9 tips from MPJ on books, hardware, podcasts and a service
Books on data viz, quantum thinking, capital, AI and sci-fi — plus hardware, podcasts and a service worth your time.
Hey Kits
I’m feeling like a list of tips this Monday, with a focus on books, some stuff that I have found enlightening the last few years.
Here goes:
Data Sketches by Shirley Wu (Book)
DataViz: Data Sketches by Shirley Wu
Shirley Wu is one of the most talented people in the world when it comes to artful displays of data with d3, and this book outlines the behind the scenes of her thinking process, and it is a GORGEOUS piece. I splurged on the coffee table hardback version a couple of years ago, and I just love having this around. Also, as any good coffee table book, can also be used as a melee weapon:
The Beginning of Infinity (Book)
Book on Science: The Beginning of Infinity
I’ve perhaps mentioned The Beginning Of Infinity before, but it bears mentioning again. I cannot recommend this mind-blowing book enough.
In it, David Deutsch, the inventor of the quantum computer, explains with remarkable simplicity, a framework to understand reality that reveals perhaps the clearest thinking I’ve even seen. It explores, among MANY things, what the essence of knowledge is, how it pertains to computing (which is NOT what thought it was) and why flowers are beautiful.
The book doesn’t require any academical math (I’m a theatre major so I could not absorb that) but even though the explanations are very simple, they are also very dense and you sometimes have to absorb a chapter for days. Love it.
The Mystery Of Capital (Book)
Finance: The Mystery of Capital
For someone that is dreadfully bad at my own personal finances, I have an incredibly deep interest in money and have spent more time thinking about it than most.
Capital (i.e. not capitalism, but the broader word, that we also use for “emotional capital” etc) is something that fascinates me a lot. Mystery of capital explores the essential concept in a fascinating way. It inspired me quite a bit at the time and I kept it on my Samsung Frame for a few weeks (pic)
The Most Human Human (Book)
Artificial Intelligence: The Most Human Human
I quote Brian Christiansen in the Volvo segment of Dawn of The Data Developer, from his book The Alignment Problem, but his earlier book, The Most Human Human, is an mind-blowingly poetic and intelligent book observing the human condition in relation to automation.
What is wild is that it was written in 2012, but he is so ahead of his time in thinking that it feels like it was just released. In case you did not know (I didn’t) the Turing Test has had a yearly competition that ran 1990-2019 called the Loebner Prize. (Don’t google this because it will spoil the narrative by the book btw).
The competition awarded a price for “The Most Human Computer” to the program that was best at convincing a panel of human confederates that is was human, but a lesser known price - “The most human human” was awarded to the human confederate that was best at convincing the judges of the same thing. The book also kicks my favorite philosopher Douglas Hofstadter when he’s down, in the segment about chess, which is also fun.
We are Legion, We are Bob (Book)
Sci-fi: We are legion, We are Bob
“We Are Legion (We Are Bob)" follows Bob Johansson, a newly rich startup founder who buys a freeze-my-brain-after-my-death-kind-of-service and after signing up promptly get hits by a car and wakes up 400 years into the future. He is now an AI that is the property of the theocratic government of the US and they have digitally enslaved him to act as a von Neumann probe since the earths environment is failing.
He manages to break free of the safeguards and essentially becomes an all-powerful being (but funny and down to earth) but not before he battles a Brazilian battleship AI in order to escape orbit.
That might have sounded like spoilers, but that’s not the plot of the book, that is what happens in the first few pages of this wonderful book series.
Pimoroni Badger 2024
Hardware: Pimoroni Badger 2040
I bought a Badger a few months ago, because the concept of tiiiny cheap e-Ink displays really tickle me. I have not figured out what to do with it yet, but ideas are welcome. I haven’t bought one yet, but the same company also sells a bloody 7” color e-ink display with a micropython-programmable Pico W attached for 75 pounds - has some cool potential too… just don’t know what. :D Ideas welcome.
Nocturne (Podcast)
Podcast: Nocturne
I am generally a good sleeper these days after a LOT of debugging effort on fixing that, but there are still nights sometimes when sleep just doesn’t come - anxiety, heat strokes and loud noises still gets to the best of us. A savior in these situations have been Nocturne, a podcast that isn’t one of those make-you-fall-asleep pods, but a podcast uniquely vibed to the dark of nights. I am overusing the word beautiful in this chronicle, but man, the writer of this show has an incredible command of language:
"There are 24 hours in a day. Seems pretty straightforward. But what do you really know about the hours between say, 11pm-6am. From graveyard shift jobs to “secret identities”, who we are and what we do at night is often less fully perceived by others, whether by choice or by circumstance. Peering into the dusty corners of the night, Nocturne explores these often overlooked and undisclosed slices of life.”
So, if you find yourself struggling to fall asleep this week, or if you are just up late at night coding and desire a voice in the dark, give the episode Noctalgia a listen.
Flow Club (Virtual Co-Working Community)
Virtual co-working Community: Flow Club
My productivity has always been many times higher when I am pair-programming, but it is only after my ADHD diagnosis that I realized that I was incidentally practicing a attention hack that has a name - Body doubling (Wikipedia). Since I discovered this general trick, I am like 400% more functional in all aspects of my life that are possible to shoehorn into Body Doubling, which is almost everything.
Flow Club is a community/online service for body doublers. Needless to say, I was all over that shit. We finally got around to ink a partnership with Flow Club this week, but I’ve been a member and avid user for ages before they became a sponsor (or rather, that's why we're making them a sponsor).
In fact, I was absolutely dependent on Flow Club during the months when I was working on Dawn of The Data developer. Those months were an enormous struggle when it came to attention and energy, and the commitment box and support that Flow Club gives was truly a lifesaver for me. I cannot see how Fun Fun Function would not have been relaunched without them.
It's such simple idea:
... and it's well built as software goes (okay, except for one badly optimized canvas animation of the celebration confetti that spins up your computer fans at the end of a session) but...
The thing I honestly love the most is the amazing vibe of the community. It's just so godawfully disarming and takes the pressure off and replaces it with a feeling of support. Flow Club is definitely great for getting eat-the-frog kind of work done, but my favorite sessions are frankly the "Start your day" sessions where people show up sometime half-asleep in bathrobes putting down "make some fˆ&@@ing coffee" on their goals list.
If you want to support yourself and support Fun Fun Function at the same time, give Flow Club a whirl using the link fff.dev/flowclub -
That link extends your free trial to 14 days instead of the standard 7 days that the plebeians gets. You also get 30% off if you also use the code MPJ30 at checkout.
(Protip: your monthly cost also drops if you host some sessions in the community, and it's super fun to do)
Hope to catch you in a flow!
I wish you have good week (or at least you keep your head above water most of the time)
So honored to have you as a reader - really. It's quite something to have the attention of someones inbox, and I don't take it for granted.
As always, hit that reply button and say hi. 👋💛 I get lots of interesting insight sent from subscribers and I love that part of my week.
And won’t feel pressured to write clever shit, really just drop a line and be you - a dirty secret about being a content creator is a pretty lonely job, and simple cheers and getting glimpses into the life of the actual people on the other side of my writing can sometimes turn a bad day around completely.
Pen pals are amazing and should really be brought back at large!
PS.
Funfun.email subscriber book recommendation: Designing Connected Content
Thanks to funfun.email reader Ethan Calvert to this tip sent in response to the “What if you did *all* your writing with the same tools you write code in?” chronicle.
I am reading it right now on Kindle, and if you are a PKM kind of person, or just have an interest in structuring content in general, check it out!
DS.