/now/

/now/^[1] is a monthly updated page that lists some of the projects I'm working on, media I'm engaging, and hobbies or other activities I'm doing.

👩‍💻 Coding

• 🔬 Experimenting with a visitor push pin map - try it out! 🌎📍
• Updated isaacwyatt.com to include a footer, a new logo for TIL, and adjusted some of the content to make finding the posts easier.
• Working on new features for Mega Man 2: Puzzle Attack - Carcinized
• And more on my github

🏔️ Hiking & Mountaineering

• ✅ Family Hike

Misc. Projects

• Cardio, weights and climbing gym to train and get fit
• Misc. Household Fixes
  • ✅ Fixed the chimney cap
  • ✅ Fixed the drain stoppers
  • ✅ Fixed the damn fence panel
  • ✅ Remounted the garage security flood light and camera
  • ▶️ Yard maintenance

Media

Books

• Locklands by Robert Jackson Bennett (book 3 of the series)
• 7 Powers - The Foundations of Business Strategy
• What you are looking for is in the library by Michiko Aoyama
• ✅AI Engineering
• ✅ Shorefall by Robert Jackson Bennett (Book two of the Founders Trilogy)
• ⏸️ The Incredible Years
• ⏸️ Advanced Hands-On Rust by Herbert Wolverson
• ⏸️ Bulletproof Problem Solving

Music

• The Elder Scrolls V - Skyrim

Movies

• The Odyssey

Podcasts

• The DOS Gaming Club
  • Rise of the Triad
  • Scorched Earth
  • Prince of Persia
• Opposing Bases
• Aviation News Talk w/ Max Trescott
• Improve Something today

🎮 Video Games

• Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erd Tree
• Stardew Valley (with kiddo and partner)
• Valheim (Peaceful mode with kiddo)

Articles I clipped:

Universal Health Coverage Could Save $1 Trillion and 114,000 Lives Every Year, Yale Study Projects by Matt Kristoffersen

“Healthcare costs have been rising faster than inflation, and a staggering share of that spending is consumed by administrative middlemen, soaring drug prices, and emergency care for conditions that should have been treated earlier and for less,” said senior author Alison Galvani, the Burnett and Stender Families Professor of Epidemiology at YSPH and the director of the Yale Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis. “Medicare for All strips out those sources of waste while providing everyone with healthcare, saving over a trillion dollars and 114,000 lives every year.”

Universal Moral Core Principle 2 by Albert Wenger

What exactly do I mean by power? The ability to influence the future for others by making choices and taking actions in the present. The key here is the impact on others. A king leading his country into war is exercising massive power over his subjects. My choice of a Cappuccino for breakfast by contrast involves minimal power. Why does it involve any power at all? Because I am choosing to drink coffee with milk. So there is an incredibly dilute impact on the future of coffee growers, traders, roasters, etc. and the same for cows, milk farmers, etc.

The principle, like the others, is intentionally written without referring to a specific actor. It applies not just to individuals, but also to groups, organizations, corporations, countries.

How to spot a psychopath by Zoe Williams

Cluster one includes a need for control; a grandiose sense of self; pathological inner response to challenge; vengefulness; refusal to compromise.

Cluster two includes being predatory or exploitative; sadistic and cruel; having a low regard for laws, agreements, social and moral codes; no boundaries in sexual relationships; unreasonable expectations of others.

Cluster three relates to the truth: Dark Personalities cultivate a façade of normality; they are chameleon-like; dishonest; devious and manipulative; and unwilling to accept responsibility for the negative impacts they cause.

Finally, cluster four is around the Dark Personality’s own interior life: their emotions are acted and they do not experience affinity or the joy that comes with it; they are callous and devoid of empathy; unremorseful; self-interested; and brazen.

What the F___ Happened to Nerds? by Mr. Market

I've befriended some of the most thoughtful, brilliant, curious, eccentric, and sincere people I've ever met in the tech industry. Many of my dearest friends are former coworkers. I've also encountered the most egocentric, delusional, irritating personalities imaginable in tech.

It is a mixed bag, like anything. But increasingly, the egomaniacs are not only taking center stage at the most influential tier of their respective companies - whether as 'founding engineers' or founders/CEOs/CTOs/ETCs or 'GTM engineers' - but they're also talking about themselves incessantly online.

