Oh boy, I skipped a whole three weeks of week notes. Oh well, there goes another new year's resolution. Why do I keep on making resolutions? I wrote these notes mostly for myself, and publish them publicly so that I'm forced to put them into a mostly coherent format. I do hope if you find any of them helpful that you'll comment down below.

What I read this week month

Text is king by Adam Mastroianni

Adam has a great blog called Experimental History, where he covers science-related stuff just a little bit differently. Recently he wrote about how great reading books really is:

Finishing a great nonfiction book feels like heaving a barbell off your chest. Finishing a great novel feels like leaving an entire nation behind.

In an age of short-form content, reading a book is still worth it:

in the long run, books are all that matter. Podcasts, films, and TikToks are good at attracting ears and eyes, but in the realm of ideas, they punch below their weight. Thoughts only stick around when you print them out and bind them in cardboard.

I'm really struggling with reading books at the moment. It's too easy to just read an article on Readwise (my read-it-later app of choice) instead – I have more than a hundred articles saved there, and they feel more manageable, more bite-sized. But I wonder if that's exactly the trap Mastroianni is describing: optimising for consumption over retention. There are six books currently scattered around the house that I'm in the process of reading, and yet somehow I always reach for the phone first. I think what's missing is any kind of deliberate reading ritual – a time and place I associate with it. If you've found something that works for you, I'd genuinely love to hear it.

Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig by Sinclair Target

I've been programming in Zig on and off since at least 2023, and what I've seen from Go and Rust this article makes sense. I especially love this sentence:

Zig has a fun, subversive feel to it. It's a language for smashing the corporate class hierarchy (of objects). It's a language for megalomaniacs and anarchists. I like it.

I like Zig too! It feels like a much better C. More so than what C++ ever did.

What's Working: How Denver's Art Gym Went From Private Passion Project to Artist Co-Op – Colorado Sun

There's this makerspace in Denver called the Art Gym that recently became a member co-op. My local hackspace is also run almost like a co-op, where members make decisions together (although there are directors chosen each year to have the final say and be responsible for the day-to-day workings). The article lists some good ideas on how to run these spaces:

All that equipment presents a liability issue, and the building must be staffed by two people trained to keep an eye on things at all times. Every member is required to volunteer a set number of hours.

A standard membership costs $135 per month and requires a commitment of 12 hours per month as a monitor.

That's a lot more expensive than our local hackspace, but it's also a much bigger space with more expensive equipment. The mandatory volunteer hours idea is interesting – I wonder if it would work at the hackspace? It could get people more involved, instead of just attending open nights.

Why There's No European Google? – Ploum

Ploum has a great article discussing the differences between European and American tech. One thing I learned was that the Web basically won because Gopher was proprietary at the time:

Gopher's creators wanted to keep their rights to it and license any related software, unlike the European Web, which conquered the world because it was offered as a common good instead of seeking short-term profits.

And while it's easy to think that most modern tech is invented in the US, he gives great examples of truly foundational tech that don't fit the usual tech startup or big tech mould:

• The Web was invented by a Brit and a Belgian at CERN in Switzerland
• Linux and Git were invented by a Swedish-speaking Finn
• Mastodon was invented by a German student born in Russia
• VLC was invented by a Frenchman
• OpenStreetMap was invented by a Brit
• LibreOffice is maintained by a German institution

It's a useful corrective to the default narrative.

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Looking back at this month's reading, it's been a bit all over the place. Maybe I should rather start grouping my blog posts by theme, even if that means that it takes me a couple of months to get back to some highlights that I've made.

#hackspace #reading #programming #tech

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