Aneesh Sathe

I’ve long used quarto and github pages to post in my studio. It works great. For many years I have also tried to publish my wiki/digital garden but it always kind of sucked. I had tried free programs like logseq and foam, and they were ok, but overloaded for my tastes. I like simple markdown files. Obsidian! Roam! I hear you, but no, I’m not going to be paying either to let me have control over data I generate.

Writing (almost) every day for the past month has been exhausting. It slowed down me reading significantly to say the least. But it proved a point to myself, that I can. I’ll be trying to write slightly longer posts maybe once or twice a week. I still don’t feel that I’m in the proper writing mode yet that I can stick to it if I take a month to write a long high-quality essay. I’m aiming for mediocre, but done.

It was a small announcement on an innocuous page about “spring cleaning”. The herald, some guy with the kind of name that promised he was all yours. Four sentences you only find because you were already looking for a shortcuts through life. A paragraph, tidy as a folded handkerchief, explained that a certain popular reader of feeds was retiring in four months’ time. Somewhere in the draughty back alleys of the web, a small god cleared his throat. Once he had roared every morning in a thousand offices. Now, when people clicked for their daily liturgy, the sound he made was… domesticated.

As part of the Contraptions book club we will be reading the Essays of Montaigne. I actually started to read the Donald Frame translations, but felt I needed more context. In the book club, Paul Millerd had recommended Sarah Blackwell’s book on the life of Montaigne. I just finished it and I was left feeling rather warm. In contrast I was left rather cold and unsure by a recent podcast on a recent book by Byung-Chul Han. The book is titled The Crisis of Narration and covers the idea that we have lost the ability to tell good stories. Stories, Han says, create a shared reality instead stories …

start tiny and scale fast without vendor lock-in All biotech labs have data, tons of it. The problem is the same across scales. Accessing data across experiments is hard. Often data simply gets lost on somebody’s laptop with a pretty plot on a poster as the only clue it ever existed. The problem is almost insurmountable if you try to track multiple data types. Trying to run any kind of data management activity used to have large overhead. New technology like DuckDB and their new data lakehouse infrastructure, DuckLake, try to make it very easy to adopt and scale with your data. All while …