very helpful because it can bring you peace of mind when you want to use some resource but are not sure if you can trust it to not harm your computer, phone, or tablet. You can push the risk of questionable sources onto this site and have it evaluate the source for you. I have only found a handful of opportunities to try it out (I tend to be a pretty safe web browser), but I have saved it as a bookmark in my browser just in case I need to investigate some sketchy internet site.
Andreessen Horowitz / a16z - Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz are a couple of Silicon Valley, CA tech guys who founded a venture capital investment firm in 2009. According to their About page, they have around $12 billion in assets under management. They invest in all kinds of techy stuff, but it seems like they focus heavily on fintech, bio/medical, and cryptocurrency businesses. They are famous for having written a blog post where they describe the central driving idea of their investment fund, the idea that Software is Eating the World. By this they mean that instead of the world being totally physical as it has been in the past (for the world to get better, people and businesses made "physical things"), the world is increasingly digital and software driven. There are lots of physical devices that you no longer need because there is an app on your computer or smartphone that does the same thing more efficiently for less money. They want to encourage the growth of software companies that can solve big problems facing society. They also have a few podcasts that they produce on a regular basis that are very interesting. One is a news show that talks about the biggest headlines relevant to their business (16 Minutes on the News). Another podcast they run is more of a general purpose show that includes interviews and discussions on anything they think is interesting (The a16z Podcast). One final thing I want to share about this site is an article written by Marc Andreessen called "It's Time To Build". The idea is that we only improve society and the quality of our lives through building things and that we need to stop talking about hypothetical change and start building things that will make life better. It might be an imperfect argument that doesn't perfectly apply across the board, but it is an interesting and motivational article.
80,000 Hours - This is an interesting organization that looks into how a person can do the most social good for the world through their career. The reason for the name is that the typical person will work about 80,000 hours over the course of their career. They have just 80,000 hours to do professional good. They study what are the most effective ways to use those hours to make a positive impact. They explain that some of the most effective careers, those where each hour you spend can make the greatest overall difference, is often in areas where there are too few people doing work. If you are just another person working on a problem that a million other people are trying to solve, then you are not likely to make much of a difference in solving the problem. If you become one of only a thousand people working on some other problem, each hour you put in will have much greater marginal returns. They also have a podcast.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century - This is a documentary about money, growing income and wealth inequality, capitalism, investments, the excesses of the rich, the widespreadness of poverty, and lots of other related things. It is a film version of a book written by a French economist named Thomas Piketty. When I saw the trailer for the film I was totally hooked. I could not wait until the movie was released and I could watch it. The movie has now been released and is available on Netflix. I highly recommend that you watch this movie. It covers a lot of ground, more than I can summarize here. One really interesting topic they cover, though, is how property and housing are rising in value despite more and more housing being build to meet and sometimes even exceed demand. This is due to the uncoordinated, yet concerted, action of people who own property insisting on always increasing rent and sales prices totally irrespective of housing supply. People invest in real estate to make money and profit. This is kind of disgusting if you really think about it, because housing is a necessity. People need to have somewhere to live, and property owners are extorting people for something they need. It is like if you were to restrict access to water or air and then charge constantly increasing amounts of money for people to be able to access them. The water and air didn't cost more to produce, but the people who are in a position to charge for those essentials would be able to charge anything they wanted and people would still buy it, so they continue to raise prices just to make more money and show financial growth. That is not happening with air and water, but it is happening with housing. Not because housing is more expensive now or much more scarce, but because the people who own the housing stock want to make a return on their investment. Watching this documentary helps you to see lots of situations like that for what they really are.
Those are the things I most wanted to share in this post. Hopefully it was not too many or too few. I thought these things were useful, interesting, and helpful, and I hope you find some value in them. I intend to share lots of link roundup type posts like this going forward. I'm amazed at how hidden and hard to find some awesome things are online. I want posts like these to help people discover some things they'll love that they might have otherwise never found. Thanks so much for reading!
Have you heard of any of these sites? Did you find value in any of them? Do you have any sites you think I should check out? Let me know in the comments.
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