Newsletter #5
7 min. read
Hello.
A fairly beefy installment today as I recount a 4-day trip I took in the middle of February to New York. In a similar vain as the few days spent in Chicago, I found myself discovering a city in a completely different light and learning to love it in a way I hadn't thought possible before.
On the home front, the semester is continuing to progress without hiccup. More than that, I find myself wandering around campus and feeling eternally grateful for the opportunity to be at this school at this time of my life. With university returning in Australia last week, the cycle of applying for summer internships is beginning to slowly rear its head, so I am exploring and prepping a little bit for these as we speak.
Particularly after the NYC trip where I had my camera out non-stop seemingly, the past 10 days or so I have been aggressively leaning into learning more about photography. The next step in that progression is to explore more of the post-production side of things, using software like Adobe Lightroom and so forth. I'm excited at the idea of adding even greater depth and quality to these memories and moments I am experiencing.
As always, enjoy the read and I look forward to hearing any thoughts you may have. Wherever you are, have a meaningful rest of your day!
Photos.
Bullet digest.
Something I am learning... One of the earliest versions of an IDE, Vim has been given a fresh coat of paint in recent years along with a resurgent popularity under the Neovim hood. Unlike most text editors, Vim is entirely keyboard-driven and is infinitely customisable. This does mean there is a really steep learning curve which spawned memes like this about not knowing how to exit it, but the gains for software development speed seem immense, so I've finally decided to bite the bullet and jump off the deep end.
Something I am rereading... The article The Rise of TikTok and Understanding Its Parent Company ByteDance by Turner Novak. Written a little over 2 years ago, it is scary how some of the predictions made here have come true, and how if anything they underestimated the growth of ByteDance and the role it will play in our futures. Related also to the Y Combinator article Hidden Forces Behind Toutiao: China’s Content King. If you are still using Tik Tok, please read this and then promptly delete the app.
A quote I am pondering...
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process - E.B. White
Digressions.
Cellular companies are just the absolute worst and my prediction is that they will become obsolete in by 2040
When I got to Purdue, I raced off at the first opportunity to get a SIM card (AT&T).
For reasons I am still unsure of, I was able to get data access on the prepaid card, but have been unable to make any calls or texts since installing it.
To this point however, I have readily survived solely on Wi-Fi (calls and texts) alone, and with the proliferation of public networks at seemingly every store, this is only going to get easier
The only times I have used cellular data was when I was out in the back streets of West Lafayette completely lost, though this can easily be avoided by downloading maps for offline use.
Some of the exchange students here haven't even got an American SIM card and have so far made it through university and trips to other cities where we can't make use of the roaming network here on campus.
Attempts to resolve my technical issues have been beyond frustrating - most of the big providers like AT&T only make use of call support lines, which when you are unable to make calls in the first place creates a loop that I don't see an escape from short of borrowing someone else's phones.
- The other annoying thing is that the carrier plans, along with the region locking of phones, turns what should be a simple process of buying a phone overseas into a dive down a rabbit hole of support bandwidths, network cards and device types.
With the prevailing wind of ever-widening Wi-Fi networks, surely it is not a big stretch to imagine these companies becoming pointless in the not-to-distant future. Why get a SIM card when any call can be made on Whatsapp or your social media provider of choice?
If you really want to be infuriated, there is the documentary Digital Disconnect - Fake News, Privacy and Democracy that details the nefarious origins of most of these companies in the pre-internet age.