TIL
TIL that there’s no leading off in softball
Kids are playing both this spring, and it’s been interesting to learn about what actually separates the two
TIL that saffron is the most expensive spice by weight
I cooked with it for the first time today. I noted, beforehand, that the recipe didn’t call for much, and was surprised by just how little I used (1/4 teaspoon for 2 cups of rice)
TIL that “bubba” is common nickname in the American south. For years I’ve assumed that Bubba Wallace was his legal name
One in a series of perpetual joys working at a remote company and having coworkers all over the country
TIL about stately.ai — we’re kicking off a project with a lot of screens and states, and I’m more compelled than ever by state machines in the AI age
If we can sketch together the states allowed and required, it ought to be a powerful tool for an agent to work against to know if it built the right things
TIL about a kind of issue I just don’t think I’ve ever seen. A package with a release changelog that directly mentions a fix that isn’t in the NPM tarball. I’m sure it’s an easy enough mistake to make, but it was hard to track down because I assumed so assuredly that it couldn’t be the root cause github.com/facebook/…
TIL that tonkotsu ramen broth is made from pork bones
I had dinner at Menya Ultra in San Diego, which is the best ramen spot I know
TIL that Jacob Elordi is 6’5”. Really helped in Frankenstein where he really is that much taller than everyone else on screen
TIL just how obtuse more basic LLMs can be without complex system prompting
I’ve been working on building a mini Claude Code, something I’ve seen recommended to get into the guts of the tooling. Ive been working with a mistral model, and it’s fascinating. The model is so reticent to take action, even when there are tools provided to do exactly those things.
TIL that all curling stones come from only two quarries.
Thanks to the Distraction Podcast for this very important information
TIL about the Codestral API, while building a tiny code agent.
It delights me to no end the stateless nature of these APIs. Just keep passing blobs back and forth about your conversation.
TIL that when you use Bun with Expo, it really only acts as a package manager, because you have to use the Hermes runtime on device, and you have to use jest for React Native testing
TIL about Datadog’s App Builder. I was shocked at the ability to create a widget that could fetch and parse JSON from the web. So cool
TIL that this year is the Year Of The Horse
We had a lovely Chinese New Year party at my brother’s house
TIL that Giant Sequoias have remarkably shallow root systems. Only 12-14 feet at maturity for a tree that can be 300 feet tall boggles the mind
TIL that San Diego actually has a healthy fossil record, including it’s own extinct species of walrus, aptly named the Chula Vista Walrus.
We went to the San Diego Natural History Museum for the first time today. What a cool place, and we didn’t even see it all.
Another shout out to the Balboa Park Explorer Pass
TIL that Steven Pastis (of Pearls Before Swine) wrote a series of children’s graphic novels called Trubble Town. I was delighted when we found it at the library. It’s so fun to share authors I enjoy with my kids
TIL about superset.sh and tools like it for running parallel agents.
This was the week where the tide turned for me and I began to want tooling for agents across multiple repos at once. At first blush, I’m not impressed with superset, but I’m sure a tool like this will be an important part of my workflow very soon
TIL about Istanbul, the JS code coverage tool, while looking to add it to a project
Fun side fact: one of the associated CLIs is called NYC, and that feels like a They Might Be Giants song
TIL that non-profits in the US are (broadly) not required to issue donation statements. It’s considered the duty of the donor to keep receipts
This fascinated me, from a data and records perspective, and in the realm of norms.
TIL that the React Compiler effectively turns all props etc into a useMemo call
This makes sense when considering the nature of the compiler, but isn’t immediately obvious without using the playground
I learned this because we had an undefined access bug in a render prop that started throwing errors with the compiler, since all “dependencies” are evaluated on first render
We ended up solving it by converting the original file to Typescript. That kind of rigid syntax checking helps when a follow-up tool will be modifying the end result that much