David Chico Pham writes on technology, sourdough, and current events.

Octavia Butler wrote Parable of the Sower in 1993. In many ways she was a prophet in describing a profoundly prescient future. The book took place in the mid-2020's. There is a powerful passage that in my view, captures something about the 2024 election. Emphasis is mine.

People are setting more fires to cover crimes although why they would bother these days, I don't know. The police are no threat to criminals. People are setting fires to do what our arsonist did last night —- to get the neighbors of the arson victim to leave their own homes unguarded. People are setting fires to get rid of whomever they dislike from personal enemies to anyone who looks or sounds foreign or racially different. People are setting fires because they're frustrated, angry, hopeless. They have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it. - page 143

Some people just want to watch the world burn. Trump created a permission structure to easily blame immigrants, trans people, and liberals for their plight. He plainly and repeatedly said he exact revenge and retribution upon everyone who doesn't support him. "They have the power to make others even more miserable," is one hell of a way to describe it.

As an aside, Octavia Butler was raised in and buried in Altadena, CA in a cemetery surrounded by blocks of burnt out rubble. The fire in Altadena and Los Angelos is the largest in LA's history.

Her book takes place in Altadena, CA. There are many references of people overtaken by a fictional drug that makes them set fire to things for the high of it.

It's quite a coincidence I picked up this book at the right time. I didn't know I needed it until I did.

The Washington Post is really a special place. Our reporters and journalists are smartest in the business. Brianna Sacks, Joyce Sohyun Lee, Imogen Piper and Aaron C. Davis dove deep in what could of caused the recent historic fires in LA. We've built some powerful tools for our journalists in recent years, one of which is designed to help sift through mounds of visual data. The work of engineers, data scientist, and of course our reporters really shows in this piece.

One passage stood out to me, I'd like to share:

The Post identified the burn scar of the New Year’s Eve fire using false-color satellite imagery taken before and after the blaze. The technique tracks changes to vegetation in satellite imagery. Healthy plant cover appears red, while the scorched ground appears blue to brown.

Our staff at the Post rise to the occasion; always will.

Reuters interviewed Mr. Bezos on Sunday evening, January 11th, 2025. Mr. Bezos believes Mr. Musk is not acting out of self-interest but in the the interest of public in respects to SpaceX:

"Elon has been very clear that he's doing this for the public interest and not for his personal gain. And I take him at face value," said Bezos, founder of Blue Origin which rivals SpaceX in the space industry.

Hello 👋 Mr. Musk is lying. It's not as if Mr. Bezos is acting out of self-interest too!

Re-reading Data Structures and Algorithms by Jay Wengrow. A key comparative advantage to ordered arrays over classic arrays is that searching in them can end a loop early if certain conditions are met. Whereas classic arrays, a value can be anywhere in the array. You must inspect each element and hope that the best case is finding the value on the first element. Here's an example in Ruby from Wengrow:

Skip code block ▼

# write a linear search algorithm that searches for a value in an array.
# stop searching when the value is a) found or b) the end of comparisons are reached or c) value is not founded

def linear_search(arr, value)
  arr.each_with_index do |element, index|
    # found the element we are looking for. give index
    if element == value
      return index
    # reached the end of comparisons, e.g. 45 > 56. Will always be false. exit out of loop.
    elseif element > value
      break
    end
  end
  # no dice
  return nil
end


# test cases
arr = [3, 13, 45, 56, 86, 170, 1000]
puts linear_search(arr, 45) # 2
puts linear_search(arr, 170) # 5
puts linear_search(arr, 1) # nil

During the loop, the first check is if you find the value matches the element, tell me where it is (index). If the element is not greater than the value, e.g. 45 > 56 -- always false, then break the loop. If you don't find anything, give me back nil.

An ordered array has an important benefit over classic arrays, in that it can end a search early.

What is it that turns seemingly grown men into babies. Does having billions of dollars do something to their brains?

Chance Miller of 9to5 Mac listened to Mark Zuckerberg air his grievances to Joe Rogan without acknowledging his only invention (Facebook) was 20 years ago (2005) as well:

“[Apple has] used the [iPhone] to put in place a lot of rules that I think it feel arbitrary. I feel like they haven’t really invented anything great in a while. It’s like Steve Jobs invented the iPhone and now they’re just kind of sitting on it 20 years later.

Mr. Zuckerberg had one good idea and it ran it's course. Even the Ray-Ban smart glasses are not his invention. It's an extension of the Oculus Rift technology, which he acquired.

He goes on. While Meta doesn't provide third-party access to Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, or Facebook, Mr. Zuckerberg wants to gesture with his other hand, Apple does not give it's special private protocol (Airpods use to pair with iPhones) to Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses.

They build stuff like AirPods, which are cool, but they’ve just thoroughly hamstrung the ability for anyone else to build something that can connect to the iPhone in the same way.

There were a lot of other companies in the world that would be able to build like a very good earbud, but Apple has a specific protocol that they’ve built into the iPhone that allows AirPods to basically connect to it.

It’s just much more seamless because they’ve enabled that, but they don’t let anyone else use the protocol. If they did, there would probably be much better competitors to AirPods out there.

Mr. Zuckerberg does not tell Mr. Rogan here that Android and Android devices exist. With his billions and billions of dollars, Mr. Zuckerberg could create a special protocol to pair with Ray-Ban smart glasses on Android devices. After all, he did drop out of school as a mildly above average programmer.

