Five Links #111

1. Buy Fonts Save Lives

Some great typefaces in here, I particularly like Timmons NY (2.0). All proceeds from these typeface sales go to Cancer Research UK and MacMillan Cancer Support.

2. Introducing NEO

Hugh Howey, creator of the Silo universe, created a writing tool and opened it up for others to use. Some great feature naming here:

If you want to get rid of a piece of writing but don’t want to lose it forever, highlight it and drag it down to the DARLINGS tab. Or hit COMMAND + SHIFT +D. It’ll stay there while you improve the draft. If you realize your original stab was better, you can restore darlings from the darlings tab (or you can delete them forever). This allows you to take creative risks without FOMO.

I also came across this, which is pretty cool:

If you didn’t know, I opened up the Silo universe to fan fiction years ago. And not just to put on fan fiction sites, but you can charge money for the things you write and keep every penny of the income! Lots of incredible Silo Stories out there. But readers are forever looking for more.

3. I’m done using AI

I stopped using the AI chat because it became very clear it wasn’t helpful or healthy, and it was in fact dangerous. But I kept using AI for coding at work, using it to take on more and more of the heavy-lifting to the point where I was just a code reviewer and a quality assurance tester for the features the coding harness would spit out. Getting a lot of tasks done, it can feel exhilarating. That is, until I realized, well, I’m basically just a hamster on a wheel, checking boxes, getting tickets done with no real purpose. Sure, I catch an issue here or there. But it’s impossible to review the quantity of code the AI writes, and we’ve got a different AI to review it anyway! So what did this do? Well, it made me lazy. It made me stop caring. It made me a worse programmer. It made me depressed.

4. XCancel – an unofficial Twitter/X mirror

As a StopTheMadness user, this rule was particularly useful to come across. No need to manually replace Twitter links in my browser anymore:

Pattern: /https?://(www[.])?x[.]com/
Replacement: https://xcancel.com
Enabled on platforms: All

5. Migrate to Fastmail from Gmail

You can import all your mail from Gmail to Fastmail, in theory. In practice, it might be next to impossible if you have 16+ GB of emails. I tried several times and failed.

I remember this from when I switched from Google. Google Takeout failed repeatedly and I ended up using the method Greg outlines here, except with Thunderbird.

What am I up to?

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Until next time,

Dave

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