I just started using Felt. The best way to describe it is it feels like magic. I have been thinking about side projects involving creating maps or using geospatial data for a while, but I’ve procrastinated on learning Mapbox or QGIS. And I’ve spent way too much time trying to install SpatiaLite on a Windows Laptop.

No coding involved. I just dragged the two Shapefiles (Property Boundaries and Address Points (Municipal) - Toronto One Address Repository) from the Toronto Open Data Portal on, and the map appeared. I then added the Felt’s preexisting building footprint layer. It was then easy to quickly add colouring by category. And even better (unlike some other tools), there is a working search bar so that you can look up parcels at an address.

In general, I like open tools so that I can have more control over the output and be confident that the publisher won’t stop supporting the tool in a couple of years. But I value velocity more than everything else. (If you’re reading this ten years from now, you’ll know how it worked out).

It didn’t take me that long to start seeing interesting things near the water, on Algonquin Island, near my home, etc. However, I need to work on my styling.

I was laid off on Aug. 10, 2023. I feel like I was a good employee, but due to the vicissitudes of trade, my services were no longer needed. I wasn’t disappointed, I was honestly pretty excited.

During my sabbatical from employment, I want to produce work that I will be proud of 10 years from now. Reading, browsing Twitter or getting nerd-sniped are okay, and they feel like work. They definitely are intellectual work. But they are not legible. They do not let me signal what type of person I am and what I can do.

I have benefited for a long time from being perceived as a young, ambitious person. I lost that sheen for a bit when I was at Accenture. I regained it at Searchspring. Greatness comes from slack. The slack I had at Searchspring gave me time to become a better engineer and the confidence that I could be a great engineer. I want to build on that over the next couple of months.

I invested for a future decades away. But I worked for my stand-up hours away. That is no longer true. I am now constrained by money. But I can work on projects that can take years to pay off.

But I can’t waste time. I can invest time for a far future, but my limited money buys me limited freedom from the social contract of employment. I don’t want to impose a totalitarian discipline on myself, but failure is not acceptable. I have run away from the prison, which employment is. But the guards are out searching for me. I must find a new home or build a new one. I will not die in the wilderness. I will not go back. I will not spend years plotting another escape.

I have lived a charmed life. I have had one or more part-time jobs or a full-time job since the month after my 18th birthday. I have had less money in the past, but I have not really been constrained by money. Ever since I started working full-time, I have readily traded money for more time, reduced hassle or psychic benefits. But now that money directly buys freedom, I need to be more conservative with my spending.

I am a little afraid, very excited, but also overwhelmed. In the past, when I am overwhelmed, I have delayed or taken no action. Sometimes, no action is the right move, but often, it allows me to procrastinate on make hard decisions. I need to rapidly develop a bias for action.

For the last several years, my life has gotten better almost automatically. I passed my courses and went to the next grade. I matured as I gained more life experience just by waking up every day. But after I graduated, that is no longer true. I need to take action to improve my life. In 2020, I graduated and joined Accenture. In 2021, I took action, and I left my consulting job at Accenture and got a better job as a software engineer at Searchspring. I was concerned this year would break the trend. Whether or not it does, it certainly won’t be boring.

Goals:

• Base:
  • I want to stop selling commodity engineering services to generic tech companies
• High
  • Exit the social contract of employment
• Low
  • Get another software engineering job

Fail:

• Lose control of my sleep cycle. Allowing it to invert and me to be nocturnal
• Become unemployable before reaching sustainability
• Not being able to get another job
• Taking a sabbatical, working on side projects, “Building in public”, etc., is a luxury belief
• I become overwhelmed and procrastinating on everything
• I have implicit and explicit responsibilities to others that I don’t want to abandon

Today is September 6th, 2022. The three main image generation engines are DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney. (The date is important. The leading engines could be different a week from now.) Two months ago, the creation of digital artwork cost $100’s dollars or $1000’s dollars an image and photography costs $10’s and $1000’s per image. Today, the creation of digital images costs cents. Images can now be generated in seconds, by giving an image generation engine a text prompt and by fiddling with two or three simple parameters.

DALL-E 2 was released on July 20th, 2022. OpenAI, one of the world’s leading research laboratories, created it. OpenAI has XX¹ employees. It was closed-sourced and available initially only to beta testers on the waitlist. OpenAI distorted any faces in images making it hard to be used for deep fakes. Stability AI released Stable Diffusion on August 22nd, 2022, 33 days later. Stable Diffusion is open source, can be run on a consumer GPU, and doesn’t blur faces like DALL-E 2. Stability AI, as of August 12th, 2022, has 75 employees.

Created by Stable Diffusion using Replicate

The images aren’t prefect. They still gave off a weird vibe. And giving the right words to get the image you want (prompt engineering²) is still a bit finicky. But an hour after I started playing with Stable Diffusion, I was able to create this image of an Canadian Flag and an Astronaut on the moon. (So can you with Stable Diffusion on commit a9758cbfbd5f with width 512 height 512 prompt Neil Armstrong on the Moon Canadian Flag num_outputs 4 guidance_scale 7 prompt_strength 0.8 num_inference_steps 129 and seed 47692).

More:

• Soon for videos, etc
• Fundamentally, a different medium
• Deepfakes
• Creative labour
• New art created (Comic book etc)
• Programmatic creation (See what clothes would look like on you?, What products look like your home?)
• Meaning of non-human-created artwork?
• Creative work of curation??
• Can’t be put back in the box. This felt different. We were/aren’t ready.
• We won’t be ready for the next one

Edit: 2023-11-11 A link was added to footnote 2 and the title was changed to from The World Has Changed to The World Has Changed:Image Generation Engines

These days there are many places to hang your digital shingle— Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Mastodon, Reddit, etc. And there are many ways to communicate— Messenger, Instagram DMs and WhatsApp and others not owned by Meta, like iMessage, Slack and Discord.

But you own none of these.¹ It’s like building a business in a building you don’t own. Maybe it’s the right move, but your landlord can always decide to kick you out at renewal time. There’s nothing wrong with posting or messaging on platforms you don’t own. But you should have at least one place where to control your access to the platform. Check the terms of your lease. You can get kicked off Facebook, banned from Twitter, and have your Gmail account suspended for any or no reason.

You should go out today to buy FirstNameLastName.com if it’s available. If it’s not available, then buy another version of your name, like FirstNameMiddleNameLastName.com, FirstNameMiddleInitialLastName.co or FirstNameLastName.site . I would recommend searching for available domains using NameCheap’s Beast Mode Search which lets you search 100’s TLD’s at the same time. And then buying the domain on Hover. Hover is a domain name registry which is easy to use and has amazing customer service. Customer service is an very important to consider when picking a domain name registry because you’ll be a customer for possiblly decades.

It’ll take less than 20 minutes and cost less than $20. If you don’t do anything else, you should buy this domain. Then, you can procrastinate for years before you do anything else.

If you want, you can buy LastName.com, so that send email from FirstName@LastName.com. Using Hover, you can set up this email and forward it to your normal Gmail account so that nothing about your day-to-day emailing experience will change. So even if your Gmail account gets banned, you’ll have access to FirstName@LastName.com. How many sites is your Gmail account the credentials for? What happens if Father Google wakes up on the wrong side of the bed? Also, sending email from FirstName@LastName.com is cool.

If you are a software engineer or a designer or do anything creative, you probably have some (or should have some) artifacts of your work you can share to with others. Your personal website is a great place to share them. Even if they natively live on GitHub, Vsco or Vimeo, you can link to and back them up here. I am using Ghost for this website and using Jekyll for my personal website ramvasuthevan.ca.²

Remember, you can set up your custom email and personal website anytime, but time might be running out to register FirstNameLastName.com . Go do it now.

I assumed the 6a would have an audio jack, just like the 4a. But to my shock and horror, it didn’t. One of the robotics team coaches at my high school— an engineer for GM for 35 years, would say, “When you assume you make an arse out of you and me”. I was certainly made into an arse.

So I begrudgingly went to Best Buy to buy the cheapest Google wireless earbuds—the Google Pixel Buds A Series, for $80. I came back home and used them inside for a couple of hours. They’re okay. Not the best, but useable.