That is not good for any of us.

Don't paste the AI, please.

Someone asked you a real question. You popped it into a chatbot, copied the answer, and sent it back. It felt fast. It felt helpful. And it usually isn't.

The person on the other side has the same tools you do. If they wanted the generic answer, they would have gotten it in four seconds. They asked you because they wanted your take on it... Your context, your taste, your judgement.

The world is filled with people that don't want to read or think about things, don't be one of them.

Neo-Etiquette Basics The New Rules of Being Human by JA Westenberg

The point of having good manners isn’t to honor an arbitrary ritual; it’s to show a modicum of respect to the folks you come into contact with every day of your life.

Technology didn’t create selfishness, but it has made selfish acts extraordinarily easy and almost inconsequential.

1. Write to the people you love in your own voice, not OpenAI’s.
2. Remove your headphones when another person enters the interaction.
3. Don’t make your convenience somebody else’s administration.
4. Keep your private soundtrack private.
5. Ask before adding someone to a group chat.
6. A read receipt isn’t a subpoena.
7. When you’re with someone, stay with them.
8. If people can’t see the camera, don’t use it.
9. Other people’s children aren’t your content.
10. Don’t screenshot the group chat
11. Don’t film strangers at their worst.
12. On the subject of disclosure by the way…make it your guiding light for AI, too.
13. Aim your surveillance at your own property.
14. Don’t let a screen remove your body from the world.
15. Don’t join in a punishment because it has attracted a crowd.
16. Give credit as a matter of honesty.
17. Do the small work of civilization.
18. Don’t announce a life that isn’t yours.
19. Answer human effort with human effort.
20. Allow people to leave their former selves behind.
21. Never forget the nervous system.

Never Give Them Your Face

They want your face. It will be called safety. Verification. Age assurance. A small step to protect children. But strip the language away and the demand is plain: before you may speak, post, or read, you must first prove who you are. And the only way they've figured out how to do it is with your government ID, or with your face held up to a camera that decides whether you are old enough to be trusted. This is the deal now being written into law on three continents, and you are meant to accept it quietly. Don't.

Native Apps Should Be Avoided Whenever Possible by No One's Happy

• Openly refuse apps, and vocally advocate for the web instead.
• Try not to install any apps if you don’t need to.
• If a service has a functioning website, use it instead.
• Revoke all permissions by default, including background location, microphone, and camera permissions for anything that doesn’t require them to function.
• Audit your installed apps. Uninstall all apps you don’t actively need.
• Treat every “download our app” prompt with skepticism.

How Complex Systems Fail

Because overt failure requires multiple faults, there is no isolated ‘cause’ of an accident. There are multiple contributors to accidents. Each of these is necessarily insufficient in itself to create an accident. Only jointly are these causes sufficient to create an accident. Indeed, it is the linking of these causes together that creates the circumstances required for the accident. Thus, no isolation of the ‘root cause’ of an accident is possible. The evaluations based on such reasoning as ‘root cause’ do not reflect a technical understanding of the nature of failure but rather the social, cultural need to blame specific, localized forces or events for outcomes

Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer’s – how complex mental maps and spatial reasoning protect your brain by Hatim Sharif

Taxi and ambulance drivers are less likely than workers in almost any other job to die of Alzheimer’s disease. That was the surprising result of a 2024 study examining the death certificates of nearly 9 million people in the U.S.

These findings stopped me in my tracks because those two jobs rely on the same thing as my own work: maps.

Don't Become a Productivity Tourist by JA Westenberg

It’s a mistake to make “productivity” itself a hobby.

The idea that switching systems and optimizing tools, workflows, and widgets around your work is a fun little pastime is a dangerous quagmire to fall into.

It might seem harmless - it’s just another AI assistant! To-do app! PKM tool! - but it will catch and keep you in an endless cycle of vocabulary changes that never shape or produce the words you so desperately want to share.

Productivity chasers talk about building systems - but that’s not actually the activity. They’re more sampling systems; trying a taste of this and that, and with every flavor they fall in love with, declaring they’ll eat nothing else for the rest of their life, until the next taste…