Mr. Zuckerberg's immense wealth is so utterly unbearable, it breaks any comfort of his achievements. Like a fat cat, weak and soft from eating endless catnip, he can't stand his own success. Mr. Zuckerberg built a chaos machine that he himself no longer can control. But hey, at least he has that molly dealer from Chechnya look going for him.

A little known fact about me is that I ran cross country and track in high school. It was the best thing for me that I didn't know I needed. It was a refuge, a space where I'd run and run and not think about my boring life. In may ways it helped me get through tough years.

Euan Ashley, a professor of cardiovascular medicine and genetics at Stanford University in a PBS interview shares some really cool insights on how exercise benefit us. First, exercise behaving like a drug treatment in repairing or restoring health:

An example would be the mitochondria, the little battery-like organelles inside each cells. When we looked at the changes with exercise, we often saw mirror image changes to the ones we see with disease. So, exercise was quite literally kind of reversing in a mirror-image-like way the changes that happen with disease and explaining a little bit about how exercise manages to protect from those diseases.

Pretty neat! Also I found this to be very true: I slept better. I was more resilient in day to day stressors. I can handle my kids screaming and being chaotic better.

People sleep better. They have better mood. They're able to breathe better. There are just so many ways in which exercise helps. And I think the key is, is just stressing you just enough so that your body then in recovery builds these mechanisms that help you deal with the stress of life in other ways.

I've picked up kettlebell workouts in the back half of 2024 and read up on the kettlebell swings have the benefit of increasing heart rate up to fat burning zone while not depleting you entirely. Part of my avoidance in working out is my training long distance running as a teenager was to give 110% of yourself to the sport. I am 40 and I have kids, a job, and chores to do. I need enough in the tank to do stuff after working out. Kettlebell swings has that special perk.

And, of course, if you want to do more, there's added benefit. One of the things I regularly tell my patients — I'm a cardiologist — is that one minute of exercise buys you five minutes of extra life, which means you definitely have time to exercise, because, even if you exercise even a little bit higher intensity, you get seven or eight minutes of extra life.

Hotdogs take three seconds away from your life, so I'm told. A minute of exercise for 5 minutes of extra life? I believe it.

• Client-side routing like in NextJS is something not done in Astro and instead routing is handled by the server.
• function components are treated as static html and attributes on those components are like AngularJS directives. Those directives tells the component when to render
• Component can hydrate (render the html partial) based on 3 states:
  1. client:load === render immediately
  2. client:idle === chill until ready
  3. client:visible === render when in viewport

Technique is called island architecture, where you selectively swap out/hydrate html without render cycles.

Can do dynamic routing like NextJS via getStaticProps or full Server-Side Rendering (SSR) in nodeJS.

Simon Willison offers informal guidelines to link blogging. Let me share with you some of them:

Back in November 2022 I wrote What to blog about, which started with this:

You should start a blog. Having your own little corner of the internet is good for the soul!
I always include the names of the people who created the content I am linking to,

Ah I knew I read Simon Willison before. That piece helped me over come a bit of imposter syndrome with blogging. Who is going to read me? I am a nobody! But also I am a nobody :0). What a beautiful freedom.

I always include the names of the people who created the content I am linking to, if I can figure that out. Credit is really important, and it’s also useful for myself because I can later search for someone’s name and find other interesting things they have created that I linked to in the past.

Coming from the liberal arts, school drilled that copying someone else's words is plagiarism. Attribution is important. Back in my day, backlinks were a way to credit someone.

• I try to add something extra. My goal with any link blog post is that if you read both my post and the source material you’ll have an enhanced experience over if you read just the source material itself.

I often don't have much to add when I read something, even if I read the whole thing. I think now it's because I am trying to pass the time or the author did a perfect job in articulating a thing.

• A lot of stuff I link to involves programming. I’ll often include a direct link to relevant code, using the GitHub feature where I can link to a snippet as-of a particular commit. One example is the fetch-rss.py link in this post.

Note to self: he has good examples in writing about programming. Audience is you, not them.

• read several of his pieces on programming and write a piece on programming project

Go do some blogging.

The solution is to pass on old gaming hardware to our children

Jim Trinca of Eurogamer argues persuasively that game console exclusives are nearing an end and that trend might be part of a bigger phenomenon.

I haven't really considered genZ and genAlpha consumers as an impending challenge to the console business. They are not buying TVs, game consoles and gaming like older consumers (like me). Their attention is very much on their smartphones. It doesn't seem they are all that impressed by higher and higher end graphics. The big three consoles are still selling games from the 80's and 90's. I mean Final Fantasy 7 Remake was pretty darn fun.

I, for one, am introducing my daughter to gaming. She's 7 years old and for the couple years, she has played my wife's restored Gameboy Advance (over 20 years old!) and my Nintendo 3ds. She recently played lots of Pokemon Red and Super Mario World Advance. She's gotten pretty good at Mario 64 on my Nintendo Switch.

Will there be a console business in the next two cycles? I don't know, but there is plenty of games I own, consoles sitting in my basement, waiting to be played.

My old manager, pryan back at Symplicity is one talented person. Don't know how I ran into his music, but I like it a lot. I can hear a little bit of Bush in his guitar play.