I then decided to go for a walk. I put the earbuds in their case and the case in my pocket. When I came back home, the case was not in my pocket. I am now legitimately pissed off. After searching my house, I realized I had probably dropped them when pulling out my wallet. I got some cheesecake on a stick. The case was on top of my wallet in my pocket. I hadn’t set up my tap properly yet. So I quickly took out my wallet to pay. And the case probably fell out, and I didn’t hear it over the loud music.

Tradeoffs

Everything in life is about tradeoffs. Saying that something should be different without considering constraints is just magical thinking.

I understand that the phone can be thinner and have a longer battery life without the audio jack. I understand the Bluetooth is good enough to stream quality audio now. I understand that the goal is to eventually remove the charging port. But I still want my audio jack!

From Kanye West’s Twitter via Reddit user _the_orange_box_

Why?

I don’t think the tradeoffs are worth it. I am willing to have a larger and thicker phone. I’d love more battery life, but I care much more about my mental battery than my phone’s. Relative to my $15 wired earbuds, wireless earbuds are more expensive, are easier to fall out of my ear, are easier to lose individually, and take up more space in my pocket. And it’s easier to lose them even in the case, as I found out.

Now I have to walk around with a dongle attached to my wired earbuds. And I can’t charge my phone while using earbuds. I understand that some people are willing to make these tradeoffs. And maybe flagship phones shouldn’t have an audio jack, but the Pixel A series definitely should. (But I secretly believe all of you agree with me. Memetic desire has got you believing that you’d be cool if you were wearing AirPods)

All I want is a stock Android phone with an audio jack. Google, why won’t you take my money?

Photo by Juja Han from Unsplash

There are two types of podcast ads — static and dynamic.

For static ads, the ad doesn’t change, it’s the same for everyone. They’re the podcast ads we know and love, the host we’ve listened to for dozens of hours makes an authentic recommendation for a product they use and then implores you to use their promo code. Because of the host’s relationship with the audience, these ads are effective and convert well. The right podcaster with a podcast about the right topic can support themselves full time with an audience of just thousands. But the fact that the ads can only be targeted to the listeners of the podcast as a whole means that the product usually needs mass appeal, e.g. Casper mattresses or Squarespace web hosting. As a result, static podcast ads might not work for smaller companies or niche products. This is doubly true for more popular podcasts because it’s the same ad for all listeners, only large advertisers can afford to pay to reach the entire audience.

For dynamic ads, the ad is customized for you, either at download time or stream time. For download time ads, when you download the podcast, the podcast’s ad network will select what they think is the best ad for you based on your IP address, location, when you are downloading the episode, and any other info they can determine about you. The ad is then inserted into the audio file that you download. It’s usually an ad recorded by a different person trying to sell a product, similar to how ads work on YouTube. It’s obvious when you download the back catalog of an old podcast, and it’s all the same ads, despite the podcast being several years old.

Streaming time dynamic ads are the same as download time ads, except that the ad is picked when you are listening to the podcast and that the same company runs the podcast ad network as your podcast player (i.e. Spotify). Because your podcast player is inserting the ad, they know a lot more about you, what type of products and ads you respond to, and critically if you listened to the ad.

In the past, the trade-off between static and dynamic ads was that you could have really high-performing, authentic but untargeted ads or better targeted, more corporate-sounding dynamic ads. But modern Text-to-Speech removes the trade-offs. TTS has improved quite rapidly, with a small audio sample, modern TTS can generate audio almost indistinguishable from the podcasters’ real voice. Audio production was once expensive, but now with AI, it can be cheap.

In the near future, dynamically inserted ads will not be generic corporate ads but targeted and customized to you, read to you in the podcast host’s voice. If the cost of generating audio is cheap, the ad network won’t just choose the product and pitch that resonates the most for you but could also generate custom promo codes targeted for you. For example, if you’re streaming your podcast or if the podcast uses individualized feeds, you could be hearing, “Hey Myke, use your promo code, JustForMyke to get 10% off beard oil”.