2024-02-07
I've adopted [Resend] (https://resend.com/) for a project. If the Resend team is out there and stumbles across this, I offer this feedback as a gift, nit-picky as it might be.
On the whole I enjoyed it, but the lack of out of the box analytics means I'll probably search around more should I need an email service in the future.
Here are my notes:
- Insanely easy to get to sending an email; I was shocked how quickly I got to hello world.
- Super straight forward when it comes to organizing and formatting an email. It felt like using React on a webpage.
- I don't understand why their batch email caps out at 100 emails; this is perhaps unique to my use case, but I'd like to be able to queue up my entire email list and have them process through it (I'm sending the exact same email to several hundred subscribers).
- Sort of frustrating that you have to already have a domain name to try it out; for this project, haven't yet picked my domain name. Luckily I had one handy I could use.
- Really disappointed in their analytics offering. I need pretty basic metrics (e.g., sends, deliveries, opens, clicks); best would be grouping the emails by subject so I can see how various messages are performing, but even a domain wide view would've been helpful. Instead I had to build this myself using their webhooks offering, which probably cost me more time than I saved in email formatting.
- Along these lines, their webhooks encrpytion, Svix isn't in their docs and I got stuck until I found an implementation example buried in their github repo. It's totally possible that this is my newness as a developer showing through, but given how comprehensive the rest of their documentation related to webhooks is not including this in there feels like an oversight.
2024-02-05
I was listening to Fall of Civilizations podcast and they referenced the size of Lake Victoria, the source of the Nile river, in Africa as approximately the US State of Georgia.
It turns out this is incorrect. Lake Victoria is 23,146 square miles while the US State of Georgia is 57,513 square miles. However, it is about the same size as the Country of Georgia, which is 26,830 square miles or the state of West Virginia (24,038 square miles). Still incredibly massive, and it's not even the biggest fresh water lake! That honor goes to Lake Superior, which is 49,300 square miles, about the size of Alabama or Greece and holds 10% of the world's fresh water (!).
In either case, Lake Victoria has shot up my list of places to go. I'm sure I knew that it was the source of the Nile river at some point, but there's something romantic about being reminded about all that distance and all that history.
2024-02-04
I’ve been noticing a particular strong point in my use of LLMs: repackaging knowledge.
I’ll use a specific example here from my work at Macro Oceans: I need to understand the research around specific polysaccharides that can be extracted from seaweeds 1) so I can sell them and 2) so I can do further product development with them. To do this, I do a pretty basic lit review. I get a lot of help from GPT in this stage understanding things that are beyond the chemistry and/or biology that I took. But I actually need to distill this into something I understand and have an intuition for, so it's pretty essential for me to take the times to put this into my own words.
At the end of this process, I’ve effectively got a 1 page memo that explains how the polysaccharides work and what their benefits are. From there, I need to turn this into:
* 2 slides for the team meeting to help teach internally
* 4-5 slides for a sales training deck
* a blog post for content marketing purposes
* a paragraph to a specific customer for a deal where it's relevant
This is where I think the LLM really shines. The context is set and hallucinations are rare. Perhaps more important, I understand the content well enough to catch things that aren’t quite right. The important part is mutating the form. In tasks like this, I’m frequently able to cut half the time more out of the work compared to what it would take me starting from a blank page.
An implication of this is that the value of proofreading and comprehension as a skill is shooting up tremendously. I’ve always been impressed with the ability of some of the senior executives I’ve worked with to read a memo or a slide deck and immediately pick out the critical issues at hand (Neal Mohan, CEO of YouTube, is fantastic at this). The difference between an average manager and the top ones on this dimension is startling. The average managers fall into nodding along but the really top tier people are engaging with and testing the material they’re being given.
I think this comprehension skill is going to play the role in the next two decades that being a strong writer played in the previous two. Of course these two skills are closely related, but as more people move into a role where they’re reacting to more text than they’re creating, it will become even more important.
2024-02-02
A compelling case that plants and animals without brains have memories.
“The neuron is not a miracle cell,” says Stefano Mancuso, a University of Florence botanist who has written several books on plant intelligence. “It's a normal cell that is able to produce an electric signal. In plants almost every cell is able to do that.”
On one plant, the touch-me-not, feathery leaves normally fold and wilt when touched (a defense mechanism against being eaten), but when a team of scientists at the University of Western Australia and the University of Firenze in Italy conditioned the plant by jostling it throughout the day without harming it, it quickly learned to ignore the stimulus. Most remarkably, when the scientists left the plant alone for a month and then retested it, it remembered the experience.
Found via The Browser.