This Lex Fridman podcast looks like it's going to be a good one.

Walter Isaacson, is a popular author, who has written well renowned biographies of Steve jobs, Einstein, Da Vinic, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Kissinger. He has been accused of preaching the Great Men theory history, because he presumably overstates the contributions of single actors in the progress of history.

Although in my opinion, there are definitely times in history when a single individual has massively accelerated/enabled some path of progress and of course the people who have done that where building on the shoulders of everyone that came before them but often the last 1% is the hardest part.
Not only that but also in my opinion the "great men" theory of history can be considered as motivating to some extent, because the alternative is believing that your contribution won't affect much change and that it's just a 0.0001% of the total, and even if you don't do 0.0001% of the work somebody else inevitably will. That's kind of demotivating for me. My belief is that even if i am doing 0.0001% i wanna feel like i am the person doing the whole thing, even if that's not true.

All the text above is meant to preface the following, Walter Isaacson is also doing a biography of Elon Musk which i think will be released tomorrow (September 11, 2023) and i am excited to read it. So don't call me an Elon Musk fanboy or claim that i am part of the manosphere for being interested in Elon Musk, i am neither. I know exactly what I am doing.

Now let me get back to the podcast 😁

https://youtu.be/aGOV5R7M1Js

Typescript is not the best language but it's the only way one could bare the pain of writing JavaScript.

In the Beginning was the Command Line
by Neal Stephenson (author of Snow Crash, the king of cyberpunk fiction).

I just finished reading this essay/semi-book. The essay centers the discussion around OSes and also talks about the CLI vs GUI debate. It talks about the inherent dumbing down of capable machines that is the GUI and how and why the CLI is better. The essay also talks about the general problem of machine-to-human interfaces.

Although i wasn't aware of this essay when i organized the /dev/tty competition, the essay outlines most of my views that led to me organizing that competition.

If or when i organize the next /dev/tty competition, I am definitely making this essay a mandatory reading for participating in the competition.

There is a lot of cool stuff in the essay

https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt