Weeknotes #5 (December 07, 2024)
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Things I found, read, did, and produced this past week.
- Advent of Code 2024 has begun. Its a series of programming puzzles that come out once a day from December 1st through December 25th each year. I've participated and at least tried a few problems every year since its inception in 2015 as it is a low stakes way to play around with programming languages or just work your brain in a different way than you usual work day.
- The Browser Company, creators of Arc, released a video An early peek at Dia, our second product | A recruiting video. They're leaning in hard on GenAI & LLM tech, and while I am slightly bullish on the tech itself, I still personally don't see how they turn this around and make a solution that they can start making money on, cause they will only be able to take in VC funding for so long. They raised $50 million this March, and yet between now and then, they got a huge amount of criticism for dropping Arc with no more feature updates in favor of this new app Dia.
- YouTuber Jared Henderson posted a video Why we can't focus covering the content and internet around us is draining our capacity to focus. It definitely is a real phenomenon and you have to actively turn away from the constant push of endless feeds and algorithms to work to keeping your focus.
- OpenAI announced ChatGPT Pro at a whopping $200 a month for unlimited usage of their o1 model which is now out of technical preview as well as "o1 pro mode" which supposedly will provide more compute power. We will have to see if companies decide (As I feel most just standard users aren't going to pay for this plan as an individual) that for 10x the standard $20 a month if the added benefit of these new models is actually worth it.
- I've been reading Engineering Management for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner. At work I'm one of the main technical leads on my program and as such I've been wanting to do some more personal learning on how to help manage the team and elevate others on the team to be able to do the best work they can do.